Working on a huge Hawaii update

For my millions of readers: I'm a good 38% or so done on writing up a HUGE report on our trip to Hawaii. It may literally be months before it's done, but I'll truncate it and put up one entry per each day of our trip, with photos. Weekend Recap: Because you know you want to to read someone else's vacation report!

Sept 11 - Sept 13 2009: Moving Daze

(Image from http://www.ripten.com/ -- "All your geek are belong to us"!)

I seem to have a little bit of time here to write, so I thought I'd go ahead and recap a weekend.

The weekends that are easiest to write about are the least exciting to read about. Last weekend was no exception. Friday Josh and I had dinner at BW3 (aka Buffalo Wild Wings) in Niles, IL. I was proud of myself for keeping down the calorie/points intake while we were there, since I just joined Weight Watchers on Wednesday. Then we went home and went to bed early.

Saturday, Josh got up at 7am and was in a car headed toward Kenosha, WI by 8am to help one of my best friends, Luke Ski, move. Luke is moving into the new house he will share with his future wife Sara in Des Plaines, IL. I was able to sleep in, however; my excuse being that it was my only chance to do so since I would need to be up early on Sunday for church stuff.

I met up with the movers in Des Plaines, where over half of the truck had already been unloaded by the time my tardy self showed up. I did my best to be helpful in the remaining unloading, but I missed the bulk of the work.

Finally we ended up at my best friend Ken's house in Wood Dale, where a bunch of us spent hours playing the new Beatles version of "Rock Band". We also played the songs "Opening Band" by Paul and Storm, "Re: your Brains" by Jonathan Coulton, and "Origin of the Species" by MC Frontalot on the regular version of the game. Pizza and garlic bread (or in my case, salad and plain bread) was consumed somewhere in there. It was a good time, but unfortunately I failed to tote my camera.

Sunday, I had already been at church for a few hours by the time Josh showed up (noon-ish) at Tanya's to start helping her move. She is schleping her stuff from a 2nd story apartment to the 1st story apartment just below. After many hours of singing, I arrived at Tanya's at 2:30 to do my best to help. We followed that up with a tantalizing visit to CVS, an exciting Jewel/Osco run, and a low cal dinner of (surprisingly tasty) dry chicken and chips. As we are oft wont to do when we actually eat dinner at home, we watched "Flight of the Conchords" while eating. Then while getting ready for bed, I listened to Luke rant on the phone for over a half hour; the main point I took away from it was that starting our new podcast is his top priority on October's ye olde "To Do List".

Hopefully next time I bother to write, it will be something worth writing about. :)

Fri, July 17 - Sun, Jul 19th -- Super happy waterpark day

Friday evening kicked off with Friday Evening Laundry (always a bad idea for day-job-ers), followed by sushi dinner with Tanya. It was nice to finally hang out with my Maid of Honor for the first time since our wedding 7 weeks ago. Since she lives 4 blocks from us, we don't really have any excuses.

She came up to our apartment afterwards to play Burnout Paradise with Josh, and then they both gathered around my computer to look at our Niagara Falls/Toronto/Cleveland/Ann Arbor honeymoon photos. It was actually the first time Josh or I had looked at them on a really large screen. One photo in particular of the American Falls was so cool that it immediately became my desktop background (see above: no, that wasn't part of the water park weekend, as tempting as it may seem to ride down).

Saturday, I continued my quest to eat some of my favorite sweetness-containing foods, anticipating the day (today, actually) that I would give up sweetness forever. Hopefully, anyway. As a diabetic, it's about time I try something extreme to assist my health. So we headed to Ann Sathers, an amazing Chicago breakfast restaurant known for their cinnamon rolls. It was good to have the city's best cinnamon roll one last time.

After a trip to Target and Microcenter, we started getting ready for Nap's surprise 40th birthday party at Charlie's Ale House. It turned out to be a casual affair filled with wonderful things such as a metric ton of balloons and streamers, appetizers such as hot wings and quesadillas, and (my last ever piece of) birthday cake. And of course, alcohol. We were probably more surprised to see Nap show up 5 minutes early than he was to see us (bets had been placed on what time he would show, but everyone lost). Later in the evening, Josh and I enjoyed looking at a hand-drawn map from the 1920s or 1930s showing the location of Chicago's gangs. Charlie's Ale House will surely see us haunting their hallways again sometime.

Sunday we woke up early to head to the Raging Waves outdoor waterpark in Yorkville, IL. First, we stopped in Plainfield to have breakfast at Bob Evans restaurant, who continue to have the best pancakes I have ever tasted. Though I usually associate them with roadtrips, it was worth it to go out of our way to visit one in Chicagoland.

We got to Yorkville, which is clearly on former farmland, and surrounded by farms. In spite of this, and in spite of my lifelong Chicagoland resident best friend (Ken) saying they are too far away to be considered "Chicagoland", they do claim Chicagoland, and I found Yorkville on a list of Chicago suburbs on the interwebs. The interwebs never lie!

With highs in the low 70s and lows in the high 50s, this was apparently not the day that all of Chicagoland decided to go to a waterpark in a far flung suburb. Also, it doesn't help that no one seems to have ever heard of them. I've never seen an advertisement for them, and we found them using the almighty Googles. Basically, it's a full size Water Park, but there were 40 cars in the parking lot at most when we got there at about noon. Except for about 2pm through about 4pm, it often felt like there were more employees there than attendees.

Without going into too much of a painstakingly detailed review, I'll just say my overall impression of Raging Waves is that it is fun and clean, but the amenities are minimalistic. For instance, if you're expecting to be able to set your stuff down on something in the changing stalls, such as (oh, I don't know) a bench, you'd be asking for too much. Also, the waves aren't exactly "raging"; maybe it should've been named Ranting Waves instead. Josh put it best when he said "It's like someone invested the bare minimum to make a waterpark, leaving room for expansion if it should take off."

Most of the slides are tube slides in more ways than one: tube shaped and inflated tubes required to ride. After I tried one of the body slides and felt every rivet in the plastic scraping against my back, I realized why the tube slides are more popular. As for the tube shape of all the slides, we figure it's a liability issue. I am used to seeing more slides with partial openings in them. In some cases it made for a very dark ride; in other cases (such as the yellow body slide) I could see everything.

My favorite slide was one that Josh declined: the Boomerang. (See also: Howling Tornado at the Great Wolf Lodge.) Up to 4 people on the same 4-leaf-clover-shaped tube are dropped into a 6 story tunnel and sloshed around. I wish I could say Josh captured video of this, but I didn't even remember to bring my camera. The above photo of us together at the end of the day was taken with Josh's blackberry camera.

Josh's favorite ride was the Lazy River tube ride. For those of you who know him: I'm sure you're not surprised! Unfortunately, we found out later this was the source of his back sunburn, as the sunlight reflected off the bottom of the Lazy River onto his back.

One definite negative about Raging Waves is if you want to ride an innertube in the wave pool, you're going to pay $5 to rent a special wave pool innertube. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. I see this as a safety issue: in fact, we were able to see one of their well-trained lifeguards in action when a girl around 7 years old called for help and found out she couldn't swim in the deep end. We never did see her reunited with her parents, by the way, and can't help but wonder where they were. In any case, she wouldn't have been at such risk for drowning if her parents didn't need to pay for a special wrist band for her to use an innertube.

We rounded out the evening at the Sweet Tomatoes salad bar restaurant in Naperville. Having been to the Schaumburg edition of this chain restaurant several times, I must note that I liked the Naperville one much better. Not so much of a "soccer mom" feeding trough atmosphere.

Having walked around a lot (the water shoes saved us) and climbed stairs 8 times to get to a slide, and also having relaxed quite a bit in the lazy river and the wave pool, I came to the conclusion this is the way life is supposed to be: an interval of movement followed by an interval of relaxation. Lather, rinse, repeat. The not-exactly-moving but definitely-not-relaxing aspect of working in an office (or writing in a blog) is not the way we're meant to spend our lives. We need to have many more moving-relaxing-moving-relaxing days like we had on Sunday.

Wednesday, July 15th -- Making sure it's official

Since our wedding on May 30th 2009, we have been worried about whether or not our marriage was official and legal. Even though I gave Sasha the marriage license and even though I know Sasha can really be trusted, I never heard anything about it being sent in. Additionally, my maid of honor Tanya, who I had designated as one of the people I wanted to sign the marriage license as a "witness", mentioned she left the wedding without being asked to sign it.

So on Wednesday, Josh and I were excited that we would finally get a chance to pick up our "Certification of Marriage" from Cook County to make sure it is, in fact, official. Josh picked me up from work and we had a reasonably easy and enjoyable drive on a sunny day out to Rolling Meadows to pick up our certificate.

Something interesting happened after we got through the metal detectors and started heading up the escalator: some emergency lights were flashing in the building. Then, the women who worked in the room where we were heading (the same room where we got our marriage license exactly 3 months earlier) were yelling frantically at everyone to exit the building. So we went right back downstairs and exited as we were told, kind of laughing at the whole thing. We were reasonably certain that no one was targeting a harmless little courthouse in Rolling Meadows. I told Josh I was convinced that the gel packs I had in with my insulin to keep it chilled had set off the alarms.

A few minutes later we were allowed back inside, this time without needing to use the metal detector again. We went to the proper room and paid our $15 in cash, and got our official Proof with no hassle. It turns out the record was filed on June 15th (shortly after our honeymoon), so we could have got our official proof a full month sooner than we did.

After that, we drove to Don's Dock in Des Plaines for dinner. They have an interesting, cluttered decor that I enjoy looking at (including a few references to SpongeBob SquarePants and a Napolean Dynamite sticker with the caption "I caught you a delicious bass.") and good seafood. This is the same place we'd eaten 3 months ago after getting our marriage license. I got fried food once again (Calamari because the name reminds me of Wisconsin Dells' "Kalamari" indoor waterpark), while this time Josh opted for a healthier plate of grilled salmon, rice, and broccoli.

It was a nice evening that kind of felt like a weekend to me, plus it was a significant day in the life of Josh and Carrie. So I felt the need to write about it even though it was a Wednesday evening.

Fri. July 10 through Sun. July 12 2009: Too much eating out

Here is a photo I took today of Josh getting ready to go biking. Maddeningly Cute!

Friday, my wonderful husband Josh picked me up from work. After heading to Walgreens where I bought new socks to more adequately cover my swollen ankles, and stopping at Panera Bread to purchase tickets to Bruno from Fandango, we headed to Moretti's bar and grill in Edison Park. There was a gathering of current and former employees of a place Josh used to work. Their salads weren't as good as I remember, but we had some good laughs with the people there; most notably Cynthia and Scott, who were sitting near us (and also attended our wedding).

From there we headed to Skokie for a near-opening night showing of Bruno with Sacha Baron Cohen. Having both loved Borat, we were expecting to love Bruno. However, we felt it was 90% lame attempts at shock value with not very many laughs. We eventually felt so uncomfortable by the movie that we actually left about halfway through. Watching real people suffer is not a hobby of ours.

Saturday morning we headed out to Glenn's Diner on Montrose. The reason for this specific restaurant is because I am planning on giving up all sweets very soon due to my diabetes, and wanted one last hurrah with sweetened breakfast cereal. Glenn's has a whole wall of popular breakfast cereals. I started off with a bowl of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch, while Josh polished off a large bowl of Lucky Charms while I was in the bathroom. We also shared a bowl of Cap'n Crunch: Crunch Berries. Additionally we each had a WONDERFUL plate called the "Canadian Scramble", which is mostly meat, but without beef. I will definitely be back there for that dish alone.

Josh headed to work in his car while I took the brown line to Jeweler's Row. I intended to have my engagement ring and wedding band sautered together at the place where they were purchased, but they were closed. I paid $75 to Golden Crown Jewelers to have them do it, and also to re-dip the bands in yellow gold. I waited at Starbucks (drinking my black decaf iced Americano, since I no longer drink sweetened or caloric beverages) for them to finish. While I was initially wowed by the results, I noticed later it looks a little off center. I may need to try to get RF Moeller to fix it this Christmas.

After I got home, Josh arrived soon after and we headed to the post office followed by lunch at Wendy's. (I don't recommend their chicken nuggets). Later he napped while I tried to wrestle with Verizon to get my short code texting to work so I can use Twitter normally again (note: I still can't).

Later on, we had dinner together at the place where we had our first date, Kopi Cafe on north Clark in Andersonville. We thoroughly enjoyed our too much food, getting smothered nachos. I also bought some items in the store, including a replacement red coin purse with pink kitty. I inquired about selling my CDs there, but it doesn't sound like it would work.

Sunday I headed to choir rehearsal at PRCC while Josh presumably played video games. I got him Surprise Oil Change and bought groceries at Whole Paych..., er Whole Foods. It was a day fraught with plumbing-related problems that I don't feel like getting into, since I'm trying to focus on the good things. I spent a few hours cleaning my kitchen, and my husband took the recyclables to the recycling center, for which he will be rewarded. Finally, we had a nice dinner of Whole Foods food while watching Life After People.

All in all, not a very exciting weekend, which made it easy to write about. :)

First entry! / Mission statement

This is the blog where Carrie and Josh (primarily Carrie) will do a weekend recap once per week, with a recollection of a less recent weekend also posted up to once per week (for a total of 1 or 2 entries per week). When slaves to the office world live for the weekends, we feel we should document those weekends.