As you may have noticed, with wedding planning and work getting pretty busy, official OFTs are becoming a little less frequent. OFT 11 was a goodie though, as it lasted several days long! You've already heard that our friend Jen was in town for an interview, and spent a couple of days extra with us. Unfortunately her arrival was at the mercy of the weather and O'Hare airport (worst airport ever), and so she arrived about 5 hours later than she was supposed to.
Speaking of weather - recently, Chicago has been kind of crazy. It was really cold when Jen was in town, then it warmed up (in the 50s!) and now it's a snowy, slushy wonderland. Today saw snowfall all day, a lot of which stuck to the ground, and a lot of which turned into puddles of slush. Thank goodness for my winter outfit - floorlength sleeping bag coat, and waterproof, furry boots. It makes the walk to my office almost enjoyable - I like to reminisce about the neighborhood-wide snowball fights of yore as I'm making fresh tracks in the Midway snow.
Anyway, back to Jen's visit. As you know from Brian's post we had a nice dinner at Frontera Grill on Friday night. We didn't get home from dinner until rather late, and Saturday was supposed to be really cold, so we didn't plan on doing much Saturday. Oddly enough, we ended up doing quite a bit. Jen had also requested deep dish pizza, so we went to Lou Malnati's for a sausage and mushroom casserole (that's what I call 'em - I don't think they'll ever be pizza to me). It was pretty good, but all agreed that it could have been more flavorful - sorry Lou. After that, we decided to head out to the Museum of Science and Industry just off the campus of UChicago. We got there at 3:15. Unfortunately, it closes at 4pm! So instead, we decided to just drive around campus a bit. I love my campus, it's really lovely with lots of ivy and gothic influences. I should take some pics and write about it some time.
To get a little culture in, we stopped at the Frank Lloyd Wright Robie house, which is just on the edge of campus (and in fact served as housing for the theological school at some point). The tour was pretty interesting, and the 2nd floor of the house is really quite lovely. We had to use our imaginations a bit because they are going through some major restoration work, but the tour guide was obviously very knowledgeable and spoke lovingly about FLW and his work.
Neato art glass windows in the Robie HouseAfter that we went to my office just for fun (Brian hadn't even seen it yet!) and, apparently, to exasperate the security guard on duty :) On the way home, we hit another of Jen's excellent requests, a Vosges chocolate location. Vosges is a fancy chocolate company based in Chicago that offers interesting flavors - they have a Bacon bar - yup, exactly as it sounds. Happily, they had several samples out, of which we (I) took full advantage. We tried some truffles with chile, wasabi, balsamic vinegar, and curry. Jen and I also opted for their "drinking chocolates" - mine was an ultra-rich, thick and creamy concoction that I couldn't finish (gasp)! It reminded me of the dipping chocolates I had in France, though not quite that thick. (Wait, wasn't this post supposed to be non-foodcentric?!?!)
We decided to take it easy that night, eating leftovers and renting Superbad. The movie was funny enough, though a little too... um... phallo-centric (?) for me. But it starred our beloved Michael Cera, of OFT No. 10 fame, so it was still worth it. He's just too adorable.
And just like that, our fun weekend came to a close. We took Jen to the airport on Sunday morning, and then it was off to get our groceries for the week. Sigh, back to normal. Well, all good things must come to an end. Thanks to Jen for distracting us from real life for a weekend!
Any other potential visitors out there? Come one, come all - we'd love to have you!
