plonq | Year In Pictures: 2010/05/09

Our cunning plan today was:

1) Meet

atara's sister and go for brunch.
2) After brunch, go for a boat tour along the river.
3) Wander up to Millennium Park
4) Have dinner and go our separate ways.

What actually happened was this:

We got to

fleethecleve's place a bit later than planned, but not enough to really hamper our plans. The hampering of plans came later, when we were on the train into town and she remembered a couple of stations shy of our destination that the tickets for the boat tour were still on her desk back home. While we were waiting to take the return train back to her neighbourhood, I split my pants up the middle while going down on one knee to try and get a picture of the subway station.

We got back to

fleethecleve's place, and she kindly drove us to the nearest Target so that I could buy some replacement pants. Between that and going back for the tickets, we decided to just grab lunch at the diner there; not exactly the fancy brunch we'd had in mind, but it filled the gap.

On our way back to to the train we encountered a barefoot toddler standing at the end of an alley a couple of blocks from the station. There were no signs of his parents around, and he looked like he was thinking about wandering out into traffic, so

fleethecleve's double-timed it ahead and intercepted him. After some gentle coaxing by her ("Where's your mommy?" "Mommy go bye-bye." "I'll bet she did! Do you live around here? Do you live here? Can you show me where you live?) he led us back to where he lived up the ally (past a large spread of broken glass that he'd somehow managed to avoid walking through). He lived in a town house complex, behind a back gate with a combination lock that was obviously meant to be locked, but wasn't.

She led him into the back yard of the complex and began calling. Moments later a frantic father emerged from the front yard where he had been desperately searching for and calling his son. To say that he was relieved would be an understatement, and I have a feeling he's going to be keeping a much closer eye on junior for awhile. While we were pleased at the happy ending, we missed our train.

Fortunately we arrived for the boat tour with a few minutes to spare, and the rest of the day went as planned.

I cropped this one a bit to remove a couple of people from the edge of the frame, but otherwise it's mostly untouched from the original. Shot at 1/125th of a second with an aperture of f/8.0