F: Friendship

My 8th grade English teacher used to say to us, "You'll have a lot of acquaintances in your life, but you'll be able to count your friends on one hand." The older I get, the more I realize how true that is. There are only four people, not including Birthday Boy, that I would call if I really needed someone. Of course, one of them is SIG. Since she moved to D.C. in November, there have been mad flurries of e-mails back and forth - sometimes several dozen a day! But things get left out of e-mail, and we were desperately in need of some face time. So SIG came out to Chicago for the weekend this past weekend, and we stayed up too late and ate too much and spent too much money, and generally just had a great time. 

Friday night, after her plane finally found a gate to which it could attach to the jetway, we got takeout sushi from Sushi X, then stayed up until 4 in the morning talking about her trip to South Africa, her lab, my lab, graduation, my upcoming trip to D.C., all kinds of things! When we finally went to bed, I had less than 3 hours sleep before I had to get up and come down to lab for a little bit. Then we had a fantastic lunch at Grand Lux Cafe with our friend HW before our spa afternoon. Both Birthday Boy and Cute and Cuter's parents got me gift certificates from the same spa for Christmas, so I took that opportunity to use it - I got a salt scrub and a massage, and it was a totally wonderful two hours. I would go back in a second if I could afford to! Even last night when I saw him, Birthday Boy commented on how smooth my skin was :). The worst part of our weekend was definitely our dinner on Saturday night - we went to May Street Market, which I had heard amazing things about, but it was horrible. I will say that my appetizer (Maytag blue cheese cheesecake) was very tasty, but we both hated our entrees, the service was terrible (Jeff, our waiter (yes, that's his real name), was super sketchy, kept staring at us, calling us 'Beautiful' and 'Darling' and generally just being creepy), and nobody ever came over to see if we were satisfied with our dinner! Halfway through, SIG looked at me and said, "We should have just gone to Otom. Remember how good our dinner was there? And the desserts!" We made a quick decision to skip dessert at May Street (oh darn) and go to Otom, so that at least one thing would be good. They seated us and even brought us a little dessert amuse bouche (a take on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!) before our deconstructed banana split and apple crisp. YUM.

Unfortunately, the places we tried to go to after Otom kind of sucked. Suite was playing horrible music, and the normal waitstaff wasn't there either. So we (and HW) went over to J Bar, but as soon as we heard the horrible hip hop coming from J Bar, we turned around and left! All we wanted was a place playing good house music where we could just hang out and drink, but we gave up on Saturday!

Sunday we had brunch with two other grad school girls, then did a little bit of shopping in Bucktown before heading out to the airport. I can't wait to see SIG again in 5 weeks when I fly out to D.C., and she'll be back in Chicago for graduation in June, if not before that! 

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