Late night adventures

Midreview is tomorrow.
It's been a really long week with not so much sleeping in it. Got about four hours last night, and about the same the night before. Probably get about four tonight as well. Maybe a little more so I'll be coherant enough for the review.

Anyway. We took Thursday easy, going out to explore the town and indulging in a trip to the mall, where I ended up buying a fun green hoodie at H&M for $20. Saori was incredulous that I was buying something so boldly colorful. In her experience, I'm mister monochrome or neutral. Maybe it's all the young students I'm hanging out with in studio. Most of them are five years younger than I am. I think I may actually be the oldest in my studio.

Friday night we went out to dinner with Silvino at Gokul, a relatively new vegitarian Indian restaurant. Food was decent, service was appalling. The wait staff made it obvious that customers were second to looking at pictures of monkeys online. And we got the buffet. It's not like we were a party of nineteen ordering separately. All we wanted was drinks, but we had to wrestle them to the ground to get them to do anything. Won't be going back anytime soon.

Afterwards, Saori and I went driving at night around the city. I wanted to see old town St.Charles, which is actually a really cool historic street with brick pavers and a lot of original old architecture from early settlements and exploration. It's apparently a huge magnet for the blue collar crowd and suburbanites living in St.Charles. Tons of bars. Mostly sports bars, but a few clubs, a few wine bars which looked like they were trying a little too hard. Every place was packed.

We drove on, through the countryside, with the lock and dam at Alton as our goal. I wanted to see this massive piece of infrastructure at night. We passed a huge coal powerplant for Ameren and drove in the entrance marked visitors. It was late at night, approaching midnight, and it was huge and mechanical and lit up at night with huge smoke stacks and floodlights. We pulled up to the gate and this huge guard lumbered out from the 1980s. Heavily overweight, with coke bottle glasses, he was appalled to see us. I rolled down my window and said cheerfully, "hello! is it ok if we get out here and take photos?" (we were in a driveway leading to the fenced off area controlled by a checkpoint.)

The guard was hostile and flabbergasted. "It's a federal crime to even HAVE a camera on this property!" he gibbered, eyebrows arched. "You need to back up, turn around and go out the way you came!"  So we did.

It took awhile to get to the dam, but we were rewarded with the isolation and river and the horn blasts from the boat pilots navigating the locks. Drove on home, getting in around 1am.

Speaking of which, back to work.

Oh, and I need to start preparing for my trip to Italy, as I leave the day after tomorrow.