Yesterday, after work,…

Yesterday, after work, Kevin watched the kids so I could take Karina to experience a little of Chicago. We stopped at Anthropologie because I thought she'd like their style (she did) and Vosges so she could stock up on Chicago chocolate. Then over to Violet Hour, which was super-fun, and someplace I should remember to go more often; I LOVE the Alice-in-Wonderland feel of the place, and the way you can nurse a strange cocktail for hours without feeling time-pressured. Also, the corn fritters with lime aioli were seriously yum. (Lori / Simone, if you're reading this, want to go? Do you like weird $12 cocktails?) I had a Gothic Age cocktail, which had egg yolk in it, which sounds strange, I know, but it was quite good. The drink had a certain unctuousness to it, which presumably comes from the egg. Interesting. After that, we went on to Handlebar for dinner, which was a bit nostalgic for me, since we used to eat there reasonably often when we lived in Wicker Park. Karina had the black beans maduro, which was as good as I remembered, and I had a samosa appetizer, which bore little resemblance to real samosas, but was still reasonably tasty.

This morning, I made tea, and then went out to garden on a rainy morning. It was muggy and warm, but the light drizzle helped nicely. Put in two meadow rue and two lady in red ferns (which one garden site describes as "sultry red stems surrounded by bright green, lacy fronds"), product of a birthday present gift card. Got sweaty and muddy, and am now ready to go rinse off. Such a satisfying way to start the day.

I'm not quite sure what I'll be doing today. I have the kids 'til one, so probably just putter around here as best I may, maybe watch an episode or two of Medium (Karina recommended it, and I'm surprised to find I like it a fair bit. Maybe because the protagonist is married to a snarky mathematician?). Otto (neighbor kid) is coming over from 9-11, which is always unpredictable -- sometimes they play together very nicely, and I can get more done than normal; sometimes, I must intervene often. We'll see. There's still some post-party clean-up to happen, including quite a bit of bedding to launder (we had five guests staying at the house!), and I'll be a lot happier if I can get that done today. Set this house in order. For some reason, I'm also feeling compelled to clean off the front porch and the back deck, which have accumulated a bunch of gardening detritus. Off! Off with its head! (Okay, that doesn't make any sense. Maybe I'm still sleepy.)

From 1-6, Kev has the kids, so I'm going to try to get some writing done -- I have three or four stories at the moment that need revising / finishing, and it's actually an amount of work that could theoretically be done in five hours. We'll see. I'd also like to get the curtains back up in my study -- I took them down because I'd hung them too high and they were blocking too much of the sky. But time to get them back up now, especially if I'm planning to be in there working for a long time.