CLICK HERE for a comprehensive list of 2020 Summer Festivals (May through September).

No surprise for those of us who live here, Chicago has been named the #1 place to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day according to the personal-finance website WalletHub. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that we have the most  Irish Pubs & Restaurants per Capita in the entire country.

In Chicago, St. Patrick’s celebrations have already started and will continue throughout the month with the biggest day this year being March 14. Here’s the schedule:

9:00 am. Chicago River Dyeing The main show takes place between State and Columbus; the water starts turning green at 9 a.m. and usually keeps its brightest colors for about five hours.

Noon: Chicago St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The procession travels north on Columbus Drive, beginning at Balbo Drive and ending at Monroe Drive.

On-going: Parties, pub crawls, cruises and more throughout the city and neighborhoods.

Back to the Survey

Before the stock market tanked last week, Trump bragged endlessly about how great the economy is. He had every right. After all, the stock market was at an all time high and so far, it still is.

But Trump’s economy hasn’t been great for me and millions of others like me. Let me explain.

My husband and I are seniors.  Over the years, we have worked hard and saved what money we could.

At this stage of our lives, we can’t afford to gamble with our money so we’ve put our modest nest egg into what we’ve always believed are safe investments such as bank CDs.

We haven’t made a killing, but as careful savers and spenders, so far, we’ve been relatively happy with the way we’ve been able to navigate through life.

That is until now. Now bank CDs, safe, federally-insured investments, are as low as I can remember–around 1.5 %  at most banks.

Our bills keep going up and up, but our income is way down. Will we be able to keep up with inflation? Who knows, but it doesn’t look good.

Starting September 2019, Trump started pushing for negative interest rates. You heard right, negative interest rates.

“In a topsy-turvy world of negative interest rates, borrowers win and get paid while savers are penalized,” Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody’s Analytics, told NBC News.

Bank of America says negative interest rates are a real possibility. That means banks might have to charge people to keep their money in money market accounts and  increase fees on checking accounts and mortgages.

While negative interest rates might be good for cat fat borrowers like Donald Trump, they’re horrible for seniors like me.

Trump recently bad mouthed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whom Trump appointed, because Powell dismissed the possibility of the U.S. adopting negative interest rates anytime soon.

But who knows how long Powell will hold out? As we all know Trump likes to bully and even fire those who don’t line up with him.

And the feds just slashed interest rates by a half a percentage point this morning in response to the economic fallout from Coronavirus fears.

What does this mean for seniors and other people who can’t afford to gamble or are risk-adverse? It means middle class people like us are screwed.

As seniors, our top earning dollars are behind us. It would be highly unlikely that we could make up for losses incurred if we ventured into the stock market now.

It hardly seems fair that people who’ve done the right thing, who’ve played by the rules, who didn’t gamble, are now getting the shaft.

Are Trump’s senior supporters so rich they don’t care?

Bernie? Biden? Bloomberg? Warren? You all want to be the candidate to beat Trump. We’re listening. What do you have to say?

Thanks for reading Opinionated Woman. If you don’t want to miss the next blog post, just type your email address in the box and click the “create subscription” button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.

With so many claims, counterclaims, so much misinformation and disinformation floating around in the politicized debate over the spread of Coronavirus, here is a place I discovered to be the most authoritative and comprehensive source of information:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.

It provides information on how it spreads, symptoms, prevention, treatment and testing. It brings you up to date on the progression of the disease, where it is spreading, risk assessments and lots more.

Partisans who are spreading their interpretations of the disease would do will to check it out.

[email protected]

www.dennisbyrne.net 

My historical novel: Madness: The War of 1812

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Zelda is a 20-month-old, 48-pound, adorable and playful Catahoula/Terrier-mix looking for a loving guardian.

Zelda loves people of all ages and knows multiple commands including sit, down, stay and high-five. She is full of kisses for everyone she meets.

Zelda has lived with a male dog, but would probably be best as the only dog in the home. She has also lived with a cat for a few months. Zelda is good in the car and good on leash except she can be reactive when she sees other dogs.

Zelda loves to sleep in bed with her foster mom. She’s an athlete and loves to run in a fenced in yard. She is crate-trained and has been trained to ring a bell to go outside.

Zelda is extremely healthy, up-to-date on rabies, distemper and bordetella vaccines, spayed and microchipped. Her adoption fee of $175 benefits rescue.

If you are interested in meeting and possibly adopting Zelda, please contact [email protected] for an adoption application.

She is being fostered in the Hillside/Oakbrook area.

Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, 2020 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates

Chicago, IL (March 3, 2020) – Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Dublin, Ireland, have been selected as the 2020 Pritzker Prize Laureates, announced Tom Pritzker, Chairman of The Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the award that is known internationally as architecture’s highest honor.

“Architecture could be described as one of the most complex and important cultural activities on the planet,” remarks Farrell. “To be an architect is an enormous privilege. To win this prize is a wonderful endorsement of our belief in architecture. Thank you for this great honor.”

As architects and educators since the 1970s, Farrell and McNamara create spaces that are at once respectful and new, honoring history while demonstrating a mastery of the urban environment and craft of construction. Balancing strength and delicacy, and upholding a reverence of site-specific contexts, their academic, civic and cultural institutions, as well as housing developments, result in modern and impactful works that never repeat or imitate, but are decidedly of their own architectural voice.

“For their integrity in their approach to both their buildings, as well as the way they conduct their practice, their belief in collaboration, their generosity towards their colleagues, especially as evidenced in such events as the 2018 Venice Biennale, their unceasing commitment to excellence in architecture, their responsible attitude toward the environment, their ability to be cosmopolitan while embracing the uniqueness of each place in which they work, for all these reasons and more, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara are awarded the 2020 Pritzker Architecture Prize,” states the 2020 Jury Citation, in part.

“Within the ethos of a practice such as ours, we have so often struggled to find space for the implementation of such values as humanism, craft, generosity, and cultural connection with each place and context within which we work. It is therefore extremely gratifying that this recognition is bestowed upon us and our practice and upon the body of work we have managed to produce over a long number of years,” says McNamara. “It is also a wonderful recognition of the ambition and vision of the clients who commissioned us and enabled us to bring our buildings to fruition.”

Their native Ireland, an island replete with mountains and cliffs, informs their acute sensitivities to geography, changing climates and nature in each of their sites. Their buildings consistently remain purposefully rich, yet modest, enhancing cities and lending to sustainability while responding to local needs. University Campus UTEC Lima (Lima, Peru 2015) is located on a challenging site with a highway sunk in a ravine on one side and a residential neighborhood on the other. The result is a vertical and cascading building responding to both site and climatic needs. Its open spaces were designed to deliberately welcome cooling breezes of the ocean and minimize the need for air-conditioning. At the Offices for the Department of Finance (Dublin, Ireland 2009), the selection of local limestone used in thick panels grants strength to the building. Windows recessed or flush with the façade have grills below them to circulate fresh air throughout the building. Exposures on all sides of the building, atypical of the architecture in this city, offer panoramic views.

The architects are continuously conscious of the dialogue between the internal and external, evidenced by the mingling of public and private spaces, and the meaningful selection and integrity of materials. “What we try to do in our work is to be aware of the various levels of citizenship and try to find an architecture that deals with overlap, that heightens your relationship to one another,” illustrates Farrell. Universita Luigi Bocconi (Milan, Italy 2008) fosters community between its occupants and the vibrant city that extends well beyond the vertical campus through its ground floor public space, which continues indoors, and its floating canopy that overlaps the ground below, engaging passersby with students. Université Toulouse 1 Capitole, School of Economics (Toulouse, France 2019) features brick buttresses, ramps and courtyards, which are metaphors for the city filled with bridges, walls, promenades and stone towers. North King Street Housing (Dublin, Ireland 2000) is intentionally void of external design elements to resonate with the restraint of the neighboring warehouses.

“The collaboration between Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara represents a veritable interconnectedness between equal counterparts,” states Pritzker. “They demonstrate incredible strength in their architecture, show deep relation to the local situation in all regards, establish different responses to each commission while maintaining the honesty of their work, and exceed the requirements of the field through responsibility and community.”

Farrell and McNamara have mastered proportion to maintain a human scale and achieve intimate environments within tall and vast buildings. “They have tried, with considerable success, to help us all overcome what is likely to evermore become a serious human problem,” explains Justice Stephen Breyer, Jury Chair. “Namely, how do we build housing and workplaces in a world with over half of its population dwelling in urban environments, and many of them who cannot afford luxury?” A contoured theater floor at the Solstice Arts Centre (Navan, Ireland 2007) creates a physical nearness between audience members and performers. The generous placement of open spaces, windows, glass curtain walls and exposed ceilings allows natural light to filter through a passage of rooms, creating impressions of light through large and small spaces, and within the interlocking areas that compose Institut Mines Télécom in Palaiseau (Paris, France 2019).

McNamara states, “Architecture is a framework for human life. It anchors us and connects us to the world in a way which possibly no other space-making discipline can.” Farrell continues, “At the core of our practice is a real belief that architecture matters. It is a cultural spatial phenomenon that people invent.”

The pair established Grafton Architects in 1978 in Dublin, where they continue to practice and reside. In just over forty years, they have completed nearly as many projects, located in Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Peru.

Farrell and McNamara are the 47th and 48th Laureates of the Pritzker Prize, and the first two recipients from Ireland.

https://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/2020