Adventures in Exploration

The upside to a Super Bowl power outage? Time for blogging! The past two weeks have been crazy busy (work, exploring, auditions, etc, I’ll tell you all about it), so I’m finally catching up on documenting all of that here. What, you thought I’d leave you with my list of goals and that was that? No way! I’ve been out making those goals happen.

I started hacking away at my “handwrite 50 letters” goal and sent out 4 letters last week – one to the other side of the world!

I added a couple of extra stamps to ensure that it would get there

Alright, let’s catch up what’s been happening the past two weeks: The other week I got it in my head that I really wanted to play a board game, so Ben and I decided to buy Risk and learn how to play it. Ben had played it before, but it had been years since he last attempted world domination (on a board game, anyways, ha ha) so it was a relatively level playing field for the two of us.

Needless to say we got totally sucked in and ended up playing the game three times over the weekend (which is a LOT because each game takes like 2-3 hours!). As dorky as this is about to sound: it was awesome! I lost all three times (ha), but it was really fun, and it was nice to do something different for a change.

We also knocked off a bunch of goals off the 101 in 1001 list over the weekend two weeks ago, too! We explored a new neighborhood (Chinatown), which, granted, I’ve been to Chinatown before, but only to that little stretch. We walked down to 26th street to see this “Urban Island” – part of the neighborhood that used to be the old Italian neighborhood before Chicago put a highway right through it. And another along the south of it. Oh, and a third going another way. Typical Chicago.

So this neighborhood is quite sectioned off (in the sense of surrounded by highways), but still has a bunch of character and charm, just off the Chinatown main drag. There were super old houses like this one:

 

Aside from visiting this urban island, we had two main goals of visiting Chinatown: but a rice cooker, and get a LUCKY CAT!

We got this lovely beauty for our apartment, and she lives on top of our fridge.

 

And I got this adorable little black one to stay with me at the office. : ) Rowsdower the Cat is over it.

Here’s a close up. Isn’t she adorable?

We finished off the weekend with some brownies. I have nothing to show you in terms of a finished product though…we ate it too fast. Ha! Maybe next time.

All in all: Three goals down (or worked on) in one week! (Letter writing, neighborhood exploring, maneki-neko/Lucky Cat acquiring.) Not bad.