SHE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO IT



Summer, that is.

Everyone is lamenting the end of the season like it's the end of their youth, bemoaning back-to-school and cool evenings and acting like it's time to stop slacking off and get back to business and they can't believe it's already over it was so short and we had all that rain in June after all, and I never did get to go swimming have that BBQ go to Wisconsin and so on.

Not Caca, who has no time for summer and the requisite heat, humidity, insects and proliferation of the insane and stupid on the streets. As Cam often said, "The warm weather brings out the crazies."

And everyone else, too.

Nonetheless Caca took some summer snaps during an end-of-the-day lakefront ride home from the downtown-health-club-that-cannot-get-its-act-together, when the light was hitting the buildings and lifguards and everything else just-so. She then spent many hours uploading them for your enjoyment.




This is the North Avenue boathouse, which was there when Caca's father was a kid (it was rehabbed a few years ago, but it always looked like a big ol' boat). He used to ride the streetcar in from his northwest side neighborhood in the 1940's. Caca used to change clothes in boathouse bathroom back in the early 90's, when she and her triathlon partner would do early-morning mile-long training swims between North Avenue Beach and Oak Street Beach. One had to be very careful while changing, because the stall walls were sometimes smeared with fresh feces.





Cam always bemoaned the fact that the city of Chicago ruined the lakefront by putting in Lake Shore Drive. She was right of course. But at least they also put in the lakefront bike path, which one and all -- walkers, strollers, joggers, rollerbladers, bicyclists, people in wheelchairs, visiting suburbanites who think it's their own private driveway -- use during the summer. For some reason many bike racers still find it necessary to don their satin jockey outfits and do their high-speed training rides, their mouths shaped like mail-slots, on high-traffic weekend afternoons. Perhaps they find it challenging to dodge everyone else using the path. There are many accidents during the warm weather and occasionally they're fatal.





Lake Michigan is to the east of the city and the sun sets in the west, making for some stunning light as the sun goes down... which the photographer nearly failed to capture here. That thing in the distance is probably a water intake crib. A homeless man once pointed out there and asked us what those things were. When he heard they were cribs, he scratched his head and said, "CREE-ibs? People live out there?"



Yes, we should charge visitors admission just like the suburbs and small towns that dot the lakefront charge us to use their beaches. But no, we don't. And yes, the woman on the right is wearing a sari and walking a few paces behind her male compaion.