Vacation, Part Deux

Since last week was a disaster, we've decided to take a mini-trip back up to Madison for the weekend. Nice-looking hotel on the far east side, plus two tickets to the Nostalgia Train. Party like it's September 2004, y'all!

Not much has been happening lately. Last night I had dinner and many beers with some coworkers, then 'ran' about 800 blocks to catch my train home in time for most of the bastetball game. T-Dunc owned in the third quarter. Take that, haters!

Uh, um, I also shaved off my vacation-beard, which was down to a vacation-goatee. My office-groupies all had strong reactions.

Last weekend we saw Batman Begins. My office building is in Gotham City!!! I could totally be Robin!

My Morning Routine

First I hit my yahoo page, which contains news from politics to sports to entertainment to my email, then it's my sparingly updating friends, including N-dawg, C-Mac, the Dave, and especially my chi-town crew. Then it's pitchfork, salon (you have to watch a 'web-mercial' but it's worth it, especially the 'war room', 'fix', sports daily, and anything written by heather havrilesky, one of the best SFFWs around), and McSweeney's. Check for anything new on ESPN (page 2 especially) and Roger Ebert. Get nerdy entertainment news from defamer, TVgasm, and Ain't it cool news. Check chicagoist for local happenings. Good blogs include fluxblog, stereogum, whatevs, TMFTML, rabbit blog (h. havrilesky again), and fittedsweats. All these and maybe a few detours and suddenly it's 10 am and the day is off to a great start.

13 days ago I said, boldly, "Spurs in six"......

Priceless

Back to work after vacation today, my protest is a two-tiered process:
1. Not shaving off my impressive vacation-beard.
2. Not actually doing any work.

I should put the word "vacation" in quotes though, since I use the term loosely. Sure, I did have an entire week off of work, returning to find 100 emails and everything screwed up beyond repair. So that counts. I did get to go to New York, see a few sights, so that counts as well. But, I just have this slight nagging feeling that something didn't seem right while on the trip. Just a little voice in the back of my head. I think maybe that this feeling was strongest when I took M to the Emergency Room at 4 in the morning on Wednesday, or maybe sometime during the next 36 hours that she was in the hospital with a kidney infection. The "flu" that had cut dramatically short our first four days of activity was actually something called "Pyelonephritis" which kept us occupied until the flight home. No worries, things are OK now, and we had stopped freaking out within a couple hours of the time we got to the hospital. But the quality of the trip suffered a bit from day one, we had to cancel basically all activity after 5 pm the first few days, she kept feeling weak and feverish (hence the 'flu' diagnosis) and went to bed at 9 pm (8 Chicago time) or earlier while I watched the playoffs, read, or walked the streets and bought a six-pack of beer. We did get to do a few things in between, like: taking endless walks through central park, seeing chinatown, little italy, coney island (the cyclone kicked our asses), times square, the staten island ferry (we were in 4 of 5 boroughs), midtown and 5th ave, the museum of tv and radio, and a couple of good restaurants. But I had lots more planned (first day in my head included seeing a band play at 2 am and THEN going to an afterparty at another bar, instead I picked up chinese and M was asleep at 9 o'clock). There was way too much time spent in the hotel room, and not in any sort of good way. We saw a mouse there on our last night. I was not allowed to stay the night in the hospital, so I took cabs back and forth and became an expert cab hailer. Subways were easy to navigate as well. I'll go back, someday.

This weekend was spent lying around the house. M went alone to Milwaukee to help her dad clean graffiti off of his house (the perfect father's day activity!) and I drank a bottle of wine and scratched myself. We went to dinner last night, I ate 3 people's entrees, including my own.

Sucky vacation, but I Will Be Avenged!!!!

Sorry, kids, there will be no food this week, we had to buy a mixed media collage.

Plan:
1. Buy art from young artist.
2. Tell all friends to spread the word that young artist (Allan Tuttle) is the next big thing.
3. Observe as word spreads and future works get snapped up like hotcakes.
4. Trade in art for giant mansion.
5. The End.

Come on! Feel the Illinoise!

thunder lightning strike and it's a baseball-colored sky saturday that proves to be the day I finally break out the shorts, exposing knee scars and nearly enough leg hair to be called 'wookie-like.' Mr Popular declined an invitation to a party tonight to attend another, in honor of the birthday of one of my fav local bloggers. In the meantime have been wasting the entire day putting obscure new music on my ipod, reading A Fortress of Solitude (which is supposed to be due back at the library today, but I just started it and I don't want to take it back, though it'll take me a while to finish), taking pointless walks around rainshowers, and vacuuming the apartment (not my idea).

Other weekly 'highlights' include fruitless shopping for new sneakers, suffering through a university drama club production of Sophocles' Electra (which didn't have anything at all to do with the movie starring Ms. Jennifer Garner). In another week I'll be in New York, which hopefully will be great. So if anyone lives in New York you're welcome to let me know some city secrets. I'm pissed I was too late to get Conan tickets. As i mentioned before, my absence from this city means that all my favorite bands can sneak in and play shows (Spoon, S. Malkmus, Sleater-Kinney, and Ted Leo, all in a week!) but hopefully they'll make it up to me someday. I'll see Spoon at Lolla, anyway, during the rock-filled month of 'Cool-ly'. (, that's never gonna stick)

Oh, SLGTM last week was awesome, full six-piece band played all the songs I missed last time. I ended up going solo, which is not terribly unusual, but still felt a bit self-conscious standing directly in the front of the unfortunately small crowd, singing all the lyrics (even the ones from the 7"s and limited release EPs) and sort of dancing, all completely sober.

i can't complain about much else, save for the lack of meaningful nicknames among new national sports teams these days. I'm also ashamed to say that "Beauty and the Geek" is the best reality show I've ever been forced to watch. Are you a 'beauty' or a 'geek'? Like I even had to ask.