Life In Chicago, Fall 2013 - Brady

You know, the tagline for this blog is "Three Sisters and the City of Chicago." But I feel like every time I drop in to post, I write about some trip I've been on.

That has happened, I think, because it's a little bit what Kevin's and my lives are like in the summer.  As much as we love days in the city, we end up leaving almost every weekend - to go to Lake Wawasee, to Denver, Michigan, etc. This year we consciously tried not to fall into this pattern, but it happened anyway.

So now it's the first fall weekend here in our beautiful city and we've predictably followed the second half of our yearly routine. We get fed up with packing and unpacking and never feeling caught up with the kinds of chores you only get done during weekends in your house and one of us insists on a full Saturday and Sunday at home - no commitments. This usually happens at the end of September or beginning of October (check), we marvel on that Friday night how amazing it is to not be going anywhere (check), we are reminded how great a place Chicago is to be (check), and we spend the next two days working and cleaning and doing all of our favorite neighborhood things like the outdoor Green City Market, a nice long run, and coffee at Intelligentsia or Bow Truss (check, check, check, check, check).

So in the spirit of enjoying being home, here are a few little things about my everyday life that have been particularly nice recently.

- Baking. Last fall, totally out of the blue, I kind of got into baking. I made carrot bread and pumpkin bread and cinnamon bread and regular bread, blueberry muffins, lots of cookies. I got the itch again the other day and made some...wait for it..."browned butter, sea salt, nutella chocolate chip cookies." They were excellent, I must say. Kevin says they're the best homemade cookies he's ever had. Then we had all this nutella sitting around so I HAD to make a nutella pound cake, right? I think going forward, though, I might focus on choosing slightly, um, healthier baking projects. It got kind of ridiculous last fall and winter.

- My new desk. When the veteran grad student in my office finished her dissertation I, as the new senior advisee in my research lab, got to move to her HUGE, next-to-the-window desk. This isn't a great photo - I took it with my cell phone - but my new space is spectacular.

- My snuggly dog. As the weather's getting cooler, she's getting much more willing to cuddle with Kevin and me. (She's also getting much more energetic...morning walks have been interesting the last couple of days. Let's just say she and Kevin have a game called "Let's run crazy!" and sometimes Molly wants to play it with me and I have trouble keeping up.) Here's a picture of her the other afternoon when I was trying to get dissertation work done.

- Chicago theater. Have I talked about how Nate invited Kevin and me to be his special guests for the opening night of his play? I probably have, because I'm obsessed, but he did. We got to use his "comp seats" and then go out for drinks after the show with all of the actors and IT WAS A CHICAGO DREAM COME TRUE. I love theater in this city and really want to somehow become more involved and this made me feel like a big shot for a night. Plus, the play was really great - and Nate was excellent in it. I performed with Nate in high school, and I thought it was neat to see how good someone can get when they make acting a career. Here's an illegal picture I took in the theater of his name in the program.

- Grad school. I passed my proposal defense back in July, so I'm officially ABD ("all but dissertation"). I actually applied for a faculty job a couple of weeks ago. I'm co-teaching a class this fall. My dissertation is slowly humming along. Life at work is stable and good, and I know things will change fast as I move toward the end of this program, so I'm trying to enjoy the quiet and the routine right now.

So that's what "real life" has been like recently. We'll be around the city much more in the coming months...looking forward to enjoying the perfect fall weather Chicago usually gets, getting back into the swing of things as the school year starts, watching the Chicago Marathon, re-doing our bathroom, welcoming family for our annual Vegetarian Thanksgiving and family Christmas shopping trip, and celebrating the holidays. I'm always sad when summer ends, but this weekend has been the perfect way to get excited for everything that's to come.

Labor Day Dogcation 2013 or What I Like About Denver - Brady

Kevin and I have a big group of friends who all live out in Denver, so we get out there pretty often to visit - at least twice a year for the last couple of years. (Sometimes I skip the wintertime trip, though, so I can travel to Siesta Key to visit my grandparents. Call me crazy, but I like 80 degree weather, palm trees, tropical sunsets, and reading on the beach better than I like picking my way slooooooowly down a snow-covered mountain in rented ski boots.) This summer, since our Denver friends all have super cool dogs, we decided to drive out rather than fly so we could take the Molly Monster with us to meet her Colorado cousins.

What did Ms. Molly do, you ask?

I'll tell you in pictures.

**********

She fetched tennis balls in the backyard with her buddies.

She hiked.

She camped.

She ran around off leash and swam in a mountain lake.

And she slept. 

We left Denver at 6 a.m. yesterday morning. It took us 16 hours to drive home. She was so tired from all of her adventures that she slept through the entire car ride. We got home at 11 p.m. and were in bed by 12. She slept from then until this morning at 6:30. When she came back from her walk, she slept again from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. with only one trip outside to break it up. And she's sleeping now. Think she had fun? 

**********

Kevin and I had quite a bit of fun ourselves. Denver is a really different city than Chicago, and it's neat to kind of step into a more relaxed, outdoorsy, R.E.I.-clad life for a few days. This trip in particular, mostly because of the dogs, probably, and because many of the couples we know have recently gotten settled into homes of their own, felt very comfortable and very easy. We knew our way around a little bit better. We made our own coffee. We walked to the 7-11 to buy toilet paper and to Sprouts to buy groceries. We sat in our friends' backyard, and I nursed an upset stomach from a long, hot run on their couch, watching Mad Men. We had a big family-style dinner on their deck and drank far more beer at home than we did out at bars. Like I said, comfortable and easy and certainly a place I look forward to visiting for years to come.