Independence Day

Today is the Fourth of July, the day the U.S. of A. declared its independence in the year 1776. It has since become the national holiday; however, since today is also Sunday, the actual holiday will be on Monday, by law. (By the same law, the holiday is on a Friday when the Independence Day is on a Saturday, like last year.)
However, regardless of the importance of this day to the Americans, my colleagues and I had to spend some time in the lab today. We were of course particularly unhappy about going to work on a Sunday that is also the national holiday, but we had a big maintenance day on Friday that required additional measures on two extra days. While it would have been possible to postpone the extra work until after the celebrations, it would have meant that the experiments can be resumed only by Wednesday. Time is always an issue in our lab, so we had to go through with this. At least on the way home I caught a glimpse of the decoration of our street with a host of Star Spangled Banners. Someone is doing this every year, and I did take a few pictures last year, but I hope the video will reveal better the affection of the Americans for their country. I apologize for going to work today, but at least I would like to say to everyone, "Happy Birthday America!"

"This train will run Express"

As every day when I go to work, I commute via the Elevated train, more precisely the blue line. (See the photo for all the stops.) I live near Oak Park (here referring to the station, because I currently live in the municipality of Oak Park), and my work is at UIC/Halsted. Earlier on this week, on my way home, the train started to run Express, which usually happens if it had been too slow, and another train line is right behind it. Express trains skip a certain number of stations, which is usually good for me, because Express service typically starts at UIC/Halsted, Racine, or Illinois Medical District. It typically ends at Cicero, Austin, or even Oak Park. This time, the Medical District, which is by the way also where Rush University Medical Center is, where I got my recent conjunctivitis treated, was again the starting point for Express; however, the train operator did not manage to inform the customers about this properly. Perhaps she did announce it, but either way it later became evident that the speakers in the train were malfunctioning. Yet the sign on the train did show Express, along with a flashing red light. Now, I understand that it is quite inconvenient to be trapped on an Express train you don't know it is one and then go many stations further than you actually wanted. Yet that is, in my humble opinion, no reason to puckishly activate the emergency opening mechanism of the doors to make the train stop. This then led to an extended halt, because the operator could not override this and had to search for the door in question, before she could continue our ride. I don't know how long we were staying there, but it sure felt like 15 minutes. Then, finally, we started moving again, and we reached Cicero. For one moment the speakers actually worked, and it was announced that the train would run Express to Austin. That was a bit weird, because Austin is the very next stop anyways. I assume that Austin was the original end of the Express run, but then the time we lost on the door incident gave of course the following train more than enough time to catch up with us, so our train then had to run Express from Cicero all the way to the end of the line at Forest Park. Therefore, I had to wait at Cicero for the following train to get home. To sum up, this so-called Express run, combined with a speaker malfunction and a bratty attitude of a fellow CTA customer, gave me the chance to expand my average commute time of 20 minutes to almost one hour. At least the next train was not so crowded - another downside is of course that the subsequent train has to accomodate about twice as many passengers.
I would like to conclude this post with a link to a video of an old Madonna song, "Express Yourself". It even has some trains at the beginning. - I am, by the way, anything but a huge fan of Madonna. But that is only appropriate, because I do not want to waste my favorite music on something stupid.