KrisDi and I had a short vacation to Chicago, primarily to see The Marvelous 3 but also to eat deep dish and Italian beef and enjoy the local beer scene. We also claimed (retroactively) that it was to celebrate starting dating 20 years earlier. I’ve wanted to see Butch Walker in one of his iterations for many years (like, 20 years) and never had the chance. I introduced KrisDi to his music, and she likes it, too.
We arrived late on Thursday and I left my hat on the plane. We Ubered to our hotel (having determined that long, expensive Uber rides were on the whole cheaper than renting a car and paying for parking) and went to bed. In the morning, we had breakfast and walked around, had lunch at Portillo’s, visited a beer place called Centennial which was awesome (both in service and in selection). A new-to-me brewery called Crushed by Giants (it was fine), a haven’t-been-there-in-years brewery (Haymarket) that was so-so, and then met with KrisDi’s friends at Siena Tavern for dinner and drinks before the show.
Shows are fun when the band is energetic and you know and love the songs. This was absolutely the case. I think they were billing this as the last Marvelous 3 show ever, and I think in part it was an excuse for the guitarist’s son to play on a big stage. I enjoyed it a lot.
The next day, we went to a new place for deep dish pizza, Art of Pizza. We went there in part because they actually sell deep dish by the slice. They also sell humongous sandwiches. We enjoyed our previous visit so much we took our friends back to Centennial. KrisDi and I went to a fancy steakhouse called Bavette for an anniversary dinner, which was delicious. After dinner, we went to Dovetail and had a couple beers before returning to the hotel and going to bed.
The next morning, we met KrisDi’s friends again for breakfast and then visited Off Color (as good as I remember) and Hubbard’s Cave/Une Annee (they have moved out of their dinky little strip mall and now they’re a barbecue restaurant) breweries. And then we flew home.
Not much later, I flew to Albuquerque to visit Mom. Northwood decided that he would drive down from Colorado Springs (which later depended on whether or not he finished re-assembling his CRV’s engine and transmission in time). We never told Mom he was coming. The TSA pre-check security line took like an hour, which was longer than the regular line. On the day of my flight, Northwood said he’d come get me at the airport (thereby assuring that we would both arrive at Mom’s house simultaneously for maximum overwhelmedness), but for that to work, I had to non-suspiciously deter Mom from picking me up at the airport. Thus, this terrible lie (and this follow-up conversation with Northwood). She was definitely surprised when we both showed up.
The next morning, Northwood and I visited The Burrito Lady for breakfast, which was pretty trippy. Tiny little place, located in an aged strip mall, apparently unused to people actually eating there. We ordered breakfast burritos and coffee, and they pulled out a regular home coffee machine and searched around for a place to plug it in, settling on an outlet by the table we sat at. We basically made our own coffee. Two more aspects of weirdness: (1) The cook came out and wandered around, and his pistol was quite evident stuck into his waistband (no, not a holster, literally just stuck into the waist of his pants). (2) There was also another worker who never said a word who had a huge scar across his throat. The burritos were great, though.
Mom had a list of chores for us to do that she thought would take the whole weekend, but we completed by ~9 AM the first day. We tried to take on fixing her guest bathroom’s shower faucet handle, but we were unable to find a replacement valve so our repair option would basically be rip out the old one and solder in a new one, which we weren’t prepared to do.
I also found Tia B’s Waffleria, a place that does lots of weird waffles. We had breakfast or lunch there, and it was glorious. Highly recommend, and will absolutely go back.
Miscellaneous: