Tourist Take on Chicago
My mom and sister spent last weekend here in the city in a four-day long celebration of my mom’s birthday and her 27th anniversary of being breast cancer free – my sister and I are pretty grateful for our great momma so we had to take her out on the town to prove it!
They arrived on Friday and we spend the evening gorging on Chinese food and hanging out in my living room. This was after my sister and I carried up my wedding present from her, in the form of a giant (and heavy) kitchen island that she oh-so-generously donated to me. If my mom ever had any doubts that she raised two strong and stubborn women, we put that to rest after carrying that thing up three flights of stairs! So our Chinese and rest was hard-earned. On Saturday we checked in at The Virgin Hotel, where we had a swanky room with separate dressing room “chamber” that came in handy when it was time to get ready for the concert we had tickets for. After a fancy dinner at The Walnut Room (told you we were going tourist), we went to the Chicago Theatre for the Experience Hendrix show. It featured a group of artists honoring Jimi by playing some of his hits and we got to see Buddy Guy and Jonny Lang, who happens to be one of my mom’s all-time favorite musicians. The show was good but we all agreed that we wished Jonny had performed a little longer…just gives us a reason to find another concert to see him in the future!
Told you it was a trip!
We spend some time wandering around downtown and shopping but our grand plans of drinks at the top of the Hancock Tower were thwarted by bad weather. Such a shocker for Chicago. We finished the evening with snacks and drinks at the hotel then thoroughly enjoyed our room with crazy-black-out-from-the-future-blinds that made us feel like we were sleeping on the dark side of the moon. They even had a button to lower and raise them and not going to lie, it was pretty hard to get out of bed the next day. But we did! Eventually. Afterwards, we treated ourselves to a brunch complete with Bloody Mary’s before finding a huge Flower Carnival in Macy’s that was free, fragrant and pretty fantastic. Then we headed back to my place to nap it all off. But wait! There was more! We also had mani/pedi’s and drinks at the local bar grocery store before watching a movie to cap off our weekend. What movie, you may ask? Finding Dory (because we’ve learned the hard way that watching family-friendly films with Mom are better than say, Black Swan).
I wish we could treat my mom to weekends like this more often but I think we managed to pack a good amount of fun stuff into the time we had.
It’s Raining Babies!
And thankfully none of them are mine!
I feel like I make these posts every so often, where I talk about how every single person I know is pregnant. This is another one of those posts because once again I’m surrounded by pregnant people! Or pregnant women, more specifically.
I haven’t planted any babies so that means I won’t get pregnant, right?
One of my closest coworker friends is pregnant with her third child right now, as are three of our other coworkers and one of my bosses. Two of these five pregnant co-workers sit directly next to me and all are due around the same time so I’m hearing lots and lots about this whole pregnancy thing . Also, over the weekend Scott’s little sister announced that she’s pregnant with her first child! This means we’ll have another little niece or nephew to spoil, since my brother-in-law and his wife have a two-year-old son too. On top of that, one of my closest friends in Chicago is trying for her second kid and one of my closest friends from high school is also trying to get knocked up – while our other high school BFF just had her first kid around Christmas. SO MANY BABIES!
You may think this is giving me baby fever but, even though we’re moving into a two-bedroom apartment on the first floor as compared to our one-bedroom pad on the third floor, I am in no way trying to get pregnant too. After all, I have enough kids around me to keep up without popping out one of my own!
Girl Power
On this International Women’s Day…
I’m working today and I’m proudly wearing my red alongside my “Celebrate Diversity” and “Another Woman for Peace” buttons. I’m still writing my postcards and making my phone calls and I’m so glad Paul Ryan’s voicemail is finally working again. I’m volunteering at the food pantry tonight but that’s because it’s my regularly scheduled volunteer night and it’s what I would be doing regardless of the holiday.
I endure. I resist.
To Move!
Well, Saturday sure was productive. I worked at the Field Museum all night (literally) Friday then volunteered until about noon on Saturday. Then Scott and I had appointments to see some apartments but lo and behold, we signed the lease on the first one we looked at. So that’s done!
We’re moving from the third floor of our current building to the first floor of the building next door (same complex and everything). So basically we’re walking our stuff down the stairs and up one flight over. Actually, we’ll likely going to pay someone to do that for us because moving large furniture sucks and our friends are too old to do that shit for pizza and beer anymore. But we should get a price discount since there’s no actual truck loading or unloading going on, so that’s nice! And my commute will stay the same, which is also super nice and SUPER convenient! 
Our new place is like our current place 2.0. The bathroom is bigger and there are two (count ’em TWO) bedrooms – each with its own walk-in closet! THAT MEANS I GET TO HAVE MY OWN CLOSET AGAIN!!! The master bedroom is also so big that the current tenants have a queen sized bed and a futon along one wall, a desk along another and a ton of space for dance parties to spare. We’ll also have a small pantry off the kitchen and a back porch big enough for two chairs. We get to keep a dishwasher and central AC too! And we’ll just have to walk down the back stairs out back to get to our laundry, instead of the creepy trek through our long alley that we used to have. Basically, everything about this new place is an upgrade! Except the fact that it’s on the first floor, that is. As much as we bitched and moaned about walking up three flights all the time, living on top has its perks and we’re hoping our new upstairs neighbors don’t drive us bonkers with dance parties of their own. But all in all, we feel really good about this and are pretty pumped. In fact,we may or may not have already drawn out the floor plan and come up with similar ideas on how to arrange things. That also may or may not have been how we spent our Saturday night. Because we know how to rock and roll. And soon we’ll be rock and rolling into a new place!
To Move or Not to Move
That is the question.
I’ve lived in two apartments in Chicago – one for two years and my current one, where I’ve resided for nearly six. Scott and I truly love where we’ve lived for so long but I’m not going to lie, we’re starting to outgrow it. We also love our neighborhood and want to stick close but that’s about all we’re certain of. Our lease is up soon and we’re debating on what to do so I’ll do what I do best – make a pro/con list.
Pros of Moving:
- New place! New ways to decorate and new surroundings!
- MORE SPACE! We only have one closet in our entire apartment and it would be SO NICE to have say, an extra closet. Or an extra bedroom. Or both, which is not entirely out of the realm of possibility.
- Laundry in the building and not down the stairs, down the alley, around back, through a courtyard and down some more stairs. Also, in-unit laundry is a pipe dream for suckers.
- Did I saw more space? Having an extra bedroom would help with Scott’s studying as we could have an actual study, plus we could have more space when we have house guests (which we do frequently).
This would be me the last time I moved sans movers. Never again.
Cons of Moving:
- More money. Any place we move will likely cost us a few hundred more a month. This is because I got a great deal when I moved into our current pad and it’s essentially a steal. We could afford it but we could also stand to save some more money (who couldn’t?). Also, moving costs need to be taken into account because we are for sure hiring movers.
- Won’t find all of the perks of our current place such as: central AC, dishwasher, (tiny) back porch, top floor so no one above us, corner unit so sharing no walls, ceiling fans in all rooms, trees outside of living room and dining room windows, open kitchen space with lots of room
- Moving is a pain in the ass. And Scott’s in school so a lot of it would fall to me. Gross.
- Would likely be slightly further from my train/my gym/my grocery store
So what’s a couple to do? Yeah, I don’t know either. I saw a few places last night and the first one immediately ruled itself out for being kind of nasty but the second one was decent – there was a bigger back porch than ours but it’s shared with a neighbor and faces a brick wall, whereas ours is ours alone and faces the neighborhood. There were two bedrooms and tons of storage space but it had a super tiny kitchen and the dining room table would have to be in the living room/sunroom area. And no dishwasher, which I can live without but may ruin my marriage if Scott doesn’t learn how to wash dishes immediately versus letting them “soak” for three days at a time.
No matter. We have a few more viewings set for this weekend so we’ll see how it all shakes out. After all, the biggest pro of all is that we don’t have to move if we don’t want to!
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