Nose blog.

Yesterday my nose, instead of quietly doing its duty fronting my face, made noise and demanded attention, something like the seven-month-old child who had passed the condition along to me. I was at work despite this, of course, doing what needed to be done, sneezing and blowing my nose all the while. Upon returning home, instead of devoting any time to a Web log, I calculated the precise dose of generic Nyquil and gave myself a blast. The nose is better this morning. I may post more later today.

Isabel blog.

"A storm the size of Colorado," said someone on the radio this afternoon about hurricane Isabel. I suppose that could have been a storm the size of Wyoming, too, but in any case it wasn't anywhere near those western states, or this Midwestern state in which I find myself. In fact, but for instant communication with the East Coast, we would have no notion that anything so violent was lapping North America, since today was a perfectly clear, very calm late summer day in Chicago.

A hurricane in Illinois would be a peculiar thing, but not as strange as you might think. In November 1998, a storm blew through the Great Lakes, damaging buildings, knocking down trees, blowing over things. According to one weatherman, at least, the storm would have been called a hurricane, had it originated in the Caribbean. He also noted that it was the same caliber of storm that had sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald 23 years earlier.

It didn't do any major damage to my property, but I did have to walk through the winds that night, and I have a clear picture in my mind of twin pine trees in someone's front yard with their trunks sightly but visibly gyrating, and their branches whip-flop-whip-snap-whipping.

Then there was the typhoon that hit Osaka square on, in September 1990. Actually, not a dead-on hit, since the island of Shikoku tends to absorb some of the energy of typhoons before they get to Osaka Bay. But it was a long night of wind, rain and rattling windows, which I thought might pop into my room and shower me with glass. So I moved the mattress away from the windows and passed the night restlessly. The windows held their own.

The Barber of Sicily Blog.

Today our regional publisher was in town, and I went with him and one of our salesmen to the Civic Opera Barber Shop on the 15th floor of our building late in the morning. The last time he was in town, he wanted to know where he could get his shoes shined, and I told him that was the place, though he didn't have time for it then.

The shoeshine man shined us one at a time, naturally, and while we waited, we had a talk with Sam, my barber. Sam is of medium height and build, clearly in his 50s but not graying much yet, and speaks not so much with an accent, but an Italian flavoring. He's a fixture in the building, barbering there for the last 30 years. Time enough to built a loyal clientele. I know of one older gentlemen, a renowned real estate executive as it happens, who has Sam shave him every business-day morning that they're both near enough to the Civic Opera Building to make it practical. I get Sam's haircutting treatment about once every two months. He does a fine job of making me look respectable.

I asked Sam where he had been this summer -- I'd wanted a haircut in July and called a number of times, only to be told he was still on vacation. (I eventually went to another barber I used to frequent, over in the Wrigley Building.)

"I was in Italy for three weeks," he said. "My mother and brother still live there." Italy; Sicily in particular. He went on to tell us that he had left Sicily when he was 15, which I would put at about 40 years ago. Sam, on the whole, isn't chatty, which I admire in a barber, and that's more information about him than I've gotten in the last three years. He was between haircuts at that moment, and suddenly became interested in talking about Sicily. Even more so when our regional publisher told him that his mother’s family was from central Italy.

Sam had been to -- or heard about, I didn't quite catch it -- an Elton John concert at a Greek theater during his visit, mentioning that the pop singer had come by helicopter to do his show, all dressed in gaudy red. "Did you know," he continued, "that there are more Greek temples in Sicily than in Greece? In Greece, they show you a spot, and say, 'This temple used to be here.' In Sicily, the temple is still there."

At which point he showed us a coffee-table book about Greek ruins in Sicily, an impressive publication that shares the waiting-area table with the likes of Outside magazine, Penthouse and the daily papers. A barber shop is nothing if not a masculine institution.

Library blog.

The Schaumburg Township District Library, as it's known in full according to the large letters on the side of the large building, is a remarkable place. We went for a look on Sunday. A postmodern design, I suppose, with all sorts of art deco touches, this particular library was only finished in 1998 -- faith, I think, in the future of paper as a medium for writing. Blogs and e-mail notwithstanding, I'm a believer myself. I'm not going to gripe about the small fraction of my property taxes that goes to support this institution.

Size matters in a library. Books need space. For a suburban library, the Schaumburg Library is huge -- 146,000 sf, according to its Web site, making it one of the largest in Illinois. We had other errands to attend to that afternoon, and couldn't spend a lot of time there, but we did explore the three main lobes of the facility on the first floor: juvenile books and video; books for adult readers; and the video/CD/DVD/whatnot room. Lilly got herself a book and a tape, a Disney song collection. Yuriko got a tape, The King and I. An amusing musical.

King: ...Pairs of male elephants to be released into the forests of America. There it is hoped that they will grow in number and the people can tame them and use them as beasts of burden.
Anna: But your majesty, I don't think you mean pairs of male elephants.

These days I'm on a literary bender -- a Maugham bender -- so I went to Fiction and picked out Liza of Lambeth and Cakes and Ale, which will be the third and fourth books of his I'll read in a row. The former was his first published book, which came out in 1897. It's slim volume, and so far interesting enough. More like a long character study of the woman Liza, though of course in the end bad things will happen to her for loving a married man.

Peninsula Blog.

Busy day. I was entirely too productive for a Monday, but professional circumstances demand it. I'm in the throes of hammering a new issue of the magazine into place: hammering, cutting pieces off that don't fit, tightening the screws, checking the plumb lines, and so on. Somehow, though I don't have a talent for real carpentering, the analogy fits. That's all most journalism is, anyway. Building tables and chairs.

The place I went today, and the thing I saw, was the Chicago Peninsula Hotel -- or that might be the Peninsula Hotel Chicago, I forget how they style the name. It's a posh hotel, modeled after the posh hotel of East Asian fame, the Peninsula in Hong Kong. Yuriko and I wandered through that property some years ago. Memory isn't exactly clear on what I saw then, but this incarnation of the brand reminded me of that stroll.

I only saw some of the common areas, since I was attending a reception of the National Multi Housing Council -- a trade group for apartment landlords. Part of the function was at an outdoor terrace, about five stories about street level, with the tall buildings of North Michigan Avenue crowding close by the hotel and illuminated by the setting sun. The hotel could have been a more modest place, for all I cared; but that view was worth coming to see.

Macao blog.

(Back to posting items from the past on weekends.)

Sept. 7, 1990.

I spent a dusty, sweaty, absorbing day in Macao. The hydrofoil trip across the Pearl River estuary from Hong Kong wasn’t especially interesting, mainly because streaks of water obscured the view most of the way. But once I got there, customs was a mere formality, and I found myself in the last wisp of the far-flung Portuguese maritime empire. A short walk — Macao isn’t really very large — and after various misdirections, climbed to the top of the Fortalenza da Monte, a hilltop fort of old, now a shady little park and weather station.

Down from there are the ruins of Sao Paulo cathedral, which this day were enshrined in scaffolding. Then a long, hot walk to the sea and along Rua da Praia Grande, the ocean-side of Macao. Passersby here are almost entirely Chinese, without the very small but (at least in the Central district) visible Caucasian minority of Hong Kong. Most of the place names, including street names, are Portuguese, but I understand that the actual Portuguese population these days could fit into one room.

A restaurant called Bela Vista had been recommended to me, but when I got there, it was weedy and graffiti’d and quite closed, though it still had the bela vista of the ocean. So I ate nearby at Henri’s Gallery: escargot and roasted pigeon. As I pried my bird apart, I thought of various friends back in the States who might not entertain pigeon as a luncheon option. Once is enough for pigeon, however. Too much effort to clear too little meat from too many bones.

After lunch I grabbed a cab — a steal at M$5.50 — to the Hotel Lisboa. I wanted to see the gambling. The casino was a roundish building, not as bright or gaudy as something you’d find in Nevada, but popular all the same, with crowds of Chinese encircling just about all the tables. I watched a little black jack, and some other games peculiar to East Asia. At those tables, I had no idea what the gamers were doing, other than losing money. Before I left, I played the slots, which took Hong Kong coins. After initial success, I ended up blowing all of HK$8.