Mike Bryson

Yesterday 10/23, the last day of the EcoChallenge competition at Roosevelt, was a busy day for me of meetings and teaching, and thus I had few moments to spare and couldn't spend any significant time outside. Moreover, the need to haul stuff to work prevented me from riding my bike to my commuter train, and thus I drove to the train station instead. However, I tried to use the little time I did have on campus to exercise by taking advantage of the AUD Bldg's free health facilities: the stairs!

Today I had to commute to campus by car instead of train due to scheduling constraints. However, this resulted in a pleasant walk from Millennium Park to RU via the north garden at the Art Institute, a very pleasant green oasis along the hustle and bustle of Michigan Ave. Also made a point of taking the stairs while in AUD as much as possible, since I didn't have time for proper exercise today.

Today I had some built-in exercise during our Monday morning SUST 350 Service & Sustainability class, which meets off-campus at Eden Place Nature Center. Part of our morning's work consisted of harvesting peppers from the open field planting beds and tomatoes from the east hoop house. We managed to get several bins' worth of the latter, and the bending and stretching to pick the fruit felt good after a long train ride into the city.

Yesterday I took a 30min hike in Hammel Woods, part of the Will County Forest Preserve system, on my way back home from attending an electronics recycling drive held through Will County Green for area residents. While only a few miles from my home, Hammel Woods is a place where I've only explore spordically, and even now I haven't walked all of its trails. Usually I take a trail along the shoreline of the DuPage River, to a place that my family and I have nicknamed "the Secret Spit." But today I walked some upland trails, higher above the river, and found a lovely wooded ravine where a small creek winds through the preserve on its way to the DuPage.

Another example of how the mysteries of nature are sometimes located close to home, right under your nose!

Today 10/8 I rode my bike from home to the Joliet downtown train station, where I catch the Rock Island Metra train to Chicago. Good exercise on a beautiful fall day, and I saved $1 in parking fees. (Too bad my train round-trip is $15.60.) I'm attending a talk at Roosevelt this afternoon at 2pm by Gina Ramirez (MA Soc '14), who is speaking about her experience w/ the Natural Resource Defense Council and activism on the Southeast Side of Chgo, her home neighborhood.

I leave that event a bit early to catch a train back to Joliet, where I'll attend a public meeting at 4:30pm of the city's Environmental Commission, which is exploring new water sources for the city to replace its current source, an overdrawn aquifer that will no longer meet the city's water needs by 2030.

All in all, a busy day of bike riding, environmental justice discussion, and the politics of water in IL's 4th largest city!