At work, there’s been talk of a team outing for some time now. And today, we finally arranged for a big team event (which included getting several remote folks in from Minneapolis and Detroit). Our venue for the outing: Ragnarok Axe Throwing, in Chicago.
Yesterday, right as Bob was here with a truck full of drywall… wouldn’t you know it, the crew was just starting to pour the cement for our driveway apron. We had scheduled some help with Dolly, and had two helpers scheduled for the morning.
Got another good house night in today, after work. With some serious cold temps coming soon, I wanted to get more insulation on the walls by the stairs (every little bit helps). The main challenge here is that a scaffold is required, to be able to reach the high angle of the ceiling, near the base of the stairs.
Put some time in after work, and threw in some Great Stuff foam along the stairway walls. I had to get the scaffold in place to reach everywhere, but I’ve found I’ve gotten much faster with the setup and breakdown of that guy.
It’s funny because in Hyde Park, we once made the mistake of trying to board a South Shore train as it was entering the city. As a commuter rail, at that point in its route the train doesn’t take on passengers and simply lets people off. More than once, when someone tries to board a South Shore Train in Hyde Park, one of the conductors will yell out “This is not your train!” And the train waits until that person steps off, before proceeding.
Liz and I got talking earlier in the week, and we came to a decision about the weekend. We’ve been working pretty nonstop on the house – and with Bob, it’s just been house house house all the time. Our only context has been working on the house, lately.
So we decided to call it an early Saturday, and asked to spend the night in Valparaiso. Our goal would be to just hang out a bit more socially, outside of the housework. And just do something that didn’t involve tools or demo of any kind.
Liz has been pretty sick the last two weeks, recovering from the flu and a few other issues. She just got back to work on Wednesday, and today we had a vet appointment for Phineas. Usually, she’s the one who takes the day to shuttle the bunnies out to our vet (Chicago Exotics), which is way out in Skokie.
There was a lot of changes on our street, when I got home after work. I’d heard that they would be doing some restoration work (replacing the curbs and repairing all the concrete along the street)… but I wasn’t quite prepared to see the state of the street.
Not a lot of photos to share, this Halloween. With Liz under the weather, she only manned the door a few times over the course of the night. Since she didn’t want to risk being outside too much (still recovering from the flu), I ended up doing a lot of the door greeting and handing out of candy.
On my way in to work this morning, I saw this at my Metra stop. I immediately muttered to myself “That’s not right.”
Whenever I found myself impatient and waiting in line, it was usually at Treasure Island. And each time, I’d think about how grossly inefficient grocery store lines were, and how tedious the manual checkout process was. And how I longed for someone like Amazon to swoop in and change things up.
When I saw this, I got really excited. It’s amazing to see the room in this state, as the walls have never been this insulated or this protected ever. I know we’ve still got more work to do, but this was really encouraging.
An old slide. I wonder if these things slipped down from upstairs, from behind the fireplace?
I’ve gone there this morning for breakfast, and was remembering an episode that happened a long while ago. As I was paying for my purchases with a credit card, I asked the woman (the owner of the store) for change. I think I may have had a $10 or $20 at the time. She said no to me (and I think she also said sorry), but also muttered something under her breath in French and I heard the word “bank.”
Funny thing about this place – it was very nice, and on the fancier side. Definitely nothing like Shamrock at all. I joked to Chris that had we come here 15 years ago, my reaction likely would have been “I can’t afford this place.”