Rethink.

Spending the weekend in Chicago, I enjoyed visiting the "Meet the Oscars" exhibition at the Shops At Northbridge downtown, Michigan Avenue. Thanks to Kodak, you can take a picture with an Oscar statuette and have a copy printed in about a minute and go online later to download a digital copy. If you are visiting Chicago, the exhibition closes Sunday at 6 p.m. CT. If you are in New York City, there is another "Meet the Oscars" location at The Shops at Columbus Circle, Time Warner Center, running until Sunday at 6 p.m. ET. This was my second time holding an Oscar statuette and was just as enjoyable as the first. The 8.5-pound statuette never ceases to amaze. It's shiny, smooth and solid. And the most coveted and well-known trophy in the world. Link to video: Oscar Update: Meet Oscar - March 7, 2010 Sunday night we will learn the lucky few who are given their very own golden statuette.

Looking out the window of the tour, I thought to myself, "Where am I? What is this place?" That was last Tuesday afternoon, June 16th. Today, I'm still asking that same question to myself - if only to a smaller extent. I am spending the summer as a design editor at the Chautauqua Institution's daily newspaper, the Chautauquan Daily . I'll be here at this utopia-like place until the end of August. That may answer the first question I asked myself, but there's still the second... Trying to describe the Institution is very hard. Over dinner Tuesday night, Institution president Tom Becker gave us a better idea of the place. It's like chocolate in that it's incomparable to anything else, he said. For me, Chautauqua is like many things: a resort, a summer home or lake house, a small college town, Disney World and, in a sense, Monaco. On Monday, resident archivist and historian Jon Schmitz stopped by the newsroom and helped describe the Institution anecdo...

Left my home in Toledo for a cottage along Chautauqua Lake in western New York. It's a four-hour drive - essentially like driving to Chicago. What waits for me there is a design internship at the Institution's daily newspaper. I'll give you the details some time tomorrow. Off to New York I go until the end of August!