This is a picture of Steve

Here's a picture of Steve that I took this morning as I was leaving the apartment. You might be able to see the piece of white fabric near his back end. This is his new favorite toy. What is it, you might ask? It's the bottom part of my softball tshirt that I cut off so my shirt would fit better. I accidentally left it out after cutting the shirt & now he's discovered it as his latest toy. It's a piece of shirt fabric.

His other favrite toy these days is the top to a platic green tea bottle. At the moment, it's "stuck" under the TV stand, so all he can do is sit in the front of it and look under, sometimes swiping as if he'd be able to reach it.

This may also remind loyal SCBR readers & Steve lovers alike, that his first toy was the one pictured below. We had to take it away though, in fear that he might swallow the twine.

It appears I havent updated in quite some time

Wow, I'm lazy.


So, for those who actually care about what's going on in my life, here's what's gone on since my last post.


Illinois lost to Virginia Tech in a game they should have won.


I celebrated my 29th birthday at Diversey Rock N'Bowl, at which I rolled my ankle. Yes, I rolled my ankle bowling. I'm that much of a klutz. It was a good time, and I was happy so many people were able to make it. Thanks to Matt for planning & for the Dinkels!

Matt, Teri, Dan & I went to Atlanta for the Final Four. Dan spent most of the time with his family in the burb-y area of Atlanta, while Matt, Teri & I met up with Jamie for the regular Final Four festivities. Matt was a FF virgin, so we figured we'd take him to the regular spot - the hotel bars. Eventually we found the coaches hotel, and it seemed we spent a good amount of time there. (The local bars around the downtown area kind of sucked. Buckhead, while different, wasn't all that better).


In any case, I'm even more sick of Florida Gator fans as ever, and I'm pleased to have introduced Matt to sitting through not one, but two of their games, where the band played their stupid GITUPNGO song every chance they could. I never understood why no one got up to go.


The Cubs opened the season 3-3 on the road... and so far, 0-2 at home. Fantastic. It was interesting to encounter drunk people at 8AM on the Addison bus, on the way to Wrigley... all with beers in hand. I guess the bars opened at 8:30 or 9 yesterday. :eek. Regardless, it's always nice to see baseball season roll around again. I'm still in the "I'm not so annoyed about the drunks and the crowds" - I'm hoping it lasts longer than normal this year, somehow I dont see that happening.


So, now I'm finally getting back to the grindstone at work... first full week for a while. It sucks a little.


I don't yet have any pics from my birthday, and no real ones from the Final Four, but here are some camera phone pics for you to enjoy!

My friend Sean

This is my friend Sean. As you can see, he's "that guy." For no other reason, other than wanting to laugh, I present a montage of "that guy":

Kids aren't easy!

So, this weekend, Matt & I had my two neices & one nephew staying at our apartment. We picked them up in Elgin (mainly because driving in Chicago scares my mom, and there's a 98.9867% chance that she'd get lost anyway) around 9:30 (so we could make it back to the city in plenty of time for what turned out to be the atrocity of an Illini game).

After the game, we headed out to the Shedd Aquarium. I took the kids on the train, mainly because they'd think it was some sort of ride. When we got to Shedd, the line was all the way out the door, and probably halfway across the museum campus (likely a 30-45 minute wait). We decided to head to The Field Museum (Natural History museum). We made our way through the Nature Walk first, and then headed up to the evolution exhibit. It was a bit heavy for the kids, so I walked through it quickly with the kids, so they could get to the dinosaur section of it. We eventually headed home, made our own pizza & relax.

After many hours of cartoon watching and illegible "pictures" drawn by my 4 year old neice, it was finally time to take them back out to Elgin. I knew kids weren't easy, but I didn't realize the young ones needed as much freaking attention. :eek

After dropping the kids off, Matt & I met Matt's parents at Pequod's for pizza in celebration of Matt's birthday (3/3) and his dad's birthday (3/8). Any time I can have some fantastic Pequod's, I'm in.

Because lunch/dinner was at 3, we were able to get back home by 5 and relax for the remainder of the weekend...

Some pics....

Matt bought a TV today

Holy effing crap.

A short backstory on this - back in the beginning of January, we saw this TV for $799.00 at the local Target. At the time, they were out of stock (duh, that's a great price for the TV). We were given a raincheck receipt for the price & were told to call in the future to check on availability. We called multiple local Targets, only to usually be told, "Sorry, we're still out of stock."

Yesterday, I called, and low & behold one of the Targets in the city had some in stock. 3 to be exact. So, after work, Matt & I headed over to the store to see if there was still at least one available. No such luck. I was pretty bummed. I resigned to the fact that it would be another couple weeks before more would become available.

Matt gets home a little later than normal today, but I didn't question it, as he had a bad day, I figured he got stuck at work. I'm laying on the couch, the back door opens & Matt is out of breath. He asks me to come help him carry stuff in. I'm thinking, "Huh? Carry what? I just went to the Jewels. What in the world could you have that you need help with?" I go to the back door, and there it is, sitting on the back deck.

Here's a visual montage of our adventures getting it set up:

Suburbs & Baby Showers

Two things I'm not particularly fond of. In any case, I was at a baby shower in the suburbs this weekend. Winfield to be exact. For those of you who have no idea where that is (myself included), it's some place near Wheaton.

Driving out there, based on the directions I was given by the broad having the baby, wasn't exactly easy. After a couple of loop-de-loops (is that a word?), I eventually made it to the burb I needed to get to. Before driving up to the house, I stopped in a parking lot to finish up listening to the first half of the Illini game on the radio. (sounds creepier now that I'm writing it).

Have I mentioned this party was Illini themed? Well, it was. I expected a bunch of orange and blue decorations, orange and blue foods... but didn't expect the girls to know there was an Illini game being played at the exact time of the party. (Don't worry, they didn't).

In short, the party was filled with pregnant women, women with babies, and married women. Lots of talk about how many teeth kids had, how fat some kids were (am I supposed to know that a 6 month old isn't supposed to be 22 lbs?), and the plethora of baby bopper covers available.

I am happy to report that the food was good... including the homemade pokey stix. And yes, somehow I was able to get the second half turned on the TV in the basement.

Cubs tickets went on sale today

Contrary to my past experiences attempting to purchase tickets on this day, I was able to get through, twice. I ended up buying two games (tickets are freaking expensive).

The first game is July 21st against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Now I know, my first choice was the Diamondbacks? Well, I heard the game promotion was Carlos Zambrano bobbleheads, so I immediately went for tickets. As I'm sitting here writing this, I'm thinking to myself, "Uh, you don't even like bobbleheads, why in the world would you get tickets for this game?" Even worse, for whatever reason, I figured, "Hey, it's a Saturday, in the middle of the summer, why not try for bleacher seats? Excuse me, Bud Light bleacher seats?" Once again, I'm thinking, "WTF is wrong with you, you hate the bleachers?" Tickets were $42 each. Somehow when I hit "purchase tickets" the final price for 2 bleacher seats ended up being $96.68. I guess that includes the Total Convenience Fee for 2 seats $9.18, along with Order Processing fee(including delivery) of $3.50. Holy cow.

The second game I purchased was the August 17th game vs the Cardinals. I'm planning on selling those tickets to some idiot Cardinal fan willing to pay me much more than what the tickets are worth.

Come to think of it, I may do the same with the Diamondback tickets, only replace "Cardinal" with "Cub" or "Diamondback" above. That, or maybe I'll try and sell the stupid Zambrano bobblehead on ebay.

One awesome thing of note regarding the Zambrano booblehead day - of the 10,000 people who receive the bobblehead, 10 lucky people will win a bobblehead made in their likeness. Now, that would be sweet. And kind of weird.

and just bec-ah-ha-ha-ah-ha-ah-ha-use

Chambana!!!

So Friday I went to Champaign with my friends Chris & Jen, mainly to have lunch with my internets friends, but also to spend some time in Champaign. I hadn't been since football season, and figured it'd be a fun way to spend a Friday night.

We had lunch with a big group at a new place called Billy Barooz. Chris and I were thinking of boycotting based simply on the name. The only part that really bothered us was the fact that it ended in a Z. Food was meh, beers were good.

Jen & I then headed to campus with our friend Joe, to kick off our campus bar crawl. We started off at Murphy's, had a couple of beers there (my tab for 4 beers was $8. 8 DOLLARS!)... decided to head to Legend's next.... turns out they were serving big ass 24 ounce bottles of Miller Lite for $3.25, which roughly equates to $1.62 a beer. Is this a joke? We ended up getting pretty buzzed at this point, and Jen decided to head to the Colonial Pantry to purchase cigarettes and a lotto ticket. After completely that transaction, we decided to head to Jimmy Johns for some food, after all, we needed something in our stomachs if we planned on making it the rest of the night.

While eating, Jen brought up the idea of heading to Kams. Now for those that do not know what Kams is, but do know the type of person I am, it's not a place that I would frequent without being pushed against my will. Because the snow on the sidewalks made it hard to walk, I convinced Jen that we should just go into the first bar we see...which ended up being Firehaus. Again, I had an issue with the name, but decided to go in, since there were spots to sit.

As we were sitting & enjoying our beers (of which I do not know the cost, as Joe graciously purchased them for us), the topic of masturbation comes up. On the car ride down, Chris had mentioned that his right shoulder was stiff. I asked him whether or not it was due to too much masturbating. He responded with, "Nah, I use my left hand for that. I'm ambidextrous" - so in lies the theme of the night. Jen & I asked pretty much everyone we were with which hand they normally masturbated with. Jen even went so far as to pose as a reporter for the Red Eye (commuter paper put out by the Tribune) at the bar. She went up to a table comprised of roughly 8 guys and 1 girl. Guess who got embarassed & didn't answer the question, while the rest of the group eagerly rose whichever hand it was they used more.

After Firehaus, we met up with the rest of our group down at the White Horse... one of my favorite bars on campus. Actually, the 3 bars I frequented while in school were all hit up on this crawl, so I was pretty happy.

We headed downtown after White Ho & hit up a couple of places. My memory starts to fade around this time, and as we hit the second bar downtown, I wanted to head home. Ryan (where we were staying) graciously offered to drive me home. I've since been told that he fishtailed part of the way home as a means of envoking some sort of fear in me. I'm sure I got mad at the time & I'm sure it didn't help my already upset stomach. Anyway, I made it home safely, changed into my pj's & got under the covers on the couch...

We went to breakfast the next morning at Flattop Grille. Normally, I'd be all about this place, as you can put candy in your pancakes... but after eating roughly half of my candy cake, my stomach decided it didn't agree with how delicious it was. I quietly excused myself to go to the bathroom. Candy cakes taste much better on the way down. :(

All in all, it was a great night in Champaign & I'm glad we decided to make the trip down. It was good to see everyone, to see campus (well, the bars and bookstores at least), and to not spend an entire weekend down there.

Next up this weekend: a baby shower in the burbs. That should be exciting. Stick around for a recap.

Happy Valentine's Day!!

This is the card I made for Matt. See, we have a new couch, a new cat, & new shelves. That's why those things are pictured. I'm pretty impressed with myself.

I just created the best Valentine's Day card ever

I will post it tomorrow, once I've given it to Matt. For a general idea of my skills, this is what my card for him looked like last year:

Superman!

There's no reason (other than the fact that I love this picture) for this post.

I ate my sandwich backwards today

I have some absurd eating quirks.

Today's quirk: Having to eat a side-sliced sandwich with the slice facing the right. Despite having a 50/50 chance of getting a sandwich sliced on the wrong side, I'm usually pretty lucky with this, and very rarely have to bite/rip off the wrong end of the sandwich. And even though I rarely buy lunch at Quizno's, hats off to them for never making me do this.

Anyway, here's my Subway sandwich from today:

Malfunction!

So, is this phallic?

Yes. It's Prince, people.

It's phallic & it was very likely intentional.

My favorite quote found from all the discussion on this comes from Stephen Colbert: "They knew that they were dealing with a lustful, pansexual rock 'n' roll deviant," said Colbert, who joked that the sheet hid (not enhanced) Prince's "demonic guitar phallus."

Ok, so I've also decided to give this place a face lift

I like this template much better. Sorry if it confuses anyone who was used to my old blog format (not that I assume I had that many readers to begin with). Happy Tuesday.

Catching up...

So, the Bears lost in the Super Bowl on Sunday. That pretty much sucked, but didn't keep us from heading out to the bars for some post game drinking.

In any case, Matt & I have been making our apartment more 'our apartment' over the past week or so. We've put up shelves & stocked them with what Matt likes to call "frick-a-frack." We even had a craft project with some vases, rocks and fake grass that ended up turning out great. We also purchased a cool little square ottoman that I've been wanting for a while...Below are some pictures of the latest additions to our place. We're planning on painting a couple of the living room walls sometime soon, as we'll likely be in the place for at least another year.

Also, it's freaking cold in Chicago.

Super Bears! Superbowl!

Well, it's been 21 long years since the Beloved were last in the Superbowl. And now that I think about it, I believe I posted on this day in 2006, pointing out that it had been exactly 20 years to the day, since the Bears had won the Superbowl...

Here's to hoping we have the same outcome in the 2007 installment!

The kick that gave us the opportunity to play for the NFC Championship:

And here are a couple of pictures from the NFC Championship game, in which the Bears defeated the Saints (Sorry, America) 39-14 on a snowy afternoon at Chicago's Soldier Field.

And for fun, some pictures from the bar where we watched the game....

So, Christmas is officially over

Well, close to it, at least. I'm currently in the process of taking down our sagging tree.

Christmas afforded me the opportunity to get to know pretty much every family member of Matt's & let me just say, he has an amazingly awesome family. I felt very much a part of a family that I'm not officially a part of, and everything ended up being a lot less pressure-filled than expected.

December was also spent attending a handful of Illinois games. In addition to the Arizona game at the begining of the month, I also went to a couple more. Matt, Dan, Brad & I went to see the Illini play & defeat UIC at the United Center in early December. A group of us spent time in St Louis just before Christmas for the Busch Braggin Rights game vs Mizzou (which Illinois ended up winning - feels like it was the last game they won)... Teri and I drove to Cincinnati on the 29th to see the Illinois take on (& lose to) Xavier University. We stayed with Megan & had quite the adventure that night... Teri and I had to wait approximately 2 hours for a cab. After standing on the street corner like ladies of the night, we decided to head to a dive bar about a block away. They ended up calling us a cab while Teri and I chugged as many beers as we could (splitting one each time). After the debacle of a game, Teri and I decided to head to Newport, Kentucky, which just so happened to be right across the river. Perfect. Ended up at some mansion turned into a bar, with a live band playing in the living room. Beers were served in cans, I ordered plain diet cokes and emptied the booze from my cell phone flask into the plastic cup, pretty much in front of the 60-something bartender who just served me. Didn't get to spend as much time with Megan as I had hoped, but greatly appreciate her hospitality.

So, the Illini have lost 3 in a row, the Bears play the Seahawks in the playoffs on Sunday & I'm back to work for the first full week in quite some time.