Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Some Bosco Bits

Grand-mom Bork sent me some photos of Bo, and he's looking pretty awesome (and upright!). Check him out with some of his peeps.

Um, Dad and Auntie, my margarita is coming over so please put me down

Check me out, world! My toy totally matches my outfit!

Why yes, Grampa, I agree that E Bonds are a very secure long-term investment

Sunday, April 10, 2011

A Sunny Day in April

I haven't been out of the house other than to walk Henry around the block since Thursday night; I caught a wicked chest cold the Sunday after returning from Tennessee (although I'm sure that I caught in on the trip itself) and have been sick ever since. I of course passed on my illness to T., and the two of us has been laid up, cold-medicated, and pathetic, for the past six days.

So we decided to take advantage of today's weather and get outside a bit. First, to provide us with enough energy, Trevor made us breakfast:

This is the biggest omelet ever, filled with peppers, onions, and broccoli, with a side of veggie sausage
Our primary objective for the walk was to get the Jewel on Des Plaines to pick up some more Kleenex and cold medicine. I also got us some ice cream (very good for a cold), which we ate in the park across the street from the grocery store. We walked all around after that, even visiting T.'s old workplace, Flatfile Galleries. The space has just been rented by the Chicago Artist Coalition and they were having an open house, so we popped by. We walked most of the way via Kinzie, which took us right through a great and odd little industrial area just east of the meat packing district.



I'm going to steal this to use as the logo for our school's creative writing club

And now we're home and beat. We might head over to the downtown Borks for some afternoon hang-out time, but we're waiting to hear from them. They had Bo over for his first ever over-night and they might be too tuckered out.

We hope you all enjoyed today's weather, too, wherever you are and whatever you're doing. I'll leave you with the best view in the city:

A view from our couch--I could stare at this all day long

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Henry on the Town

Henry had some adventures on his walk tonight with Trevor.


Saturday, April 2, 2011

Nashville


Unfortunately, I didn't come home with a pair of cowboy boots--though perhaps it was fortunate for our bank account, since I saw not one pair of boots in Nashville for under $250.

Now, the trip was a huge success, and hopefully you've been following the ASB blog and checking in our our progress. We got home last night about 7 p.m., which was earlier than we'd originally expected, and nice for the group, who were tired. We had four volunteer-packed days, spending time with the Second Harvest Food Bank, a Habitat for Humanity home store (a thrift store for home repair and construction goods), and three Youth Encouragement Services (YES) centers around the city of Nashville.

We drove from Nashville to Maryville on Wednesday night to the Once Upon a Time retreat, which is a hostel-like wilderness retreat. The majority of guests are "break away" groups like us, on alternative spring breaks from high schools and colleges. We did service on Thursday in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with a group of rangers; we spent the time planting grasses meant to help the landscape and feed the animals in the park. The rangers told us that our group of twenty-eight did in about five hours what would have taken them weeks to do alone, and they were grateful and thankful for our work, which made us feel spectacular.

And now we're home! I still haven't unpacked or laundered my duffel bag full of dirty clothes, but I'll get to that after I (finally) take a shower. Yikes. Here's a picture of the group from Thursday in the park, and I'll be posting more later on.