Okay, I was awakened to an entire new geek subculture. It’s kind of hard to explain, but basically groups of people whip out a chess board (or some other game) and pose for one of those pictures they take of you when you’re on a roller coaster. Maybe I’ll let a picture explain it:
You really need to see the whole series to do this justice. You can’t believe how many of them there are.
Is it just me, or can you totally picture the Rupleys doing this?
Via Jackie’s twitter.
Over the weekend we hit up another new restaurant, Frontera Grill. This place was a little pricier than we usually go in for. Run by famous Chicago chef-restaurateur Rick Bayless, it serves some truly awesome, authentic Mexican food. It’s also right downtown in a pretty touristy area, another thing we don’t usually do.
Let me back up a second and say how it is we came to be interested in this place. They make awesome salsa. I can imagine most people might eat at the restaurant and then seek out the salsa at the store afterwards, but it kind of happened the opposite for us. We’ve been getting their truly impressive salsa at the store for some time now.
So we went to check the place out, but we pulled our usual trick of going really, really early so that we can be in and out with Evie before the place gets too crowded. The problem is that the plan falls down when a place is so busy that it’s always crowded. There was a line already when we got there 15 minutes before they opened. They told us we would get a table in about 45 minutes.
We spent some time at the fanciest McDonalds I have ever seen, before eventually making it into the restaurant. Despite the wait, and despite the hype, the place still blew me away. The food was amazing. We had a couple of appetizers and entres of course, and even a margarita. With the exception of some salsa that was roughly the temperature of the sun, each thing was more delicious than the last.
I can’t recommend the place highly enough, we will definitely be back there again.
As far as everything else, work is really killing me at the moment, so I didn’t do much else besides work over the weekend. So I apologize for the lack of quotes, etc. Hopefully we’ll be on track again next week.
What is more delicious than chicken? Chicken wrapped in bacon. What is more delicious than that? Chicken wrapped in bacon in the shape of a narwhal. The narwhal is the most delicious animal shape known to man, FACT.
Of course I wouldn’t just tease you with a great picture like that without providing the link to the recipe.
In case you are wondering, the horn is cheese. Of course, you wouldn’t have to have the cheese-horn, but then you’d just have a whale. And who wants just a whale, when you could have had a narwhal? Nobody, that’s who.
Link courtesy Meg, who, I heard through the grapevine, may be considering an entirely narwhal-centric blog. 🙂
Over the weekend we found yet another amazing breakfast place, the Bongo Room. We knew about this place and had wanted to try it out for some time, so we finally gave it a go. The thing is, it’s just around the corner from our other favorite breakfast place, Yolk. The first time we just sort of flipped a coin between the two and ended up going to Yolk. It was so good, we never really had a reason to look for another place.
So you can’t help comparing the two places. The thing is, it turns out it’s not really as much of a head to head competition as you might have expected. Although they both serve breakfast, Yolk has more choices in the savory department (like egg-based things) and the Bongo Room has more choices in the cake-y department (like pancakes).
The things that we had at the Bongo Room certainly were amazing. Sara had an apple French toast with crushed up ginger snaps on top. I had red velvet pancakes with a white chocolate sauce. It was basically like eating a cake for breakfast! The interesting thing was that 3 of us independently made the comment that, although our food looked really decadent, it wasn’t too sweet. That is, it was plenty sweet, but not to where you were thinking, “I can’t eat all of this” (although it should be noted that I could not, in fact, eat all of it). There were also plenty of choices that looked good that I wasn’t able to order, so future visits should not be a problem.
The Bongo Room is much smaller, with nowhere really to wait. I imagine it could be hard to get in at times. We’ve had to wait for awhile at Yolk, but it is a huge place, with plenty of waiting room.
So, at the end of the day, I highly recommend either place. I guarantee you will not be disappointed! As to deciding between the two, it would depend on what you are in the mood for. For savory, I’d still go with Yolk, but for sweet, choose the Bongo Room.
Let me start by saying that Evie is an amazingly good kid. She very, very rarely does anything to really get in trouble. Furthermore, let me say that we sort of brought about this situation by planning a day that was a little rough for her. She missed meal times and she missed nap time. So, by the time we finally did get her down for a nap, she was sort of past the point of no return.
So, more or less, the library book incident involved her ripping the crap out of the book, when she was supposed to be taking a nap. I mean, utterly destroying, every single page removed. It was sort of spectacular in it’s destruction.
Now, since she doesn’t usually do things like this, Sara and I were sort of at a loss for what to do. We told her how naughty it was and gave her a time-out, but she just didn’t seem to really get it. She told me later, the reason she ripped up that book was because it wasn’t hers. She knew on some surface level that she was wrong, but there wasn’t really any indication that she wouldn’t just do it again, if given the chance.
I felt like it was important that she be the one to tell the librarian that she ripped up the book. This technique probably works pretty well for a little older kids, but she’s a little too young to be cowed by such a thing. I still think it was the right thing to do though. The library was open for another 45 minutes or so, so we hopped in the car so we could take care of it while it was still fresh in her mind.
I felt pretty bad when, on the way to the library, she was saying to herself, “You have to apologize. You always apologize before you go to the police.” Ouch! I explained to her that we were not going to the police, just the library, but I kind of thought, “Maybe we’re overdoing it a little bit.” It only got worse.
She never did manage a nap, so as soon as we got in the car, she was out. When we got to the library she was in that state that kids get into sometimes where they are so tired that nothing else matters in the world. She tried walking with her eyes closed. She grabbed on to the legs of people she didn’t know, clinging to them for support. She couldn’t support her own weight, slumping to the floor when I wasn’t physically holding her up. So here we are waiting in line so that she can apologize to the librarian, and I’m trying everything to wake her up. I felt like everyone was judging me, thinking, “Geez, no wonder this kid did this, her parents are clearly not letting her nap, etc.” In short, I felt like a child abuser. She did apologize (and wake up) at some point. We also returned all the other library books and didn’t get any more.
I feel like we handled it pretty well. Anybody else have similar experiences? Horror stories? Support, sympathy, ridicule? Share in the comments.
Shane Halbach 