I haven’t ranted in a while. So let me get some of the observations that have been bugging me off my chest.
Time is money and gas is expensive. I still resent that those of us headed southbound on Laramie can only make the left turn onto the Eisenhower Expressway with the green arrow. I feel like a target at 3 a.m., being the only car on the overpass and waiting for the green turn signal. No traffic is coming northbound out of Cicero, and yet one is forced to wait for that left-turn signal. I also hate in the suburbs where if you are not at the left-turn signal in advance, it literally makes you wait several cycles, and spend a lot of time burning gas, before it finally gives the green turn signal.
Speaking of gas, why do I pay membership for Sam’s Club only to have them utilize the slowest gas pumps in town? I am literally thinking it’s by design. All of them are bad, but the ones at the Cicero Sam’s Club are the worst.
Is anybody paying attention to the cheesy new license plate stickers that Illinois has come up with? Yellow stickers that just say the number 23. I can imagine the number of thefts that are going to occur.
I hadn’t been on north Central Avenue in a while. So imagine my shock when I saw the land that used to hold the Dominick’s at Addison and Central now contains both a CVS store and a brand new storage facility. The storage facility is huge and it looks like it’s four stories tall. Just how much junk are people holding onto that they end up paying a monthly fee just to store it? I’m also perplexed when I go to houses and the driveways are filled with cars because the garage has become the storage place for all their extra things. America has a junk problem!
I don’t know about anybody else, but Chicago is now loaded with rabbits. Everywhere I go there are rabbits running around. Unlike the squirrels and the raccoons that tend to get hit by the cars, I’ve yet to see a rabbit lying dead in the middle of the road. I think the Austin area is starting to get a bunch of skunks as well. My son told me he encountered one as he came up the gangway. I’ve been noticing the stench for some time now.
Chicago really needs an ongoing campaign to address the issue of our two nuisance infestation problems. First, no matter the neighborhood, I have seen giant rats. I was on the North Side, and somebody had tossed a half-eaten pizza into the grassy area in front of their apartment building. The rat was going to town feasting on it. Then there are the filthy alleys with overflowing trash containers. Why would the rats ever eat the poison the city puts down when they have so many other food sources to choose from?
Second, I’ve been hanging out those disposable fly trap bags that I got from a discount store last year. You cut the opening at the top, pull out the little green tab, and fill it halfway with water. I hung it out back by my garage and within one day, I had at least an inch worth of flies in the bag. By day four, it was about six inches worth of flies. The bag says it can hold 40,000 flies!
Now I don’t know if all those flies would have just been around this area anyway or if the odor it used inside happened to attract all the flies in the area. But the number of dead flies I ended up seeing is humongous.
We could really do a better job of being sanitary to eliminate both the rat and fly problems.
