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Sometimes a day is so much superior to the one before it's hard to believe they both even occurred within the same week. I woke up yesterday honestly believing it was today; with nothing planned before afternoon, I was all ready to roll over and go back to sleep. My hear sank when I realised my mistake. I wasn't just tired; I was achy and out of sorts and didn't want to see anyone, much less have them demand anything of me. Eventually I pulled myself together, pushed through work, and then set about forgetting the whole ugly experience.
Today, I slept in without fear. I got up and made blueberry-pecan oatmeal for the two of us. Then I lazed about for a while before going back down and taking a nap with the cat. Afterwards, I had some lunch and got dressed. Turtle and her wife picked us up at 2 p.m. sharp and drove us north to the Chicago Botanic Garden for their bonsai exhibit, followed by dinner at a Korean restaurant and a shopping trip to Super-H Mart.
One of Friday's few bright spots was waking to an inch or so of lake-effect snow. (In fact, my lack of joy at this discovery was one of my first clues my bad morning mood was not going to be going away.) There wasn't as much north and west of here where the Garden is located, but enough to survive the bright sunshine mostly intact. In particular the frozen ponds were shining fields of white such as you practically never see in the city. We did see some tracks across them, but from geese, deer, or rabbits rather than schoolchildren and mutts.
It was just at the end of day when we left the Japanese garden. (We barely had time to get tea and coffee at the café afterwards.) The bare willows were golden in the light and the space of half an hour blue shadows conquered the landscape. We saw some truly impressive bonsai at the garden centre, but once we stepped outside we had the place largely to ourselves. There was hardly a breath of wind, and that together with the full sun made it quite comfortable despite the below-freezing temperatures.
At the café, Turtle showed us her research on local restaurants and we settled on one with good reviews called Cozy. Squeezed into a tight booth and gazing at the stained-glass windows, we decided its prior incarnation had been as a nieghbourhood pizza place. Now it offered Korean pub grub. I ate the better part of a fried chicken and washed it down with makkeolli; Turtle had a big bowl of seafood nyumen, her wife order the bulgogi, and we all shared a huge dish of tteolbokki.
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monshu? Poor monshu! It's a vegetarian day for him, and no sooner had he settled on the bibimbap with tofu then he was informed that they don't serve it any more. So we asked the waiter what other dishes on the menu were strictly vegetarian and there was literally nothing else he could point to besides the sweet potato fries. Couldn't they at least do a simple vegetarian stir-fry? He asked the kitchen and returned to tell us no, but that they could leave the fish cake out of the tteolbokki. Now that's far from the Old Man's favorite dish, but he was game about it. So we shook our heads and tut-tutted and then moved on.
The food and the company were nearly enough to make us forget the terrible music choices. (As we were about to leave they started plaing K-pop, but when we walked in it was Snoop Dogg and Eminem.) Everyone else stayed sober, making my makkeolli-fueled antics at the grocery store seem all the more raucous by comparison. We were almost to check out when I decided I needed some pumpkin taffy and ran off to the candy aisle to grab some; meanwhile, Turtle had bought hodugwa and we munched on them in the car on the way back to Cozy for the reading glasses the GWO had left on our table.
Maybe I'll be regretting that bottle of milky Korean liquor in a few hours as acid is burning its way back up my esophagus, but right now I'm pleasantly tired and full and filled with love for the world and, in particularly, three special people in it. Besides, tomorrow is going to be stormy and nasty and we have nothing more ambitious planned than watching a Chinese historical epic and making paella.
Today, I slept in without fear. I got up and made blueberry-pecan oatmeal for the two of us. Then I lazed about for a while before going back down and taking a nap with the cat. Afterwards, I had some lunch and got dressed. Turtle and her wife picked us up at 2 p.m. sharp and drove us north to the Chicago Botanic Garden for their bonsai exhibit, followed by dinner at a Korean restaurant and a shopping trip to Super-H Mart.
One of Friday's few bright spots was waking to an inch or so of lake-effect snow. (In fact, my lack of joy at this discovery was one of my first clues my bad morning mood was not going to be going away.) There wasn't as much north and west of here where the Garden is located, but enough to survive the bright sunshine mostly intact. In particular the frozen ponds were shining fields of white such as you practically never see in the city. We did see some tracks across them, but from geese, deer, or rabbits rather than schoolchildren and mutts.
It was just at the end of day when we left the Japanese garden. (We barely had time to get tea and coffee at the café afterwards.) The bare willows were golden in the light and the space of half an hour blue shadows conquered the landscape. We saw some truly impressive bonsai at the garden centre, but once we stepped outside we had the place largely to ourselves. There was hardly a breath of wind, and that together with the full sun made it quite comfortable despite the below-freezing temperatures.
At the café, Turtle showed us her research on local restaurants and we settled on one with good reviews called Cozy. Squeezed into a tight booth and gazing at the stained-glass windows, we decided its prior incarnation had been as a nieghbourhood pizza place. Now it offered Korean pub grub. I ate the better part of a fried chicken and washed it down with makkeolli; Turtle had a big bowl of seafood nyumen, her wife order the bulgogi, and we all shared a huge dish of tteolbokki.
And
monshu? Poor monshu! It's a vegetarian day for him, and no sooner had he settled on the bibimbap with tofu then he was informed that they don't serve it any more. So we asked the waiter what other dishes on the menu were strictly vegetarian and there was literally nothing else he could point to besides the sweet potato fries. Couldn't they at least do a simple vegetarian stir-fry? He asked the kitchen and returned to tell us no, but that they could leave the fish cake out of the tteolbokki. Now that's far from the Old Man's favorite dish, but he was game about it. So we shook our heads and tut-tutted and then moved on.The food and the company were nearly enough to make us forget the terrible music choices. (As we were about to leave they started plaing K-pop, but when we walked in it was Snoop Dogg and Eminem.) Everyone else stayed sober, making my makkeolli-fueled antics at the grocery store seem all the more raucous by comparison. We were almost to check out when I decided I needed some pumpkin taffy and ran off to the candy aisle to grab some; meanwhile, Turtle had bought hodugwa and we munched on them in the car on the way back to Cozy for the reading glasses the GWO had left on our table.
Maybe I'll be regretting that bottle of milky Korean liquor in a few hours as acid is burning its way back up my esophagus, but right now I'm pleasantly tired and full and filled with love for the world and, in particularly, three special people in it. Besides, tomorrow is going to be stormy and nasty and we have nothing more ambitious planned than watching a Chinese historical epic and making paella.