[/quote]

I love Chicago, the pizza, the Italian beef sandwiches, Wrigley, etc. It's a tempting offer [/quote]

Don't forget good old Comiskey Park - and I know the BEST pizza joints around...

Laura

Laura,

You temptress you! Have you ever had the upside-down pizza at Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinders in the Lincoln Park area?

And ladies, stop it with the dissertation on pains and painful procedures! Enough already!

I kid you not, everything works and works well. I've fad a few stitches in my day and broken a few toes (no more barefoot excursions for me). I have sleep apnea and use a CPAP machine, that's about it. I embarrassed some teens and 20-somethings by out-working them on sandbag detail this spring. I rock!

Dutch

Just got to through this one in there booka sorry!

I get to have a hysterectomy and gall bladder surgery on the 25th of Nov, can you imgaine that pain???

My thought is a little discomfort from surgery will make up for all the pain over the years!!!! If they would've agreed to this sooner!!!!

Let's see this weekend going to the movies tonightwith a friend, tomorrow night going with church youth group for a hyride and barn dance.

Will coach the peewee bowlers, teach sunday school the regular weekend stuff, bowl on Sunday night!!

Dawn

Nope - haven't gotten there yet. But, I have had on several occasions the absolute finest pizza around - Home Run Inn. I believe you can get it frozen in your grocery stores, but it's just NOT the same.....gotta get it fresh out of the oven. Another good one is Gino's, of course gotta mention Giordano's, and a franchise that will blow you away, Beggars.....the mounds of cheese on those babies can get stuck in your throat! Ahhhhhhhhhh, Heaven!

I just love the Lincoln Park area - so much to do, see and EAT!!!

Well, when you can't stand it any longer and need to visit, you've got a place to stay (just as long as you buy the pizza!)

Laura

Our exchange student from Germany leaves tomorrow!

FWIW, I dont' let it stop me...into everything I'm interested in! Some people tell me they don't know how I do everything or find time to do everything I do.

There are times I even get called the Energizer Bunny!

So, we got to the airport at about 8:00 a.m. There were tears.

So, we went to a book festival and drowned our sorrows in books...So many books, so little money....So many books, so little time.

Knitting books, history books, novels, books!!!!!

I am so going to have the neurosurgeon give Tabs a good look over during her MRI.

She calmly let a HUGE hornet in the house tonight, just stood there telling me there's a hornet outside the door and just stood there instead of getting inside and closing the door, letting it just fly right by her and in it came. There was absolutely no sense of urgency.

The spray didn't even knock it down.

Tab's dinner tonight, Miso stock soup with [censored]é mushrooms and toasted seaweed.

She absolutely loved it!

http://i529.photobucket.com/albums/dd335/R_Tison/100_0533.jpg

http://i529.photobucket.com/albums/dd335/R_Tison/100_0535.jpg

I'm still gonna tell the neuro about the bees and the lack of urgency with danger though.

*looks inside fridge*

nope... no toasted seaweed

Busy Busy Weekend!!!

My DIL is ready to have grandson #5, so made freezer meals for them got 10 meals completed on Saturday for them. I started with a Package of minute steaks, porkchops 5 lbs of ground turkey and a family packet of chicken thighs. Amazing what you can all do with that!!

Coached the PeeWees on my own this week, I forget how many of them there are when they are all together!!! But I love to watch them talk to their balls when going down the lane!!!

Did some drywall work, will texture that this afternoon. Did some shopping, found curtain material.

Watched movies with my daughter, Saturday n ight, that was fun.

Didn't get up til 10 this morning and have to go to the dentist!!!

Dawn

Laura,

They have the frozen Home Run pizzas in my market (literally and metaphorically) and they are probably the best frozen pizza I've had. Would like to try the real thing!

We may have to work out a pizza schedule!

Dutch

Looks very good! What was the wine?

A woman that drywalls? Be still, my beating heart!

Dutch

All right, here goes, the big kahuna:

Left work Friday and after stopping at Lowe’s for 2 Russian Sage plants, I decided to go to the new hot place, Babylon, to check it out. There’s a cigar store in that general vicinity so stopped in there and bough 3-cigars and a punch-style cutter. I head onto Babylon and there’s a bunch of union protesters out front, never a good sign. I walked in and was fairly disappointed with my first glance around, a large space, but it’s a freaking strip-mall and there’s really only so much you can do to disguise the fact that you’re in a strip-mall form factor. It had no heart, no soul. I sit there for several minutes before a BB (use you imagination on that one) comes over and I ask her what’s on draught. She proceeds to tell me what they’ve run out of. I ask again what’s on draught. She rattles off the same list and then says they have premium beers. I ask her what those are and she rattles off a nice list, so I order a Guinness, break out a cigar, talk to the guy next to me, he ha a cigar lighter, so I borrow his, fire up, and just start to enjoy it and then the bouncer comes over and tells me there’s no cigar smoking permitted in the bar. Nice. Guess how often I’ll go there. So I let the cigar go out, the guy next to me hits the road, I strike up a conversation with the guy to the left of me, end it at two beers, an probably will never set foot ever again in the place. I was out in Cottleville, so I took an interesting route home and headed home to grab my lighter and headed up to The Dog.

There was a good crowd at The Dog and as I got there Steve was just getting the karaoke stuff setup. I had not had dinner and ordered a cheeseburger and fries, telling Jo to cook the fries extra long as I like them crunchy. I brought Dave a new cigar box for his collection (it’s pretty interesting where they eventually turn up J), so I gave it to him and made my initial hellos. I should note that when I first walked in Cynthia greeted me with a hug (not unusual) and kissed me on the cheek (the first time). So I settled in for a beer and awaited my food and talked to Glen and Rick about various things. I sat next to Bruce Brown on the other side of me. Now Bruce is an interesting guy, he initially viewed me with great apprehension when we first met, but I did my usual stuff and during one crucial night I proved to be a great listener and he has progressive warmed to me since. I had a great conversation with his wife Katie a couple of weekends ago. This is how St. Paul is, the birthday party on the 3rd was Katie’s sister Donna, they’re Fiese’s (Fi-zee, long “I”), there’s at least 4 sisters, etc. The Fiese’s are big landowners and have a road named after them, so it can be said that Bruce married well. They have a very nice house right on St. Paul Road and Bruce told me that it has 5-fireplaces and he heats the whole house with them. He has all of the big toys for country boys and is a hot-shot trouble-shooter for commercial HVAC systems. Bruce does not act like a hot-shot and I’m sure that he’s worked very hard for all that he has. He has a brother Frank that I know pretty well and there’s some family history there and Frank doesn’t like Bruce and says frequently “They’re living like the Rockefeller’s over there.” Frank is a funny dude who liked me almost immediately. I’ve had many a beer with Frank and know his life story pretty well. There’s an interesting contrast between the two and with as many families as there are in St. Paul, you get to be a keen observer of sibling differences. Anyway, Frank was talking to Jason, who is married to Cynthia (unhappily it seems) and he in turn was sting next to Katie, all of us at the bar. I’m pretty hungry at this point and wolf my burger and fries and compliment Jo for doing the fries just perfectly. I have never eaten there when it wasn’t a fish-fry or wasn’t free, so it was an interesting experience and they were doing a lot of food business that night. Afterwards a fired up a cigar and made the rounds. There were probably 50 people there at that time and I knew them all. So I typically go and say hello to everyone and then float around a bit to find where the conversation is good. I should add that Friday nights are also bucket nights, with 5 for $10.00. So I end settling down with Bruce and we had a wide-ranging conversation for a long time and I enjoyed his company greatly. I then talked to Katie for quite a while. It was then time to make the rounds and Eric and Kelly-baby came in and I hadn’t seen them in quite a bit, so I settled in with them at their table and both watched and participated in some interesting dancing that was going on when Steve would play songs in between karaoke segments. I went back to the bar by Bruce and a really pretty woman was standing next to me and we started up a conversation that went quite a while. This was Patty who I had not met as of yet but had seen her husband around before.

This I where I’ll need to explain myself a bit. I get hit on a lot by a lot of married women. The one’s that I know love to flirt with me and both they and their husbands know that I am safe. I am not interested in breaking up a marriage for my own gratification. I dance with them, may flirt a little, am a conversationalist who is in demand, but I respect both their boundaries and my own. Patty was doing the classic women hitting on a guy thing of touching my shoulder during conversation, bumping into me, etc. I don’t even get excited by such stuff and never miss my conversational stride. I suppose it could be viewed as a validation of me by them, that I’m attractive, personable, good company, etc. (I of course am all of these). So I had a fun time talking with Patty and it can be a useful experience of sharpening your own skills and perhaps something much more valuable, the possibility of getting a referral through such an interaction. Everyone knows someone who is single.

It was back to Eric and Kelly-baby and there was some drama with Eric and someone else there whom he despises, so there were some nasty eyeballing back and forth and Rick and Craig defused the situation by gently suggesting to the other party that he wasn’t welcome there, and they walked him out while I sat between Eric and door in case Eric needed to be restrained. Everything calmed down but this very thing has happened about 4-times that I’ve send and both parties are acting pretty infantile about the whole thing and I really think that they should settle it outside once and for all. It goes back to something that happened when they were friends and drunk and certain things were said about Kelly-baby. This would foreshadow some other things I learned later in the weekend. I should add that it was Kelly-baby’s birthday Saturday.

As the clock rolled towards midnight, I decided to leave, having had a very good evening there, and went home and caught up with Tim and Jen for one beer and talked about our dinner plans for the next night.

I got up Saturday around 09:00 and read the paper and puttered for a bit around the yard, including planting the Russian Sage plants. I then decided I needed to check out the plants on sale, so got cleaned and dressed and headed to O’Fallon, where I first browsed Big Orange (Home Depot), then stopped at Del Taco for lunch, went to Big Blue (Lowe’s), and in the parking lot I said to myself, “Self, that looks a lot like next-door neighbor Jim’s car”, of course I leave out the next-door neighbor part because of course I already know that he’s my next-door neighbor. So I park right next to it, get out, look in his back seat through the window, and I could recognize Jim’s jacket, and lo and behold they (Jim and Pat) were walking out as I was walking in. I had a very amusing conversation with the both, Jim is the kind of sarcastic that I truly like and appreciate, and he is forever making jokes about his misfortune to be married to Pat, but I know that they deeply care for each other (and to boot said I’m one of the ten most eligible bachelors in the county and can’t believe that no woman has snapped me up yet, they know my value very well!) and Pat riffs very nicely with Jim and always has snappy repartee. It is a joy to converse with both. I browsed the entire store and bought 2 garden hand tools as I misplaced my transplanting trowel from last week, think it went into the trash with empty pots, and 3 bags of Sta-Green tree and shrub planting soil (I cannot say enough good things about this stuff and absolutely swear by it). I’ll put it to you this way, when you un-pot something you’ve purchased commercially, look what it’s planted in. Everything I get is in very light and fluffy stuff with a good quantity of what I would call mulch mixed with the other ingredients. That old black potting soil that hardens like a rock is so passé. So is topsoil, which will eventually compact into a hard mass. There, I’ll step off of my plant-box, so to speak! In this case, Big Orange had 25% off on all evergreens, so I went back there and bought 2 blue spruce and 2 perennial flowers, don’t recall what they are, went home and puttered some more, planting the flowers but saving the spruce for Sunday. I eventually went in and ironed clothes for the evening, got dressed, and walked up the street to Tim’s, and Tim and I, J1, Ryan, and J2 loaded into Tim’s Ram and we drove to McGurk’s. After we were seated, Rob and Jaimie, Tony and Laura, and C1 and Carra joined us and we had a fun and rambunctious meal. I love going out to dinner with this crew because we always have a great time. I am the only non-married person in the group. It was Tim’s birthday Friday and mine is this Tuesday, and had Justin and Leslie joined us for dinner, we would have 3 birthday boys together. We finished with a round of Irish Car Bombs (pretty darn good) and headed back to “The Dale” which is the nickname of our subdivision. We did catch up with Justin and Leslie and all went over to C1’s driveway (the 3-car wide version) and he dragged out the fire-pit and we had some interesting conversations. I was tired and stayed later than I wanted to and said my goodbyes at about 23:30.

I slept well and woke up just after 07:00 by the sound of a loud lawnmower and realized it was the guy who cuts the common ground (my windows were open), so I’m not going to try to go back to sleep, so its up and about, read two papers plus the weekend ads, puttered around, listened to my favorite radio show, planted the 2 spruce, and puttered some more. I had to install a new server at work, so left about 14:30 and arrived at work at 15:00, updated a bunch of programs to point to the new server, waited for my boss and a co-worker to show up to run some tests to their satisfaction, bolted from there at about 16:45, and headed straight for The Dog as this was the Sunday for their annual Fall Festival. They do things up so well at The Dog for certain occasion that I have learned in less than two years that when they put on a special event, go! I missed the fall festival last year. I rolled in an everyone was outside and tables with umbrellas in the side-year, an acoustic 3-piece band on a trailer, the outside hut which is named “Gene’s Dog House” was open for business and there was a great crowd there. I got a beer and socialized a bit, got a plate dinner and sat down and ate. There was some very humorous stuff going on started by my friend and ringleader Tom. Greg’s wife Ginger showed up in a serious neck brace. She was fine when I saw her Friday night. You can use your imaginations a bit her, but Tom made up a hilarious story about a certain sex act occurring in the car sitting on the train tracks and hearing the whistle of the train blowing. This was one of those viral things because after Tom started the rumor it got back to us later by several different people and was a running joke of the evening. Tom’s wife is nicknamed Ham and she and I are getting to the point now where we like to comically trade insults and we had a hilarious time bantering back and forth. Paul was there and between him and me, we know every rock and roll song, artists, album, etc. ever recorded. I’ve never met someone as well-versed as I am, and frankly Paul is more well-versed than I am. We have spent hours talking about very specific songs, groups, etc. I ended up hanging around the Dog House with Jo Ellen and Dave and Dave eventually left to go frog gigging. Now for a quick aside, between the two major floods that we had this year, a damp spring, way more rainfall than normal, etc., we have a bumper crop of bugs, and to that, a bumper crop of frogs and toads unlike I’ve ever experienced. I remember sandbagging in May where you could hardly take a step without stepping on a frog. I’ve never had frog-legs but I would be willing to try.

So Paul and I ended up keeping Jo company and we had a hoot and Jo was dishing up about a lot of stuff in the past that I didn’t know. Her youngest sister Sherry was there and I think we’ve only met once before, she was very funny, had a lot of personality, and certainly found out a lot of things about me. It’s all about connections. My other neighbor Tim (T2) stopped by on his Harley and I talked with him quite a while and I bought him a beer while he was there. After the band quit (they were very good), it got dark and everyone either moved indoors or left, so we hung outside with Jo and Sherry and later helped Jo and Nikki clean up the whole outside area, stack the chairs and tables, etc. Jo bought Paul and I a couple of beers for helping. Earlier in the evening they handed out prizes and I won a Bud hat and a Bud Select bottle-hugger. For as much as I’ve invested in both brands, they should give me franchise! We all went inside and had some beers and I left way past my bedtime and made it home about 22:30 and went straight to bed.

Kris and I had some texts back and forth but no words from Susan or Mary all weekend. As of course, I’ll include the disclaimer that to tell you everything that went on is physically impossible to type.

Dutch

P.S. Gas is $2.97 here this morning.

No problem Booka - whenever you get a bug in your bonnet for some Chicago fun - although spring/summer is best with all the fests and all........you have a tour guide!

Home Run Inn right out of the oven? You've heard of HEAVEN, haven't you???

My weekend was OK - didn't do much of anything - with the bad back and all....I did go last night to the Chicago Theatre to see Kathy Griffin live - she was wicked funny! I had no idea that she had such a faithful gay following (I went with three of my homosexual pals) - and I'm not kidding - I do believe I was one of the 25 or so straight people in the audience!

Made for some GREAT people watching though......the two guys next to me were snuggling the entire show - I couldn't help but stare!!! Does that make me a bad person??

This afternoon, I figured out that I used to work with Ann Patchett's sister, Heather. Interesting thing to figure out you have a connection with a PEN Faulkner Award winner. Shall I add that to having known, in my youth, a now-deceased Pulitzer Prize winner?

I had parent-teacher conferences today. Ah, if only my children would turn in all their assignments.

Spent a couple of hours with my mom today.

It was an EXCELLENT day!

Friday night was football

Saturday I worked and then my son's homecoming dance was that evening and M came over.

Sunday I worked and M came over.

Today my son got an "all clear" for playing football which he was/is sooooo excited. Friday night is Senior Recognition for football and his dad has confirmed that he will be here. Which is a first in many many years that he has come HERE to see our son. We have about 30 friends and family coming to watch him play Friday night.

Now were there gay friends male or female? I have this theory that states that hetero-women can prefer the company of gay-men as they find them non-threatening. To be exclusively in the company of gay-men would indicate avoidance of hetero-men for at least irrational and perhaps unhealthy reasons. Note that these are general observations and opinions and apply to the general population and not specifically to your night out with a few gays.

I feel we're to some degree a product of our generation, where overt homosexuality was not a reality. I tend to stand mouth agape at the PDA's of lesbians.

Now if women hang with gay-men, should men hang with lesbians and do lesbians make good wingmen?