The Food of Life

For the 4th of July this year, my wife and I traveled to Chicago. Because we had to pay for Shelly’s ticket, she ended up flying a different airline than me. As such, she left two hours before me and I arrived two hours before her. We paid $18 bucks each for a shuttle ride to our hotel, which was in down town Chicago in the Chicago Loop area. We got in late, so we didn’t do much that night.

The next day was Friday, the 4th. We started walking towards the lake. We stumbled into the Taste of Chicago. We had heard is was going on, but we had no idea where it was. Pure dumb luck caused us to walk right to it. The Taste is a big food party where restaurants around town all have booths and you can buy food. However, our first stop was not a food vendor, but the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). The guy there was great. He was so very helpful and full of places to go. Now I know were were going to take the train to at least two locations but he pointed out how we could ride the train/buses to most everywhere we would want to go, even the Airport. So for about the cost of our one shuttle ride the day before, we purchased three day unlimited passes. If you come to Chicago and are staying down town, the I highly recommend take the train. OK, back to the food. I had sweet potato hashbrowns (yum), Goat with fried plantains (the goat was a little tough) and sugar free cheesecake. From the taste, we walked towards the lake. We decided to walk towards the Field Museum of Natural history. Along the way, we found a tour boat that was selling tickets for the fireworks that night, so we purchased two (more on that later). The field museum was great. Now we purchased the based admission and tickets to the “Natural Disasters” exhibit. I wish we hadn’t done the extra ticket. It was so not worth the extra cost. The general admission sections where much better. I even go to see Sue, the T-Rex. We really enjoyed the museum.  Later that night, we went on our boat tour. Although the tour boat had two decks, they only sold enough tickets for the upper deck. Well, as we were waiting for everyone to board, this girl, who obviously was used to getting her way, showed up and wanted on the boat. First she tried the “but I called and they said there was lots of tickets left”. Then she went into the “but there is no one on the bottom deck.” She argued up and down with the captain. I think her first problem was that the captain was a woman and not some man she could use her feminine whiles on. Well, after arguing with the captain, she then went to a cop. I think she really thought she was going to get the cop to force the captain to let her on. The fireworks show was great. I even managed to video some of it. This was the end of the show.

Saturday was our most ambitious day. This was the day we were going to Superdawg. This is supposed to be the best hot dog in town, so we had to go. It was was to far from down town to walk to, so we took the blue line subway to Jefferson Park stop. Then we walked from there. Only, I didn’t realize that it was 2.2 miles from the train station (and yes, that is the closest stop). Both Shelly and I agreed that the dog was worth it. It was great (or maybe we were just really hungry after that long walk). After that fine meal, we decided not to walk back to the train station, so we hopped on the bus (the CTA pass works on busses too). We then took the Blue line back to the loop, transferred  to the red line and went to Wrigley field. Now the cubs where not playing, but stadium offers tours. They have two tours. A 20 minutes ($10) and a 90 minutes ($24). We did the 20 minute one and it was perfect. Basically, they walked you down to the actual field, sit you in the cub’s dugout, talk for about 5 minutes (giving you the history of the stadium) and then let you go and take pictures. After that took the red line back to town but got off at the Million dollar mile area. First we went to the world’s largest McDonalds. This is a two story McDonalds with its own escalator. Down stairs was your standard McDonalds fair, while upstairs was a coffee place with ice cream.  Outside they have a 1957 Corvette in its own building. The car was cool. Then we “had” to do some shopping on the Million dollar mile (OK, Shelly had to and I got dragged along). We had dinner at the Rain Forest Cafe.

Sunday was the big game. We had purchased tickets to the White Sox game. We took the train to the game (the red line runs right next to both ball fields). We got there early and found out that they give out “free” stuff to the first 10,000 people. We got free hats. Way cool!!!!! Even though our seats were all they way to the top, they were still great seats and the game was great. The train ride back was interesting as it was REALLY crowded. We where really crammed on. When we got back, Shelly and I decided to just walk around town. We walked over to the Chicago river and walked along it for a bit. We found this cute little open air restaurant on the river. It looked pretty upscale, there was a nice bar, the hostess was dressed very nice, even the prices were in the “nice restaurant” range. However, there was a dark side. First, the food came on plastic disposable plates (at least we had metal utensils). Then, we got this bowl of ice cream with chocolate syrup. The syrup was Hershey’s chocolate syrup and the ice cream was cheap vanilla that had been melted and then re-frozen (the ice crystals in it were huge). The what really set this place a part was the bathroom; it was a port-a-potty. I kid you not. I about fell over laughing when I saw that. After our meal experience, we continued our walk and ended up at the Sear’s Tower. They were open, so we went up. Now the Sear’s town is the tallest building in North America and the third tallest in the world. It was really cool. I kind of wish we had done this first as it gave us a good lay of the land. I really recommending paying the extra for the audio tour. The give you a portable player and you play it yourself, but it was really worth it. That was really cool.

Monday was a travel day (for Shelly anyway as I am working in Chicago that week). We took the train back to the airport. Give yourself about 45 minutes to go from down town to the airport. (I would say that we got our money’s worth on those train passes.)

Overall, it was a great trip.

If you travel enough, bad things are bound to happen. This last week I had my rental car broken into. Now I stay in a hotel that is right off the highway, in a business area. There are no houses around at all. I hotel has security and there is usually a cop in the parking lot, just sitting there (no idea what is about). So I felt a little safe so I left my GPS in the car window (it was an inexpensive model from WalMart). You can see what is coming… some idiot broken in and took it. Now I don’t call him an idiot because he was a thief, I call him and idiot because he was a stupid thief. Instead of just breaking the window to get into the car (which is a relative easy thing to fix), the idiot first tried to pry to door handle off? WTF???? What was he thinking? (I actually don’t know that is was a male the committed the crime, but I am old school English and was taught when in doubt, use the masculine.) First of all, it takes time to pry off a door handle and once you get it off, then you have to tinker with the inner workings to get the door to release. Only after he realized the door handle was a bad idea, did he break the window. Here are the pics:

The police were called and came out, looked at it, filled out some paperwork, handed me one piece of paper. I know officially they will do everything they can to catch whoever did this, but in reality, this will never be solved or even looked at again. I got the feeling the paperwork is so the rental company and insurance company will be happy and believe me when I say it wasn’t my doing.  Understand that I am not trying to case dispersions on the police (either in the Chicago area or in general), it is just that this is a very low priority crime. He did a couple of thousands of dollars of damage, that is it. They would spend more money trying to solve the case then it is worth. Not a good ROI.  What did surprise me was why they didn’t finger print the door handle, door lock and window where the GPS was. You know this guy is going to get caught one day (he is to stupid not too). If you had fingerprints for this crime then you could just tack it onto whatever he go caught doing. Case would solve itself that way.

I will say that the rental car company was great. They sent me out a new car and everything. The people at the hotel were great.

Everyone that I have personally met in the Chicago have been great people. But one bad apple does ruin the whole bunch. It just reminds me why I don’t want to live in a big city (Boise is not a big city). That and the evening news where every other night you here of someone that was killed on the local news.

This week was a very busy one for me. First of all, the weigh in. I have now lost 39.4 pounds on weight watchers. I lost 1.7 pounds this week. Which is good since I would up one pound last week.

On Tuesday night, some people for work went to see a White Sox baseball game. This was my first Major League Baseball game. I had a blast. I liked the stadium as even from the cheep seat, I had no problem seeing the game. Sadly the game was a bit of a blow out, but the first 5 innings were close.

Then today my wife’s company, Workspace, had their company picnic. Since they had such a problem with the caterer last year, they decided to do all the cooking themselves this year. Since I have done company picnics before (and enjoy doing it), Shelly volunteered me to cook. They had 100 people RSVP and though we would need 3 grills. Now I have done company picnics for 250 and did just fine with one. As such, I told the other people that brought one to not unload it. As it turns out, my one grill was just right. I had no problem keeping up with demand. What they don’t realize is that not everyone is there at 12 for food. People naturally stage themselves, making only one grill enough. The picnic went pretty will and I think everyone had a good time.

I took this out my hotel window in Chicago. I ran it until my battery died.

OK, so I am doing pretty good on the diet. I have lost 32 pounds so far. When I lost 25 pounds, I got this award from Weight Watchers:

If you could read it, you see that is have "25lbs" engraved on it. I put it on a chain and wear it around my neck.

Weight Watchers also has a special award when you lose 10% of your body weight. Since I started to 301 pounds, my ten percent when lost 30 pounds. You get this really nice key ring.

I wish my phone took better pictures. The key ring is very nice but I am afraid to use it as I would probably ruin it.

Can you tell which girl is from Idaho in this picture?