Bear Fever.

I personally don't have it but most of the natives do. Including the people at the Field Museum. I took these pictures this afternoon on my stroll down to the lake in 12 degree temperatures. After about ten minutes I wiped my nose and realized that I couldn't even feel my hand on my nose because it was so numb. The ice provided some unique photo opps down by the harbor. It looks like you could ice skate from the museums to Navy Pier. It is only supposed to get colder over the weekend too. High around 5 on Sunday and Monday. The funny thing is that it is so sunny today that I don't even have to run the heat in the house. It's 73 in here now and the heat hasn't been on since nine this morning.

My cold was short lived. I think I knocked it out on Sunday with all the exercise I got in the basketball game. I came home after the game and got a huge headache and when I woke up the next morning I felt just about 100%. Spanish class went well this week. The teacher pushed the exam from Wednesday to this Monday. It has been going a lot better the last couple classes because she has slowed way down which gave me a chance to catch-up. With all the CD and online resources it is easy to get lots of practice without doing the same lesson over and over.

I thought I would try something a little different here instead of just tell everyone what I'm doing because quite frankly when I'm not driving around the country my life isn't too exciting. And since I've choosen to no longer devulge details of my lackluster love life I will make some recommendations of new things I find/try/see/etc. This could include movies, music, volunteer opportunities, etc.

So when I first heard of YouTube I thought it was just a stupid sight where average joes just post stupid home movies (kinda like blogs) but turns out you can pull up all sorts of good copyrighted material that can be hard to find. Lately I've been staying up too late pulling up music footage from my favorite bands. There are old live concerts, videos, SNL skits about appendages in boxes.

I also recently watched a movie called Prozac Nation, which apparently was a best selling book, starring Christina Ricci. It was about living with depression and, although fairly depressing itself, it seemed like as good a depiction of living with serious depression as I've seen, based on what I know about depression. I find depression to be interesting because it seems to affect a large portion of the population yet it doesn't seem as though it is in the news very often or discussed very openly. There still seems to be a stigma attached to it, which I find strange because a mental illness like Alzheimer's does not seem to have that stigma. Probably because people who don't have Alzheimer's find the symptoms easier to understand than those of depression and people are generally more compassionate and understanding of illness related to age. Anyway, if you are interested in the topic you may want to check out the movie but I warn you that it is a little edgy.

Sorry for running a little long this time but I'll be back with more recommendations soon.

Go Bears!