I announced it wistfully in early February. Tomorrow (or today by the time you read this) it finally comes to pass. Apologies for delaying the beginning of my Amidah Project, but I’ve been preoccupied with planning our move to Edgewater. Or, rather, surviving it. They say Murphy’s Law is never truer than when you’re moving. Let me say in defense of Murphy’s Law, an aphorism hasn’t yet been written to adequately describe the past five weeks.

As you can see from the above photo (click it to make it larger), the move seems straightforward enough. A simple northward trek up the lakefront from downtown to Edgewater. We’ll be renting a condo in a lakeside high-rise on the block of our synagogue. You’ll be more interested to know we’ll be living 74 house numbers away from Dr. Hartley’s high-rise from the opening credits of the Bob Newhart show (oddly enough, immediately on the other side of our synagogue.)

The building (which shall remain nameless until we finally manage to move in) came very strongly recommended by several friends from shul who live there. (“You’ll love it. Trust me.” “It’s a perfect fit for you two.” “Call this leasing agent right now. I’m not taking no for an answer.”) When we visited to look at apartments, the interior and amenities made Marina City look like, well, frankly the dump that it is.

When we applied for the unit in late January, we knew we’d need to overcome the hurdle of our life- and recession-dented credit. We spent a week waiting for our credit to be vetted by the admissions committee.  That week turned into three weeks as delays began to appear and mount in the leasing process. We thought it was us and our credit.

Three weeks came and went and we sailed through admissions, but still no moving date. We temporarily held back our final month of rent at Marina City (with our landlord’s approval) in case our leasing application unexpectedly fell through. We researched movers–but couldn’t actually reserve them. We made lots of calls to lots of people in our old and potentially new buildings. And then we waited.

We began to feel absolutely helpless, and increasingly became as stressed out at work and home as we’ve ever been. Have I also mentioned we both had the flu through most of this process?

When the bombshell hit–which I can’t detail here but follow my eyes (cough*inarrearswiththeboard*cough)–about issues out of our control and having nothing to do with us that were delaying our approved move–and our application for Ryan to park in our new building–from moving forward, we were too far into the process financially and time-wise to do more than yell, shrug, and try very hard to put our trust in Adonai.

Once other people’s issues–that should have been disclosed to us up front–were finally settled, we were within five days of the end of February. Marina City took pity on us and gave us a daylong move-out slot for the last day of the month to make sure whatever move-in slot we got at the new building, we’d be able to match the two times together. We had already gone ahead and booked movers, so finally we were slightly ahead of the game.

Until our movers (All My Sons) lost our reservation and refused to rebook us. Which seemed like a major inconvenience until our new mailbox key ended up on a plane to Costa Rica.

Yes, really.

Facebook and Twitter friends gave us suggestions for new movers. We went with the Israeli-owned The Professionals–more for the stellar reviews on Yelp than the Israeli part. Though I did tell the owner that, despite my last name, I was Jewish while I was desperately begging for a last-minute morning reservation two days in advance of our move. It seemed like it wasn’t meant to be.

And then this morning, we got that last-minute early reservation, after all. Thank God for daily miracles. For the very first time, we now look forward to our move in a few hours’ time with a sense of security. All we have to do is finish packing up the rest of our apartment by morning.

I’ll save the emergency root canal I need to replace the tooth I lost eating a hard Subway sandwich tonight for next week.

Yes, really. Murphy, where are you when I need you?

This post originally appeared on the ChicagoNow blog, Chicagosphere.

Know this first: this is the most emotionally compelling blog I’ve ever read, and perhaps the best. A Chicago writer and pet lover loses his job, gets fed up with the economy, and decides to bike to the Pacific Ocean to promote pet adoption, with his favorite Basset Hound, Antigone, blogging the trip from her doggie trailer. But it’s the candid bravery of the human author that shines best as Antigone Goes West.

Chicago fiction author Marshall Lee, 41, was working an unstressful office job to give him the time and mental energy to write. The job evaporated with the economy last year, and Lee had a heck of a depressing time finding a replacement gig.

A stalwart Basset Hound-lover, and not a great fan of a Chicago winter (who is?), as Antigone tells it, one day Lee’s demeanor changed. Last fall, he came home with a bike and a little animal trailer, started taking her on practice rides around the northwest side, then around Chicagoland. And the next thing she knew, she was being towed across the country.

Laptop in paw, apparently.

Lee decided to give up the Windy City for the warmer winters (though no less onerous job market) of the Pacific Northwest. Figuring such a monumental move ought to be put to good purpose, he decided to make the trip by bicycle and dedicate his effort to Basset Hound adoption. And the best way to make that happen was to “let” Antigone blog the journey from her canine perspective as the scribe of Antigone Goes West.

It’s a touching, heartwarming, and at times melancholy blog, as Antigone chronicles the towns and states through which they pass, and the mood of her human companion as his well-known past recedes in the distance and an unknown future looms larger into view.

They’re in southern California now, trekking the last few hundred miles to the Pacific coast in San Francisco. Once there, the official journey will end and the pair will head up to Portland, Oregon, and potentially on to Seattle.

Today, in the midst of the Californian desert, Antigone remembered her origins in a sad puppy mill. Earlier this month, she was worried about the mood of her human companion as evidence of the stress of the 2,000-mile journey became apparent, as it had a few weeks before, in Colorado Springs, Texas.

Of course, there have been many happy moments, too. The inexpensive repairs at the bike shop in Tempe, Arizona. The fun of the foothills of the Continental Divide. The U.F.O. museum in Roswell, New Mexico. Meeting friends in Kansas City, Missouri.

Lee hopes to raise consciousness for Basset Hound adoption, and the blog offers numerous resources for you to become involved. His effort has earned him praised and media coverage along the way.

But this blog is something deeper. It’s an unexpectedly candid look into the heart and soul of an average Chicagoan forced by the hard times we’ve all been facing lately into making an extraordinary decision. This is as much Lee’s story as Antigone’s, and it’s an astounding one.

It is not lightly that I say, of every blog I’ve ever written about, this is easily the most personal, honest, and affecting story I’ve ever encountered. I’ve cried reading Lee and Antigone’s story. I’ve laughed, been riveted with attention, and rooted for this pair.

Why Lee isn’t a published author I don’t know. What I do know is Chicago’s loss will be the West Coast’s gain. If you want to read one the most compelling personal blogs you may ever come across, read this one.

From beginning to what I hope will be a well-earned, warmer-wintered end.

(Photo: A tee-shirt fit for a friend who took an unexpected Pepsi Challenge…and failed.)

I’m about as non-scene as a gay man can get, but I’m not a zealot. I’d never turn down an offer of free slushy drinks at Sidetrack. Nor did I yesterday, when I found myself sandwiched between Overly Frank and J. P. Organ in the MainBar of Chicago’s mainstream ‘mo hangout on Show Tunes Sunday.

Usually when I go to Sidetrack, which is rarely, I’m stuck in the stand-and-model GlassBar (yes, each bar has an official name), dragged there by whomever dragged me up to Boystown in the first place. Sunday was the first time them that brung me wanted to hang out in the MainBar, where Show Tunes nights are taken far more seriously.

I sneered at videos from the Madonna version of Evita and yawned through the clips from …Whorehouse (I’ve never gotten that show). But I raised my voice with the rest of the bar through the numbers from Oklahoma and tossed my napkins in the air during Titanic: The Musical.

What can I say? I’m a musical-theater purist.

After one too many prurient parts of others rubbed in passing across private parts of mine, though, I felt it was time to stop getting felt up. Frank and I quit Sidetrack and headed for somewhere altogether trashier: Gay-hop, otherwise known as the International House of Pancakes at the top of the Boystown Halsted strip.

Frank wanted something fried. I wanted to see if after two years since the last time I’d eaten there they’d finally cleaned the bathrooms. As I tucked into my biscuits with sausage gravy, I remembered why I used to like the joint.

“I forgot the interesting, trailer-trash vibe this place always has,” I told Frank. “It really is a guilty pleasure of mine.”

“You mean you like it here?” Frank asked, incredulous. “After all the eight minutes of shit you gave me when I suggested it?”

No one ever said I was agreeable. Case in point, I told the ex-Oklahoman to save his much-heralded Pepsi story for the walk back to the Clark bus. As we dodged the eternal puddle in the parking lot outside on our exit, I reminded Frank he owed me a tale.

“Much like I’ll eat in an Ihop instead of a real restaurant,” Frank began, “when I was in London a few years ago, I spent a lot of time eating in fast food places instead of savoring the fine English cuisine, since as you know the U.K. is not known for its food.”

“That changed a long time ago,” I interjected.

“Well maybe when you were there,” he shot back, “but that wasn’t my experience when I was there, now shut up and let me continue my story.”

I’d have smacked him, but as he is a libertarian who voted for McCain in 2008, I contended myself in the knowledge that as long as I know him my votes will cancel out his.

“Fast food places don’t have a lot of room in London,” Frank went on. “I was in a bilevel Burger King, with the dining room squeezed in downstairs from the order counter. I ordered something I don’t remember and a large Pepsi. I really don’t know what happened. A tremor? A foot slip? But there I was walking downstairs watching my soda tumble end over end in slow motion in front of me.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“When things start to go slow motion,” Frank said, “sometimes you think you have more time to react than you do. I tried to catch the Pepsi gingerly with my tray and instead managed to turn my tray into a tennis racquet that slammed the container all the way to the bottom of the stairs, where it exploded. Everywhere.”

I’d have bet money on that.

“Mortified and being extra careful, I made my way down the rest of the stairs, retrieved the now-empty cup, and went back up to the counter to tell them what had happened. The staff was very nice about it. As female employee went to mop the stairs, the man behind the counter took the cup and said, ‘Here, let me refill that for you.’”

Personally, at this point I’d have opted for something in a sealed container.

“More careful than I have ever been in my life, I went back down the stairs and set down my tray at a table. I felt safe finally sitting, so I grabbed a straw, opened it, and poked it into the lid on top of my new Pepsi. And that’s when the sides gave way.”

I laughed out loud, picturing my straight-laced conservative friend sitting in a puddle of pop in a fast-food basement, probably doing his best not to show any outward reaction.

“The woman mopping the stairs from my first spillage just looked at me and said, ‘Having a bad day, huh?’ Turned out when the guy refilled my Pepsi, he didn’t give me a new cup. And the battered old sides of the one that went down the stairs had just about had enough poking and prodding when it saw my straw coming.”

I flashed on the likely health violation of refilling a customer’s beverage container that had recently hit the floor, but that’s not germane to the incident.

Frank’s story drew to a close. “In response to my latest embarrassment, the counter guy, himself, came downstairs with a bunch of napkins and a new, third Pepsi. I told him I’d just as soon eat my meal dry, but he insisted. He also insisted on inserting the straw for me.”

“Did you learn anything from the experience?” I asked.

“Yep,” Frank said in a drawl reminiscent of a tumbleweed suddenly graced with the miraculous power of speech. “You can’t catch a midair Pepsi with a slow-motion tray.”

There’s gotta be a country song in there somwehere.

Last Thursday, I did the Wisconsin State Fair badly. In my defense, I meant well. But having been to only two state fairs in my life–Arizona’s in 1990 and New York State’s in the Shea Stadium parking lot–I was ill-prepared for the scope of Milwaukee’s century-old annual festivity. Not to mention the heat.

I was looking for a brief break from my Windy City work-at-home day to day, and a ten-dollar Megabus ride to rekindle an old friendship with my Milwaukee friend Big Buddha on the first day of Dairyland’s State Fair seemed like just the ticket.

My inability to figure out how to work the A/C in my overly sunny, upper-deck front row seat on Megabus should have been a clue as to the impending tenor of the day, though the bus’s speedy WiFi made the two-hour trip a multitasking dream. Big’s thirty-minute late arrival at the Cream City’s Intermodal Station to pick me up should have been another.

Late or not, it was fun to take a spin through Chicago’s smaller, northern neighbor. New Yorkers often call Chicago a little NYC due to our town’s smaller but still-imposing skyline, though nothing could be farther from the truth. Yet even for its almost non-existent skyline, I often have a similar impression of Milwaukee: all the lakefront yuppiedom and mid-town slumminess of Chicago, but in a convenient, travel-sized dose.

Even with one-fifth the population, though, driving across Milwaukee’s industrial Menomenee Valley from the staton to Miller Park and back–then south to St. Francis–then further south to Cudahy–all in search of a Chase bank, made the city seem postiviely enormous last week. Big works at an Apple Store and we both have iPhones, so there was no excuse for not Google Mapping the nearest branch. But I wanted to see the city–especially it’s less-touristy side–so I settled in for the ride.

Eventually, we made it to the Mitchell Domes, which provided a respite from the morning’s 80-plus heat. Last time I saw them was with Devyn. They’ve since been renovated and are more spectaular than ever. The modernist in me has to love any botanic conservatory squeezed into three massive, breast-like 1960s conoidal domes.

(Photo: Milwaukee’s version of the Garfield Park Conservatory always puts me in a happy, Jetsons mood. More in my flickr.)

But after an hour, I felt the clock ticking on my already-delayed day trip. So canned goods in hand for a nifty $7 Hunger Task Force Day admission discount, off we headed for West Allis, the near-west suburb that hosts the Wisconsin State Fair since (incredibly) 1892. The town sits in the same location relative to Milwaukee that Oak Park sits relative to Chicago–but with yuppies and BMWs replaced by mechanics and Harleys.

I bit my tongue–mostly–as we parked half a mile from the fair to save on the parking fee. As we reached the ticket booths after a sweat-infused walk back to the fairgrounds, I noticed a woman trying to pass off a roll of toilet paper as a non-perishable food item. I inwardly begged God to bring Twitter back up from its Denial of Service attack to let me tweet the moment.

Once inside the mile-square fair, snap judgment gave way to the pleasure of surrendering to a big, fat, grassroots, down-home day of fun. The kind that urbanites like me only admit to at the time and later on blogs, but rarely in mixed company once returned to our metropolitan high rises.

(Video: No, I didn’t. Yes, I wanted to.)

Food and beverage booths extended into the distance down multiple pathways as far as my eyes could see, punctuated by gargantuan show houses, with a lazy skyride hanging above all. How much did I get into the mood? I stood on a ten-minute line to buy a four-dollar ticket to stand in another ten-minute line to buy a “famous” Wisconsin dressed baked potato. And liked it.

It was the Midwest my New York friends warned me about when I moved here in six-and-a-half years ago, and it was a blast. But it was also something just short of 1,000 degrees. That kept Big and me off the sky ride. That and Big’s distaste for amusement rides kept us out of the Midway most of the day. And that, my damnable lactose intolerance, and a line of hundreds kept me away from the equally “famous”, gargantuan cream puffs.

Good sense didn’t keep me away from a Noon-time, open-air beer in full sunlight, though. Nor did good sense motivate me to stop taking “No” for an answer every time I tried to maneuver Big into a shaded, air-conditioned show house. (Much as I respect the guy, refusing to enter a livestock barn at a state fair because it would “smell like animals” reached so far up my nose I could feel my brain hurt.)

So by day’s end, what should have been a relaxing end to a really fun, absolutely out-of-character stint in Laverne-and-Shirley town headed south, and quickly. As we exited the fair, I could feel a dehydration headache growing.

By the time we reached downtown’s uber-urban Historic Third Ward to hang out before my trip home, headache had grown to a migraine of historic-hangover proportions. As I sat with Big on the second floor of the Public Market with my sunburned head on the table and a frosty Sprite Zero held tight to my forehead, it was all I could do to apologize–in what feeble voice I could muster–for the unspectacular end to the day.

Big drove me back to the Intermodal Station–a trip that could have been a five-minute walk from the Third Ward if my head hadn’t wanted to explode so badly–where I ditched Megabus for a speedier Amtrak Hiawatha ride back to my home downtown. I did my best to think happy, healthy thoughts the whole way to try and avoid my rampant sense of spew-at-any-second nausea. Thankfully, by the time the train pulled into Union Station, my head had pulled itself together enough–with the help of a pint of vitamin water–to allow me to make the 20-minute walk to my house in relative comfort.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad day. I still love Milwaukee–though next time I’ll stick to the lakefront neighborhoods I’ve frequented in the past. (For Milwaukeans, that would be the yuppie spine of the #15 bus from the East Side, down through downtown and the Historic Third Ward south to Bayview.) I’ll do State Fair again, too. Only I’ll be sure to arrive with a stash of Lactaid pills so I won’t have to avoid the cream puffs. And friends will enter air-conditioned buildings with me voluntarily or via being moved there bodily.

And considering the flu-like symptoms I developed the day after returning home, if ever again I run into a small child hacking his lungs up in the Milwaukee Intermodal Station, I’ll run like hell.

Once again, the Internet has wrought cross-country friendship for Yours Truly. Departing today after a whirlwind Windy City vacation are Seattleites Café Kasey and John Dramatist. Emerald City barista Kasey originally contacted me after visiting a link to my blog. He and actor-boyfriend John were ready for a change of scene and were coming to Chitown to see if the flatland urban shores of Lake Michigan would fit the bill.

I met up with them yesterday after their afternoon at Wrigley Field. “The sun was out when we got to our seats behind third base,” said Kasey. “For about five minutes. Then we froze in the wind and had to buy sweatshirts.”

I could have told them in advance to bring a blanket, but they said they wanted the real Chicago experience. Their newbieness reminded of the last out-of-town couple I helped shepherd around Chicago. In 2006, New Yorkers Adam and Vicky were similarly wide-eyed about this place. (“How do the tall building stay standing without touching each other like they do in New York?” asked Adam as he peered out at the Loop for the first time from the Marina City roofdeck.)

Kasey and John’s happy gaping continued as I led them on a final-day tour of Millennium Park. Somewhere between the Bean and the Plensa fountain, I asked John how Chicago measured up to his expectations.

“This is way better than our New York trip was,” he told me. “New York has a million things to do, but Chicago feels like it gives back to you. There’s a real civic pride that we don’t have back in Seattle.”

“Chicagoans really like where we live,” I replied. “We’re aggressively amiable about it, and we like the folks who come to see our town. We go out of our way for each other, too. That’s the attitude that got me to move here six years ago.”

(Video: Facebook friending brings prospective Chicagoans Kasey and John to town–and their Seattle weather along with them.)

It really is a magical attitude most native Chicagoans downplay, but I have yet to meet a longtime Windy Citizen who gives the lie to this relative civic truism. Not long ago, I visited my old professional stomping grounds at Chicago community-garden land trust NeighborSpace (whose staff and gardeners work their green thumbs off to protect neighborhood gardens all across Chicago from the bulldozer). I was in the neighborhood and wanted to ask head honcho Helpinghand Ben if he had any favorite bloggers to clue me into for my super-spy-secret web project.

He did. In return, he handed me an envelope of seeds. “Do me a favor and blog about this,” he asked. “After all, it’s The Year of the Bean.”

Amazingly enough, he didn’t mean it ironically. A vote among members of One Seed Chicago, a project of NeighborSpace to promote urban community gardening through seed distribution, selected Blue Lake Pole green beans as the giveaway for 2009. More than 100,000 seeds will be mailed around Chicago to interested gardeners. (Mine are in my shoulder bag waiting for me to develop the urge to buy a balcony planter.)

I told Ben it felt like Chicago magic for the two of us to meet up unannounced and both have blogger business to tell each other about.

“It is like magic, look here,” he said, pointing to a chart of planting instructions. “All you do is plant the magic seeds and water them and wait a little while. Then these little ones like I gave you? They grow from bean magic.”

I’d have kicked him in the shin, but he’s the most adorable straight guy I know, so I let the deadpanning continue.

Ben went on. “The round red things? Wait a little while and they’ll grow because of tomato magic. These orange ones over here? They’re my favorite. That’s carrot magic!”

I came to recognize magic as the theme of the entire week of Kasey and John’s visit. I pondered the obvious enchantment between the two lovers as we sat at a table in the backroom of Cellblock on Saturday night.

Something made out of ice slush and vodka at our evening’s first stop, enormous grande-dame gay video bar Sidetrack (“You could break up with someone in here, neither one of you leave, and never run into them again,” said John), and a manly pint of Smithwicks in Cellblock’s front bar help explain why normally Pollyana I was sitting in the back of a wanna-be-1970s gay leather mecca.

On “Furr Party” night.

As I pondered the relative emotional health of myself and the cowhide-clad daddies and boys surrounding our table, I told the Seattle duo I was uncharacteristically tipsy.

“I’m a lightweight too,” said John. “I usually don’t get drunk at bars.”

“That’s not what you told me the other day,” I said. During the obligatory visit to my high-rise Marina City home, the pair recounted how John stood three-sheets-to-the-wind in a Pike Street bar on the eve of his 39th birthday, thinking he’d be alone forever. Out of nowhere comes the eight-years-younger barista and sweeps the unsuspecting birthday boy off his feet.

“Who knew you could find love at the Eagle?” said Kasey.

Rare that may be. Rarer still is finding me on a Boystown bar crawl. At all–much less ’til 2 in the morning and having a good time straight through from entering the glass bar at Sidetrack to heading off the hangover with a wee-hours visit to Halsted street’s late-night lifesaving Taco & Burrito Palace.

“The food here’s cheaper than Seattle,” said Kasey, between mouthfuls of an enormous torta.

“And really good, too,” said John.

Last night, after Millennium Park, as we tucked into hulking slices of Lou Malnati’s deep-dish in River North, I had a feeling Kasey and John were past the point of no return.

Little do they know, it’s the food magic that really sucks in those prospective Chicagoans.

(Click the HQ button for a higher-quality video. RSS subscribers, click here to view the video on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

(Photo: Hey, which one of you guys ate the alligator?)

Earlier this month, a visit to the Brookfield Zoo with Sonny (aka Mr. New Guy) uncovered new depths of hidden obsessiveness in Yours Truly. I’ve always liked the place–it reminds me of a pancake-flat Bronx Zoo, minus the Bengali Express monorail ride through Wild Asia that I grew up riding. (My transit geekiness started young.) But there’s one thing I unfortunately didn’t grow up with at the NYC animal park: Mold-A-Rama!

Sonny and I did Brookfield on a chilly, drizzly weekend afternoon. As I only had (and continue to have) goo-goo eyes for him, I didn’t mind the wet much. The pallid weather gave us the zoo mostly to ourselves, and kept the few potentially marauding yuppie toddlers in attendance snugly bundled in their plastic-domed, already-outgrown strollers.

Being a member and lifelong visitor, Sonny knew the best way to circuit the zoo. We entered from the South Gate and wended our way counter-clockwise around the Roosevelt Fountain starting with the Bear Grottos, then working towards the Seven Seas Dolphin Arena and on from there.

All the while, Sonny told me tales of being a little kid making regular visits to the big zoo. He remembered Olga, the giant walrus (She used to come up to the edge and blow water at you; they didn’t have all this Plexiglas here then), Ziggy, the chained bull elephant (He died right after they set him free), and the day Binti Jua rescued the 3-year-old who fell into her gorilla exhibit.

But walking into the Australia House, our combined relative calm shattered when Sonny saw the Mold-A-Rama machine in the entry alcove.

“Oh my God, those are so COOL!” he cooed like a little kid. “I grew up making plastic animals with them! Every time we came here, I used to beg my parents until they let me have one–just one. Eventually, we had a whole herd of plastic animals around the house. Did you have these back in New York?”

I swept my gaze over the ice machine-sized, 1960s-era blue monstrosity of dials, switches, pistons, and plastic. “Um, no,” I replied. “I can’t believe you people keep these things around, they look dangerous.”

“Nonsense,” said Sonny. “You don’t know what you missed back there in New Yawk City not having these around.”

I thought about his comment while we passed through the miniscule Down-Under exhibit. As we exited out the way we came in, I stopped by the gently purring machine. I told Sonny, “OK, I want one.”

He stopped me from pulling out my wallet, deposited two singles into the money slot below the big, clear plastic dome, and told me to watch. I was surprised at the ferocity of the rumbling that soon began. While the floor beneath us trembled, pistons pushed two metal molds together, hot plastic was injected in-between, and (as I would later learn) air blasted the molten plastic hollow, then anti-freeze brought everything down to a less dangerous temperature.

But still an uncomfortably warm one. “You have to be careful when you take them out,” Sonny warned, as he reached inside the vending hopper and pulled out a newly minted pink aardvark. “You gotta hold them upside-down like this until they cool off, so no plastic drips out of the holes on the bottom onto your hands.”

I wanted to make a snarky comment about potential liability suits, envisioning decades of ten-year-olds with aardvark-shaped burns on fingers and palms. But the thing was just so damned shiny.

“It needs a name,” said Sonny. “I know! Let’s call him Artie–Artie the aardvark!” Artie smelled like a crayon on a radiator. But there was no denying it; he was amazingly, unexpectedly, kitschily cute. I felt the time bomb begin ticking before we even left the zoo.

The same weekend, Sonny gave me a dozen roses–orange ones, to signify desire, enthusiasm, and passion. The moment I saw the colorful blooms, I knew exactly how they’d be repaid.

The weather was less charitable than my mood when I made my clandestine visit back to the zoo the following Wednesday. Before I hopped on Metra for the 20-minute ride west to the Hollywood/Zoo stop, I visited a downtown bank branch to break a twenty into singles.

I told the clerk, “I need them for the Mold-A-Ramas at the Brookfield Zoo.” The single look she shot me instantly told me she had fond childhood memories of the machines–and thought I was insane for visiting a zoo on an 18-degree day.

Never having taken commuter rail to the zoo, I was pleasantly surprised to find the walk from Metra to be a leisurely 10-minute residential stroll from station to the zoo’s South Gate, a less-urban version of the similarly short saunter from the number 5 train to the Bronx Zoo’s Asia Gate.

I paid my full admission, pulled my double-wrapped wool scarf a little higher around my neck, and headed towards the Dolphin Arena, where I remembered to be the first set of Mold-A-Rama machines I had passed with Sonny during our weekend visit.

Once there, I pulled out my wad of singles, grabbed one of several freezer bags I had stuffed in my computer bag, and proceeded to devolve into a pre-teen. As I watched a dolphin watch a workman scrape old paint off a viewing window ledge in the arena’s otherwise empty lower level, I made myself a blue dolphin, an orange lion, and a black gorilla.

Sonny was right, I quickly learned to be ginger in my attempts to remove the still-semi-nuclear playthings from their creaky, metallic birth canals. Worried they would stay hot in my computer bag, I decided to forgo my simmering sense of embarrassment and sat with my potentially carcinogenic menagerie on a bench in the cold to let them cool.

It was a strategy I repeated–sitting outside the Pachyderm House with a gray elephant and a brown rhinoceros, outside the Australia House with another pink aardvark, outside The Living Coast with a pointy, white penguin. And each time a Mold-A-Rama machine vibrated the ground as it brought one of these animals to inanimate life, I felt an immediate, grade-school-boy urge to immediately find another one and do it all over again.

By the time I found the three dinosaur Mold-A-Ramas in the hallway next to the Perching Bird House, I knew I likely had a diagnosable obsession. The unexpected apatosaurus, triceratops, and tyrannosaurus rex molds had been brought in specially for this year’s Dinosaurs Alive! animatronic dino exhibit. Sitting right next to each other as they were, I knew what I had to do.

I took six remaining singles out of my wallet, and a deep breath. Then I ran crazily from one machine to the other, inserting dollar bills as quickly as humanly possible, making three Mold-A-Rama machines simultaneously stutter to life in the same room. As the whirring, rumbling, thundering trio played its cacophonous mechanical melody, I rode the rush and tried to handle it.

I blame the fogginess of my following refractory period for having missed the alligator mold machine in the Swamp exhibit. No matter, I’m sure I’ll be back, singles in hand. A perusal of several Mold-A-Rama fan sites informs me that the MARs change at Brookfield pretty frequently, so there’ll be some new animal to mold soon enough.

(Yes, there are several fan sites. Yes, we rabid fans call the shiny molded animals MARs for short. Yes, all of this gives me pause, too.)

On the train ride home with my rubber fauna, I worried whether an appropriate 12-step program exists for someone who amasses a Mold-A-Rama menagerie in a mere two hours. I wondered just how far gone I was.

Not as far gone as some, apparently. I only gifted the ten Mold-A-Rama animals.

Sonny named them.

(Photo: Cincinnati’s iconic Tyler Davidson Fountain at night.)

As I run out the door to have lunch with blog-diva Jasmine Davila (see her blog, News from the Flip Front), I wanted to note to regular readers a curious thing that has happened this weekend.  Yesterday via Twitter, leading bloggers in Cincinnati discovered the guardedly positive trip-report/thinly veiled love letter I wrote regarding their fair city, Cincinnati Is Cool, after visiting there with Cincinnati Jamie in August 2008.

Out of nowhere, the four-month old blog post has made the rounds on the Cincinnati blogosphere for two days (along with another thoughtful Queen City trip report from fellow urban blogger Aaron Renn, blogging as The Urbanophile out of Indianapolis).  My thoughts on the town–birthplace of my beloved Cincinnati-chili coneys and 5-ways–have been well received, and I’m gratified to have helped raise the debate about the real future potential (and current coolness) of my second-favorite Midwestern urb.

If you haven’t read either blog post yet, I invite you to do so.  While you’re at it, click through to some of the Cincinnati blog sites mentioned in each post and comment thread to learn about the burgeoning blogosphere in the city that deserves to be famed for far more than merely Mr. Carlson.