A non stressed two days in Illinois

Right now it's Thursday morn, and I'm hunkered down at the ridiculously large Chicago Public Library typing this. The last couple days I spent in Champaign-Urbana, a small metro area two hours south of the Windy City that is home to the University of Illinois. You may wonder why I chose to go there. There's a few reasons. First, my friends Ellen and Paul live there, so I wanted to hang with them for a bit. Second, I showed "From Portland With Bike Love" (directed by Steev and Phil) at an artsy cinema while I was in town, which went over quite well. And thirdly, after two weeks of biking and a whirlwind four days in Chicago, I knew I needed some down time before I hit the east coast. Champaign is a perfect place to do that. It's fairly small (the combined population of it and Urbana is a little over 100,000), but because it has a large school it's got some things to do. Basically I spent Tuesday and Wednesday hanging out with Ellen and Paul, adding entries to this blog using their borrowed laptop (if you're wondering why this flurry of activity has occurred on the blog, that's why), and drawing a cover for Paul's MediaGeek zine that you can see here. In fact, check out the page a little more, it has all the stuff I've worked on since I've been away from town.

Now I have several hours to kill before my train leaves at 5:30pm tonight (Central Time) and brings me to Washington, DC at noon tomorrow. And then it's the comix geek out fest known as SPX, my sixth time attending since 1997.