I spent most of the day today running Daughter #1 to and from her SAT testing, which was happening down at the Illinois Institute of Technology (one of the colleges that she, being an aspiring engineer, is interested in attending) campus. This started around the crack of dawn, so I ended up grabbing a Zip Car for an hour to get her down there by 7:30am, with my then returning the car and getting a few hours of work in.The materials that we had regarding the test were very explicit on a lot of items (such as NOT having her bring her cell phone), but rather sketchy on how long things were going to run, and when to pick her up. I found something on-line that indicated that the test ran three hours forty five minutes, so figured that I'd need to be there somewhere before noon. Nuh-uh. I had gotten tied up on a project this morning and was running "late" for my initial target time of 11:45am, so rushed as much as I could (including making a mad dash down the stairs at Clark & Division to just make a southbound Red Line train) to make it down there at least close to that (as we had left it sort of vague as to where I was going to be and I didn't want her giving up on me at location A and heading over to location B while I was still in route to location A).
However, when I got down to the building where I'd dropped her off, not much was happening, just a lot of parents hanging out, either in the lobby areas of the hall or in their cars parked all the way around the block. I had, fortunately, brought a book, as there was no sign of any of the test-takers until after 1:30pm (and Daughter #1 was one of the very first ones to appear).
I had hoped to have gotten some cool shots of the architecture on the IIT campus (much of it from the re-design that Mies van der Rohe had done from 1940-1960), but the only thing I managed to snap (with my phone) was this one of the Green Line el stop. It drives me nuts that I can never "trust" any of my digital cameras to take a good picture. If you click on this for the full-size image you will see that, despite this being outside in full light, it's still a blurry mess. I really miss shooting with my film SLR. I did a rant about this in a comment today over in a post to
ana's LJ. Despite the ability to shoot limitless images (as opposed to when I used to have to "budget", while off doing archaeological tourism, four rolls in the morning and four rolls in the afternoon, for less than 200 per day), I'm always finding that what had seemed to be a perfectly fine shot on the camera and/or phone's screen was blurry, out of focus, too dark, bleached out, etc., etc., etc. I've lost a LOT of enthusiasm for photography when I can't tell if what I've just gotten is great or is crap until I pull it up on my computer at home. I'm guessing that maybe 2 out of 10 shots turn out "as I'd envisioned them" with any of the digital cameras I've had (and, admittedly, I've only ever been able to afford mid-level point-and-shoot units), compared with 7-8 out of 10 for my old film SLR.Hell, I even neglected to shoot what we'd gotten for lunch down in Chinatown today (although on the way out of the restaurant I did get a pretty decent shot for an Instagram update of the unhappy residents of their crab tanks), when we ended up going to Daughter #1's fave place for her and her co-conspirators (which is called the Mayflower, yet I was unhappy to find that we, as members of the Mayflower Society, did not get any discount there!). I know that shooting one's lunch (in a non-NRA context) has become cliche (see
ana's post!), but how else does one keep up one's Klout score?