Miles and I took a research trip to the Northeastern Illinois University library on Friday. The library holds the Chicago City Council proceedings from the earliest days of the incorporation of the city onward. This is quite remarkable because these records pre-date the fire of 1871! It was a most fruitful research trip. Miles was able to look at original documents related to the riot, including this claim by a jewelry store owner that panes of glass had been broken during the riot. They also had voting records for these years, with the tallies written up by ward. This shows…

Given how regularly we have gone to Flying Saucer over the years, it hasn’t made an appearance on the blog. This was the first place we came to when we move back to Chicago and it was where we met Frankie’s relative by marriage. They seem to have eased up on their unusual dislike of restaurants serving water without guests asking for it, but other than that not much has changed over the years. We ate there this morning, managing to “beat the rush!”

This week I finally moved into the Hancock Tower, a big open office space, really modern with great views of the lake from my desk on the 22nd floor. No more office for me, but a far nicer office environment, with a supermarket on the 44th floor, restaurants in the basement, so really convenient. Can’t wait for the air and water show

Liam accepted his offer at University of Illinois just now! We are super excited for him. He’s very happy to have the decision made and credits the engineering program that he went to last week with making it seem more real and like a place he wanted to go to. Here he is clicking on “accept.”   I’m writing on a post it because while the page was loading (the internet as we know it was invented at Univ of Illinois but they seem to experience the same delay in loading times as other websites) we were making up alternate…

On Saturday I went looking for a very important document — the official surveyor’s report of our back yard from when we bought the house. We have some ideas / dreams about work we’d like to have done on the back yard this spring, and I thought it would be useful to have the official measurements of our little kingdom. This paper was so hard to find, and I ended up taking a whole bunch of stuff out of the closet in the office and sorting through it, with a bonus that I was able to throw a bunch of…

On Saturday we got another 6 inches or so of snow, and we also went out to see a play on a similar theme. “Rose and the Rime” is a play that tells a fairy tale about a town in Michigan called Radio Falls where it has been winter for a whole generation. Or maybe 12 years or so anyway. It was really magical, with these small houses set up on pedestals and catching the snow (white paper squares) that fell from high, and song and dance numbers with the townspeople shoveling snow in synch. The not-very-good (sorry!) photo below…

We started getting some pretty heavy snow last night, with a promise by the weather folks that the “lake effect” snow, or as I understand it precipitation that is caused by the evaporation / condensation off the lake then dumped right back down as snow, would continue and be at its worst during the morning commute. Fortunately the snow stopped in Chicago sometime overnight, leaving us with blue skies and just a couple of inches of pretty, fluffy snow this morning. I took the above photo this morning from my parking space at work — note the band of dark…

Readers will have seen this sight before, but the Chicago grid was a particularly lovely sight for Liam and I after a lot of delays returning from Colorado over the break!

What to do on snow day 2? Work on homework. Stay in pajamas!   Take photos of the snow drifted into interesting shapes… through the window!   Make a fancy breakfast (cooked and plated by Liam)

Who says you can’t have fun outside (briefly) when it’s minus 14 F? Check out Liam’s frosty science / magic trick.