July 18th -Chicago, Illinois

I didn’t manage to creep out of bed until 9, which is a whole lot later than normal, but we all slept in a bit. Monika fixed us a nice breakfast of eggs and leftover gyro meat, and after a leisurely breakfast with a lot of talk we finally got around to mounting the wall hanging over the piano. Once we had it up and straightened to everyone’s satisfaction, Monika and I packed up the truck for the trip down to Martin’s apartment near Chicago.

We took the back roads to avoid the tollroad and only got off track once, so it was about a 2-hour drive. When we arrived at the apartment, Martin’s cats, Penny and Cactus, seemed very glad to see us and clearly remembered us from our last visit. So we played with the cats a while and then I settled in to work on the journal while Monika read some of Martin’s books.

Martin returned later after a hard day at work and we all went out to eat at the nearby Mexican restaurant. The food was good, inexpensive, and we could listen to Spanish-language soap operas while we ate. Altho I haven’t learned Spanish yet, I could almost guess the content of the dialog from the expressions of the actors. The basic issues of who is doing what to whom seem to be eternal, or at least common to western-hemisphere soap operas!

Our evening entertainment was a cheap bookstore that specialized in hardbacks and trade paperbacks in the $5 to $6 range. Of course, taking us to a cheap bookstore is as dangerous as taking an alcoholic to a cheap liquor store, and it had the same sad, predictable results. We emerged hours later with over $60 in books among the lot of us, and at five bucks a book that’s a lot of books. Then we hustled home to start reading them while Martin played some computer games, which burned up the rest of the evening. Despite our good intentions to get to bed early we couldn’t pull out of our respective books until around 11.