Monday, January 3, 2011

New Year's Rewind

Before we discuss anything else, I'd like to announce that C has a twitter account!  That's right, folks, all of your wildest dreams have come true. You can now follow his every thought. Feel free to follow him @CharlesMLC.  Not only will you be able to follow him at all hours, you'll probably also get an inside look into what it's like living with me.

One last thing before we get to the trip.  Since we did celebrate Christmas this year and Santa visited, I added some more (recently discovered) pictures to my Christmas post.

A lot has happened since the last Affliction Alert post (thanks for all of the well wishes!). For starters we went to Chicago!! One of C's very generous Christmas/Anniversary gift to me was a trip to Chicago, complete with dinner at the Signature Room and a shopping spree.  This dwarfed my gifts to him of socks, books, and a replacement XM radio.  I've already started to turn the gift-giving wheels for next year, so I'm doing good, right? And Valentine's Day, decided.

Originally we were to head out on Wednesday (our anniversary) with dinner at the Signature Room that night.  When I became deathly ill (and I use deathly lightly) C wisely pushed the whole think back a day. 

Thursday, despite waking up to an upset stomach, we hit the road arriving in Chicago around 6.  We were put in a corner room at the Omni on Michigan Avenue.  Our views = amazing. After getting dolled up for dinner (complete with my new bracelet and earrings!) we walked three blocks in the not-so-freezing cold, in our heels which had issues staying on our feet (ok, that was me).  Dinner was great, the view was amazing,


and check out the flowers C had waiting for me.


I love lilies.  Their scent reminds me of England.  At least that's the scent I chose to remember, there were plenty of not so great scents.  Like the one that goes along with the unshaven armpits of the woman in front of my while climbing one of the towers at the Tower of London.  That scent also comes with an engraved image.  But I'll stop there.  Back to my love for lilies.  They managed to keep the room smelling lovely the entire trip and after perfuming the car on the way home are now making our apartment smell just as lovely.

We didn't head out to start my shopping spree until Friday afternoon (as I was again feeling a bit under the weather), but managed to enjoy some room service for breakfast (C really did his homework for this trip and got us quite the hotel package) and watched some of ABC Family's AFV marathon.  Love me some AFV. Once we made it out, in the rain, I was on a mission to find quality, long-term use items to spend my moolah on. I'm not going to go into details as I'm saving that for a special Fashion Friday post of things I actually own!

As soon as we got back to the hotel the skies cleared and the sun came out.  Determined to spend at least some time in the nice weather we headed back out to Ghirardelli for a chocolate milkshake and chocolate covered strawberries.

We spent New Year's evening in the hotel room so I could rest up (to continue my conquest in the morning). We were able to watch the Ohio State basketball game (love my boys) and some more AFV.   By Saturday evening someone was a little tired of AFV (it wasn't me). We also used more of our room service vouchers and got quite the spread of New Year's Eve food.  Since I wasn't feeling up to walking to Navy Pier we watched a The Other Guys in our room (2nd ever - we don't make a habit of spending $14 for an in room movie - 1st was when I was sick on our honeymoon).  We paused the movie at 11 to watch poor Dick Clark count down from 22 (I think he made it to 8) and see the ball drop (since we are eastern time zone folks, I always consider that the real new year, no matter what time zone I'm actually in). At midnight we tuned in again to the local Chicago stations hoping to catch some of the local celebrations. Needless to say, they don't really celebrate in Chicago.  At least they don't televise anything.  The only thing we witnessed were the cheers when C cracked open our hotel window to see what we could hear. I think we were asleep by 12:03.  At least I was.

Saturday morning I was feeling a bit better and after we had our room service we headed out to continue my shopping extravaganza.  We also got Caribou (yay!), stopped for some lunch at Jimmy Johns (yummmm), and did some other stuff I can't remember.  That evening we met C's sister, Amilia and her bf (boyfriend, not best friend, but they may be best friends, but here I mean boyfriend) for dinner at the Grand Lux.  Sound familiar? Because it is. We seem to go there a lot.

Go figure on our last day I woke up feeling great.  Sunday morning I remembered to take some pictures of our room and the view





Hello Crate & Barrel. 


and then we hit the streets for my last shopping mission (I hit a shopping wall Saturday afternoon) and then met up with Lora and Scott for lunch at Giordano's (favorite Chicago eatery).  After lunch my shopping was still incomplete, and money was still on my giftcards.com card, so C gracioiusly agreed to walk all over Chicago (south, then north, then south again)  in search of my one last item.  It was finally found in an area I didn't know existed (but let me tell you I'll be going back as there were some nice shops there).

After almost all of my money had been spent (because I couldn't remember the balance and therefore just told the lady less than I knew was on the card) C and I returned to the hotel, had the valet pull up the car (because that's how we roll - well, for this weekend at least), and headed home. 

I would also like to point out that we stopped at Culver's on the way home.  My chicken fingers were delish.  The mashed potatoes, not so much.

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