Sun Sun Sun

This spring has not been a spring so far.  It's been more like a long, cloudy, miserable winter that's lasted for seven months (though some states like Colorado are still getting snow and that is just not okay).

I was beginning to forget what it was like to feel the sun on my face and had actually started wishing for the blazing heat of July.  That's how UV-deprived I was.  So last Tuesday, when Chicago cranked the heat up to 80 degrees it felt like the first day of summer vacation from school and I'm pretty sure the birds were singing this song:

Tuesday morning I prepared, half-awake, for the glorious day ahead.  I pulled a sundress out of hiding, ignored my tights in favor of bare, ghostly pale legs, and made sure to grab my camera and check that it was charged for the lunch-break-long summer photo adventure downtown I had planned.  When noon came, I burst out of the office, camera around my neck.  I came to the L underpass at Lake and State, framed a great shot of the shadows on the metalwork, and clicked.

Nothing.  Why? I asked myself.  It's charged!  The lens cap is off!  What's going on?  Oh.

No memory card.

I thought longingly of the little blue rectangle, lonely in my dark apartment, still stuck in my sleeping laptop.  I mourned the loss of opportunity for a moment, and even considered buying a cheap, low-memory card just to get me through the hour.  Luckily I quickly realized that my bank account would be disappointed in me if I spent an unnecessary $12.  I came to my senses, threw my shoulders back, and tapped the camera icon on my phone.  Was I too good for Instagram? No. No I was not.

Looking north on Dearborn Street Bridge

I suppose the sun took pity on me and my absentmindedness, because Wednesday was just as beautifully warm.  I reunited my memory card with its true Nikon love, and together they went on a romantic tour of the Chicago river between State and Wells.

Days like this seem so rare that sometimes you just have to take advantage of it, especially in Chicago because you know that the next day could drop 40 degrees (which it did).  I'd scheduled a badly-needed haircut for that day, but I called and rescheduled it in favor of going jogging with friends.  And actually, yesterday was the first time I didn't feel at all like death since I started jogging about 2 weeks ago.  Good decisions all around, really.

Earlier in the day I discovered that my friend Amanda has been working two blocks away from me since February, so she joined me for part of the time.  I'm starting to suspect that I know many people that work near me and I just don't know it.  Well, it is the Loop, so the odds of this are pretty good.  I guess none of them go to the Au Bon Pain I've planted myself in every day of this year's ice age.

Hopefully I got enough Vitamin D in these past few days to last me for a while.  Because it seems, looking at the next 7 days, I'm going to have to learn to take good rainy pictures without ruining my camera.