Let's try this again...

I'm so excited! (You know I just split this up into two posts so I could say I posted TWICE today... how often does THAT happen? :)) And it's a really silly reason to be excited, but nevertheless -- there is a new frozen yogurt/coffee shop right across the street from our neighborhood (take note of the COFFEE part -- it's not just frozen yogurt, but also Sweet, Sweet, Nectar of the Gods...). And what REALLY makes this great is the fact that it's within walking distance of our house. One of the things I was really looking forward to the most about moving to Chicago was the promise of stores/restaurants within walking distance of wherever we'd be living. It's much more difficult to come across locations like that in suburbia...

But we have, within the last couple years, found ourselves within walking distance of two drug stores (which can be handy now and then), at least four banks (which is never handy, since none of them are OUR bank), a decent restaurant (Z Tejas -- good southwestern-style food), and a few fast-food/casual places (McDonald's, a Quizno's, a really good pizza place). But all of them pale in comparison to the arrival of our new frozen yogurt/coffee shop. To have frozen yogurt within walking distance is already pretty awesome -- espcially since the walk to and from serves to burn off some of those (not much less than ice cream) calories. But to also have COFFEE within walking distance?? That's like my dream...

At one time, the now-exclusively-pizza place was actually a coffee shop (I believe I wrote about it on the blog a few times, because they also had some of the BEST carrot cake I've ever had), and I fully expected to make it a regular summertime walk destination... but the "coffee shop" barely lasted a few months before it was converted to a "Brooklyn-style" pizza place... and while they DO have some of the best pizza around, I don't consume pizza nearly as often as I consume coffee -- ergo, I haven't been there in quite a while (whereas I've been to Starbucks fifteen thousand times in the last week ALONE... okay, I may be exaggerating... but not by much... :)).

So now I just need to encourage everyone else in my neighborhood to patronize the new frozen yogurt/coffee shop, lest it suffer the same fate as the Brooklyn pizza place and turn into, oh, I don't know, a Philly cheesesteak joint or something. And I am NOT usually one to discourage the northeast from encroaching upon Austin -- we have FAR too many barbecue and tex-mex restaurants, and not nearly enough Brooklyn-style pizza or New York bagel shops. Still, I really like the idea of a regular summertime walking destination that ends with either dessert or caffeine...

Or possibly both... :)