Day 48

Free t-shirt from the concert

    About the second day that we were downtown, I came across this website http://chicagofree.info/.  I signed up for the email reminders and it has been great.  I have found out about days that were free at various attractions, street fairs, music events and so on.  But the absolute best thing that I got from "Free Things to do in Chicago" was the information about the Pop-Tarts Crazy Good Summer concert.  It was free for the first 4000 to sign up for it and if it's something to do on the Internet I'm a viking.  So I immediately got my name in and found out right before the concert that we got the tickets.  Now I will admit that the line up was targeted for a little younger audience, but if I learned anything from the Summer of Brick it's that age is a condition of the mind as much as a condition of the body.  So TWIK and I headed out on Thursday to watch Austin Mahone, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Boys Like Girls.  It was really, really fun.  I didn't know the first guy but I have loved Call Me Maybe ever since I saw the Youtube Harvard Baseball Team video.  And Boys Like Girls is TWIK's favorite new band.  In addition, Pop Tarts knows how to throw a free concert.  They handed out Pop Tarts, Pringles, free speakers complete with batteries and even gave me a plastic pancho when it started to rain.  They even had a parent's tent for the old people that brought their kids to the concert.  It was one of the best events in The Summer of Brick

City in the clouds.

     Before we left I was up on the sun deck and loved seeing all of the buildings in the clouds.  Earlier in the day I had spent about an hour and a half at our health club.  It was probably the most I've used the facility since we've been down here.  I'm starting to feel the crunch of trying to do all the things I wanted to do before our time is up.  Speaking of that, the people that we are sub leasing from gave us a call asking if we could be out by the weekend so that they could also get their stuff out since they've decided not to re-lease the apartment.  That was earlier than I had planned, but they've been good to us so we agreed that we would be out by the afternoon on Saturday.  So we are down to a week.  Ouch!

Another great FSL.

     Friday I had a plan to have a lunch with a former student that I hadn't talk with for over 17 years.  He's not even on Facebook so connecting up with him was completely by chance, but it was a really good opportunity to catch up with one of my past favorite students.  I was happy to hear how well he is doing as his life parallels mine quite a bit.  He too married an Asian girl in the medical field.  Later on Friday night Ty came down to spend the night.  We went out for Korean BBQ at 9:30 and stayed out until close to midnight. We are also getting close to the time when Ty goes to school so I think our whole family is living life with the idea of savoring our times together.  It has been great fun doing our summer stuff when Ty joins us.  

Today they ran and I walked to Lincoln Park Zoo and we looked at the animals for a while and then headed back to the apartment.  We spent a little time watching the sail boats on their Chicago to Mackinac Race.  Now we are headed out to lunch, I'm blogging while they get ready.  Life is good.