Tough Time of Year

No, not because ESDNM was in town (he left this afternoon after a very productive two days) and not because of the weather, though it doesn't help. It's tough because Christmas starts a barrage of presents and romantic dinners due LL! There's Christmas and NYE, followed by our dating anniversary (yeah, we still celebrate that...what of it?), her birthday and then Valentine's Day!! While I like to fancy myself as a pretty good gift giver, that's a lot to ask from a guy (not that she asks at all and is probably appalled that I'm writing any of this). But so far I'm doing ok on the gift side of things. Hopefully I won't run out of ideas before Valentine's Day!

The Bears playoff game is coming up, just three more days of preparation before the big day. Since it's a noon start, I'll be cooking breakfast and hopefully some celebratory post game grub. It's tough to hang out in the parking lot if we lose though. Pre-game should be awesome. LL is going out of town so I'm taking a client who is also a buddy of mine. Should be fun. Benny Baseball and E-Money are going to be there as well, in addition to Mr. Heater, the propane heating unit I pull out in the cold weather. Can't wait!!

The Return of Snow

Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, ESDNM came to Chicago and brought with him the snow. We haven't had snow in Chicago for two weeks or so, but got hit with a bunch today. It wouldn't bother me too much, but we had clients to call on today which meant traveling around the city and cleaning snow off the car several times.

No visit from ESDNM would be complete without a visit somewhere crazy and tonight he held up his end of the bargain by convincing LL that we should go to Sun Wah BBQ, a Korean restaurant... I think. Unfortunately the link to Trip Advisor provided by ESDNM had the wrong address, but fortunately they had only moved around the corner. Doesn't seem so bad unless it's twenty degrees outside and snowing while I'm trying to find the email, link and address. Brrrr. But we got there without much problem and the food was pretty good: dumpling soup with noodles (do NOT get this if you are trying to share as the noodles do not cooperate), bbq duck, bbq pork, bok choy and egg plant (which doesn't have as much yolk as you might think). I think ESDNM is going to put pictures of the food on his blog, so check his out.

One more meal the bad influence from New Mexico. I'm hoping to survive.

And so it begins....

ESDNM came into town tonight. Since that time all I've done is eat and drink. Just stating the facts. It was another trip to one of our favorite restaurants, Sapori Trattoria, for their family style price fix menu. Great stuff. As we drove there, I mentioned that we might see my softball buddy John and his wife Carol there as they recently moved into the neighborhood. And they were indeed there!! Once again LL mentioned that we have to get together with them more often because "Carol is so nice". Can't argue there.

Four inches of snow on the way, which isn't too troubling but it makes the day more annoying. Tomorrow is our big day of seeing clients and we park and walk throughout the day so the snow just makes it a little more difficult.

Starting to get excited about the Bears game on Sunday!!

Bread and water

Heard this song Saturday and though I've head it before, I actually listened to the lyrics this time. The song is "Nothin' on you" by B.O.B with Bruno Mars. Here's a real line in the song that made me actually laugh out loud: baby you the whole package plus you pay your taxes. Seriously? If you're comparing your gal to women "all over the world", I'm not sure how far down the list I would have to go before I got to the "So do you pay your taxes?" box.

After a very busy Friday, the weekend started off pretty laid back. We decided just to rent a movie from Red Box, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Different movie than I thought, but entertaining. LL made chicken cordon bleu. Very tasty!! On Saturday we ran a bunch of errands, mostly stuff I had to do, then I hit the gym. For food we had leftovers, a loaf of bread and a small bag of chips. Yeah, a little weird huh? This bread we bought at Jewel was da bomb! It wasn't completely cooked, so you take it home and bake it for 20 minutes. It was hot and delicious so we had tuna fish sandwiches and then later on in the evening just ate the bread after dipping it into a mixture of olive oil, Parmesan cheese, garlic and seasoned pepper. Uber good.

Well isn't that nice?

So the other day, LL needed to get up early for work and set her alarm for 6 a.m. Yes, that's early for her and for US. After her morning routine, she was running late and was somewhat irritated (there were issues with "getting ready" process). On her way out she came in and hurriedly gave me a goodbye kiss (I was still in bed...no comments) and had not much to say before leaving.

About an hour later or so, the phone rang. It was LL. She was feeling bad about being a little grumpy in the morning and felt like she took it out on me. It was really nice because I had noticed that she was grumpy and felt a little bad about it. So she explained why she felt like that, apologized and it was all good. In fact, I went and took care of one or two of the problems that contributed to her mood.

If you've been checking the web news recently, you've heard about the mass animal extinctions going on around the world. That kind of thing really interests me, especially when the far right starts talking about "end of days" crap (and then try to pin it on Obama). Here's a link to a short, solid explanation for a lot of the prevailing reason why.

How Facebook impacts my life...and yours?

As you know, I'm a softball player and I'm fairly outgoing. Both seem like positive things, at least I think so, generally at least the latter is seen as good. Being a softball player might be a mixed bag! Recently however, I've started to encounter an.....issue. Not necessarily bad or good, but an issue nonetheless (I love typing that word by the way "nonetheless"...seems like it needs to be more than one word but it isn't). Even if you don't play softball, if you're involved in any social events, you probably run across this too....if you are also on Facebook.

See, the guys on my teams are usually 10-15 years younger than me and not all are married. Many are though, so that's fine. The others however have....what? Girlfriends. And the girlfriends come to the games. And they come to our tournaments when we go out of town. And Joe talks to them because he's an outgoing guy and likes to meet new people. Plus I like to take an interest in my teammates personal lives because it's more than just softball.

Then Facebook comes along and now I get friended by these softball teammates' girlfriends. Fine.

Until they breakup.

Right now I'm friends on FB with no fewer than three women who have dated guys on my team, oh wait, just remembered a fourth. Four. Now these folks are nice and all, but now what's my real connection with them? Is there a chance that I'll even see them again? I guess it's no greater or less than many of my FB friends to tell you the truth: people from high school or ex co-workers.

Without FaceBook, these people would have disappeared from my life.....so I guess FB is a good thing. It just impacted me in this odd way.

Weird Day

Today was one of those days that just seemed to drag on...without point....without much energy....just sort of there. It was weird. The funny thing is, I was meeting LL and a couple for dinner and then the Blackhawks game. It was going to be a very fun evening, but the day was just blah. When I have days like this, I just try to do little things and accomplish SOMETHING because I know anything big is out of the question. So that's what I did today until it was time to head out for the game.

My mood turned dramatically as I left for the game and was very happy to see LL in her new Patrick Sharp autographed jersey and our friends. They actually gave us their 300 level tickets since they were gifted 100 level seats. But our vantage was pretty good, even though ALL six goals and a penalty shot were at the other end of the ice. The last two minutes were at our end and it was exciting to watch, but the good guys lost 4-2. Well, it was still fun and I'm hoping tomorrow is more productive!

Some Pics

First, here's some pictures from NYE.

Apparently it's been a tradition for the Legal Eagles to go to Fogo de Chao. You couldn't tell that we're in a recession based on how busy they were! The place was packed!!

If you haven't been to a Brazilian steak house, these little disks control your food flow. Each disk has a red side and a green side. If you put the green side up, you're inundated with servers carrying meat on a stick. If you want the flow to stop, flip the disk to red.

And here's the four of us outside Fogo. The picture was taken by Cecil, our driver for the evening.

On to Sunday! Greg, of the Legal Eagles, had scouted out a Bears bar for us to watch the Bears game at. Very awesome! We showed up early and got prime seats in front of the projection TV. The bar, Union Pub, was packed by the time the game started.

Here are just some of the 8 TV's we were able to watch.

Just some of the Bears memorabilia in the bar. And across the street? Armand's Chicago Pizza!

And last but not least, me sporting my Julius Peppers jersey courtesy of Joisey Ken.

The game itself was fun to watch despite the 10-3 Bears loss. Two big plays did us in: a Cutler interception on 3rd and 15 in the redzone, and a timeout called by Lovie (and Mike Martz, the offensive coordinator) negating a 15 yard pick up on third down and a first down.

The former was just an awful throw by Cutler (QB rating of 43 I think) who made bad decisions all game (at least 3 of his 6 sacks were easily avoidable if he only would have thrown the ball away). We were up 3-0 at the time with a good chance to be up 6-0. Instead we were revisited by Bad Jay.

The second play was really confusing for us at the bar since, though the sound was on, you couldn't always hear everything the announcers said. It was third down and 15 with the ball around midfield and the play clock was running down with the score tied at 3-3, but Jay took the snap with 1 second left on the clock, dumped a pass over the middle to the running back who took it 16 yards for a first down. Then we find out Lovie Smith called a time out just before Cutler snapped the ball. The next play they ran resulted in a sack and was followed by a punt. Just awful. Not only was the negated play successful, but why use a timeout that you could need later in the game since the score was close? A 5 yard penalty on 3rd and 15 really doesn't matter. Your chances of making 3rd and 15 can't be much greater than making 3rd and 20. Anyway, Green Bay took the ball after the punt and scored 3 or 4 plays later. Momentum just left the Bears after the time out. It was awful.

One good thing about the game though was Lovie playing our starters the whole game. The Bears had nothing to gain by winning the game, their playoff position was set, but they will have two weeks (13 days) without a game, so they will have plenty of time to rest. Someone could have gotten hurt, but I wouldn't have blamed Lovie at all for it. I like the idea of playing your starters and working to improve. It sends the message that there's always room to get better!!

Back home

It's good to be home! Don't get me wrong, the Legal Eagles were great hosts, but there's nothing like your own bed and getting back to the daily routines. And those routines really haven't been, for several weeks. This week things should be getting back to normal though. With wedding planning beginning, not at a crazy pace by any stretch however, there won't be a ton of downtime.

While we are indeed home, there was no certainty at the beginning of the day that the day would end this way. The morning started positively enough as we got to BWI airport in about 15 minutes and we had allotted twice that amount of time. We're lucky we did! The line for the skycaps to check bags was over 30 minutes. The line INSIDE was unbelievably long...like Vegas on a Sunday morning long. Just freaking crazy. What's the deal? Most people who traveled for NYE, we thought, would have gone home on Sunday right? Well, maybe it's just that BWI is always screwed up, but it was pretty bad. Getting through security wasn't a problem at all though, it was just the checking bags stage of the Southwest process. Neither McDonald's nor Starbucks had abnormal lines. Crazy.

Fortunately we got our bags checked in (we were there 90 minutes before our flight) and had time to get breakfast and coffee and even got our gate reassigned before it was time to board. Smooth trip the rest of the day, but we were both pretty lethargic. Can't wait to hit the sheets tonight!

Tomorrow: football from the weekend.

"I wanna be a billionaire, so effing bad."

Still in Maryland (Odenton), but we come back tomorrow morning. It's been a nice, relaxing trip which has involved a minimal amount of time away from the sofa. LL's sister and bro-in-law, the Legal Eagles or LE's for short, planned and executed a great weekend. The theme drink for the weekend was caipirinhas, a Brazilian drink of lime, sugar and Brazilian rum. They are awesome! After watching some football on Friday, the LE's hired a limo, driven by Cecil, to take us into D.C. for NYE dinner at Fogo de Chao, the most famous of the Brazilian steak houses. Very good food and massive quantities of it.

Saturday brought much more football, in which every team I cheered for (ALL DAY), lost and more caipirinhas!! Instead of the usual two tablespoons of sugar per drink (yes it is sweet!), we substituted 3 packs of Splenda for one of the tablespoons to cut down on SOME of the calories and sugar....though I realize it's kind of ridiculous to worry about it, but when you have 6-7 of them, it's not a bad thing to cut out some of the sugar.

For food we had various appetizers made by LL and her sister. It was the stereotypical guys-in-the-living -room and women-in-the-kitchen scene. They did a great job though and the apps were delicious: shrimp stuffed puffs, cream cheese stuffed mushroom caps, hotter peppers stuffed with some kind of cream cheese concoction, bacon wrapped shrimp....all very good.

Now it's Sunday morning and we're getting ready to head downtown to watch some football games, including the Bears in the afternoon. I'm wearing my new Peppers jersey courtesy of Joisey Ken and am hoping the Bears play their starters for most of the game. They play the Packers and it's fun to knock them out of the playoffs!

And the title today is from a song on LE's annual mix that is stuck in my head. Don't want to forget that piece of info!

Happy New Year!!

Off to D.C. until Monday!! Happy New Year everyone!!!

Mmmmm, Crow.

Not only are the Chicago Bears 11-4 and division champs and in the playoffs, but they've locked up a bye in the first week with no worse than the #2 seed. Hopefully they will still play full out against the Packers in the last game of the season and knock them out of the playoffs. If Lovie Smith stays true to his past behavior, the starters for the Bears won't play more than a half though. Such a wuss. I believe in the Belichick philosophy where you play your starters all game all the time. We already have a week off!

At the beginning of the season, though I couldn't find my blog entry on it, I suggested the Bears would be 7-9 or 8-8. The schedule just didn't allow for more wins than that and the Bears had a lot going against them including a new offensive coordinator who was our QB's third in three years and a QB who had just a ton of interceptions last year.

Fortunately, I picked very few of the games correctly. I correctly said we'd beat Detroit (twice), Carolina at home and Buffalo on the road and I said we'd lose to New England at home which we did. But then I also said we'd beat the Giants (lost), Washington and Seattle at home (losses). I thought we'd lose to Dallas on the road (we won), Green Bay at home (won), Minnesota both at home and on the road (we swept them), Miami on the road (won and I bet on us in Vegas), and Philly and the Jets at home (won both!). So the moral of the story is you just never know. Of the 15 games played, I only picked 5 correctly at the beginning of the year. Crazy. Time to eat crow.

Christmas Cards

Only two Christmas cards have come back with problems this year, which is about normal I guess. For one I used an old address even though I had the new address and on the second one the address sticker actually fell off! The return label stayed on so the card was returned. I've never had that happen before. Resends are in the mail.

Today, Wednesday I mean when most of you are going to read this, is Joisey Ken's birthday! Happy Birthday buddy!!

It looked like a relatively down year in the quality of Christmas cards I received this year and I'm severely disappointed in all of you. Many, many family picture and kid picture cards. Those all have to be disqualified because I can't really say one kid's picture is better than another's. The best cards will be scanned and posted shortly though.

My Bears playoff tickets came today!! They are going to play one game at home at least in the playoff and have a chance for two. That'll be one hell'uva tailgate!!!

There's nothing like sleep and a good breakfast.

It was another busy day after a nice, long, 10 hour sleep last night. We were both exhausted and sleeping in was just the ticket. After I finally hauled myself out of bed and got showered, I headed to Starbucks and then to the grocery to get breakfast items: a green pepper, grated cheese and chorizo to make omelets.

After brunch (since it was pretty late in the morning), there was work to be done before we started a whole bunch of running around which included trips to the post office and stores to return/exchange/buy gifts. One of the gifts I got LL was a new office work chair and, of course, the local store was out of the model she wanted so we had to drive way north to another branch. The mission was successful though and we got home with about 45 minutes to spare before we had to go meet LL's parents and sister and brother-in-law at Sapori, our favorite Italian place.

On a completely unrelated note, I lost in the championship game of my fantasy football pool...or will after tomorrow's game. The tough part to swallow is that I was going to start one quarterback, Josh Freeman from Tampa, over Matt Schaub of Houston, but decided to go with Schaub at the end of the day. Schaub did about as projected, scoring me 16 points, but Freeman was OFF THE HOOK with 43 points. Ugh. The 27 additional points would have left me trailing by only 11 points going into tomorrow night's game with one player to go.....there would have been a reason to watch the game and a hope to carry the championship title for a year. Like the Cubs, there's always next year.

On the go since Thursday

It's been a really busy Christmas. Now, normally Christmas is somewhat busier anyway, but this year in particular was busier than others. And it all started with Ricardo on Thursday night.....it seems like all arduous paths start with Ricardo.

Ok, maybe that's a little unfair to Ricardo: we're all too willing victims. After Zoo Lights, dinner and Ricardo's on Thursday (see Friday's entry), we were in rough shape come Friday morning, but I had to do get up early to tackle some work before we could go to see LL's family. Mission accomplished though and we rolled in around 1:30 I think. There was much celebration and gift giving and of course, eating. Lots of eating.

While we were celebrating, the snow started and it was getting a bit hairy for travel. We left around 9 so we could get back in time for midnight mass. Everything was fine and we made it to mass without a hitch, though we had to drive much closer to the posted speed limits than normal...and often below!

In church there were actually two little kids, like 7 and 5, sitting in the row in front of us. It's tough for kids that age to stay up so late and these kids were no exception. The little girl was sleeping with her head on her father when he abruptly stood up. Bang! Her whole body just collapsed on the pew and she jumped awake, very startled. Ha!

After mass we felt like the little kids and went to sleep as soon as we got home. We were up early again though on Christmas morning to exchange gifts before heading to my parents for more merriment. Afterwards, stuffed to the gills with food, we headed back to LL's folks' place for a Christmas Day visit.

Around 10:00 or so, we were finally home, but not ready for bed as one of my car headlights had gone out. Fortunately I had a spare and was able to replace it with LL's help holding a flashlight. Why replace it at night? Because the next morning it was off to the Bears game with Bill the Bear and I didn't want to give the police ANY reason to pull me over!

And what a game it was!! The Bears took it to the Jets 38-34 in a really good game. The highlight/lowlight though was when Bill took off his glove just after getting to our seats and having his hand warmer fall perfectly into his beer. After deftly removing the warmer, a decision had to be made: is the beer drinkable or not? The answer? We don't know. The package said don't put the warmers into your mouth, so we kind of assumed putting them in beer and then the beer into your mouth was also not good. Bill sucked it up and went and got another beer (plus one more since he was there) and we were ready to go once again. Good fun!

Zoo Lights

Last night LL and I headed to the Lincoln Park Zoo for Zoo Lights. We wondered around there for about an hour and took these pics of the evening:

The welcoming sign.

The first big tree that's lit up.

This guy is well into his fourth or fifth ice sculpture. Very cool to watch, not easy to take a picture of with my phone.

An abundance of trees very densely packed with lights.

There were animal lights as well throughout the zoo. Here, LL is posing with one of our favorite meals: crabs!

This tree was awesome and would look better as a video than a still shot. Those whitish/blue lights would "fall down" the tree limbs. Very cool to see in motion.

One of my favorite light exhibits was this dragon. The "fire" from it's mouth is lit up in this picture, but it wouldn't always be. Then the bushes in the left of the picture are "on fire" as they had red lights on the bottom and progressively lighter lights to the top of the bushes. They would also flicker when the dragon was breathing fire on them. Very cool.

After Zoo Lights, we hit an Italian restaurant in the hood called Angelina's. It's been there for 22 years we were told, but I hadn't been there in 10+ years because I thought it was too expensive at the time. In reality, I just didn't have enough money to eat there more than on special occasions. It wasn't too unreasonable though last night. For $75 including tax and tip, we had an appetizer, two entrees and two glasses of wine. Pretty standard. Plus we have enough left over for another meal for both of us!!

Then we headed to Ricardo's house to give him and wife Jodi their Christmas gift. They had house guests from the UK and had invited some folks over (including us) for some food and drinks. We ended up having way too much wine and left around midnight. Great fun!!

Merry Christmas again!!!

Shopping is done.....I think

As of Thanksgiving, I had not one Christmas gift purchased. Not to worry. Not to panic. It's a fairly typical year for me. But what was different this year is that I found online shopping really, really convenient....even more so than last year. In fact, LL purchased some gift cards on my behalf and I bought some more gift cards at my local Jewel, but just about every other gift (more than 15 at least) were purchased online and mostly through Amazon. They have EVERYTHING and it's pretty inexpensive compared to other sites. It was a little stressful though waiting for a box from Amazon with 6-8 gifts in it. The last box arrived yesterday, much to my joy!

Most of the gifts are wrapped too! Only a few of those gift cards left. By the way, I really don't like to give gift cards as gifts. I much prefer to take the time to find an item from a list (online or otherwise) or to think of something on my own. Unfortunately, I don't spend enough time with everyone in my family to know what they might actually appreciate, so the gift card comes in handy.

But I also find myself buying MORE gifts because it's so much easier than schlepping to a mall. So while I THINK I'm done shopping, I'm not really sure I am. If something cool pops up online, who knows??

So Merry Christmas to all my readers and lurkers!!

Let there be light??

Most every heard about, or was lucky enough to see, the lunar eclipse last night. The last time it happened on the winter solstice was in the 1600's. That coincidence didn't interest me so much as the lunar eclipse itself. It just seems cool. Unfortunately we had clouds, and snow, so we didn't get to see it here in Chicago.

What we did get to see was the Bears humbling the beaten up Vikings. Brett Favre was ruled out earlier in the week, then questionable on Sunday and finally was named the starter about 2 hours before the game. Crazy! Nobody could remember the last time a player was listed as "out" and then started. Leave it to Favre. A huge sack from rookie Corey Wootten, his first of his career, ended the night for Brett and the hopes of Minnesota.

It was a huge night for me too as I had 10 point lead in my fantasy football league with no players left and my opponent had the Vikings runningback and their defense. Since the Bears scored 40 points, the Vikings defense ended up with -1 points and the runningback got 6 for a total of 5 and a semi-final game win for me!! Championship next week!!!

The new light poles are up on the street! They aren't working yet, but they are up. Here are some pics:

The smaller light pole is the new one. On the corner, the new one is placed right next to the old one.

Outside my condo, the old one sits on my side of the street and the new one is across the street. The new lights don't work yet, but I'm interested to see how well they light the area.

Some more pictures

..they're not the best, but they are IPhone pictures. Thankfully LL remembered to bring her phone onto the ice. So let's get to it!

This is me just getting up from a crouching position and getting ready to lunge forward away from the hack-the starting block-like pads in the ice. In my right hand is the stone, 42 pounds by the way, and in my left is the stabilizer, a support tool. In much of the world and if you're an old school curler, you use a broom for support in the left had. If you're relatively new to the game, you use one of these stabilizers.

When we were practicing sliding and form, this is how far you can go easily. I'm at the "hog line". You have to let go before that line. At the other end of the ice is another hog line and your stone has to make it that far to stay on the ice. I think my form was decent here.

Sweeping is crucial to placement of the stone. If you sweep in front of the stone, it will move further and curl LESS. The stone will curl based on speed and the turn when you throw the stone. This stone is in the house and heading towards the button.

We stuck around to watch our instructors play a few ends. They were team bacon and they turned their stabilizer into a pig! It was funny. Their opponents showed up dressed as butchers!! I should have taken a picture. My bad.

Long weekend, short post

So much to talk about, but I'm going to keep it short.

Friday night LL and I saw Jerry Seinfeld doing stand-up at The Chicago Theater. Good fun! His show was only about an hour long, but it was good. One thing he talked about that was of more interest to me than humorous, was that he got married at 45 and has three kids who are 10, 7 and 5. I'll be 45 next year when I get married.

On Saturday I wrapped Christmas gifts while LL hung out in the burbs with a good friend of hers. After hitting the gym, where I ran 2.5 miles, we went out with a friend from L.A. who was in town for the holidays.

Sunday was church for both of us, though LL went to Joliet and I went to St. Alphonsus as usual. Afterwards though we headed to Northbrook to go curling. Yes curling!! Pictures to come tomorrow. In short though, it was a lot of fun and I may join the club. Ok, here's one picture: