gnat surfaces

alright so me being m.i.a. is not a new thing, we all know this - in any case, here's a recap of what happened after i unplugged the router and went offline two weeks ago.

we packed. and packed, and packed, and packed.

everything in the apartment broke at the same time - no kidding, the kitchen sink stopped up, we blew a fuse in the hallway, the microwave mysteriously refused to turn on... it knew we were vacating and it was not happy about it. i spent several hours plunging and cursing and fiddling with circuit breakers, all to no avail.

we packed some more. well, cara packed, i plunged.

...cara had a lot of things to pack.

i had fewer things to pack, which managed to fit in a few suitcases... with a little finagling.

i took a break from the packing and plunging and finagling to say goodbye to some friends over pizza.

finally, we managed to empty the apartment.

the last thing to come down was the chicago skyline. because we were sleep deprived and it seemed poetic at the time, each of us took down one of the three panels: eileen the first,

cara the middle,

and myself last.

and then it was time to go.

these pictures don't really capture the utter disaster that our moving day actually was - when i say we were sleep deprived, i really mean we hadn't slept properly in a few days (cara hadn't slept period), we stupidly packed the kitchen first thing in the morning and couldn't feed ourselves despite having a fridge full of lovely things like eggs and milk, the movers were hours and hours late, and as i've mentioned before things just stopped working left and right. to top it off, my girl guy must have known we were going because he started up before 8am and didn't quit all day.

i suppose none of this matters anymore, because we don't live there anymore.

anyway!

we moved. i am no longer a chicago resident. this may cause you to wonder what's going to happen to gnat's chicago experiment, a blog about my life in chicago. fear not! i have plenty of backlogged adventures that never made it into posts, so i have enough material to keep the blog afloat for a bit (provided i ever get around to writing it down).

so goodbye for now, from california, more chicago adventures coming soon.

gnat enjoys free summer music

this morning i realized i hadn't yet posted about what is probably my favorite chicago summertime activity - evening concerts in millenium park.

regular attendees include cara,

myself,

eileen,

and sean,

with occasional guest appearances by aleck

and andrew

among others.

about once a week cara and i load up bags of snacks, wine, and blankets and head down to millenium park, where we all play card games and listen to free music all evening.

this summer we've heard everything from rachmaninoff to egyptian music to iron & wine, all from this patch of grass.

in other news, all of my pictures are going to be in hipstamatic for a while, both because i'm basically obsessed with it and because carmine II is in the hands of the geek squad after sustaining a fall. (yes, again. shut up.)

gnat and eileen's hipstamatic chicago afternoon

shortly after i posted today's blog entry, in which i complained about how miserable humidity is, my tutee cancelled our lesson for today leaving me with a free afternoon. i immediately enlisted eileen's aid in coming up with an exciting activity that was both free and air conditioned. without hesitation, she suggested the art institute. little did eileen know that i very recently (and by very recently i mean last night) finally jumped on the hipstamatic bandwagon and was itching to play with it, and a trip to the art institute was the perfect opportunity to do so.

(for those of you who, like me, are not well versed in the exciting world of iphone applications, hipstamatic is a program that takes vintage looking pictures with your phone's camera. it is shockingly addictive.)

what follows is a sample of the photographic results of our afternoon in the museum:

because we worked up quite an appetite at the museum we adjourned to devon seafood grill (also air conditioned) for happy hour. i have been obsessing about oysters since my visit to the publican last month (which i just realized i have yet to write about... this is awkward.) and have been intending to go to devon's happy hour for 75 cent oysters on the half shell for weeks.

eileen and i started with wine flights,

before receiving our oysters. (they were magnificent, and made even better by the fact that they are served with teeny tiny bottles of tabasco sauce that are now floating somewhere at the bottom of my purse.)

you can't have too much of a good thing, so we also tried their oyster shooters.

now, a dozen oysters is not actually that much food, so we supplemented them with an order of mussels. (i'm not kidding anyone. the real reason we got mussels is because we are a couple of fat kids. if you don't think so now, you will in a minute. i didn't even tell you about the smoked salmon flat bread, because i was so busy eating it that i forgot to take a picture.)

at the very last possible moment, five minutes before the end of happy hour, eileen and i decided that despite all the seafood we had already consumed, the deal on lobster (at cost) was just too damn good to pass up. so we did what any reasonable people in our situation would do - we ordered a lobster.

and it was the best idea ever. he was delicious. and cheap. but mostly delicious.

predictably, the meal ended in lobster carnage.

thoroughly stuffed with seafood, we braved the heat once more to return to our respective places of residence. as a result of our adventure i am feeling far less upset about the climate outside. if it means more air conditioned adventures, i say bring it on!