Gray

Thanks, and you’re welcome! 🙏🏼
Good butterfly week so far 🖖🏼

Thank you, Lauren 🤗
Couldn’t find a photo from the original store, which closed when they moved the operation south on Michigan Avenue by the river a few years back.
This photo is instead from one of the other Apple stores, I believe from the 5th Avenue one in NYC, from a visit in 2009.

Thank you, Rina. 💪🏼🖖🏼

Hear you 🖖🏼

🙏🏼 🙏🏼 🙏🏼

Thx 🙇🏻 The 100mm helps with those shots, more real estate.

Thanks, man.

Yw. I too. Appreciate your eye if you see typos or missed opportunities. 👀

The people who feel they make all their own luck are the same deluded ones who believe in the fantasy that anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed, despite disadvantages, and the same ones who don’t believe in victims, as if somehow those who get hit by cars are at fault.

Thanks 🤗
Woke up one day with fogginess around my periphery, and each day it grew progressively worse for a few months, until it stopped, and thankfully receded.

Yes!
That’s a male.
So sweet. 🥹

Lightly salted pistachios. 🖖🏼

Susan, it was a strange time, in retrospect scary, yet at the time, mostly only disorienting, struggled each day to get my bearings, reorient around the new normal.

As it was, it took a little over a year to recover almost 90% vision. Sold motorcycle, and don’t drive often, otherwise low impact.

Hear you ✊🏼

Ok, I contributed this time. 🤗

After that story, I’m changing dinner from black bean chili, to chicken. 🖖🏼

Oh yes, thanks.
I recovered almost 90% of my vision eventually. I don’t often drive a car in the city, and I sold my motorcycle, otherwise the long term impact is low.

Yes. 🤗
The visual world was fading.
There were months when didn’t expect my sight to return.
Started to learn braille.
Realized how much of my work was dependent on visual information, and how little accommodations there were for blind people.
Considered who I might be leaving behind, what to share.

I left Apple Retail because I had contracted a virus that attacked my optic nerves, leaving me more than half blind, and confused by the large retail environs, with its glass staircases and doors, table corners and ten thousand daily customers. Now it felt like working retail was no longer an option. Stressed himself by the idea of losing my help not long before the holidays, my boss said he didn’t believe I was sick. He said he believed I was only stressed— even though I’d spent a month getting poked and prodded before finally being diagnosed by a painful process of elimination, including ten days bed-rest after a spinal. Regardless of his disappointing take, I was happy to be alive. I had two little girls, a wife and two dogs, and a mortgage on my first home in Humboldt Park neighborhood. When I started that medical-testing, with some coaxing, head of neurology at Northwestern Hospital, around the corner from the store, had told me 85% chance it was an inoperable brain tumor, and I had less than six months to live, 14% it was a form of MS, and 1% it was something he hadn’t seen before. I don’t remember conveying that information to my wife, who was primarily taking care of our two and four-year-old girls. The neuro-ophthalmologist who eventually monitored my recovery made the diagnosis by process of elimination alone. Not seen before, thankfully. It took me a year to recover about 90% of my vision, and by then, I’d started my own business, one that didn’t rely so much on my visual sense.

I left the best job I ever had, working at the flagship Michigan Avenue Apple Store, where I closed five nights a week, counted the money, set the night alarm, supervised the service business, & represented Apple with the local media & weekly on a radio show down the street at WGN.

Story in alt👇

My girls, stepdad Rik, and me twenty-one years ago in 2004, outside the children’s museum in Chicago.

Early 2004, my step-father Rik with the girls and me visiting the Chicago Children’s Museum.

He died a few months ago, a few days after my son and I’d visited him, on his first morning skiing in some years, probably due to heart failure.

My story from 20 years ago below.

#theCampFire #campFire

Happy birthday 🎂
Good #campfire story 🖖🏼

Male dark-veined longhorn bee 2 (Melissodes trinodis) atop sunflower petal July 2024

Male dark-veined longhorn bee 3 (Melissodes trinodis) atop sunflower petal July 2024

Thanks, Ray!
This was from a series. Here are the other two of a male dark-veined longhorn. Made right next to my porch last summer as I walked out to survey the day one morning, with the canon.

Yep! Flying pachyderms. 😻🙏🏼

Male Denticulate longhorn bee on iron weed (Melissodes denticulatus) July 2024

Thanks, Ray!
I was misidentifying them for years as dark-veined longhorns until realized they’re ironweed specialists. Here’s one from last season, shot with the canon.

#butterflyweek 👆
✊🏼

Zinnia

Morning, Susan ☕️
Up early for a change, fun to catch you at the outset!
Hope your day is filled with good cheer, and reading.

Fabulous 😻

Thanks, Gregory

Wings open, about to drop into the air.

American snout II