The weekend before last my partner and I attended his elder son Jimmy’s graduation from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specifically the Business College there. We flew in to Chicago and spent a night or two there both before and after driving down to Champaign for the graduation, a typically sententious event that included a lengthy reading and presenting of graduates, many of which exhibited Chinese ancestry. After the event we, the extended family, did a walking tour of the campus, which is remarkably spread out. I did keep an eye out for any sort of plaque commemorating HAL, but did not spot anything. Though I didn’t look terribly hard.
Both before and after our jaunt to Champaign, we met up with Gary Wolfe, Locus critic and seasoned Chicago resident, who guided us to worthy eateries (Les Nomades; the original Morton’s) and more importantly provided a contact, via his stepson Rob, for Jimmy’s search for an apartment near Chicago’s downtown Loop, where he’d just the week before gotten a job at the Chicago Exchange. That worked out very well — by the time we’d flown back to LA on Monday, Rob and Jimmy had met and found Jimmy an apartment north of downtown in the Lakeview area. We are now eagerly anticipating the millions he’ll earn as a trader.
This most recent past weekend was another family gathering here in LA, with Jimmy taking a break before starting his job, flying to LA with friends on their way to Las Vegas, and younger son Michael returning for the summer from U of Maryland. We lunched at Paradise Cove in Malibu.
All of which is mentioned in part to explain, if not excuse, the usual backlog on the website — yes, yes, New Books listings are a bit late, Classic Reprints are way way late, sample reviews from the magazine have been neglected for several months, and let’s not mention the awards index and its expansions. I never forget these things, and they will be worked. (In my defense, the rebuilding of Locus Online blogs in WordPress was another big hit to my ideal schedule, but still.)
