We’ve featured the CTA holiday train before, but it’s been a few years. There’s a full train that they decorate at Christmas, with passenger cars and a flatbed car with Santa in a sleigh, and the train rotates between different el lines. This year a friend of mine from work had looked up when the holiday train would be on the blue line, and we got very lucky with the timing because it happened to be arriving at our stop at 4:22 on a Friday afternoon – perfect chance to cut out a bit early and grab some holiday cheer!…

Just a few more Thanksgiving photos from Mom’s camera. Here we are before dinner in the kitchen: On Friday John and I took a walk to Wicker Park and back around on the 606. It’s always fun to see a new (or new to me) mural. We went into Challenger’s Comics to get the compiled 12 books of The Watchmen, since we’re watching the HBO series, and they had a wrapping stand that I thought Colette would enjoy. When I first met Colette we went on a shopping trip in Dublin and I gave her some very valuable advice that…

Liam and Kat had plans to spend Thanksgiving dinner with her family, so we arranged to have them come over for a Thanksgiving breakfast, not a typical tradition but with the dinner plans under control made a very nice start to the day. We had bagels with tomatoes and smoked salmon, and also some really delicious tamales that Beatrice made and brought over. Yum! Liam and Kat also helped me with an excel problem (still unsolved, but they have diagnosed it as so difficult, it warrants contacting Microsoft! That’s big. Thanks for trying!) and we skyped with Granny and Grandad…

Thought I would get this holiday off on the right foot by posting incrementally rather than in one huge post! Miles flew in from Portland on Tuesday evening and is doing great. Here he is getting into the car when we picked him up from the el station. He’s looking a bit dazed because he wasn’t expecting the paparazzi in the car! Wednesday I worked but John had the day off and had a chance to go to Flying Saucer with Miles. Miles has a lot of his favorite places in Chicago to hit over these 5 days. Wednesday night…

Sunday we woke up to a completely clear day, with clear in the Bay Area meaning no fog. Saturday had seen some fog at the northern end of the Point Reyes peninsula, so with the clear day ahead we decided to take what we’d heard was a hike with amazing views at the north tip of Point Reyes. The description was apt! First, a couple of maps so this makes a bit more sense. As you can see from the first map, San Francisco is at the end of a peninsula, connected to Marin County (marked Mill Valley on this…

This morning we rented a car and drive to Point Reyes north of San Francisco. We went on a short but interesting walk called the Earthquake Trail that is right on the San Andreas fault. Like ON IT. The two fences above are 16 feet apart and show how when the San Andreas fault shifted in 1906 lengths of this fence moved in two different directions. There were a lot of interpretive signs, many very positive about earthquakes as a natural part of living on earth. One mentioned how lucky we’d be to feel a quake while standing there. Later…

John had two back to back work trips to San Francisco so I decided to join him for a long weekend. Thanks to Liam for minding the piggies back in Chicago! I arrived Thursday evening and we went to dinner with friends Matthew and Patricia – readers will remember them from John’s lovely visit to Milan last summer. Great seeing them! Friday morning we had breakfast a a place near where we stayed in The Fillmore neighborhood called Jane. Right next to Jane is a goop store! Did not know that lifestyle concept by gwyneth Paltrow was a bricks and…

I thought I’d post a few photos to get us caught up to the present. First, the synopsis:  since Sept 11, our last post aside from the special bulletin from Tenerife, John and I returned from the Pacific northwest, Miles settled into school out there, and we’ve been able to meet up with Liam and Kat several times. Kat and I both had birthdays, and Kat has been applying to law school. Liam and Miles each had a trip to Philadelphia (different weeks!) and I went to a conference in Madison. John did a lot of work travel in all…

Myself, Robert, Stuart, Ronan and Conal all went to Secondary School (High School) together, and while over the years we’ve kept in contact, and occassionally met up in groups of two or three, its been over 30 years since we were all together. So this year, with us all turning fifty, we decided we were all overdue for a big meet up. With Ronan in Finland, Myself in Chicago, Robert and Conal with teenagers still at home in Ireland, and Stuart a teacher in England, finding a time and place that would work for everyone was no easy task. But…

We had another delightful experience in the Pacific Northwest, and that was meeting up with Alex and David, friends of ours from John’s PhD program who have been living in Portland for over 15 years now. We met them for dinner in Portland only to discover that we were all going to be at the coast over the holiday weekend, so we planned to meet up there too! They have a beach house at Rockaway Beach and they were very kind to invite us over on Sunday. First we stopped at a wine and cheese shop in Tillamook that had…