wow. the last few weeks have been an utter whirlwind. here are a few of the highlights to catch you up:
mr. happy stuff and i went to chicago for a little more than 24 hours to celebrate our 7th anniversary. our favorite bits were dinner saturday night at frontera grill, which was amazing (if you love mexican food and if you’re willing to wait for a table and if you’re in chicago and it’s not sunday or monday, you must try this restaurant. i’m still drooling.), an impromptu game of chess at a used bookstore while waiting to eat (i am terrible with strategy and logic, but have no qualms about losing, so i make a pretty satisfying chess opponent), a visit to the giant silver jellybean sculpture sunday morning (see photo above, taken from underneath the sculpture–we’re on there at least 5 times. click on the picture to see it bigger.) and the other fun, kinesthetic artwork in millennium park, a visit to the art institute (haven’t been there since college) where i discovered a new artist to enjoy–charles demuth–who was apparently from lancaster, pennsylvania (a fact i discovered after deciding i liked his artwork). here’s one of the pieces of his that i saw and liked. It’s called “spring” and depicts design samples from a spring line of wallpapers and i love the irony that “spring” doesn’t depict nature, but instead man-made design. then, we took a long trip to ikea and bought supplies to build an island in our kitchen. amazingly, they fit into our vehicle (including the 6 foot long countertop) but we couldn’t see each other on the ride home because it came nearly all the way to the front and created “private cubicles” for each of us.
other happy things since then:
i’ve enjoyed watching more things bloom in the flowerbed my sister created for me last summer–
i have also enjoyed the generosity of church friends who have been willing to share plants with me. i now have a mint patch and a bunch of lilies of the valley. i’m looking forward to them taking over. i picked wild violets in my yard last weekend–a whole handful! they smell soooooo nice.
i only have one more paper left to write for my class (woo hoo!).
last night we went grocery shopping and i used the grocery bags that i’d gotten as a birthday present from my friend who visited a few weeks ago. normally, when we get done unpacking a big grocery trip, we have somewhere between 12 and 20 plastic bags to figure out something to do with. we filled up the four re-usable bags and asked for whatever didn’t fit to be put into plastic bags. when we got done unpacking this evening, we had three plastic bags. wow. and if the bagger had been a little more tight with his packing, we probably could have gotten by with no plastic bags. we are sooooooo using those again!
it’s been too long for me to remember much more than the highlights, so i’ll leave you with just what i’ve been able to remember. hope everyone’s having a wonderful spring!
