The Really, Totally Awesome, Rad, W-O-W Yosemite Wedding

I was totally stoked when my bachelor friend de jour announced he was getting married late last year. The consummate good guy who never got the girl, he finally found a beautiful Vietnamese woman who was the Asian female version of himself. Ann is about 90 lbs soaking wet, and could easily pass for a co-ed. Then Sean told me they were planning to get married in Yosemite. Yosemite, for me, falls somewhere in that vague ambiguous area between the West Coast and middle America.  Lucky for me, it's in Northern Cali. Even better, I would get to reminisce with a few of my best MIT girlfriends and be openly geeky in the most beautiful natural setting I've seen in America.

Because the ceremony & reception were on Sun night, I spent the majority of the weekend as the most gosh-darn cool third-wheel to my best friend, Kristie T, and her Obama-look-alike boyfriend, Manish. Also, flying into SF and driving to Yosemite is a serious endeavor. I calculated that, door-to-door, it took me about the same transit time from my Chicago home to the Wawona Yosemite Hotel as it did to fly from LAX to Sydney, Australia. Kristie T and I agreed that the Wawona was a shoo-in for the Poconos resort depicted in "Dirty Dancing", aka "The Best Movie of All Time."

Since we had all trekked considerable distances for Sean's wedding, we decided that the appropriate activity for Saturday would be a hike. I mean, how would you feel if you went to a place as beautiful as Yosemite and never walked amongst MOTHER NATURE. She would hate you. We decided that a leisurely 1.5 mile walk would do the trick. As the navigatress, I failed to follow the easy course and led us on a 4.5 mile to a lake that didn't exist. Way to pull a fast one on us, Mother Nature. On the positive side, we felt immeasurably accomplished and very hungry.

As photographer extraordinaire with a camera the size of a 1-mos baby, Kristie T diligently documented our trials and travails as we braved the wilderness. The wedding was simple, the scenery stunning, the company priceless. I enjoyed hanging out with the sorority sisters I never get to see (Teresa, Cat K), agreeing to be silly AND amazing at the same time, and seeing how happy Sean and Ann were to be together. Mazel tov!

Labor Day Getaway to Traverse City

And........we're back!

Speaking of which, we have done so much between our last post and today that to cover it all would be overwhelming. First off, we road-tripped it to Traverse City, Michigan for a rainy Labor Day weekend. If you're anything like me, when I think of "Michigan", I think "Detroit". This conjures up unattractive images of boarded up ghost neighborhoods, urban blight, factories, and other depressing ideas. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, on the whole, Michigan is beautiful.

Traverse City is a 6 hr drive according to Google Maps, which I always take as a challenge to "beat" this number. With the impending storm, we saw lots of beautiful clouds on the road like these:

 

Lots of our colleagues had grown up/summered in various lakeside Chicago towns, and gave us enthusiastic recommendations for various eateries. Us being the couple who focuses on the local food more than any other attraction, got to work very quickly at an adorable French eatery.  (Dan is eating chicken pot pie. I went with the flatbread pizza.)

We drove up Friday during the day, and were pretty wiped out by the long drive. Our bed and breakfast was literally the only one in Traverse City proper that had any availability left for the holiday weekend. It was also the oldest B&B, with 2 amiable and adorable senior citizens who ran their cozy inn. It definitely smelled like "old people" and we swear we never saw the husband proprietor change clothes, but it had character!

The next morning, the downpour had really kicked into gear, so we made a strategic decision to spend our day indoors. In wineries. And sampling rooms. Along the way, we "re-discovered" that Michigan is all about the cherries. Note the cherry apron that Dan is modeling. Great Christmas present idea! Cha-ching!

 

We ended up traveling all along Old Mission Peninsula, hitting up almost all the wineries on that small piece of land. Starting early in great spirits, we learned all about the kinds of wines that the land/weather lends itself to (white wines like rieslings, Gewurztraminers, roses). And every permutation of cherry wine you can think of. Note the picture was taken at 10am in the morning. And already we're happy.

After about the 5th wine tasting, we got very happy. We might have misbehaved on a vineyard / winery tour by climbing on top of the grape crusher and trying to squeeze into a fermentation tank. I'm not saying we did. I'm not saying we didn't either. Below, a picture from one of the tamer moments.

The weather cleared up and Dan got the great idea to sneak into one of the great sand dunes of Lake Michigan and climb it to watch the sunset. Great idea, bad execution. First of all, the wind gets pretty merciless on the shore. Second, it is a serious hill with some bad ass angles. The payoff only comes at the top after you've huffed and puffed and shot evil looks of DIE! DIE! to your oblivious partner who is scampering up the sand hill. It also got cold very quickly. As Numero #1 wuss, I didn't wait until the sunset, but we did take in the beautiful scenery.

The next day, we went hiking along the (easy) Empire Bluff Trail. It's breathtakingly beautiful, and reminds me of the northwest coast of Kauai. Still very windy, but the view is completely worth it.

After that, we made our way home (surgeons don't get Mondays off). Other highlights of the Labor Day Weekend included eating at Stella, an amazing restaurant in Traverse City, touring their former asylum turned commercial / retail shops, coming back to Chicago and heading straight to the Vampire Weekend concert with matching red Converse shoes, trying Al's #1 Beef for the first time, trying to not scare young children at the Shedd Aquarium with our verbal predictions of whether any particular fish was "delicious", and eating Korean BBQ at Cho Sun Oak and ice cream floats at Margie's Candies with Suj, Shamita, and Amee. Dee-licious.

August Comings and Goings

Where did August go? I did intend to post weekly, but with all the event and travel every weekend, updating this blog has slipped. Never fear, I intend to get right back into the thick of things.

For the month of August, we checked out the excellent Girl and the Goat, the new West Loop restaurant by Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard with our good friend Lolita, hung out with old and new friends at the always superb Bristol Lounge in Wicker Park, found a secret, shady, elevated, well-ventilated spot in Lincoln Park to watch the Blue Angels scream past at the annual Air and Water Show, trekked to a hippie farm in the middle of corn field Illinois to eat a delicious 5-course Berkshire pork dinner underneath the stars accompanied by a half-dozen local micro-brews, got rained on during the outdoor performance of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road ensemble at Ravinia, and flew to Sioux Falls, South Dakota for a relaxing weekend trip.

In addition, we biked to Lollapalooza to hear Lady Gaga and MGMT play, twice ooh-ed and aah-ed at the Saturday Navy Pier fireworks where we could smell the acrid odor of firepowder we were so close, ate fresh Caprese salad with truffle oil about a thousand times, successfully created tonkatsu pork dishes with the bajillion lbs of pork product we purchased from Peoria Meat in Fulton Market, got a haircut, took full advantage of the bountiful farmers markets, hugged each other a bunch, and generally thought we were the luckiest people on the planet.

I Just Might Wet My Pants With Excitement

The conversation started innocuously enough.

Dan: "I'm thinking we need a larger hard drive to store all our media."

Me: "I thought we had sufficient space scattered across our computers."

Dan: "But we're getting more movies and music and will run out of space soon."

Me: "Why don't you spec it out and see how much it will cost."

Dan: (already running off to his computer) "Okay."

(I had already forgotten this conversation in the next 5 minutes. My mind is like a sieve except it's not like the baking ones you use to sift small particles like powdered sugar or flour. No, it looks more like a drunk trunk driver rammed a Mac truck through it. That's my memory.)

We were sitting down to dinner the next day when Dan mentioned casually that he had bought a "two terabyte hard drive for only $100 dollars" and was blissfully dancing about how happy the computer was going to be to get this awesome add-in. 2 terabytes (TB)? 20 TB would hold the text content of the US Library of Congress. 10 of these babies and we'd be able to store most of modern knowledge encapsulated in written form. Hot-diggity-damn.

When the 2 TB disk arrived, you'd think it was Christmas morning in the Kwan-Chang household. Wowzers! "Can you believe it?" Dan would say, smiling and shaking his head. "2 TB for $100!" I, being the lapsed engineer, was equally excited. 2 TB seems like a heck of a lot of space. Like a bottomless well clamoring to be filled with delightful electronic water. The joy was short-lived, however, when Dan began the process of installing the HD into what he affectionately dubs the "entertainment center". I call it the "computer that holds our music and videos and connects to the TV and projector." TomatO, TomAto.

Long story short, the 2 TB hard drive nearly broke the computer, what with all the formatting, and installing, and porting, and whatcha-ma-call-its to make sure that we didn't lose the existing data. It took Dan almost a week's worth of man hours and a living room strewn with computer parts to configure it properly. The living room/bedroom looked like two computers had entered an Ultimate fighting ring and torn each other to pieces. Very sexy stuff. Every night I came home from work and asked, "Is it working yet?" and Dan would reply, "Yes, but...". Poor guy would fix one problem to have another magically appear, like evil fairies.

The moral of the story is that when your husband turns to you and says, "I'm thinking of getting more computer storage", start cleaning out the living room floor. You're going to need the space.

"All I Need is You and Cheap Mexican Food"

About 2 years into our dating relationship, Daniel took me to a favorite cheap Mexican haunt next to the University of Chicago called Maravillas. This is the kind of place favorited by cheap college kids and starving residents. In short, its Dan's kind of place. If my memory serves me correctly, we ordered approximately 47 tacos and 234 enchiladas. More or less. On the ride back home on Lake Shore Drive, Dan turned to me with the utmost sincerity and uttered, "All I need in life is you, and cheap Mexican food."

Since then, we have been a mission to discover all the hole-in-the-wall taco joints in Chicagoland. No crumbling storefront or suspicious signage can deter us from discovering and devouring delicious cheap tacos. We recently discovered Tierra Caliente, a nondescript tacos restaurant in the middle of a very homey Mexican convenience store.  You know a place is good when the patrons are either working-class Mexicans or hipsters.

We also ventured out to Peoria Packing Butcher Shop, which is not in Peoria but in Fulton Market. It's the place I'd vote for as "Best Place to Hang Out on a Humid Chicago Day if You Got No A/C". It's also the vegetarian's version of hell. Meat in all delightful shapes, sizes, and packages fill the rafters. Bacon, pig feet, shanks, sausages, wings, drumsticks, thighs, pork butt, fish, chicken nuggets, short ribs, etc. The smell of clinical carcasses fill the air, and I tend to shiver a lot in the ruthlessly efficient refrigeration. We were there to purchase pork tenderloins for a Sunday dinner we were planning to cook for some of Dan's work colleagues. We also saw some rad-looking devilish fish, like ones you might see in Disney movies.

On Saturday night, we made our way to the Kenmore Live Studio for Argentinian night. A housewife-turned-entrepreneur demonstrated her famous empanadas on Live! Facebook! TV! In addition, she was making alfajores, which is a traditional Argentinian delicacy, kind of like a crumbly, buttery cookie sandwich with dulce de leche caramel and coconut topping. Really outstanding and airy. But the way she was pronouncing "alfajores" sounded like "alpha whores". Dan turned to me amd said, "Isn't that a madam?" At which point I punched him in the arm since the HUSBAND OF THE CHEF was sitting next to us.

We got our comeuppance in the break when an Argentinian dancing duo were demonstrating the tango and invited audience members to participate. Since no one was voluntarily subjecting themselves to the very real specter of public humiliation, the husband pointed at us and said loudly, "THESE TWO WOULD LIKE TO DANCE." Since we have no shame, we jumped up and started dancing very badly to tango music. On Live! Facebook! TV! Y'all, we have never been so famous. As a revenge for calling us out, we stole one of the alfajores that was sitting on the pristine Kenmore countertop.

Sunday was another low-key day that where we strolled around Chicago's Maxwell Street Market stuffing our faces with enchilades, tamales, flavored shaved ice in lime, mango chile, and guava flavors, and many, many tacos. Our friends Lolita and Lee A. were delighted by this enchanting slice of Mexican life in the Midwest. It was a beautiful Chicago day and needless to say, topped off by churros.

Sunday night, we went to Dan's co-worker's apt in Wicker Park to cook a Southern meal complete with cheesy grits, collard greens, pork tenderloin, corn, and pina coladas! I'm not sure if pina coladas count as Southern fare, but I'm sure if alcohol is involved, the South has something to do with it. Martha busted out the blue glasses, and Akilah made sure we were having a good time. Dan's eyes got very big when he learned that there was an old-school Pacman machine in the next room. I'm sure if I hadn't been there he will still be there, playing the game, and yelling at poor Mr.Pacman.