Thanks to winter storm Mateo, we all had various versions of a snow day today. Miles was off school, I worked from home and John came home early after a heroic ride to work in his fat tire bike! This storm was called the 2,000 mile storm because of its length across the US. John (also heroically) shoveled before going to work. It snowed all night last night and I have yet to hear an official explanation but the sky was really bright even very late and early. Here’s the sky about 15 mins before sunrise, way brighter than a…

After a long blog break, cndkmen are back with the excellent news that the kitchen is complete. I don’t think any readers will be surprised by this, but just to tie up loose ends, here are some pics. The last photo is actually news – I have started the process of decorating the walls / empty areas in the kitchen / bathroom. These books salvaged from a map company’s library deaccession pile provide some interest! Anne was in town this week and we met her for a lovely meal with an amazing view at Gibson’s Italia on the river. We…

We had some exciting developments in the kitchen today Can you believe how much countertop space we have now? Then Beatrice brought us homemade tamales. Yum! 

Hope you all had a lovely thanksgiving or perfectly nice 4th Thursday in November for those readers outside the US!  Since our kitchen is out of commission, we ate out at Cindy’s Rooftop restaurant in the Chicago athletic association building. We had a couch seat right by the windows overlooking millennium park. There’s a nice fire pit on the terrace The view from the terrace really demands a selfie! And here we are just before tucking into dessert. We got three different pies (small, not full pies!) to share, one pumpkin one maple syrup and a cornbread served with cranberry…

Today I ran the Super Sprint Triathlon – readers may remember I tried this for the first time last year: https://cndkmen.wordpress.com/2016/08/27/super-sprint-triathlon/. I am happy to say I shaved 4 minutes off my time from last year and finished 16/60 in my age group. Last year I had incorrect results at time of writing and I actually finished 18/47… But most important, it was way more fun than last year for several reasons: I trained and ran with Sarah this year, I knew the drill, I rode a lighter bike, and I had practiced the difficult bike-to-run transition. Sarah and me before…

Back in Chicago, John and I went to see Hidden Figures last week at Millennium Park. On the way back I caught this lovely glimpse of our very own Picasso. A couple of notes about why I’m starting this post with this particular image: first, Hidden Figures brings up so much interest in NASA and space, which we also got caught up in with the eclipse last week. Second, I wanted to wish our Picasso a happy 50th birthday! And after seeing so many beautiful Picasso paintings at the Guggenheim, coming across this angle of the sculpture at night was…

One NY wrap up post to do! Our last morning in NY, we went out to breakfast at a very nice place in Bushwick. Only about halfway through breakfast did we notice that the fox has 3 eyes… After breakfast we said good bye to Liam, who took an earlier flight home so that he could get ready for a camping trip he was taking right after the New York trip. Stay tuned for a blog post about his camping trip soon, right Liam? We then took the subway to the upper east side of Manhattan, with highlights being we…

The Whitney museum of American art has an amazing exhibit that we were very lucky to catch – it’s called Hypermobilty, and it is a collection of Alexander Calder mobiles. The unique thing is that in addition to there being a large number of his mobiles in one gallery space, a trained ‘art activator’ (staff person in a lab coat carrying a long stick with padding at the end like a giant cotton swab) will set selected pieces spinning at designated times. We dashed across manhattan in record time to make the 4pm spin on Friday and it was very…

We took a several day trip to NYC to look at a few colleges and to otherwise enjoy the second greatest city in the world (to paraphrase Hamilton and turn the tables on the usual second city descriptor!) before our first tour we visited the museum of the city of New York, where we were very impressed by their exhibits, including this light art piece and a stairwell full of quotes and images.  No argument here!  Another site we visited was the charging bull sculpture on Wall Street. This has gotten a lot of attention lately because a sculpture of…

More pics from Debbie maddie and jeff’s visit. We met Sarah at yoga on the Saturday morning. Thanks for the photos, Sarah!