{"id":1432,"date":"2013-03-25T10:33:48","date_gmt":"2013-03-25T15:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/?p=1432"},"modified":"2013-03-25T10:33:48","modified_gmt":"2013-03-25T15:33:48","slug":"madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/madness\/","title":{"rendered":"Madness!!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I see another\u00a0lackadaisical effort at a blog update on the immediate horizon. \u00a0Blame the weather, it’s got me down. \u00a0Another foot of snow? \u00a0Really? \u00a0I’m more than ready to start cycling and I can’t even get through the drift at the end of my driveway. \u00a0I must admit, I am not<\/strong> thrilled about the prospect of Float Trip next weekend. \u00a0(Then again… \u00a0Am I ever really thrilled about driving five hours to sleep on the ground in sub-freezing weather? \u00a0I might try and tell myself I am, but that’s about as close as it gets.)<\/p>\n

I did have a fine weekend though, so at least I have a little material to work with. \u00a0Friday evening, I headed up to the airport and flew to Chicago to meet Donette for a sort of cheap weekend get-away. \u00a0She’d been there working all week, so she already had a car and hotel lined up; \u00a0I just had to bring my pretty face. \u00a0I 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. \u00a0I must say, BWW’s are a decent place to watch sporting events, but they’re a bit much for me. \u00a0They 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. \u00a0Just like every other location in their chain I’ve visited, it seems like they purposely design the rooms to be big echo chambers. \u00a0And of course nobody can converse in a normal tone in a sports bar; \u00a0They have to yell. \u00a0In order to be heard over the yelling table next to them, they have to yell even louder. \u00a0Add in five different basketball games, all turned up to max volume, and it’s just a big acoustic nightmare. \u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n

Saturday we didn’t really have much of a plan. \u00a0Watch some basketball, find some tasty food, do a little shopping… \u00a0That kind of stuff. \u00a0I slept in (or at least as late as my old body ever sleeps) and then we walked over to a nearby Zoup<\/a> for a quick bite. \u00a0After lunch we took a drive to Aurora, IL to check out the fancy Chicago Premium Outlets<\/a>. \u00a0While not in Chicago, per se, they were in fact “Premium.” \u00a0I can’t say as I’ve ever seen a Tag Heuer<\/a> outlet, for instance. \u00a0Also 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. \u00a0(I just threw that last one in to see if anybody was actually reading this. \u00a0No, really.) \u00a0I definitely had my eye on a few nice items, but unfortunately no money to actually pay for them. \u00a0There 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. \u00a0At the end of the day, Doni bought a nice purse and I got a new watch. \u00a0(No, mine wasn’t from the Tag store…) \u00a0That was more than enough shopping for one weekend, so we then headed to Warrenville and ended up at a place called Mullen’s<\/a> to watch some basketball. \u00a0They had a fantastic menu, but unfortunately we weren’t really that hungry yet so we just had an appetizer. \u00a0After 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.<\/p>\n

Sunday we kicked off the day with a fantastic breakfast, although the name of the place escapes me. \u00a0Didn’t eat again the rest of the day, I know that. \u00a0We checked out of the hotel, then went to a place called Black Finn to wait for our flights and watch the afternoon games. \u00a0It was a great place, we’ll put it on the list for a return visit next trip. \u00a0They had a ribeye steak that was calling my name, but I still had a belly full of lox and eggs. \u00a0Meanwhile, throughout the day, Donette had been getting frequent texts that the status of her flight was bouncing all over the place. \u00a0We’d ended up on separate flights for whatever reason, so we weren’t really sure how that was going to end up. \u00a0We showed up at the airport as scheduled though, and it ended up her flight took off right on schedule, whew. \u00a0She took both our bags with her and headed out to KC to get the car, pup, etc, and wait for me at the airport. \u00a0I 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. \u00a0Nice. \u00a0I wasn’t the one getting texts all day! \u00a0It was, in fact, delayed, to the tune of five hours and one plane change. \u00a0It was honestly a rather comical chain of events though, everybody really took it pretty much in stride. \u00a0First they had no flight crew, for what reason they never really explained. \u00a0Finally found some flight attendants an hour later and boarded, then had to wait an eternity on de-icing. \u00a0Having completed that and rolling out to the runway, some idiot light came on and sent us back to the terminal. \u00a0(After waiting an hour for a gate to open.) \u00a0After 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. \u00a0Our long-lost flight attendants followed us to the new gate, but for whatever reason we needed new pilots for this plane; \u00a0Back to holding. \u00a0Oh well. \u00a0Thank goodness for the generation of iPad’s so I could watch movies the whole time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I see another\u00a0lackadaisical effort at a blog update on the immediate horizon. \u00a0Blame the weather, it’s got me down. \u00a0Another foot of snow? \u00a0Really? \u00a0I’m more than ready to start cycling and I can’t even get through the drift at the end of my driveway. \u00a0I must admit, I am not thrilled about the prospect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1433,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions\/1433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}