Fun

People, I enjoyed Spring Break in Florida but got little teaching prep done. Then I returned to Chicago where I immediately started spring quarter. Also, this week was the big conference for my field (luckily here in town) and I have spent the end of the week at that. Thus, I am behind in everything.

BUT, despite all this, I am excited as R and I are going to see the Circus Cats of Chicago in a few short hours. Performing cats! Hilarious!

Missed two days!

Alas, I have missed two days now of this daily blogging. One was post-travel craziness and then yesterday I spent the day with R, our friend Matt from college and our friend Melissa from my GradSchool. So fun! Matt arrived around noon and we braved the small children at the Museum of Science and Industry. It was pretty fun -- we saw the U Boat, some old planes, and some propaganda for both petroleum (plastic is awesome!) and industrialized farming (we keep pigs clean and protect them from predators!). Melissa joined us later and we had dinner at a new to us pizza place (Pizza Capri) which was super good. Then we sat around the house and hung out and played the Game of Life, which R won like always. Melissa did really well for not going to college, though.

It was totally worth it to not blog and hang out with awesome friends, though. Now I think I have prepped my anthro class for the week, so all I have to do is make 2 more syllabi for next semester, make a rubric for my students' presentations, and dissertate a bit.

Oh yeah. PS: we also had the most awesome stuffing on Thanksgiving, thanks to a recipe from Corbett and his mom. It made a ton, but was totally slurped up and I barely had leftovers. I might make a half batch again some day, juts for myself.

so tired

Anyone who ever reads this blog can probably tell I am pleased with the presidential election results. It was awesome to be here in Chicago, and especially me and Obama's hood. R and I went to a friend's last night and as we walked home there will all kinds of people out just cheering and honking horns. It was super fun.

Obama's house does have a slightly increased security perimeter now, and I need to re-route my 2 mile run. Oh well. I will forgive him. :)

I want to post something more profound, but right now I am very tired. Hopefully I can remember it.

update

Alas, the charger was not found and I had to buy a new one. But it came quickly and my phone is now charged and back in action. Yay!

For my secret admirer Ellen: I feel we have not been cooking as much since we moved. The kitchen is smaller, and I am busier. Who knows? We did have a very good dinner this week. R gets the Weeknight Kitchen e-newsletter from The Splendid Table. One recipe we received in August was for "Fettuccine with Tomatoes, Basil and Crisp Bread Crumbs". We have made it twice now, most recently a few days ago, and it is super good. I can't find the recipe online, but it is really easy and we don't usually follow it exactly anyway. Basically you make a balsamic vinaigrette, drop some red and yellow cherry tomatoes in it (or just red, or chopped up full size tomatoes) and let it all sit together for awhile. Cook some pasta (I think we've actually always used linguine) and toast some coarse, fresh bread crumbs. Chop about a half cup of fresh basil into long, thin strips. When your pasta is done put it in a serving bowl, pour the tomatoes and vinaigrette over it and stir it up. Then top with the bread crumbs and basil. Yum yum yum.

The second tasty thing we have made lately is the most tasty ice cream ever. This Roasted Plumricot Ice Cream from the Chicago Tribune magazine. If you have the means of making ice cream, make this. It is the most tasty, flavorful ice cream ever. Also, double the recipe. This is not enough! I didn't bake the ginger wafers that go with it, but I did buy some crispy ginger cookies which we ate with the ice cream and it was all sooooo good. I am so sad there is only like 1 serving left.

The other fun thing we did lately was go to a jazz festival yesterday. It was free! It was in the neighborhood! We saw a jazz quartet that was pretty good, some Latin jazz which is always fun, but the most awesome was this guy, Orbert Davis, and his quintet. Soooooo good. Orbert is a trumpet player and he had a great saxophonist and pianist too. It was amazing. R called it one of the top random live music performances he has seen. After that we walked slowly home, stopped for some egg rolls, and then ate the aforementioned best ice cream ever. It was a great Saturday.

The rain and my neighbor, Barack

People! It has been raining here nonstop for a million days. It is out of control. I have only experienced this much humidity before in the rain forest. Our couch feels damp because of all the moisture in the air. We are going to attempt to foil our cabin fever by venturing out later to see Burn After Reading. We might not go, except we already bought tickets online. I am excited! I love the Coen brothers and the previews look good!

In other news, have I mentioned how we live mere blocks away from Barack Obama? We found his exact address recently and walked over to have a look. His block is blocked off with concrete barricades, and it looks like you have to pass a checkpoint to get through. There are Chicago Police all over the place, although we did not spy any obvious secret service people. Also interestingly, R and I stood right on the sidewalk in front of Obama's house a month earlier, and had no idea he lived there. All the security did not go up until he was the official nominee.

I also walk by Obama's barber to get to the public library. It is pretty cool being neighbors with a presidential candidate. It also encapsulates the contradictions of our neighborhood. We have a prestigious university, Obama's $1.6 million house, Farrakhan's very fancy house, other super fancy houses, and also are not far from some of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago. So if you hear people complaining about Obama being out of touch with regular people, I don't see how he can be and live here and go to the barbershop he goes to, unless none of the rest of us here are "regular people". Unlike many other people with big houses, his is not in a rich-people only compound, walled off from everyone else around.

Settling in: Chicago style

So we've been in Chicago for over a month now. It is weird, we both talk about how unreal it seems. To be honest, it seems like we don't live in any one particular city. I would say we are pretty settled in, in that most of the boxes are unpacked (the ones that aren't are totally my fault! Sorry!), R has been going to school, I have started teaching, we both have awesome automatically re-filling transit cards, we know where the grocery store is, and we recognize some of the interesting characters in our neighborhood (like the guy who bikes up the middle of the street yelling "so many white motherf***ers to kill!" but he is really harmless, don't worry!).

But still, I have no real feeling of *Chicago*, whatever that is. We keep being surprised by it. Like I go downtown to teach and see the skyline and say to myself, "wow, that's the Sears Tower! I live in Chicago!" or on the way back from Minnesota we kept saying, "huh, all the signs say to Chicago, that's where we live." I don't know why this is. I don't know if it is because being back in the midwest seems familiar to us both. I keep saying Chicago seems like what would happen if St. Louis and New York had a baby. Or maybe it is because we had both been here a number of times before, so it is not totally unknown. Or maybe it is the comparison with coming from New York City, where so many people are so *in* to it being NYC. So often people there say, "That's New York for you" or "New Yorkers are like this" or whatever, which I haven't heard as much anywhere else. I also haven't gotten out at all to meet people, so I don't talk to many people other than R and my students and faculty/staff at the schools I teach at.

I guess I feel like we're settling in, but also that there is still so much we don't know. I spend all my time in one of two neighborhoods. When I got to New York I was more into exploring, but here I am so focused on my dissertation writing and teaching, that I haven't taken the time to go look around. Also, R's school will take anywhere from 5-7 years, so we also know we are connected to here for a long time. Maybe that makes us feel less urgent to get to know it all?

I am enjoying it, though. It is nice to know friends and family are so close, even if I don't have time to visit much right now. I will one day soon. It is nice to get lettuce for HALF THE PRICE we did in New York, and tomatoes for like a third of the price. Our apartment is awesome. Our neighborhood is very nice, and I know that one day when I get out there to make new friends I will find good people to be friends with. So that is the story of settling in in Chicago.

Tales of the Bus

So I get to ride the bus two days a week for my teaching jobs. It is actually not bad although I will confess to being a transit snob and enjoying the subway/train more than the bus in general. I have to walk about 10 minutes to this bus stop, but once there I have two express buses to choose from. I took the bus Wednesday which started well, it was not crowded, I had a seat next to a non-smelly person and we were on our way. Until we stopped at a bus stop and did not go again. Slowly, passengers started to notice the lack of engine noises and that the driver seemed to be turning the key again and again with nothing happening. Then she got on her phone and left the bus to look at something under the hood. At about this point we all started getting off the bus. Everyone was quite chipper, despite the inconvenience and the driver was super friendly and said she would put us on the next bus, but that it was small. She also complained about how she asked at the garage "for a good bus" and clearly was not given one. The new bus came and some people got on, but it was already small and full. I had no schedule so I waited around for another bus, which came soon after and was spacious. I also learned from this experience that if your bus breaks down the bus driver has pre-printed passes she can sign for you to take to work to prove you are late because of the bus. Awesome!

The second bus was empty so I got a seat again. There was a crazy woman on this bus, who kept screaming "Drew Pearson is dead!" in a scary exorcist voice, but other than that she was very friendly and smiled at everyone. She also spoke about how she was altruistic, but I didn't catch most of that sentence. In the end I made it to my destination just 10 minutes later than planned and I was super impressed with the friendliness and cheerfulness of my fellow bus riders in the face of the bus breakdown and the crazy lady. I think I'll leave extra early on days I teach, though, in case of further delays.

Return

Hey! We got the internet! We are in Chicago! I love exclamation points!

So, as I said before all is well and our apartment is great. We had an ok drive here, although I do not recommend driving 500 miles the day after you pack a big truck in the July heat. The NJ-OH day was a little tough. The cats did really well, even Pass who on the last move apparently gave up on life and just awaited his death. This time he was definitely angry, but I think he knew he was not in danger of death. We still do not have a dresser but two IKEA shelves are filling in well. We also still do not have a couch but my brother provided use with a recliner so now we have two comfy chairs, buying us time to stalk craigslist for the perfect $50 couch.

Other than unpacking and exploring I've been busy with dissertating. I am really hoping to have a complete draft by Sept. 1, but it may be an impossible dream. I've also been digging up teaching jobs. I have two, at two different schools that are luckily not far from each other and accessible by the bus. I would love one more and the CVs are out, but we will see.

It Lives!

I am alive, R is alive, the cats are alive. We made it to Chicago and took possession of an AWESOME apartment. All it lacks is a dresser, a couch and the internet. Indeed, we will not get the internets until Aug 11 at the earliest. So, dear readers, you will have to soldier on mostly without me. I plan on hitting our local wifi coffee shop daily (our new neighborhood is even more awesome than our apartment) but I need to use the time for job hunting and mapquesting of furniture stores, so don't expect too much for awhile.

Chatty

Can you tell I am bored because R has been out of town?
I just found Chicago contains both an Aveda Institute and several Filene's Basements, so I can continue having cheap haircuts and cheap clothes. woo!