when life turns your milk sour, make buttermilk ... pancakes

i finally made it down to the Art Institute of Chicago yesterday evening - all summer long, Target sponsors 2 free nights at the Art Institute, Thursday and Friday, and I found out about this during my first week in Chicago, and have been meaning to get there ever since, but I always have an excuse - too tired after work, or just something else to do. So i finally said to myself, there are only 3 more weeks of this, and if you miss it, then you'll be very sad and disappointed in yourself. So I just did it - got off the train, ate dinner, got back on the next Metra downtown. I took it as an omen that i was doing the right thing when no conductor came by to collect my fare. I had a nice walk through sun-struck downtown, getting to watch all the people heading home from work and the other bunch heading out for fun.

Once inside the museum, I found myself in the Impressionist section, standing amidst a huge crowd of people looking at Monet. I found Renoir, Degas, all the classics. Then I found the Chinese art collection, and Japanese, and the Islamic pottery collection! Then the modern art collection, with Pollock et al. and the usual crap with half the canvas green and the other half white. Then i found an exhibit of photographs by Jeff Wall, a Vancouverite who takes incredibly dark (not light-wise) images of people and dirty interiors and random streetcorners. Then, in the basement, i found the interesting combination of European 18th-century furniture with all its ostentatious carvings and marquetry and fancy upholstery with American 18th-century paintings and statuary. My favorite room was all Remington, both paintings and statues of horses, native Americans, and cowboys. The other great room was all Hudson River School. I felt sort of homesick looking at all the sublime paintings of the Hudson River and New England - so many gorges and hills! I want hills!

So anyway, this morning, i got up and went to the kitchen to have a bowl of cereal, only to find that my milk had started to turn. It was a little too far gone for me to stomach on my cereal, so I just added lemon juice and made pancakes.