Chicago 2008

So, to those that don't know, we have a tradition of going to Chicago before Thanksgiving to see the Christmas windows at Marshall Fields (now Macy's). We take the Metra train down to avoid traffic, parking and all those types of things.

First of all, due to my excitement of the lovely yarn in the last post, I stayed up way too late on Friday night! But then we woke up close to our normal weekday times. We just took it easy for awhile and then intended to take the noon-ish train but traffic made us late for that one. So we stopped and ate a small lunch at McDonald's and then played at the really awesome park. The spider web thing is really big. Take a careful look and you can see my son on the right side to get an idea of size. Then a picture of the inside and one of me that he took.


These slides are very long and SUPER fast!

Interesting swings, basically like saucer sleds on bungie cords

Regardless of your political affiliation, there's no denying that this is historic and we'll remember this trip as the one congratulating Obama
Later we went to Chicago. The windows were kind of disappointing, they weren't a story, they mostly were an advertisement for FAO Schwartz which is now inside the Macy's (Marshall Field's) building. They were pretty but not as fun and there were less of them, they didn't go all the way around the building. And we checked out FAO Schwartz... now a few years ago when they had their own building, FAO Schwartz was really cool. you started by going up escalators to the top and then worked your way down (kind of like Ikea) and there was always stuff to play with and try out and there was a giant ball rollercoaster toy that went througout the store... Then they closed that one and it's been missing for a couple of years. So it's probably nice that it's back but it's inside and looks like a toy department in a department store. Although they did have a $5000 dollar giant dragon and a $1400 giant pegasus horse or $800 unicorn. We did joke about where would MojaveSis put a giant life-size unicorn in her tiny apartment....


Lego store was the usual. Son got a star wars set that he's happy with. Then we went to Borders and eventually back to the train, getting home about 10pm. I slept in a lot on Sunday and then spent the afternoon building Legos with son.

-DFly

It was made just for me!!

This beautiful yarn was dyed specially for me by lovely Apryl. She has a better picture of it on her own blog. (posted Nov 11) The yarn was dyed to transition from the dark blue on one end of the skein to the bright green on the other. I'm in total love and immediately started knitting a sock with one of the skeins. Since we were going to Chicago, I didn't want to cart two skeins and it's going fast. I'm using Roman Rib stitch pattern from The Little Box of Socks by Charlene Schurch and Beth Parrott. (beyond stealing the stitch pattern, the rest is not the same sock)