Lucky...

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone! To be honest, I totally forgot until this afternoon, when I was out and about, walking down the street, and noticed a bunch of people wearing inordinate amounts of green. (Oh yeah... that's today...) Why is it, exactly, that we make such a big deal about one particular country of heritage on this one particular day, yet totally ignore the other 190-something countries out there? I mean, what about a Peruvian day? Or a Korean day? German day?? How about an Indian day where we all eat curry and listen to Bollywood for 24 hours straight?? Actually, I might call that "next Wednesday." Yeah, that's right. Sorry Rick. (Ha! No I'm not... :))

Needless to say, I forgot to wear any green today. Just jeans and a blue sweater. Oops. The weather here was great today -- 67 degrees, and almost TOO warm for a jacket. That's crazy -- last year at this time, I would've considered 67 degrees "cold." In fact, pretty much anything below 75 was pretty chilly...

A couple days ago, before our heat wave began, Rick and I ventured downtown so he could buy some new shirts for work. He made dinner reservations at Tavern at the Park, but we ended up arriving really early (having overestimated the time we'd need to make our way downtown/shop for shirts...).

So we wasted a bit of time wandering through Millennium Park:

 We made the required stop at Cloud Gate (aka "the bean"):

And gazed upon urban canyons:

We took the required "reflections in the bean" pictures:

And then followed the scary face back toward the restaurant:

The faces are some sort of art installation, of course... but I find them a bit disconcerting... And by the way, we really enjoyed dinner at Tavern at the Park -- especially the mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwich we had for dessert.

The ice cream, by the way, WAS green -- so maybe I just celebrated St. Patrick's Day a bit early... :)