Before I left Minneapolis I got mail.
From Washington.
From my sister.
It’s a birthday present!
No, wait… it’s two.
Look at how cool this stuff is.
She picked this up from a Darwin Day event. Snazzy! I actually don’t own any Darwin shirts (I’ve got an Einstein and a da Vinci, but no Darwins), so this is very exciting and science nerdtastic.
And she made me this incredible rainbow-colored scarf. My sister knows how to work a knit and perl.
Thanks for the awesome presents, seestor!
My friend Ben (@deisum on Twitter) snapped a picture of the May 21st End of Days preachers. Apparently they showed up in Minneapolis today, just as I was driving down to Chicago. How come I always miss when the circus comes to town?
I am very excited to be in Chicago.
I survived the drive in – it’s amazing how I haven’t forgotten how to drive in Chicago and the surrounding area. Minneapolis is very relaxed: most people follow road signs, nearly everyone uses turn signals to change lanes, they only change one lane at a time, everyone leaves a nice buffer space between cars, and those who do speed do so at a nice, predictable rate and seem to know that they’re the ones who are bending the laws, so they’re good about working with surrounding traffic.
And Chicago drivers are all Screw. That.
Seriously, that $375 minimum charge for speeding in a construction zone…joke, right? If anyone were to drive the speed limit in those zones I’m pretty sure they’d get a fender in their bumper. Also, I forgot how much tolls suck and was really missing my old IPass. And, you all charge for reals money for parking.
Our hotel is on Michigan Avenue, and our hotel room… Wowza.
It reminds me of last summer when we passed through Vail, CO. Everything in town was a steal because it was off-season, so we splurged on a fancy room that normally went for $900/night in the winter. Of course, in Chicago we don’t have a view of the forests and a stream trickling right outside of our window, but that little puddle of water out front is kinda pretty. Okay, we drew an inner courtyard room, but the fact that I know Lake Michigan is right outside the hotel is good enough for me.
Now, off to the bar to have a whiskey, then it’s time to decide how we want to spend tomorrow!
This was the image posted yesterday:
And the larger image is:
NOELLE is this week’s 100-point winner with her guess of “a slice of pink grapefruit”. Noelle has been a regular player, and this is her first win. Congratulations, Noelle!
Four of you correctly sided with grapefruit, so I award 25 points to Ellie, Carly and Vicki, as well as to Steve from the Facebook comments. Ellie gets an extra +5 points for her amusing musings AND 15 points for being a new player. Welcome, Ellie!
Mully410 and Michelle get partial credit – 15 points – for guessing orange slices, which is pretty darn close to red grapefruit slices. This is Mully410’s first game, so I award an additional 15 welcome points to him, plus an additional +5 points for being the first to post in the comments.
Heidi and Erin B. get 10 points for participation, but no additional point for their shared incorrect guess of “salmon”. Heidi is also a new player – welcome, Heidi! You get +15 points.
And because this is CUP #13 and because we have a Friday the 13th this month, everyone gets an additional 15 points (I don’t want to do the math for 13).
That’s it for this CUP. Thanks for playing everyone! I’ll get the CUP Winners page updated ASAP.
Welcome to the 13th Close Up Photo Contest – the game that pits your intelligence against mine, and which y’all always seem to win pretty easily.
Okay gang – what are we looking at here?
Submit your guess via the comments or by Facebook. The first person to guess correctly wins 100 internet points. I will award or deduct points for additional submissions based on a completely arbitrary and whimsical set of rules known only to myself. If’n you don’t know what to guess, I do have a history of awarding points for funny, creative guesses. You can guess more than once, and you can echo a guess if you agree with a someone else’s answer.
The first person to win 1000 points will be the grand winner of the CUP Contest, and the recipient of Uber-CUP Winner bragging rights and a pretty lame-o prize. The list of past winners and current rankings can be found on the CUP Winners page.
Good luck guessing!
I’ll open the next CUP Contest TONIGHT at 11pm CST. I’ll keep the contest open until tomorrow late afternoon, so answers and points will be awarded on Thursday night. If you’re new to the contest you can visit the CUP Winners page for more information (I should probably update that bad boy with last week’s results, too).
In other news:
This weekend I’ll be driving to Chicago to celebrate Mother’s Day and my birthday with my Mom! We’re both arriving in town late Friday evening, and we’ll probably hit a jazz bar for drinks that night, but I need ideas for things to do on Saturday. Saturday is the only full day that we have together, so we definitely want a plan. My first instinct is to hit the Shedd Aquarium, Mom always likes the Art Institute. We could take a trip down memory lane and drive out to Tinley Park where I grew up, or we could do something outdoors if the weather is nice. We used to do Miracle Mile a lot, but I could take a pass on the window shopping. We’ll also look around for shows that we might like to see on Saturday night.
If any of y’all have ideas, I’d love to hear them! Especially if you have any knowledge of special local events happening on Saturday.
Mom’s train leaves early on Sunday, and after I drop her off at the station I’m going to try to meet up with my blogosphere pal Jeremy and his wife, Tina, for brunch. Jeremy blogs at Le Cafe Witteveen and writes about religion, politics, and the hilarious, serious and zany things going on in the world and in his life. I’m hugely excited. Then I’ll turn around and do the eight hour road trip back home.
I once again realized what a geek I am when I was planning the drive and my first thought was “Oh good, I can catch up on my podcasts!”
And then Monday is my for real reals birthday, so I’m sure I’ll find some trouble to get into when I’m back home in Minneapolis.
So, this was a heck of a weekend.
Saturday marked the end of my 30DaysofBiking, so no more posts about bike rides to the grocery store or McFlurry runs. I know…you’re crazy disappointed. It was a good experience, especially because I was pushed to ride in weather that I normally would have avoided. Now I may be less likely to skip traveling by bike in the face of inclement weather; riding in rain wasn’t really that big of a deal. I’m still probably not going to be a winter rider, though.
On Sunday we braved the cold to see the Heart of the Beast Theater’s (HOBT) May Day Parade on Bloomington Avenue in Minneapolis. We arrived early – 11:45am (we rode our bikes even though it May 1st and I was like 30daysofbiking is totally over and I don’t have to ride if I don’t want to but parking is going to suck so let’s bike) – to stake out a spot and watch the crowd arrive. There’s always great people-watching at the May Day Parade. I think I viewed most of the parade through the lens of my camera since this is the first time I’ve gone with the fancy DSLR. Of course that means I came home with about 500 photos, which may take a day or two to filter through.
And then there was the twitter explosion at about 9:20pm last night. I’ve learned about huge breaking news on twitter more times than I can count now. The most recent instances that burn in my memory are the riots in Egypt, the attempted assasination of Gabrielle Giffords, the earthquake in Japan, and now the death of Osama bin Laden. Last night someone tweeted a message to this effect: “Daddy, where were you when you found out about OBL?” “On the couch in my underwear with some cheetos and my iPhone, honey.” Oy, so true.
I’m not really processing the whole “hey, that terrorist leader who we’ve spent almost 10 years tracking is finally dead” thing that everyone is going on about today. My first reaction last night was shock, then joy that we had finally achieved our goal, then a sharing of elation, good cheer and snark on twitter (Trump wanting to see the death certificate, the undermining of the royal honeymoon, how President Obama must have been giggling at the Correspondent’s dinner, etc.), and a fleeting feeling of vindication for the victims of 9/11, the service members who have died or been injured in the search for bin Laden, the civilians in the Middle East who have died as a result of the last 10 years of conflict. Then I felt grief for all of the loss of life, the waste that has happened, and will probably continue to happen. I followed that up with a solid five minutes of overanalyzing all of my reactions of the past hour.
It’s good that we’ve officially closed this chapter, and now I’m waiting to see what the fallout is going to be. It IS a huge effing deal, and I want to see how this new information going to affect our men and women serving in the Middle East, how it’s going to affect our nation’s budget and priorities, the upcoming elections in 2012, and people’s perception of terrorism, security, the United States, Islam, President Obama, the military, the Middle East. Osama bin Laden has been a huge part of our lives…what’s going to happen now? Sorry, no words of wisdom or deep insights. Just questions today.
