I'm sorry, I'm a little distracted by those arms...

We had a great time last night hanging out with our friends Doug and Julie at "Le Bar" at the Sofitel hotel. (They make it sound all fancy and French, but it's actually really quiet and casual and relaxed... I'm really not a "bar" person, but the Sofitel bar is quite nice...) Doug and Julie had tickets to the Bulls game, but we ended up getting dinner and talking for so long that by the time they got to the game, there were only two minutes left for them to watch. But hey, I always say that the last two minutes of a basketball game are the most exciting anyway -- I mean, the score of a basketball game goes back and forth so much that it doesn't get REALLY interesting until it's almost over... :)

Our dinner conversation ran the gamut from politics to Ryan Reynolds. Specifically, Julie and I were in agreement that Ryan Reynolds has awesome arms... and a great chest... and nice abs... and... okay, I'll stop now. But seriously, c'mon: 

He's in the new Green Lantern movie that's coming out this summer... I'm not sure he quite matches up with the cartoon, but in this case, that's a GOOD thing...

And he was in that X-Men movie last year, which, Rick will tell you, I only saw because I knew Ryan Reynolds would be swinging swords around with those arms... 

I don't even KNOW what's going on here, but if Ryan Reynolds is chained to your floor, you don't ask questions... you just go with it...

Okay, okay, I'll move on to something else now... :)

In other news: I am really excited by the fact that I've finally gone through the last giant box of kitchen stuff, and I've unpacked what I need and re-packed what I DON'T need (so we can take the whole box down to storage). Yesterday I managed to clean up all the packing paper that has been strewn all over the floor for a week (Riff was loving that -- he would jump into the paper and rip it to shreds, which, of course, resulted in a million tiny little pieces of paper on the floor...). I've also tossed away all the glasses/cups we never use (which were piled all over the table) and I Swiffered the hardwood floor (to get rid of all those millions of tiny pieces of paper). So I now have a real, honest-to-goodness dining room. Or, well, at least a dining AREA:

Check out the floor! (This is much less impressive if you didn't see it before, when it was covered with packing paper and random boxes... but trust me -- this is impressive. :))

Mom and dad are heading up next week, so I'm saving some boxes for them to drag down to the recycling area and to cart over to our storage unit. Because they LOVE doing stuff like that. (Okay, maybe not... but if they help us, I MIGHT just make a key lime pie as a thank you... :)) 

For now, I think I should go work on the kitchen, because it's SO close to being blog-ready... just need to find space for a few more random items...