this evening we finally did something that has been on my chicago to-do list for years: go see the Navy Pier fireworks. as a bonus, we managed to do it without actually having to brave the awfulness that is Navy Pier, because went via kayak! our tour put into the river around Halsted and Division, paddled 2.5 miles to where the river meets* lake michigan and huddled there, 30 orange duckies bobbing in a flotilla, while we watched the evening fireworks, and then paddled back. it’s a beautiful way to admire the city architecture – all lit up on a summer night and reflecting on the water’s surface. the water is…alarmingly bathtub-warm. it was a little more up close and personal than i ever thought i’d get with the chicago river, but we don’t seem to have grown a third arm or broken out in hives just yet.

Ben is an experienced kayaker. I’ve been in one only a few times. In addition to being wobbly with my kayak navigation skills, i’m pretty stubborn and independent, so in a move that i felt sure would protect my marriage**, we opted for separate kayaks instead of trying to share a two-person one.

* i say “meets” rather than “pours into” or “pours out of” because the issue of which way the chicago river flows is a sticky one:

“… in 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago, then headed by William Boldenweck, completely reversed the flow of the Main Stem and South Branch of the river using a series of canal locks, increasing the river’s flow from Lake Michigan and causing it to empty into the newly completed Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. In 1999, this system was named a ‘Civil Engineering Monument of the Millennium’ by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).’

In 2005, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created a three-dimensional, hydrodynamic simulation of the Chicago River, which suggested that density currents are the cause of an observed bi-directional wintertime flow in the river. At the surface, the river flows east to west, away from Lake Michigan, as expected. But deep below, near the riverbed, water travels, seasonally, west to east, toward the lake.”[58]

** my brother and i had a nearly sibling-relationship-ending-argument while trying to pilot a two-person kayak around a quiet bay in thailand a few years back. while we paddled in hopeless circles and chris grew more and more frustrated with me (all warranted, probably), our travel companions sat on the sailboat, ate their breakfast and laughed at us. later it was revealed that i was sitting on something that was not, in fact, a seat, and weighing the boat down all wrong. also, i suck at 1) paddling and 2) following directions.

Pictured: objects in our coin jar that Coin Star declined to turn into cash money.

It’s a nearly perfect day that is bookended by watching both the sunrise and sunset. B’s family owns a house on Lake Erie and we invited a group of friends up to the Bay House for a weekend of grilling, swimming, and highly competitive croquet*. Since Plevs and I are both training for a fall marathon** we planned a 14 miler out to the Marblehead lighthouse and back for Saturday morning. There were several more runners in our group, and we assembled a sort of relay, with some running the 7 miles out, others driving to meet us at the lighthouse and tagging out other runners to join us on the way back. We were up at dawn and watched the sunrise over Lake Erie as we ran east.

The rest of the day was a long stretch of grilling, swimming, lawn bowling, juggling, croquet, beanbag toss, playing with the babies and dogs, cooking, visiting the model train museum, and napping. Vacationing like 30-somethings, basically. Sunset found us with margaritas in hand, preparing to set off fireworks off the end of the pier, and later watch the Perseid meteor shower and sit around a campfire. Such a simple, beautiful weekend. I am grateful to have such friends, such community. I know I can be a snob about many things in the Outside-Of-Chicago-Midwest (iceburg lettuce, things suspended in Jello and called “salad”, flat vowels, flat landscapes, to name a few), but I will swear that you will never meet nicer people than in the Midwest. Also, my friends are sophisticated Chicago city folk. So we have the best of both worlds. When I’m in Chicago, I miss California. In California, I miss Chicago. But I think we’ve found our homebase, and it is, surprisinly, amongst the flat vowels and iceburg lettuce.

*For all the (valid) complaining that B and my sisters-in-law do about the Gadda family car game, Zip, I am pleased to know that B’s family is at least as obnoxious competitive about their croquet games as we are about Zip.

** him Chicago, me Portland, since my dear friends Anne and Joe decided to get married on the day of the Chicago marathon, bye-bye $175 non-refundable race entry, sigh.

this is the spider who lives in the driver’s side mirror on our car. every night he builds a web between mirror and car door, and every day it falls apart when i drive on the expressway, and he crawls in behind the mirror for safety.

it’s so gross and creepy and fascinating that i can’t bring myself to evict him. or her. what if it’s a her and she has a million spider babies who crawl in through the air vents? excuse me, i need to go wash my car.

when i was in college this same thing happened to me, only it was on my bike handlebars. and the spider was much smaller.

we sleep til nine, wake to sunshine. the bedroom window is a square of blue sky and green trees and cool breeze. we ride our bikes 10 minutes south to Wells Park where we host a pickup ultimate frisbee game (19 players this week!). after the game, we head over to the Fireside* for brunch (outside table, of course) with a few of our frisbee buddies. then back home to clean up and rest up after the game. i make a quick trip out to pick up this week’s CSA fruit and veggie delivery (so many blueberries!!) while catching up by phone with my family. an iced coffee at The Grind in Lincoln Square on the way home, and there i assemble a picnic dinner: crackers with goat cheese and homemade pesto, pasta tossed with feta, chopped veggies, and herbs from our container garden, grapes, chocolate chip banana “muffins”**. then back on our bikes and riding north this time to Loyola Park to see Chicago Shakespeare’s free outdoor production of Comedy of Errors and eat our picnic in the fading twilight. then post-play beers at the Edgewater*** with the Keenans before heading home, an earl(ish) bedtime in order to be up with the sun for marathon training the next day.

the theme, of course? out-of-doors-ness. as much as possible. biking instead of driving, ultimate frisbee, sidewalk cafes, beer gardens, shakespeakre in the park, picnic dinners. blue sky, green trees, yellow sun. just a few weeks of chicago in the summertime keeps me going through all those months of cold. in fact, i’m going to come back and read this blog post next january, when its 12 degrees out and i’m questioning all of my life choices that have led me to this place. for today, i am content in this place.

* if i were actually designing my perfect day i’d replace Fireside with M. Henry, of course.
** eaten before 11am, it’s a muffin. after noon, it’s a cupcake. i’m a genius.
*** again, in the dream version, Edgewater would have been the back patio of Hopleaf, but who’s complaining?

Koval is our neighborhood distillery; located on the corner of Winona and Ravenswood they are less than a mile from our house, and a block from where I used to live in the pre-California days. For B’s birthday Chelsea and Lee gave us two tickets for Koval’s tour and whiskey tasting class. And boy howdy did we taste whiskeys (and learn about them! it was educational, i swear!) About 15 in all, plus a few liqueurs thrown in at the end. At about .75 cl pours each, that worked out to around two and a half shots shots. They were consumed over the course of a two hour class, but on an empty stomach (the 6pm class time is either the best happy hour ever or the worst plan ever) and some of the white whiskeys were as high as 125 proof. I wish i’d photographed the beautiful copper still, but i did manage to hold the camera steady enough for these:

we move comfortably back into our pre-honeymoon lives: up at 7, a run, 40 minutes in the car accompanied by an audio book (currently Michelle West’s The Hidden City, as narrated for Audible by my sister-in-law, Eva Wilhelm!), my windowless office, a lunchtime walk to the student cafeteria more for the sake of the walk than the fountain soda at it’s destination, more windowless office, the commute home (a palindrome! my workday, it’s a palindrome!), assemble dinner from the CSA veggies in the fridge and eat it in front of the TV, then those precious 2 hours that are mine for whatever strikes my fancy. usually, blogging, or baking, or blogging about baking. or reading blogs about baking.

today’s gloomy gray cloud cover finally gave way to a blue-sky-golden-sunlight evening, and it inspired a walk to Lincoln Square for a pre-dinner drink. (WHEN will i learn that going for a “pre-dinner drink” at Tiny Lounge actually means that we’ll be having whiskey and fries for dinner??). i came home and spent the rest of the evening saving 69 cents-worth of overripe bananas from going to waste by combing with $10 of ingredients to make $36* worth of elevensies banana muffin snacks. well, $33, because i already ate one.

we remind ourselves that these days of DINK profligacy are numbered; we’ve decided that 2014 will be the year of house-buying and baby-having; this will leave us considerably less freedom or expendable income for $10 whiskey drinks, and then before we know it “family dinner” will be a thing and we’ll have to pretend that we don’t actually want to sit on the couch and watch 30 Rock while we eat just as much as the kids do.

but i get ahead of myself. all these big grown-up life steps; they loom on the horizon and haunt my sleeping hours with anxiety-driven what-ifs. up till now most of my life choices have been reversible (don’t like the job? find a new one. moved across the country and it’s not working out? you can still back out of it. don’t like the new car? trade it in.) but marriage, house-buying, kids — these are not reversible choices. if they don’t fit into your life, you’ll have to adapt your life to make them fit; not the other way around.

and yet i also know with certainty that if i look back on my life at 70, or 80, and know that i missed out on having a family because theatre always took everything that i have to give, that it won’t be enough. i love being good at it, but it’s not enough.

*the recipe, a combination of this and this, with chocolate chips added and divided into muffin pans instead of loaf pans, yields a dozen muffins, which, if individually purchased at a cafe would probably be $3 ea. economy AND procrastination!

A pleasantly domestic Sunday after all the travel and adventure of the past month. Up at 5:45 for an early run with my marathon group, then brunch with B and Plevin at M. Henry. Then we baked bread*, harvested all of the basil and made a year’s supply of pesto,** and turned CSA cucumbers into pickles. I assembled the week’s lunches, prepped my work week and planned workouts. Planted some new basil and flower seeds in the pots on the back porch. Processed honeymoon photos while B fiddled with electronic bits that will one day be his kite-powered webserver (yes, really). The cats napped, chased sunbeams, traded insults across the DMZ, and napped some more.

Grilled salmon and corn and zucchini for dinner. Berries for dessert. Golden summer evening light. Early bedtime.

* I’m going to say it: I like my own bread better than any bread I ate anywhere in Europe. Crusty outside, chewy glutinous crumb inside, slightly sour fermented flavor, enough whole wheat flour to taste and enough bread flour to make big yeasty bubbles. Mmm.

** The recipe, for when I do this again next year and can’t remember the recipe again:
9 c loosely-packed basil leaves
8-9 cloves of garlic, depending on how strong the garlic is
9 TBS pine nuts (DO NOT use walnuts as a cost-cutting measure)
18 TBS olive oil (DO NOT use vegetable oil as a cost-cutting measure)
18 TBS grated parmesan cheese
9 pinches salt flakes

blend the whole thing in food processor. I like to do it in several batches, tasting as i go along and adjusting ratios as necessary.

yields about 3 cups of pesto. freeze anything that you won’t be using in the next week or two.

we are home, and on the way to recovering from the jetlag. the wicked caffeine habit we picked up, well, that’s a different story. while I go detox, here are the photosets!

Honeymoon, I: Italy

Honeymoon, II: Austria

Honeymoon, III: Germany

The view from the top of Französischer Dom.

With our last night in Berlin we met Wabes at Fr. Dom and climbed the 254 steps to the viewing platform where we had a 360 degree view of the city. It was still warm up there, but breezy and beautiful in the late afternoon light. Then we visited the Fassbender & Rausch chocolate shop, famed for having enormous models of the Brandenburg Gate and other architectural marvels made of chocolate, with a cafe dedicated to cakes and chocolate drinks. In the spirit of pure vacation decadence*, we replaced beer o’clock with cake o’clock (Berlin takes cake-baking *almost* as seriously as it takes beer-brewing) and the three of us destroyed three little cakes and chocolate drinks in record time. We returned to the Fr. Dom for a music concert — mostly Chopin — in the little side chapel. The room had amazing acoustics. My mind wandered with the music while the sugar high slowly subsided.

Then we walked north through the city enjoying the late twilight. We crossed over the Spree with a view of the Bode Museum, and ended at a little cafe aptly named Cafe Bötzow (apt since we’ve been staying in an apartment on Bötzowstraße all week, no relation). We had a farewell Berlin meal of house-made käsespaetzle (made, appropriately, with a strong Tyrolean mountain cheese from the region we hiked in last week) and damn if it wasn’t the most delicious mac-and-cheese-meets-freshly-made-dumping ever served in the history of mac and cheese. We sat out at a sidewalk table, of course — I realized that we didn’t eat a single meal INSIDE a restaurant all week — and had time to linger over a final beer while visiting with Wabes.**

Then it was back to our apartment for a few hours sleep, and on our way home tomorrow. I’m not anxious to leave Berlin or to resume our normal lives, but I was beginning to feel a little profligate. Had we’d stayed in Berlin any longer I would have needed to add some structure to my days — work, German language lessons, something to make me feel like a productive member of society again. We concluded that 3 weeks is, in fact, the ideal vacation length — one week to wind down, one week to really relax, one week to wind back up and be ready for normal life again.

* eg, “we’re grownups and we can spoil our dinner with 6pm cake if we want to!”

**I have great appreciation for the late-night dining habits of Berlin in the summer (and possibly winter? I keep visiting here in the summer), where one can go to a 7:30 show and still dine afterward –I’ve never been a fan of the pre-show 5:30 grandma-dinner.