Day 39

The Fredo from Lucky's.  Man vs. Food
came here and the challenge was to eat 3
of these in an hour.

     Wednesday was a pretty good day of exercise, eating and good company.  It started with me swimming at our health club.  I don't know if I'm getting better, but I do seem to be able to get my laps in faster.  Then I walked to UIC to meet former student Tony Marotta for lunch.  I have really enjoyed the lunch dates and meet-ups that I've been having with people while I've been down here.  It's not that I can't do this when I'm in Lisle, it's just that I haven't so maybe I'll make more of an effort after July.  We met at Lucky's.  The owners there put both the french fries and the cole slaw inside of the sandwiches making them huge.  I took most of mine out before eating it, but it was still difficult to finish.  This was another 4 out of 5 bricks.  Not the ultimate, but pretty darn good.  In addition to the nine miles that I walked and the swimming I also walked the ten flights of stairs from our apartment to the sun deck just for the heck of it.

Dinning by the big tank.

     Later on Wednesday we got dressed up and went over to the Shedd Aquarium for "Jazzin' at the Shedd".  It's a special promotion that they run where they have a couple of jazz groups playing, they have food and drinks for sale and they provide seating and servers.  It's a neat idea and seems to be extremely popular.  Since I had already been to the Shedd I mostly followed TWIK around so that she could see all the cool stuff they have there.  One thing that I did do this time that I didn't do last time was visit the jellies.  This exhibit was really nice and I have some great pictures from it.  I like the whales as well, but they are always not what I expect when I think of whales.  They are more like fat dolphins.  The music was really good and I like when we get dressed up to do stuff, it makes it more like a date.

I passed on the goat.

     Today we planned to visit the "Taste of Chicago".  The Taste is one of the few events that drew me downtown year after year.  I've always liked the festivals that communities do in the summer.  Lisle does "Eyes to the Skies", Naperville has "The Final Fling", Wheaton has the "Cream of Wheaton" and Chicago has the Taste.  It was a big disappointment this year.  They have cut it back considerably from past years.  It will only be five days instead of ten, there were probably less than half of the vendors that are usually there and because of that there wasn't the variety there that people are used to.  We spent about as much time at a cooking demonstration as we did walking the midway of restaurants.  It might be something that has run it's course if they continue to scale back.  I don't think people will make the effort if it stays this way for long.

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     So after that we decided to go to our fallback and see what was happening at the "Pier".  (that's what the locals call it).  There were two things that looked good; one was the Chicago Match Sailing Race and the other was Dueling Pianos at the Land Shark.  We got there at the end of the sailing races and they were very exciting.  I guess it's a pretty big deal, Chicago is the only American city on the world tour of this competition.  After that we went to listen to some more music.  I have really been impressed by the quality of the music that they have on the "Pier".  We have been over about four times and we have never been disappointed.  And it's even better that all of the concerts that we've seen there have been free to the public.  So the last two days have been pretty fun filled.  I start tomorrow off with a 9:00 am dentist appointment.  Woo-who!!