I prefer the boring, quiet weekends...

So it's been an interesting week... last week at this time, I was fighting off some kind of weird malady -- my stomach was feeling sort of off, and then I got a fever and started feeling achy. I thought maybe I was getting the flu, but by Wednesday I was feeling fine again. So apparently I picked up some random 24-hour thing from somewhere. But no matter... everything was back to normal by mid-week...

So I didn't think much of it when Rick complained about his elbow hurting Wednesday night. He thought perhaps he knocked it against a door or a table or something, and just couldn't remember. During the night, I became aware of much tossing and turning from Rick's side of the bed... at around 3 in the morning, he said his elbow felt like it was "on fire," and he couldn't sleep. So he took some Advil, which helped enough that he was able to sleep the rest of the night...

In the morning, he showed me his elbow, which was swollen and red (like angry, seriously peeved red). At this point, he thought maybe it was some sort of bug bite -- but to be honest, I was really hoping it WASN'T a bug bite, because I didn't like the idea of a bug that could cause a bite like that hiding somewhere in my house. An exterminator would've been immediately necessary. But as I looked at his elbow, I couldn't see ANY place on his arm where the skin was broken -- in fact, other than the fact that it was obviously really annoyed about something, his elbow looked fine. No bruises, scrapes, cuts, anything...

But as the day wore on, Rick decided that whatever was going on with his elbow was NOT normal, so he made a doctor's appointment for Thursday afternoon. It took very little time for the doctor to decide that an orthopedic surgeon should be consulted -- she thought it looked like bursitis, which affects the joint, and orthopedists have more specialized knowledge of the issue. But the doctor was unable to find an available orthopedist, so she sent Rick straight to the ER to have the fluid drained from his elbow (ouch).

After four or five hours in the ER, Rick was finally given the okay to leave, with a prescription for pain pills and precautionary antibiotics. (They'd sent the drained elbow fluid to the lab to test for bacteria, and initially everything looked okay.) But as Rick was walking home, he got a phone call from the ER doctor saying that something WAS growing in the elbow petri dish, but it wasn't clear yet how serious it was, so he promised to call back on Friday...

Friday afternoon, Rick called me as he walked home from work and said he needed an overnight bag because he was being admitted to the hospital for IV antibiotics. Apparently whatever started growing in that petri dish was very bad (although not quite as bad as MRSA, which is the super-resistant bacteria that's so hard to get rid of), and once he got to the hospital, they hooked Rick up to an IV of Vancomycin. (We read on Wikipedia that this particular antibiotic used to be a "last resort" antibiotic. But now there's bacteria out there that can even survive the "last resorts" so NEW last resorts have been developed...)

At first, I assumed Rick's hospital stay would just be an overnight thing... Faisal was nice enough to give me a ride home on Friday, and then I walked over to the hospital Saturday morning, thinking Rick and I could get a cab home together. But the orthopedic surgeon decided that one more day of antibiotics would be a good idea, so I walked home by myself Saturday evening. He then decided that one MORE day of antibiotics would also be good, so I embarked upon another walk to/from the hospital on Sunday. It's only about a mile walk to the hospital... and even though I'm quite used to walking/jogging three or four miles at a time on my treadmill, I was totally exhausted over the weekend. Each evening when I got home, I thought about making myself dinner, and then decided to just heat up a can of soup and watch stupid movies on the couch (seriously, I actually watched "Wrath of the Titans" one night... it was bad the first time I saw it in the theater, and it was STILL bad the second time...)

But the hospital wasn't completely horrible, as far as hospitals go -- Rick's room was on the top floor of the hospital, which, we found out, used to be the "VIP" floor. And Rick ended up in the room that Michael Jordan used to request when he needed knee surgery... or whatever it is basketball players generally need. So the room was HUGE -- I could've done cartwheels in there. There's also a Starbucks in the lobby of the hospital, so I was able to sneak cappuccino directly into Rick's IV line...

He came home yesterday afternoon, after being given the option of taking oral antibiotics and waiting to see if the infection completely clears up on it's own, or having immediate surgery and just taking care of it. Rick decided on the "wait and see" approach, hoping to avoid the surgery. He'll find out on Friday if that worked or not. 

The view from Michael Jordan's hospital room...

It's hard to tell just how big it was from this picture... it did, however, need a much bigger television set...

Cappuccino has healing properties...

And then this morning, I got the worst news of all -- the cupcake store across the street is CLOSED!! My cupcakes are gone!! No more glimpses of deliciousness through my living room window!! Noooooooooooooooooooooo...

Okay, maybe that's not the WORST news in the world... but you can bet I'll be perusing Google maps tonight to find the next closest cupcake store around here...

Because cupcakes ALSO have healing properties... :)

This week's randomness...

So Rick recently bought a couple Fitbit trackers for us to use -- have you guys heard of these? They not only track steps that you've taken, but they also track flights of stairs climbed, calories burned, and how many miles all those steps add up to. And, you can wear it in a band around your wrist while you sleep at night, and in the morning it tells you how much time you spent sleeping vs. how much time you were awake. (Last night, for instance, I really didn't feel like I was sleeping well... and according to my Fitbit, I woke up 20 times. Which sounds about right...) I have my tracker set with a goal of 15,000 steps a day -- every time I reach it, Fitbit sends me a nice little congratulatory message. So far, I'm really finding it to be a motivating tool -- I actually WANT to walk more, so Fitbit will tell me what a good job I'm doing. Which is sort of weird, but I guess motivation -- even when it comes from an inanimate object -- is always good.

I've been loving the extra light in the afternoons this week. With the disappointing winter we've had, I think I'm just ready to move on to spring now. Of course, this doesn't mean that we couldn't have a surprise April snowstorm. (Which, incidentally, is exactly what happened the first year we moved to New Jersey.) Besides, with spring comes BASEBALL -- I always so look forward to baseball season... even if the Yankees aren't looking so good this year... :)

I've heard from three separate, random sources this week how great cardamom is in coffee. Is this a new thing? I've never heard the virtues of cardamom-infused coffee lauded so passionately as I have this week. It's like all the coffee-loving people in the world had a secret meeting and decided that cardamom is the new "it" spice. Naturally, I had to try it in my own coffee this morning... so I added some ground cardamom to my coffee grounds before brewing. And it IS pretty good... I sometimes add cinnamon to my coffee, but I really do need to experiment with more spice variety. Maybe I'll try cinnamon AND cardamom... yeah, I'm crazy like that...

And back to the spring topic -- how are we already halfway through March?? Sunday is St. Patrick's Day, which means the Chicago river will be dyed green and crazy green-bedecked people from far and wide will converge on the city to wander up and down the streets, patronizing every bar in sight. Seriously -- I've never seen a city get so intense about St. Patrick's Day. They REALLY love that holiday here... I prefer to stay in my condo and avoid the drunk people...

I now have more than 5000 steps completed for the day, but since I need 10,000 more before my Fitbit congratulates me, I suppose I should get moving instead of sitting on the couch typing a blog post. :)

Recent randomness...

I have been at a loss for decent blog topics lately, which has resulted in much silence. So to the two or three of you who actually read my blog, sorry about being so boring. :)

I didn't watch any of the Oscars last Sunday... I just don't care about those awards shows all that much. I did, however, spend the evening watching a movie that WON a few Oscars: Jaws... which I'd never actually watched from start to finish. I'd seen a minute or two here and there -- but never the whole movie in its entirety. ("Is that Richard Dreyfuss??" I exclaimed, when his 28-year-old self appeared on-screen.) And let me just say -- that movie is SCARY. That shark was huge! And yeah, it was a fake movie shark... but still -- that fake movie shark was HUGE!! I've always found it extremely unsettling to swim in lakes and oceans -- I don't like large, dark bodies of water filled with unknown contents... and now, well, I'm just not sure I can ever go near the ocean again. :) (By the way -- John Williams is a movie soundtrack GENIUS. That guy can musically capture the mood of a film better than any composer out there...)

I think our snow chances for Chicago this year are officially a bust. We got a couple inches the other night, and it's actually been snowing off and on for the last three days or so... but it's been too warm for the flakes to actually accumulate. So while it's been pretty to watch it fall, it hasn't really amounted to much. Such a disappointing winter... well, for those of us who love snow. :)

It's been exceedingly cloudy the last few weeks, which has been rather depressing. I always find that I have more energy when the sun shines -- apparently I run on solar-powered batteries. Needless to say, I've found myself dragging most days, trying to decide between working out (which usually helps to give me a bit more energy) and drinking copious amounts of coffee (which temporarily gives me a slight energy boost, but only until my coffee is gone...). But we did have one clear day last week, which happened to coincide with a full (or almost full) moon:

But today is yet another cloudy day... so in lieu of drinking copious amounts of coffee, I'm off to work out. Hope everyone had a good week!    

The unbearable lightness of my bedroom...

I love my condo. I really do. I love the loft feel of it -- the high ceilings, the exposed duct work, the brick walls... even the random concrete-entombed nails, rebar and dowels, which, I'm sure could all tell stories about this building's history as a food factory nearly a hundred years ago.

It's not perfect, of course -- the kitchen could use an update. So could the master bathroom... for some reason, the previous owner of this unit completely renovated the guest bathroom, but left the master bathroom as is. The bland circa-1999 (I'm guessing) decor is pretty boring and dated... but it's roomy, it's functional, it's a bathroom -- I can't really complain.

But the one thing that HAS bothered me since we moved in is the bedroom light in the ceiling. I actually rarely use this light, since we have a couple of lamps on bedside tables that usually suffice. But I do use the ceiling fan -- I am, apparently, part polar bear or emperor penguin, because I like it cold when I sleep, and the fan helps to lower the temperature in the room. So every night, I turn the fan on, but keep the light off. And most nights, this works out just fine...

Every now and then, however, for absolutely no discernible reason, that light in the ceiling decides to turn itself on. It is quite disconcerting to fall asleep in a dark room, only to awake in the middle of the night to a brightly burning light bulb. Especially when no one has actually turned it on. And it's even more alarming if I'm not quite asleep yet, and the dark veil provided by my eyelids is suddenly pierced with glowing incandescence. It's like my mom has stepped into my room to wake me for school after I've overslept... Except, like I said, NO ONE IS THERE.

This tends to startle me so much that when Rick is traveling, I either sleep without the fan on (so the switch on the wall is off altogether), or I wear a sleeping mask to entirely cover my eyes, so I can't see if the light suddenly turns itself on.

The logical part of me knows that the phantom light is probably just a wiring issue of some sort, and my condo is NOT haunted by a ghost who really wants to read a few chapters of a good book or work on knitting a scarf. But recently I've noticed that when I use my white noise machine, every now and then (just like the light), it switches itself OFF in the middle of the night. So now I have a randomly illuminating overhead light AND a randomly silenced white noise machine. I've used the white noise machine a lot over the last few years, so it could just be that I need a new one... but still -- now my ghost-that-doesn't-really-exist wants silence, too (presumably to concentrate more thoroughly on the book and/or knitting).

And then last night, I woke up at around 2 in the morning and heard a strange whirring noise. It took me a minute to realize what it was, but I finally figured it out -- my dishwasher was running. This one actually DOES have a logical explanation (I think) -- Riff has a habit of jumping onto the kitchen counter right above the dishwasher... and sometimes, his back feet don't quite clear the counter, and he ends up hitting a button on the dishwasher. So if the dishwasher is closed and locked (as it was last night, because I'd just run it earlier in the evening), he's apt to turn it on. I'm really hoping this is what happened last night, because by the time I actually woke up and heard the dishwasher running, Riff was curled up at the end of the bed sleeping peacefully.

So yes, I honestly do love my condo. But sometimes it really freaks me out... :)  

I was told there would be snow...

You know, I really need to take a cue from other bloggers and write a few posts in advance... then perhaps I wouldn't appear to be such a blog slacker. :)

I've been far too busy pondering the question of why Chicago has had no snow this year. This is CHICAGO -- snow is supposed to be a guarantee. Meanwhile, the northeast was buried under feet of frosty frozen flakes (not to be confused with Frosted Flakes... although snowstorms ARE ggrrrrrreat!). What does a northern city on a Great Lake have to do to get some snow, huh?? Darn you and your global warming, Al Gore!!

This is about the best we've gotten so far:

Ehh... at least the sidewalks were covered, temporarily. (This, by the way, is my favorite place to sit when it actually DOES snow -- I love sitting at my balcony and watching the city view while snow falls...)

Mostly, we've just had cloudy day after cloudy day, with some rain now and then (yeah, RAIN... that's just not right) and an occasional sunny day for good measure. Riff takes full advantage of the sunny days:

Cats love their sunbeams...

Hope you all have a good week, whether or not you're digging out from under piles of snow... :)

Today's randomness...

I'm sitting at my table overlooking my balcony and the street down below, waiting for snow to start. It's in the forecast today, but I'm still skeptical, considering the decided lack of winter weather we've experienced this year. So far, the temperature is hovering around 39, which means that all we're getting is really cold rain... I MUCH prefer snow to cold rain -- for some reason, 40 degrees and rainy feels about a hundred times more cold and miserable than 30 degrees and snowy.

I just watched a woman with a stroller standing on the corner waiting for the light to change so she could cross the street. She had the stroller halfway off the sidewalk and hanging in the intersection. Hmmm... seems like that's putting an awful lot of faith in the strangers driving their two-ton vehicles around your baby. Maybe I'm just super cautious and totally distrustful, but I don't think I'd let a stroller get anywhere near a street until I was certain everything around me had stopped moving... then again, I AM pretty paranoid...

Rick is returning from a ten-day trip to San Francisco today, where he attended a "boot camp" for his new job. I was trying to think of the last time I'd spent ten days alone, and honestly, I'm not sure I've EVER spent ten days alone. But I definitely don't have a problem with it... I could probably move to Nepal and take up residence in a monastery, where I would take a vow a silence and solitude and hang out with lots of cats. Which is pretty much what I've been doing for the last ten days... minus the Nepal part, of course.

When I turned my TV on this morning, I accidentally hit the channel button, which switched the channel over to Spanish-language Telemundo. A normal person would've immediately looked for something else, but I actually KEPT it on Telemundo for a good half hour and watched some kind of weird, dramatic soap opera. And I don't speak Spanish. But I DO find foreign languages fascinating to listen to, so I'll actually sit and listen with rapt attention to languages I don't understand, completely convinced that if I listen long enough, something will start to make sense. (This is a fact that drives Rick insane, especially if we're in a hotel and I find the Japanese game show channels. I watch as long as I can, until Rick, usually sitting at his computer, begins pleading, "change it, change it, CHANGE IT." It's sort of hilarious... :))

For the first time since we moved to Chicago, I actually have all THREE of my living room lamps arranged, plugged in, and ready to light the room. When we first moved up here, we could only find two of the lamps -- our movers really strangely configured our stuff when they packed it all up, so although two of the lamps were logically found in "living room" boxes, one of them was nowhere to be found. We eventually found it over at our storage facility, when we were rummaging through random boxes -- I can't remember where we finally found it, but I think it was in a "garage" or "workout room" box. And then when we moved into this place, I couldn't find a good place for all three lamps, so one of them has just been sitting idle on my desk. But now that we've had the adventure of acquiring our new TV and set it up in a new space in the living room, some area has been freed up for lamps. And it makes me weirdly happy to see all three of them burning brightly at the same time...

And now I'm off to find something for lunch and to wait for snow... I shall remain skeptical until I see it...  

Photo randomness...

Every now and then I find myself flipping through the pictures I have in my phone, trying to decide whether or not to keep them or delete them. I also wonder: how did I get SO many pictures on my phone?? And do you suppose that someday, cameras will be obsolete? Will we all just document our lives with the cameras on our phones, instead of good-quality CAMERA cameras? (Or will phone cameras eventually reach the level of quality found in real cameras? I mean, it makes sense, right? Computers used to be the size of entire rooms... and now we fit them into the palms of our hands...)

That whole paragraph of curiosity was for the sole purpose of introducing these -- a bunch of pictures I recently took with my camera:

Oh Christmas cookies, how I miss you...

Piva checking out the twenty snowflakes that have fallen this year...

My new favorite purple mug from Caribou Coffee. Faisal bought the same mug (actually, he bought like four of them because they were a really good deal -- they were marked down from ten or twelve dollars to only three or four...), and made the observation that because the mouth of the mug is so wide, hot beverages cool down quickly. Which is true... but I tend to reheat my beverages in the microwave about fifteen times before I manage to drink an entire cup. Sometimes I'll take a sip, and then forget about it for a half hour... and then suddenly I'll realize, "hey, I still have an entire cup of coffee!" So the quickly cooling properties don't bother me much... and anyway, coffee tastes better in a purple mug. Don't question me, it just does.

Can someone tell me what's going on here? Seriously, this is the second time I've noticed a long line of people standing on the street across from my condo building -- and I have yet to figure out what they were all waiting for. There are no movie theaters, no sports arenas, no museums... the building they're standing in front of houses an eye doctor, a hairstylist, and a custom suit shop... and I just don't think all of these people are in desperate need of new suits. Next time I see something like this, I'm going down to stand in line, too... just so I can see where I end up. 

I have a LOT of Riff pictures on my phone... he's just always doing things that make me laugh. Like searching for a lost treat under the fridge...

Or hiding behind the coffeemaker...

Or taking his place as Kitty Overlord on top of the fridge and gazing down upon his human underlings...

Okay, I'm off to make some tea and huddle under a blanket to counteract the effects of tonight's 7-degree weather... hope everyone is having a good week!

Yum...

Every year, it's the same -- I feel really sad right after Christmas when I'm packing away all my decorations, but then I'll look at the calendar one day, and all of a sudden we're already halfway through January. And I realize: the year is once again moving waaaaay too quickly. (I really need to stop feeling down after Christmas -- I don't want the next one to arrive before I have a chance to enjoy the rest of the year...) All of that was to say -- it's January 15th already??

Anyway, moving on from my "time moves too quickly" incredulity... So last week, after years (literally YEARS) of arm-twisting, I finally agreed that Rick and I should have dinner with Faisal at a Pakistani restaurant on Devon Ave., which is the location of Chicago's "Little India" neighborhood. (Okay, perhaps *I* wasn't the one who needed a good arm-twist... the reluctant holdout shall remain nameless... RICKRICKRICK. What? I felt like typing Rick's name in obvious capital letters just for the fun of it... :)) There was some discussion as to what the difference is between Indian food and Pakistani food -- I think the conclusion was "not much," although the Pakistani place did have brain on the menu. (No, I didn't try it... and no, I never will... although if I WERE inclined to eat brain, I think it would definitely be best surrounded by delicious spicy sauce...)

Faisal was a bit apprehensive about finally taking us to this place, since he'd repeatedly extolled the delicious virtues of not only this particular restaurant, but others on Devon Ave., many times when asking us to join him... so in my mind, at least, it was understood to be this completely awesome dining experience. I was seriously excited to try it. Like jumping-up-and-down-in-my-bathroom-while-I-was-getting-ready excited to try it. And lucky for Faisal, it WAS awesome. Any place that knows how to cook chicken until it's absolutely-perfect-fall-apart-tender -- and dark meat chicken, at that, which I normally don't even eat -- is on my "must visit again" list. As Faisal said -- his peeps really know what they're doing. :)

And by the way, Faisal -- THANK YOU for continually asking us to join you, even though it took SOMEONE in this house five thousand years to agree. I won't say who... RICKRICKRICK... What??? Really, I just like typing Rick's name... :) (Rick is probably now plotting my demise... or at least plotting a way to keep me far away from all Indian and/or Pakistani food for the rest of my life...)

Anyway, as I was saying -- the food at this place was awesome, and I want to go back, like, yesterday. We were all completely stuffed after dinner, but Faisal wanted to stop at a place to pick up some desserts to take home. And since I'm never one to pass up an opportunity to try a new dessert, I went into the shop and tried a sweet, sticky, square-shaped thing (which is what I kept calling it until I did some Google research to come up with the proper name -- burfi). After my huge dinner, the burfi was "good," but I could barely fit it into my quite-satisfied stomach -- nevertheless, I decided to take some home with me. The next day, with an empty stomach and a craving for something sweet, I sliced off a little piece of it and took a bite. Suddenly, I heard the singing of a thousand angels and a bright heavenly light shone from above down upon the sweet square of delightful ambrosia before me. Okay, maybe that's a SLIGHT exaggeration -- but holy sugar rush... if marzipan and fudge met up with cardamom (maybe?) and sweetened condensed milk (maybe??), this is the crazy delicious baby they would have. Seriously, I don't even know what's in this stuff (except sugar... I'm fairly certain there was sugar), but it will haunt my dreams...

This whole experience made me start thinking about foods from my own ethnic background, and how many of them I like (or hate). As an American mutt, my various ancestors are mostly from Sweden, England, France and Germany. Swedish food is out -- I'm sorry Sweden... I love you for my last name and my affinity for cold weather (although I can't say I'm always happy with my arctic-circle-chic skin tone... but whatever), but your food leaves something to be desired. I know some people love Swedish meatballs and pickled herring, but I just... can't. Although I admit to knowing very little about Swedish desserts... I should look into that...

I'm also not all that well-acquainted with English food, although I've really grown to love the fish and chips place we frequent just about every week. Not for the fish and chips, of course... but the rest of their food is good, too. Whether or not it's quintessentially English food, however, I'm not really sure. But my mom and I used to have lunch at an English tea room back in New Jersey that served the BEST scones with clotted cream -- I'm glad it was a bit of a drive from our house, because I could've eaten those things every day...

French food? Well, I do love a good chicken fricassee... and French croissants, I'm fairly certain, win the award for "best use of obscene amounts of butter in a pastry." Which means they taste amazing, of course. (You never heard Julia Child say, "you know what this dish needs? Less butter...")

But I think of all the countries of my vague origin, I am most familiar with German food -- this, no doubt, is because of my years of studying German in high school and all of our various field trips to restaurants, cultural centers, etc. Not to mention the fact that family members who knew I loved my German classes gave me German cookbooks for Christmas and birthdays. And while the Germans are a bit too in love with their wurst (which violates my "no ground up meat" rule), I do love a nicely prepared Sauerbraten, and I could pretty much eat my weight in Spätzle. Black Forest cake is one of my favorite desserts (I love chocolate and cherries), and Sacher Torte and spritz cookies are quite good, as well. And Germans are no strangers to good chocolate, either.

And now that I've written this entire post, I'm starving... sooooo... anyone for Italian? :)     

Happy 2013 randomness...

1. Happy New Year! (Okay, I'm a little late with my new year wishes, but at least it's still January...)

2. I was super wild and crazy and did absolutely nothing on New Year's Eve. Just watched some TV, read a couple chapters of a book, and then stood at my window until I saw the reflections of the Navy Pier fireworks on a building down the block -- that's how I knew it was officially 2013, and therefore, I could immediately retire to bed. I always worry about noise on New Year's Eve, because even when we lived in the quiet Austin suburbs, people were always setting off fireworks for hours after midnight. But when midnight hit here in downtown Chicago, I was surprised by how quiet it was. I fell asleep right away, happy that none of our neighbors were hosting noisy parties. And then, around 2:00 in the morning, I woke up and gradually became aware of murmurings and engine noise and an occasional siren outside... so I got up and walked to the balcony windows to see what was going on. Apparently, 2 a.m. is about the time New Year's Eve parties start to break up, and EVERYONE heads home at the same time. The streets were crowded with people attempting to hail cabs (thank you for not driving, drunk people), which proved to be quite the feat, because every cab that passed was already in use. I've also never seen so many limos driving around at the same time -- I guess renting limos is also a New Year's Eve thing?? And because of all the traffic on the streets, emergency vehicles (which usually silently traverse the neighborhood at night, because the streets are pretty empty) were forced to use their sirens. So my nice quiet new year temporarily became a cacophony of party-goers...

3. I have, over the last few weeks, managed to smack my legs right into the corner of my bed on BOTH sides... so I now have matching bruises on both of my shins. Seriously, WHY did my parents not bestow upon me the middle name of "Grace"? Because clearly I am full of a lilting elegance, the likes of which is rarely found outside the realm of ballet dancing or Cirque du Soleil...

4. I'm losing hope that Chicago will get any decent snow this year. We've had a few random snow showers, where flakes will swirl around in the air for a couple hours but absolutely nothing accumulates. And seeing as temperatures are supposed to be in the 50s (and maybe even 60s???) this weekend, I'm guessing snow won't be in the forecast again for a while...

5. I never make new year's resolutions (with the exception of resolving to NOT write the wrong year when I write the date... you get so used to writing the previous year that it becomes habit. So I resolve to only write "2013" this year. I'm so ambitious.), but I suppose I should have some kind of goals for the new year. Like maybe getting the condo into better shape -- I've been meaning to buy some artwork for the walls since we moved in... I really ought to do that eventually. Perhaps I should even resolve to write more blog posts... :)

Hope everyone has had a great first week of 2013!

Friday randomness...

The after-Christmas slump has begun... it always feels a bit depressing when the holiday season ends. All of the shopping, wrapping, baking and socializing seems to come to such an abrupt conclusion. Of course, in the case of baking, this is probably a very good thing. Even though I love baking, I once again feel as if I've been eating nothing but cookies and chocolate for the last four weeks. Salad and vegetables are actually sounding surprisingly good at the moment. Rick bought me some new workout clothes for Christmas (don't worry, I asked for them -- he wasn't trying to hint at anything... I don't think...), so I'll be making use of those. Immediately.

We had a nice, low-key Christmas at mom and dad's place with Eric, Rachel, Connor and Faisal. Faisal took a few nice family pictures for us:

Although as Eric said, "Faisal is really a part of the family... maybe Lisa should take the picture..." Oh, my brother is sooooooo funny... :) (I do agree with the first part of that statement, however -- perhaps a tripod and camera with a timer would be a better option? Eric would probably find a reason why that wouldn't work... :))

One of the things Connor loves to do at mom and dad's place is run up and down the hallway of the condo building... it's good exercise... :) (We should've ALL been running up and down the hallways -- that would've justified our cookie consumption...)

But one of his absolute FAVORITE things to do is to play with phones and iPads -- if you want to get Connor's attention, just pull out an iPad:

So far, he hasn't figured out the code to unlock it, but one of these days, he's going to randomly hit the correct keys and delete everything on Faisal's iPad...

Chicago has FINALLY had some snow (although not nearly enough, in my opinion). It snowed for a few hours yesterday morning, and although most of it melted as soon as it hit the ground, we did end up with a slight "dusting" -- which is more than we've had all year. (Isn't that crazy?? This is Chicago! We're supposed to be buried under snow by now!)

Riff was quite fascinated by the falling flakes -- he was actually trying to capture them through the glass as they fell...

Okay, I'm off to try out some of my new workout clothes... hope everyone has a good last weekend of 2012!

I heard the bells on Christmas Day...

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head:
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men."

Till, ringing singing, on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men
 
Merry Christmas!

Be good for goodness' sake...

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook -- an old German Christmas card, I believe. The translation would be "greetings from Krampus and Nicholas" -- Nicholas, of course, referring to St. Nicholas, who, in this country, has morphed into Santa Claus. But Krampus is a bit of a lesser-known figure from German/Alpine folklore -- whereas St. Nick travels from house to house bestowing gifts upon good children, Krampus finds the bad children and punishes them. He's always depicted as some kind of creepy, demonic entity, who rattles chains or smacks kids with branches from his basket of switches. He's like St. Nick's terrifying sidekick...

Growing up in the U.S., the idea of a kindly, rotund, jolly man who somehow broke into my house every Christmas Eve and left me presents was extremely disconcerting to me... if I'd grown up in Germany, I think I would've needed anti-anxiety medication to get through the Christmas season. I mean, sure, we have the whole, "he sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake" thing, but apparently Germany takes their naughty-children-during-the-holidays concept seriously.

In Northern Europe, St. Nicholas Day is celebrated on December 6. I think in some places, this is even considered the "big" day for gift-giving, as opposed to Christmas Day. On St. Nicholas Eve, kids put their shoes outside their doors or by the fireplace, and in the morning they're filled with candy or small toys. This is a tradition my high school German teacher tried to show her pupils by asking us to take our shoes off before class one December 5. (Side note: my German "classroom" was actually a little room off the library that was obviously meant to be a storage room or somebody's office... My freshman year of high school, there were only seven of us in the class... by the time I was a senior, there were three of us...) We, being the belligerent teenagers we were, vociferously opposed this order... okay, everyone else vociferously opposed, I silently brooded. But eventually our teacher somehow convinced us to (grudgingly) leave our shoes outside in the library, and while we took a pop quiz or worked on vocabulary lists, she "snuck" outside (in our tiny room this really did not go unnoticed) and filled all of our shoes with candy.

After that, I felt bad that we'd all been protesting the shoe-removal, because obviously our teacher just wanted to surprise us with a fun tradition, and we'd taken a bit of the "fun" out of it by suspiciously demanding to know why our shoes were being confiscated. We probably all should've been hit with Krampus switches, but fortunately, that really IS just a silly story made up to scare children into being extra good...

It IS just a story, right? Right? RIGHT???

Sigh... the Christmas season is SO stressful... :)  

Random Mayan musings...

So here's good news: They seem to be completely finished with the tar work on our building, because I haven't smelled a thing for the last few days. YAY!!!! I didn't even realize how awesome it was to wake up to the smell of NOTHING until after I'd been waking up to the smell of tar for weeks on end. I'm also excited about sitting on my couch and reading without feeling like I've set up a lawn chair in the middle of a highway construction zone. (Seriously, for some reason, the tar smell seemed to be VERY concentrated right on the couch in the living room... which I could never figure out, because it's away from all the windows and air vents in the condo...)

But here's bad news: According to the Mayans, we have barely more than a week before the end of the world. (And I STILL haven't made Christmas cookies??? I'd better get to work on that... I would hate for the last food I eat on this planet to be, you know, healthy... Because what's the point of eating a bunch of healthy food if the world is going to end on the 21st?)

I've been busy with freelance work this week, but I'm thinking I need to get that batch of sugar cookie dough ready so I can do some baking this weekend. Especially on the off chance that the Mayans were totally off their rockers and really had no clue what they were talking about. Or the off chance that we've misinterpreted their calendar. For all WE know, the Mayans only had one guy -- let's call him Tehuixiapu the Calendar Guy (what, you're better at making up Mayan names?? Go right ahead...) -- and Tehuixiapu spent his whole life carving calendars onto stone. 1600s... 1700s... 1800s... 1900s... 2000s... And one day, he started to reevaluate his life. He realized that ALL of his time had been spent on carving calendars. He noticed his wife had been hanging out an awful lot with Ixcuahat the Mexican hot chocolate merchant, and his kids had joined a rather notorious human-sacrifice gang on the south side of the pyramids. And just as he carved "December 21, 2012," his neighbor Ahxiu approached with carvings depicting his recent vacation to Cancun. "That's IT," Tehuixiapu exclaimed, gazing down at the chisel in his callused hand, "I'm done with this calendar nonsense." And just like that, he dropped what he was doing and ran off to Cancun. And of course no one else wanted to take over Tehuixiapu's calendar carving, because they saw how it ate up all of his free time. And THAT is why the Mayan calendar ends at December 21, 2012.

Okay, it's time to make something for dinner, and obviously I don't have anything terribly interesting to say anyway. :) Hope everyone is having a good week...    

Random stuff...

1. Question: How long does it take a crew to tar the roof of a condo building? Answer: Apparently approximately as long as it would take to walk the entire length of China... wearing only one shoe... carrying a very heavy backpack... dragging a wagon full of cement bricks... and stopping to take pictures along the way. In other words -- a really, really, really long time. WHY is it taking them so long to finish this project? I'm about to go fruitloopsnuttycrazyinsane from breathing in all these tar fumes. I seriously can't stand it much longer. They even worked on Saturday. Although they took Sunday off, and yesterday morning was rainy so they didn't work yesterday, either. Two glorious days of smelling NOTHING (except the pine-scented candles I've placed out for Christmas...).

2. I'm all ready for the Christmas cookie-baking season -- all stocked up on butter, eggs, sugar and colored sprinkles. Although I could probably use a bit more flour. Better to have too much than too little. And Eric would never forgive me if I ran out of flour mid-cookie-bake... that would be inexcusable...

3. I got my tree all set up over the weekend. By the way, do you know how difficult it is to put up a Christmas tree when you share space with (I won't say "own" because he would take exception to that) the world's most curious cat?? I have no fewer than five separate Riff scratches on my arms... he quite enjoyed jumping three feet straight off the floor to lunge at ornaments and garland. I'm just lucky he hasn't attempted to climb the tree yet...

4. A few pictures:

I think I need a few more red bows... next year... :)

I'm baaaaaack...

Wait, could it be? Another blog post?? Are those NEW words on Lisa's blog page??

Yes, yes, it is I -- the Frequently Absent Blogger. :) We just got back from a week in Austin, where we hung out at mom and dad's place, met up with friends, wore t-shirts in the warm weather, and ate WAY too much food. And on Thanksgiving, we drove out to the middle of nowhere -- that's where Rick's sister Jen lives. (Okay, technically, it's called Red Rock, and since it's only about an hour away from Austin I suppose it's not literally the middle of nowhere... but it certainly feels that way when you're there. :))

This does LOOK like the middle of nowhere, right? (Although my view at the present moment is a busy street, concrete sidewalks, and skyscrapers, so I'm really not one to judge... :))

Jen has a bunch of horses (plus a donkey, chickens, and a couple dogs), so we all made friends...

But I was REALLY surprised by this:

Yes, that's MOM on a horse... (and our niece Ali behind her... but seriously -- where did my real mom go?? :))

Dad decided to try it out, too... but apparently to get a good picture, he needed some temporary help from me and Jen's husband, Larry. (I love how the donkey is peeking out from behind Larry...)

Group shot (minus mom and dad, who must've been busy with the horses... :)).

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!

Friday random thoughts...

1. I am almost out of the coffee I brought back from Hawaii. Although this is obviously a tragedy, I am looking forward to stocking up on some of the holiday blends that are always offered by coffee shops this time of year. (By the way, it's also a tragedy that I live a block away from a Starbucks and have not yet walked down the street for a peppermint mocha this season...)

2. I awoke to the smell of road tar this morning. Somewhere around here, either a road is being paved or a roof is being tarred... I don't know which, but it's extremely annoying. I lit some scented candles hoping that would help, but I'm not sure it's made anything better. Now it just smells like road tar AND pumpkin pie spice. I'm very confused.

3. Also this morning, I awoke to find the almost-full roll of toilet paper completely unwound in a pile on the bathroom floor. Apparently Riff was bored last night. And, since there was so much paper left on the roll and I don't want to waste all of it, I now have a big pile of toilet paper sitting on the cabinet next to the toilet so I can just tear a few squares off when I need them. It's so classy. I feel like a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt or a Kennedy... (or maybe a Kardashian?? That's probably more likely...)

4. I feel like I've lost a lot of my workout benefits this last month or so. I couldn't do any walking/running the week before I left for Hawaii because of my bruised toe/foot, and it was still pretty sore when we were in Hawaii. I didn't feel like really testing it out until after we got back home, and my first few workouts were really slow and tentative. I'm just now getting to where I'm comfortable with putting my full weight on my foot, but it seems like it's been forever since I had a really good workout. Oh well... good thing it's getting cold so I can hide the fact that I'm not working out as much and I'm drinking my weight in peppermint mochas... (just kidding... like I said, I haven't even had ONE yet...)

5. Seriously, I think invisible men are paving my living room -- I can't SEE them, but the smell of tar is so strong I have to assume they're here...

6. Can you believe Connor is now a year old?? This year went by so quickly... In fact, he's so old now that he's drinking coffee:

He's also obviously very smart, because he recognizes a delicious addictive beverage when he sees it. Just wait until he tries a peppermint mocha...

Okay, I'm off to give in to my tar-fume-fueled hallucinations... hope everyone has a good weekend...

A few more random Hawaii pics...

Just for the fun of it...

(This, by the way, is apparently how I look when I'm watching fish under a glass tunnel at the aquarium... I really love aquariums -- have I mentioned that? I find them quite fascinating...)

This has nothing to do with the election...

Seriously -- I'm all politics'd out right now...

Instead, since I seem to finally be over my jet lag (and have also managed to get used to the daylight savings time change), I can reflect on vacation... We had a great week with mom, dad, Aunt Carol and (Aunt-in-law?) Carol-Lee -- and Bob and Jeanie joined us on Wednesday, after they spent a few days on Molokai. Some thoughts from the week:

Things to be Thankful For

After our first full day on Maui, we sat down for a nice dinner at one of the restaurants at the resort. Right before dessert, my dad got a call on his cell from Bob -- he and Jeanie were renting a house right on the beach in Molokai, and they'd just gotten word about an earthquake in Canada that was sending a 600-mile-per-hour tsunami wave directly toward us. Not two minutes later, we heard the sirens sounding on Maui. The wait staff at the restaurant assured us that they'd been through the exact same thing many times before, and most of the time it amounted to nothing. But it still made for a rather dramatic evening. The lower levels of the hotel were evacuated, sirens continued to sound, the water was shut off (and, consequently, the water-cooled air conditioning), and the Hawaiian news stations really had a field day milking the tsunami warning for all it was worth. They kept airing a graphic that showed how the tsunami energy was aimed directly at Hawaii... and they emphasized the fact that there's nothing between the Canadian coast and Hawaii to slow down massive killer waves. Fortunately, they were only estimating a wave between 3 and 7 feet, but that didn't stop the newscasters from ominously portending unexpected calamity. Live webcams of the shoreline kept a vigilant lookout for the inevitable wave, which was estimated to arrive at 10:30, so we watched the TV in our room to see what happened... and then 10:30 came and went... and then 10:45 (the newscasters reminded us: "it's not an exact science -- the time was just an estimate."). By 11:00, I was getting tired of staring at the live webcam of a totally calm beach and decided to go to bed in my waterless, air condition-less hotel room...

In the morning, we found out that the biggest "wave" to hit Maui was about two feet high (although apparently they had a slightly larger wave over on Molokai). We also started hearing about friends and family dealing with Hurricane Sandy over on the east coast, and we realized how fortunate we were that our "emergency" turned out to be nothing.

If You Want to Kill Him, You'll Have to Try Harder

There was more unwelcome excitement after Bob and Jeanie arrived. We all met up for dinner at one of the resort restaurants one evening, where Bob ordered some kind of fish entree. Bob happens to be extremely allergic to specific kinds of ocean-dwellers -- anything that lives in the sea and turns red when it's cooked is totally off-limits. So lobster, crab and shrimp are all on his "do not eat" list. However, any kind of white fish is perfectly fine. So he ordered his white fish, and when it arrived, took a small bite... I was sitting at the opposite end of the table, so I didn't realize anything was amiss until I noticed that Bob and Jeanie were both frantically attempting to flag down the waiter. When he arrived at the table, they asked him if the entree had any sort of shrimp in it -- apparently Bob had taken one bite, and immediately felt the tingling of an allergic reaction. The worst part is that the waiter then came back and said, "no, there's no shrimp in it -- perfectly safe," so Bob took another tiny tentative bite... just as a busboy rushed over and told him there WAS shrimp broth in the dish. The chef actually wasn't SURE about what was in the broth in the entree, so he had to double-check. (I will leave out the various exclamations that were uttered at this point... let's just say that Bob was NOT happy...) The manager was summoned, I ran out to the little general store in the lobby to buy Benadryl, and Aunt Carol offered her epi-pen (which she has in case of bee stings) at the ready. Fortunately, since Bob was so suspicious of the entree to begin with, he'd only had a tiny bit... so the allergic reaction never accelerated into anything dangerous. And I have to give credit to the restaurant manager, who was extremely apologetic... and hopefully this was a lesson to the restaurant staff about being more aware of allergens...

Time Zones are Fun

Random comment: It's really weird to wake up at 8 a.m. on a Sunday in Hawaii and immediately find football on TV. I just consider football more of an afternoon sport... I can't deal with football before breakfast. Just saying...

Some Things are Better Left Unsaid

After our plane backed away from the gate at the Maui airport the day we left, the pilot announced to everyone, "folks, we're going to have to return to the gate... we're having trouble getting our left engine started..." Which, of course, is always something you want to hear when you're on a plane. He then went into an explanation about how sometimes ("actually, it's pretty rare") when planes have been flying at high altitudes for a while (our plane had arrived to Maui from Dallas, and we were making the return trip), some valve in the engine can get sticky and cause the engine to freeze up. But supposedly it was an "easy fix" and the maintenance guys would have us on our way as soon as possible. And then the pilot said, "we'll just try to start it one last time, to see what happens... oh, there it goes!" So, amid the nervous laughter of passengers (who, it ended up, didn't even need to hear about the malfunctioning engine), we backed away from the gate again and were on our way. Seriously, couldn't they have tried starting that engine "one last time" before they told us that they couldn't start it??

Of course, the majority of our time was spent listening to waves on the beach, taking pictures of green mountains and eating as much Hula Pie as we could get our hands on (thank goodness no one is allergic to Hula Pie -- that would be a serious tragedy :)). And now I have to get used to this cold Chicago weather (and by the way, did you know it's almost Thanksgiving??? As usual, the year is going by way too quickly...). But I can't complain -- in fact, now that I've had a Hawaii fix, I can say: bring on the snow!   

The week in pictures...