Stuff I thought of while driving to work:
THE BIG KID Anyone in C-U who doubts the impact of the UI on everything C-U need look no further than the nightly news reports and the front page of the paper during the summer. While stories on churches raising sweet corn and on Roger Ebert getting a plaque in Chicago are nice, it's a bit of man bites dog while waiting for the big dog to return. Local governments seem to slow down while the UI's off for the summer. Even study sessions are scheduled to take into account the students (and professors) returning in the fall.
To put it another way, C-U is pretty boring in the summer. (On the plus side, I was able to drive all the way down Green Street in Campustown Saturday night without almost running over a single drunk student).
WILD WEST it's kinda disheartening in a way to see the degree to which drivers - myself included - ignore traffic laws. Stop signs mean, at best, slow down. Red lights the same; yellow lights are meaningless. Speed limits are mere suggestions. As long as the reasonable assumption is that you won't get caught, flaunting the laws (even inadvertent flaunting) will continue.
TAKE A ROLAIDS Can ANYONE make any sense of gas prices in C-U? They can go up nearly 20 cents area-wide in less than an hour. For no particular reason. And then slowly sink back down to merely unreasonable levels. Saw one station with a $2.25.9 price this morning and thought how LOW that sounded. Low? How sad is that?
HUNTING LICENSES I wonder in how many of Champaign's permit parking lots did the city oversell the permits? I know I've seen a lot of folks with visible parking hang tags slowly and endlessly circuling around city lots. Guess it's an added city revenue source to sell 20 permits for 15 spaces. It's also highly entertaining.
FIX IT Is it just my imagination, or is just about every street in Champaign-Urbana under construction?
And so it goes.
2 comments:
I love C-U in the summer ... maybe I'm the only one.
Not necessarily. I enjoy being able to drive to and through Campustown with relative ease in the summer. And the opportunity to patronize Campustown businesses, which is practically impossible from September through May. There are some nice restaurants and other establishments that are real tough to get to during the school year. Not to mention the parking.... The slower pace of C-U in the summer isn't a bad thing. It's just that although things don't actually shut down with the students gone, it sometimes seems that way.
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