Things are Good in Chicago

Summer’s here. Summer is more than here. The longest day of the year has come and gone. But I feel like my summer’s just begun. I’m finally starting to feel settled into our Chicago home and it feels good. Sure, I’m going to jump back into working in less than two weeks, but in Chicago summer is SUMMER whether you’re working full time or not. And we’ve still got at least one and a half (fingers crossed) solid months of it left.

June 29th was the evening we spent our first night in our new home. It feels like months ago. Our incredibly patient and hard-working parents spent several days with us putting the place together. Before we knew it, we were on our own in a new city to start the next chapter of our lives. I loved it. I love Chicago. It’s the perfect fusion of my recently developed love for urban life and everything good about growing up in the Midwest. It’s hot and humid and stays warm at night. Our street is lined with beautiful trees and colorful flowers. I want to walk everywhere, and I feel like like a day hardly goes by that I don’t discover some incredible place to eat. Here’s a picture of this bagel shop down the street I just love. I cannot get enough of their honey walnut cream cheese.

We’ve only been here 24 days and I have a job, Jeremy is enjoying his, and we’ve met an incredibly wonderful group of people. There isn’t much more I could ask for at this point; God has pretty much dropped it all into my lap. If there was ever any doubt that moving to Chicago was the right thing to do, it’s GONE.

In a week and a half I start my new job. I’ll be working in the Cardiac/Transplant ICU at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which is located downtown. The neighborhood is called Streeterville and it’s just north of the Loop, which is considered the heart of downtown and home to the central business district, where most of the tallest most famous buildings in Chicago reside. Getting to Streeterville isn’t too tricky without a car, thanks to the train and the Chicago bus.

Leaving my job at UCLA was one of the hardest things about leaving Los Angeles. I was anxious about looking for a new job when I felt like I was right where I wanted to be. I can’t tell you how excited I am to start this job, and how fortunate I feel to have gotten it. I’ll be working in an environment very similar to UCLA with a pretty similar patient population. The ICU cares for patients who have had cardiac surgery, cardiac transplants, other solid organ transplants, and possibly even in the next year lung transplants. It seems like a very solid unit with really neat people who are incredibly knowledgeable and serious about caring for their patients well. I’m confident I’ll be challenged there.

Jeremy is already doing a great job in his new work environment. Working as a Program Director for Teach for America seems like such a great fit for him. He highly respects and enjoys his staff already and is eager to start working with his new teachers. He’ll be in charge of supporting 18 core members, 14 of whom will be teaching special ed. for the first time. It’s his job to make sure these teachers’ students are progressing, and that his teachers are doing well despite facing the most difficult challenges and situations they may ever experience. These sound like daunting tasks, but I don’t doubt he’ll do great.

In other news, we’re on the hunt for a little pup! We’ve been talking about getting a Yorkie for a while and we’re finally taking steps to make that dream a reality. I’m pumped, and incredibly eager to find the right one and bring him home. You can count on lots of pictures and plenty of flip footage in the near future.

In conclusion things are going well, we really like Chicago, and-as always-you are WELCOME TO VISIT.

Some of This and That

Another beautiful morning in this fair city we call Los Angeles. Jeremy is having a large group of man friends over today, so after waking at a nearly leisurely pace and helping him clean a bit, I skeedadled over here to Chango for some breakfast burrito and wake up time. It’s really quite pleasant to be doing all this at 10:30am on a Saturday.

A lot of small dogs without leashes keep walking into this coffee shop sniffing peoples’ pant legs until their owners peek their heads in to retrieve them. I’d like one of those. I’m working on Jeremy already because I’ve decided that we will own a Yorkie within the next ten years. I mean who in their right mind DOESN’T want one of these?:

Two days ago I found a pet rescue website with a little Yorkie named Dickens who had been hit by a car. He had a cone on his head in the picture and was going to be available to be adopted once all his broken bones were healed. I think I actually could have gotten Jeremy to get the little guy. Unfortunately, this pet rescue requires their adopters to be 25 or older, homeowners, and people planning not to have children during the entire lifetime of the dog. Whoa.

We’re redecorating our living room, which I have to say is quite an enjoyable endeavor. We both love variety, exercising our creativity, perusing craigslist, and taking trips to the fabric district downtown. Last weekend we headed down to Michael Levine’s on the motorcycle in search of new fabric for different curtains. We’re planning on going more of a blue direction, although our red curtains still do match nicely. What do you think?

We’re also looking for an old upright piano to take the place of our desk, which is sort of where the camera is shooting from.

I suppose it’s of note that I got my six month promotion at work last week. It’s nothing huge, basically a promotion you get as long as you don’t get fired before six months. It is kind of exciting though, because I am officially a “CN-II,” which means no more probationary period: I’m just a little bit more legit.

Jeremy and I still don’t have much of an idea what our next few years will look like. It’s exciting sometimes to feel like we’re still young and a little bit flying by the seat of our pants. Other times, it would just be nice to know how to plan for what’s next. I’m sure as time passes we’ll have more of that, and that peace and patience are things we’re learning to have in the face of the uncertainties of life.

As always, we hope you are well, and we hope that you always feel welcome to come see us and stay with us. I’m off to pick up the produce and listen to one of my favorite NPR programs, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.

call me crazy

But I need a motorcycle helmet. And I want this one:

The only problem is it isn’t DOT (Department of Transportation) approved. Dag nabit. Jeremy says they don’t make new ones like this anymore. I’m doing all I can to find one with this kind of blingy spunk.

Lepidoptery and Lovely Fridays

Good news. You’re about to read an especially upbeat blog post. Quite a contrast from the last I think you’ll find, thankfully. Why? I suppose it’s because I’m in an especially pleasant mood. Oh–but before we go any further, I should tell you upfront that, while this is a good-mood post, it is not a premeditated post… and you know how that can be.

Well. It’s Friday. 4:53pm on Friday, to be exact, and my husband and I are in a cool and inviting Barnes and Noble. There’s a grande iced Carmel Macchiato (only 1 shot of espresso, if you please) in my belly and the Manual of Perioperative Care in Adult Cardiac Surgery in my lap. Since seeking out mainstream air-conditioned places to congregate requires a trip to Glendale, we of course had to stop in our favorite store to exchange some knobs for these:

and to pick up this month’s incentive/reward for meeting my quantitative goal:

I was supposed to work night shift this evening as well as tomorrow night but one of my preceptors called in sick so instead I’m working the day shift on Saturday like a normal human being.

All this lead to a lovely Friday at Barnes and Noble with Jeremy. Jeremy, by the way, has been looking through books here related to his new hobby (“life calling” is maybe a more appropriate term). He’s becoming a lepidopterist. I plan to become one as well, although he is blazing the trail first for the rest of the family. You’re probably wondering what the hey a lepidopterist is. These are the people that study, find, catch, and travel far and wide in search of rare (and common, of course) species of butterflies. Jeremy’s goal is to eventually have an office filled with cases of butterflies from all over the world. (You can apparently buy these pre-made, but what’s the fun in having them if you haven’t made them yourself, right?)

The only other recent news is that we sold the Schwinn so I’m officially on the hunt for an Erin-sized road bike. For those of you wondering, Monica Flannery is getting along just fine here. Her legs even appear to be getting better (no progress on the druling problem, unfortunately).

summer things

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love summer. Not just the months that technically make it up, or the lack of work and school–more the weather, the patterns of sunlight, and all the things you tend to do as a result. Lately, Jeremy and I have been very intentional about squeezing all we possibly can out of our last days of summer.

Friday we spent the afternoon at the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. We had a picnic lunch on the lawn and then took advantage of their “Realism to Impressionism” tour. Here are my two favorite paintings we looked at on the tour:

1. The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis, Jacques-Louis David, 1818 (this one’s my first favorite… also the first and earliest painting we looked at on the tour)

2. The Rue Mosnier with Flags, Édouard Manet, 1878 (a close second… this one looks especially neat in person because the strokes are very thick and splotchy)

If you’ve never been to the Getty, you should go–even if you’re not into art. The architecture of the place is a sight in itself, the grounds are green and lush, the art is diverse and beautiful, and the views of Los Angeles are worth the trip. It’s free, too. Check it out.

After the Getty, we drove our bikes down to Santa Monica for some riding on the beach. Riding bikes is something you should try to do a lot of in the summertime. Last night we rode to LA’s best Gillato stop, and this week we plan to ride to both the Arclight and Griffith Park. Jeremy rides my mountain bike when we’re together, because it has a hard time keeping up with his slick vintage road bike (which he lets me ride). What a husband. This is kind of what his bike looks like:

Yesterday we got up early to go on a neighborhood walk for District No. 13 (this is the district office Jeremy is working for this summer) and then had a delicious brunch at a new found gem in Silverlake called Madame Matisse. I had the best french toast of my life there, but we both decided the name was bad because we couldn’t remember it for the life of us.

All this fun and exploring on bikes has us thinking about ditching one of our cars. The Mazda has been in the shop for over a month now, and we’ve faired surprisingly well without it. I know it’s summer, but we’re seriously questioning the need for us to have two cars for the next couple years. Jeremy can bike to school when he needs to, and I always have the metro as a last resort. There are only a couple days a week max one of us absolutely needs a car. We’d really do best off with maybe 1.5 cars. So we’re toying with the idea of getting one of these babies:

For fun, Saturday we did a little recon at a local vintage motorcycle shop in Silverlake. We found a little Honda 350 just like this one–teal instead of red–that I pretty much fell in love with. Now don’t panic. We would of course never take a bike like this (or any kind of motorcycle for that matter) on the freeway. If we did buy a bike like this, it would only be for tooling around on sidestreets.

I start work tomorrow, but summer isn’t really over until Jeremy’s school year begins. I hope you feel inspired to make the most of your summer. We’ll keep you posted on ours.