Cubs and a Flood

Ok this post is really late coming, but I wanted to write about it because it felt traumatic.

Two weekends ago, Tom took me to a Cubs game. Whoo!  I love going to live games.  They played really well on Friday night, so I was hoping for a repeat performance.  Of course they lost like 9-2 Cards, boooo hisssss!  So that was pretty depressing.

After the game we went to my dad's apartment for dinner.  We were having a nice time, making the food and hanging out, drinking of course.  We sit down to dinner, and just as we're finishing there was a loud knock at the door.

I answered it.  There was a maintenance man there who asked "Hi, are you having a leakage problem in your master bedroom?".  I said "No I don't think so..." and immediately went into the bedroom, only to find that the ENTIRE room had half an inch of water on the floor.  I screamed "Holy crap!" and went to pull the carpet up.  Tom came running in to try and figure out what was leaking.  The toilet was running but there was no water coming out.  He saw the chain was caught.  The maintenance man ran down to get a wet vac.  I grabbed the mop and started cleaning the mess.  Tom was toweling the floor.  It was a very frantic 45 minutes, pulling things out of the closet, trying to vacuum the dripping carpet.

There was a lot of water, so much water that it dripped down from the 51st floor to the 48th floor.  It was very traumatic and stressful.  It just made me think of all I have to look forward to as Tom and I start thinking about buying our own apartment.  Joy.

Moving

This weekend was brutal, I am so tired, I can't even really write about what we did, so I will just show you our schedule and you will get an idea of how it went.

Friday

5:30pm Home from work

5:30pm - 1am Packing

1:30am Bed

Saturday

6am Wake up

7am Show up at new apartment to get keys and check out apartment

8am Breakfast

8:30am Movers show up half an hour early

8:30 - 10am Frantically packing up the last of the loose items while movers are zooming in and out with all of our stuff

10-12pm Movers bringing stuff into the apartment

12:30 Lunch

12:30-6pm Unpacking

6-6:30pm Nap

6:30- 7:45pm Dad and Gay over for drinks

8pm Dinner

9:30pm More unpacking

10:30 Bed

Sunday

7am Wake up

8am Back at old apartment cleaning

11:30am Jon picks us up and takes us to Target where we proceed to spend $270 and what felt like a million hours because there were 10,000 people shopping for back to school!

3pm Lunch at Quartino

4:30pm Shopping for curtains at Bed Bath & Beyond (we did find some each on sale for $10, what a steal!)

5:30 - 6:30pm Nap

6:30 - 8:30pm Ran 8 miles w/ Lena

10pm Bed

I should note that Lena and I had an encounter with a weirdo while we were running.  She seemed kind of normal from behind, and in the dark, until we got a little closer and she saw that she had this crazy long curly hair piece in and make up that looked like she put it on in the dark.  As we started running past her, she started running with us in flip flops, and proceeded to do so for an uncomfortable distance, maybe 400 yards, then shouted something incoherent and went on her jolly way.  I have a feeling that I will be having many more encounters now that we've moved into the heart of things...

Bad Kitty

I was going through some REALLY old pictures, and came across this one from Halloween like three years ago.  I figured it deserved a post, for no other reason that it's just disturbing.  He liked to be called Bad Kitty.  Enough said.

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Da Bears

Tom and I went to the Bears game last night.  It was muggy out, so everyone was sticky and hot.  But I will take a muggy pre-season game over a cold ass January regular season game.  The stadium looks cool at night, and we even had a good view of the city from our seats.

  

If you can't tell from these pictures our seats were high.  Second to the last row high.  My legs are sore today high.  I know, you're thinking, any in-shape person would be able to climb a few flights of stairs without having sore legs and then you scoff and think smugly "My legs wouldn't be sore".  Well, I shake my fist at you, because those stairs were steep and those seats were damn high, and I didn't want to even have to go down to go to the bathroom for fear of having to go up them again.  Although it was a trek to get to our seats, we did have a very nice view of the whole field.  We also enjoyed some stadium food.  For anyone who does know Tom, Tom likes to eat.  He especially likes disgusting meats.  Here is a sampling of what he likes to eat at games.  *Warning* vegetarians do not scroll down.

  

We also had beer and nachos.  Neither one of us was feeling too great this morning.  But then I just look at this picture of Tom, and I feel so much better, and think "I'm so lucky".

Segway Adventure

For Tom's birthday, instead of buying him things, I like to buy him experiences. That sounds weird, but last year I got us a kayak adventure.  It was six miles of kayaking on the Chicago river at night time, to Navy Pier to watch the Saturday night fireworks.  It was an adventure for sure, we were in a tandem kayak, and it takes a lot of teamwork to maneuver one of those things.  It was heaps of fun, and we're always talking about how we want to do it again.

This year, Tom opted for the segway tour.  Make no mistake, the things are utterly useless in real life, but are incredibly fun.  You seriously just have to stand there.  There is little to no effort on your part to move, and you can go up to 12 mph.  Ours didn't go that fast because the tour guide put a "speed limiter" on ours to keep the newbies from killing themselves.  *I shake my fist at the speed limiter*

Tom and I were lucky, we got a small group.  It was the two of us and then a family that included a few teenage girls.  They were nice enough and very enthusiastic once they realized Tom and I were engaged.  They were also a bit reckless with their segways and each of the girls managed to fall off or crash 2 or 3 times.  

One key thing about the segway that everyone should know is that it will drive away without you standing on it, if you don't turn it off or lean it against something.  The guide told us that in a group three weeks before ours, a tourist got off to take a picture and didn't hold on to his segway, it drove into the lake.  That is an expensive $5,000 oopsie.  So of course on our way home, Tom was making sure to ride as close to the water as possible, because he "wanted to see more of the lake".  Sure, so long as they have my credit card for the damage deposit.

The highlights of the tour included: the girls crashing a few times, and getting to ride to the top of the sledding hill, but not down the actual sledding hill, riding to the pretty park the mayor put on that old air field to the south of the planetarium, the beautiful weather, and doing sweet tricks on my segway.  (pictures to come)

Date week - The Proposal

Tom and I had planned out our Sunday at the garden to the minute. Both ends of our trip revolved around catching a train.  We had to take the 8:35 am train to the trail, and then we had to plan to leave in enough time to catch the train that leaves from the garden back home.  We cut it too close.  We left in just enough time to catch the train from next to the garden, but only if we had gone in the right direction.  We went in the wrong direction just long enough for us to realize we were going the wrong way and miss the train.  Oops.

Our options after that were very limited.  We could wait two hours until the next train came, or bike to the end of the path and wait two hours there.  Neither one seemed very appealing.  We were not happy.  So we opted to wait at the train station by the garden.  At least it was a nice day, and we sat around and ate some cookies and played with our phones.

Once we got home, Tom decided we should go out for dinner.  We were going to try a new sushi place by the river, but weren't able to figure out if it was open late on Sunday.  So instead we went to our regular, Oysy.  This is my favorite sushi place in the city.  Everyone is all in love with Japonais or whatever, but Oysy is consistently good and prices are wallet friendly.

We got some or our regular fair (spicy salmon, spicy tuna, spicy california), and it was good as always.  We also had a few drinks.  It was the perfect and relaxing way to end a long, busy day.  It was nice to just enjoy each other's company.  We were there for a few hours, so by the time we started to head home the sun was just starting to set.

Since it was a nice night we thought maybe we'd walk home.  As we were crossing the river on State, I noticed a park down by the side of the river.  Since it was twilight, the park was all lit up, but it was still semi-light outside.  It looked very pretty.  I took a picture, and then Tom suggested we go down and check it out. (Picture to come)

It's a ways down from the street so it's pretty quiet, and there was only one other couple off to one end of the park.  We stood at the edge near the water and just enjoyed the night.  We were talking about how nice it was, and how excited we were to move into our new apartment (only one block away), when Tom got down on one knee and pulled out my ring.

I was so excited, that I danced around in a circle and started laughing like a schoolgirl.  I was totally swooning.  The lighting was perfect to make my ring shine, as much as possible it was fantastic.  I'm swooning even as I write this.  So now it's official, and we are engaged!  The date is 6/27/09 get ready for it!

I love hearing proposal stories, tell us about yours!

Date Week - Friday and Sunday

Ok, I know I haven't written forever, but that's because we've been extremely busy! I have many things to post about. I have 5 different posts going right now. Here's the continuation of Date Week:

After our adventure to see the Shanghai acrobats, Tom surprised me on Friday by taking me out to dinner. He took me to Sangria. It was pretty good, we had a nice peach sangria. We also had some chicken and spinach empanadas, which came with a very tasty sauce. We didn't think it was as good as Cafe Ba-ba-reeba though, I think that's our favorite.

Sunday was a very very fun day. We got up early and took the 8:35am train with our bikes out to the start of the forest preserve trail. We rode almost 20 miles up to the Botanic Garden. The ride was really nice because it was shaded and the trees kept in a lot of cool air. It was pretty uneventful until I got a bug in my eye. We had to pull off and Tom had to help me get the guts out. Gross.

When we got to the gardens we found out that Academia Barilla was in the Vegetable garden doing cooking demonstrations and doing olive oil and balsamic vinegrette tastings. We were just in time for an olive oil tasting so we decided to check it out. The "teacher" was a judge on Iron Chef (Tom and I love Iron Chef, it's so suspensful!). He is also a teacher at Academia Barilla. He started the class by telling us how to tell what kinds of oils are from Italy. Only the bottles that say "Product of Italy" are actually made in Italy. All other kinds may have some very small amount of Italian olives, but for the most part come from Spain or Canada.

We then went on to the tasting. He gave us two different kinds of olive oil, both were Academia Barilla brands. They came in small plastic cups. The way that you taste olive oil is to wrap your hand around the whole cup and cover the top with your other hand. Then you move your hand around in a circle to swirl the olive oil around. Then you get it close to your nose and smell the oil. These two in particular smell like tomatoes right off the vine. He made a good point in saying that if your food doesn't smell like anything, it won't taste like anything. I never thought about this in relation to my olive oil. Then, and this is kind of gross, you take a small sip of the oil and make a sucking noise through your teeth. You should taste the flavor of the oil and then shortly after that you'll feel a peppery burning sensation in the back of your throat. A good olive oil should smell good, and have a bit of a bite.

Then on to the balsalmics. Did you know that there's a consortium that certifies authentic balsalmic? The modena consorsium de balsamic puts a seal on all those balsalmics that are "real", kind of like how champagne can only be made in the Champagne region and has all of these rules, balsalmic vinegar has many regulations around it. Authentic balslamic also will only have an age range on it. The reason being that they keep many barrels at one time, as one gets low they use the one next to it to fill it up, thus the barrel at one end may be 12 years-old, while the barrle at the very other end may be 25 years-old. We got to try some balsalmic vinegar, as well as some balsalmic must. The must is very sweet, and extremely tasty. The instructor mentioned that it tastes excellent on desserts. Especially vanilla ice cream, fruit and chocolate cake. He mentioned that Vosges Chocolates uses the Barilla must to make a balsalmic truffle. He said he's also used it for making filet mignon. He poked four little holes in the filet after he finished cooking it, and then dropped a little drop in each hole, he said it's delicioius. A little bottle of that must is like $50, crazy. A 3oz bottle of the really super old and concentrated kind could cost around $300. The lesson was very interesting and educational. I have a whole new appreciation for olive oil and balsalmic vinegar.

After the tasting we wandered around a bit until we found a place to stop and eat our sack lunch. We had a great view, and sat at some cute tables. We then went to the Japanese garden, which was very neat and interestingly organized, and then to the Englished walled garden. I LOVED the Englished walled garden. It looked like it came directly out of a Jane Austen novel. So cute, with a little portico that had circle windows on either side, and the chairs under them had high backs, with half circles cut out of them to match the window.  So quaint!  The rose garden was in full bloom as well, and smelled wonderful.  We spent the entire afternoon wandering around and enjoying the pretty sunny day, until it came time to leave the garden.  But since this post is getting really long, I'll continue the rest of Sunday's adventure in the next post, so, 

To Be Continued...