Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Brighten Your Day

A friend of mine said that when she was at Asha, a she she salon in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago, she came across a service called "anal brightening." She couldn't resist asking someone what in the blazes that service involved, and evidently there are people who like their anuses, or is it ani?, to shimmer bright, white in the moonlight. I'll never be able to take Brighten the Corners by Pavement out of my CD rack without thinking of this operation, and think to myself, "Gosh, I wish my anus where whiter."

Monday, April 23, 2007

Why I Love The Cubs.

The title to this entry is a little misleading since I do not love the Cubs at all. I am not a Chicago Cubs fan one bit. It's the White Sox all the way for me. But I cannot turn away a baseball game no matter who is playing.

My office is four blocks away from Wrigley Field which has it's pluses and minuses. The biggest plus is that often during the baseball season someone calls me up and offers me a free ticket to a Cubs' game. How great is that? It is usually a client or vendor who offer... so my boss is usually ok with it. So this means:

1. I get to go to a baseball game.
2. I don't have to be at work for the afternoon.
3. I get to wear my White Sox hat to Wrigley and get the Cubs' fans all worked up.
4. I get to drink a tasty Old Style beer which is not allowed in our house since it has the Cubs' logo on it. I love Old Style beer.

I don't hate the Cubs... I'm not like that at all - I'm just not a fan. But working right by Wrigley has it's benefits.

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

I like eating especially when injury & ingesting dish towel water is imminent

In the Lincoln Square area, on the corner of Lincoln and Montrose, there used to be this shady looking Eastern European restaurant (?) with flamingos on the window and awning. There always seemed to be only two people there at a time and I was too scared to enter its doors. Well, I was over there recently, not to get some shady action, mind you, but on my way to get some pub grub with my friend, when we noticed no flamingos and a sign for $3 mojitos on the restaurant’s wall. Sign us up. Too bad, I don’t remember the name of the new place, but what I do remember is the dessert, the cookie monster. I was expecting something like this one on the left (you can sign me up for that oreo thing as a chaser while you're at it):

This is the cookie monster dessert from Chicago’s own Home Run Inn Pizza, which is one of the best pizza places in the stratosphere. Not only do Home Run Inn restaurants have a pizza buffet that includes something that looks like a deep dish pizza, but is actually a pizza whose crust is made out of Italian sausage (you heard me right), they also have the cookie monster. One time I drove 45 minutes just to have this skillet full of goodness.

At unknown Lincoln Square place the menu said, “A warm plate sized chocolate chip cookie topped with vanilla bean ice cream and whipped cream.” What we received was more like, “A burnt cookie that you can’t cut with a knife and when you do it shoots across the table, but you still eat the piece that touched the table because, well, it’s a cookie and no one in their right mind would waste a cookie, and even though it’s a struggle to eat the cookie you still try cutting it again and again until you almost break the plate.” That’s some menu description, huh? I’ll be back there soon with the hope that the culinary skills have gone up a notch and because man, their tater tots were off the chain.

Winter in April.

One of the things I've learned about Chicago is that Winter always comes back the first week of April. The past three years have seen snow flurries and cold-ass temperatures the first week of April. I have been to baseball games the past three years so bundled up that I look ready for a Bears game in January.

This would not be so bad, but every March we always have a string of nice days in the 70's... so going backwards into the 20's is the worst. I love the winter. I love the winter more than most - but by April 1st I am so over winter. These flurries on the way to work this morning just pissed me off.