I see another lackadaisical effort at a blog update on the immediate horizon.  Blame the weather, it’s got me down.  Another foot of snow?  Really?  I’m more than ready to start cycling and I can’t even get through the drift at the end of my driveway.  I must admit, I am not thrilled about the prospect of Float Trip next weekend.  (Then again…  Am I ever really thrilled about driving five hours to sleep on the ground in sub-freezing weather?  I might try and tell myself I am, but that’s about as close as it gets.)

I did have a fine weekend though, so at least I have a little material to work with.  Friday evening, I headed up to the airport and flew to Chicago to meet Donette for a sort of cheap weekend get-away.  She’d been there working all week, so she already had a car and hotel lined up;  I just had to bring my pretty face.  I got there late Friday (well, late for me anyway,) got checked into the hotel, then we walked to a nearby Buffalo Wild Wings to watch some basketball.  I must say, BWW’s are a decent place to watch sporting events, but they’re a bit much for me.  They did, in fact, have every possible game tuned in on various large TV’s, but it was so stinking loud you couldn’t really follow any of them.  Just like every other location in their chain I’ve visited, it seems like they purposely design the rooms to be big echo chambers.  And of course nobody can converse in a normal tone in a sports bar;  They have to yell.  In order to be heard over the yelling table next to them, they have to yell even louder.  Add in five different basketball games, all turned up to max volume, and it’s just a big acoustic nightmare.  I stuck it out for about an hour (roughly the time it took to order and scarf a tasty chicken sandwich,) and bailed for the safe silence of the hotel room.

Saturday we didn’t really have much of a plan.  Watch some basketball, find some tasty food, do a little shopping…  That kind of stuff.  I slept in (or at least as late as my old body ever sleeps) and then we walked over to a nearby Zoup for a quick bite.  After lunch we took a drive to Aurora, IL to check out the fancy Chicago Premium Outlets.  While not in Chicago, per se, they were in fact “Premium.”  I can’t say as I’ve ever seen a Tag Heuer outlet, for instance.  Also in my line of interest was an Oakley store, Staub and Le Creuset cookware, a few high-end electronic stores, and a really nice perfume outlet.  (I just threw that last one in to see if anybody was actually reading this.  No, really.)  I definitely had my eye on a few nice items, but unfortunately no money to actually pay for them.  There was a great deal on a Staub skillet, but for one thing it was still rather pricey and for another I wasn’t too keen on lugging a cast iron pan back on the plane.  At the end of the day, Doni bought a nice purse and I got a new watch.  (No, mine wasn’t from the Tag store…)  That was more than enough shopping for one weekend, so we then headed to Warrenville and ended up at a place called Mullen’s to watch some basketball.  They had a fantastic menu, but unfortunately we weren’t really that hungry yet so we just had an appetizer.  After we got tired of watching the games, we checked out the town a bit and then scurried back to the hotel to watch the late games.

Sunday we kicked off the day with a fantastic breakfast, although the name of the place escapes me.  Didn’t eat again the rest of the day, I know that.  We checked out of the hotel, then went to a place called Black Finn to wait for our flights and watch the afternoon games.  It was a great place, we’ll put it on the list for a return visit next trip.  They had a ribeye steak that was calling my name, but I still had a belly full of lox and eggs.  Meanwhile, throughout the day, Donette had been getting frequent texts that the status of her flight was bouncing all over the place.  We’d ended up on separate flights for whatever reason, so we weren’t really sure how that was going to end up.  We showed up at the airport as scheduled though, and it ended up her flight took off right on schedule, whew.  She took both our bags with her and headed out to KC to get the car, pup, etc, and wait for me at the airport.  I showed up at my gate an hour later, and they waited right up until it was time to board and cryptically announced we were going to be delayed.  Nice.  I wasn’t the one getting texts all day!  It was, in fact, delayed, to the tune of five hours and one plane change.  It was honestly a rather comical chain of events though, everybody really took it pretty much in stride.  First they had no flight crew, for what reason they never really explained.  Finally found some flight attendants an hour later and boarded, then had to wait an eternity on de-icing.  Having completed that and rolling out to the runway, some idiot light came on and sent us back to the terminal.  (After waiting an hour for a gate to open.)  After assuring us we were finally on our way, they then decided we’d burned too much fuel sitting on the runway and we had to change planes.  Our long-lost flight attendants followed us to the new gate, but for whatever reason we needed new pilots for this plane;  Back to holding.  Oh well.  Thank goodness for the generation of iPad’s so I could watch movies the whole time.