I love their flourescent green hue

I love the weekends. I'm sure most people do. But weekends mean two straight days of Boyfriend. It's pretty much the best thing ever. (Maybe second only to the BLTs with turkey bacon that I have been absolutely addicted to lately!) He just walked over to me singing along with this song:

I know I'm biased, but Boyfriend is ridiculously good looking and when he does super cute things like singing and dancing like that and his eyes get a little more Asian-y...oh man, I melt. Swooooon :P 

Speaking of Asian, yesterday I met his Asian side of the family for the first time, consisting of his grandma and grandpa, an uncle, and three cousins. They were all so kind and very welcoming, considering I am some completely random girl from California who moved here on a whim :P Anyone who knows me well knows that I have  an infatuation with old men with my favorite type to look at being those of the adorable Asian variety. Omg, his grandpa. Omg. So, so cute! He kind of reminded me from the man from "Up", but Japanese. And cuter, 'cause you know, he's real and not animated. Haha. His grandma is so sweet and delicate. And witty :) His uncle is a super nice man and his three teenage cousins were all so friendly and well behaved and very interested in me and all my Californian-ness :P

After we were done visiting with his family we headed home, but first stopped at a bar to say happy birthday to a friend of his. We were only supposed to stop for one drink...and in the time he had his one beer, I had three Midori Sours. Three. They're so sly, so slick, those Midori Sours. I finish them before I've even realized I'm drinking them. Even using those tiny cocktail straws I suck them down at the speed of light. I love their flourescent green hue. They make me happy just looking at them because they're so visually appealing. If it were possible to create a rainbow colored drink, like with individual layers, I'd be in love. Something like this, but not cheating by using colored ice cubes as this one does:

Once we got into the car though, I immediately got worried that I was gonna get sick, and given my intense fear of throw up, that was not what I was wanting to experience. Boyfriend told me it was all in my head and talked to me to help keep my mind off of it. We stopped for gas and I went inside to go buy a huge water. I also picked up some 

Butterfinger Snackerz 

that I'd been wanting to try out. They are fail. Do not eat. An average Butterfinger is about 90% crunchity peanutbuttery goodness with about 10% chocolate coating. Which is amazing! These Snackerz were about 50% chocolate, 30% wafer, and 20% crunchity peanutbutter goodness. They also look nothing like the picture. I was quite disappointed. Thinking about Butterfingers makes me miss Yogurtland. They don't have them here in Illinois, and though I'm sure there are comparable froyo places, Yogurtland is still my fave. 

I think I'm done typing for now. Kbye :)

I'm also learning not to call them freeways

I'm laying in bed, being super lazy but comfy, listening to Sufjan Stevens' album, Illinois, which has the song that the title of my blog is taken from: "Chicago". I love living here. It's SO nice to be somewhere that I...hmm, how do I phrase this? I feel rejuvenated here. I feel excited here. I feel so incredibly, completely happy here. Granted my ridiculously amazing boyfriend may or may not play the tiniest of roles in my current jubilant state. But a lot of my happiness is self-made as well. I take myself on field trips around the general vicinity. Like my trip to Ikea on Wednesday. I intentionally didn't take the freeway highway to get there, just so I could see more of the...countryside...? That and I find it absolutely ridiculous that I have to pay to drive on the freeway highway, even though the one I avoided that day was only a whopping 50 cents. I feel like if I'm gonna pay, it better get me to my destination infinitely faster, like the FasTrak lanes on the 91 at home. I'm also learning not to call them freeways :P

I had been craving an Ikea trip for a while. I love wandering through the various inviting, delicately staged rooms that sparkle in all their Scandinavian wonder. The Ikea in Bolingbrook did not let me down. Since it was a weekday at about 4 in the afternoon there were only a handful of other people there and made it even that much more enjoyable to peruse through the store since there weren't people taking measurements or sticky, unsupervised children pressing their grimy hands upon the glossy finished cabinets or mouthing the arms of the leather sofas. Kids are so gross sometimes. I saw lots of things I liked and easily could have dropped way more than the $19.74 I actually spent there. Soon enough though I'll have an actual reason to buy things from there :)

Today is the one month marker since I drove into town one chilly December night. I can't decide whether it feels like it's been longer or shorter. Sometimes it feels like I've been here forever, but that's mostly because of how insanely comfortable and familiar my relationship with Boyfriend feels. Neither one of us has to at all try to make things work. And that is such a refreshing feeling. I'll refrain from talking about how absolutely smitten I am with that boy, just because I don't want this blog to be full of mush. But just know that he is more than I could have ever asked for and I feel immensely lucky to have found him. Or have him find for me. Or however you want to classify how it is that all the various pieces and parts of many, many people's lives aligned so that we would find one another. Sighhh :D

MelSav sent me a super cute text today, saying how happy she was to have had the opportunity to embark upon my long, Eastward-bound roadtrip with me. I really never knew it'd be possible to have that amount of fun driving in a car for 33 combined hours. It's one of those memories that you replay in your head from time to time and it makes you smile now just as much as it did then. I'll definitely have to blog more about our roadtrip one day. It's on my list of things to do.

I think I'll go work on a scarf I've been wanting to knit. Knitting is a much more logical pastime here where one can actually use knitted goods. Oh, Chicago. So much about you makes me happy. I love you.

This one, apparently, served boiled potatoes.

I just woke up from a super weird dream. I was friends with some really popular blonde girl who kind of resembled Amanda Seyfried. I was at her house getting ready to go out to dinner and I was looking for something to wear. (This was probably my subconscious telling me it's time to wake up and go do the three massive piles of laundry sitting on the bedroom floor.) Unidentified blonde friend had a closet the size of this entire apartment and some gym equipment mixed in with her random piles of clothes. (This I think was my subconscious yelling at me for being too lazy to go workout this morning.) I was looking for something to wear cause it was snowing outside and my friend settled on just some booty shorts with something written across the back and a sweater that was so thin it was see-through. There were a bunch of guys there too, like band looking boys, who were all obsessed with her. Apparently one of them was Paul Rudd because by the time we got to the restaurant, which had moose heads on the wall, he was sitting across from me at the table. The waitress came around to the table and offered us boiled potatoes. Some restaurants serve bread or chips and salsa. This one, apparently, served boiled potatoes. The waitress asked Paul Rudd how many he wanted and when he answered 14, she rolled her eyes and made him stab the potatoes himself out of this huge basket instead of serving them to him. So random.

It's funny how my sleeping habits have changed since I've been here. When I was working for the Y, I had to be at work at 645 every morning, which meant sleeping til about 612 at the latest. Yes, I actually had it timed out that precisely. And now that my life is completely different in so very many ways, I typically don't get out of bed til noon, or noon-thirty. And then I usually take an early evening nap, too. It's kind of amazing. One not awesome thing about it though is that by the time I roll out of bed "in the morning", there are only about 4 hours of daylight left at this time of the year. I heard a commercial on the radio today that said there are only 55 days until Spring. That is super exciting because I know how fast that's gonna come because I know how busy we'll be in the coming months. Though that's not at all to say that I hate the winter. I dislike how unreliable it makes my car, but other than that, it's really not that bad. Of course I usually wear a minimum of 3 layers when I go out, sometimes up to 5, but it's totally doable. There are still a lot of snow related activities that I've yet to do, like SLEDDING and snowmen/angels/balls, so I don't mind that Winter will be hanging out for a while longer. And I have a feeling that if I came home to visit right now, I'd be sweltering in the 75 degree heat ;)

Add that to the list

I'm really, really, really BAD at blogging. In fact, I don't think I've ever successfully blogged in my entire life. I'm one of those people that has ridiculously good intentions, but suffers from an extreme form of illness known as dillydallyitis which means I'm nearly physically incapable of doing anything in a timely manner. I think this lifelong procrastination problem of mine stems from the fact that I came into this world 16 days overdue and have been running late ever since. I'm also really, really, really BAD at storytelling. I always feel the need to add an exorbitant amount of meaningless details that I somehow feel are somehow relative to the story when really it's just excess information. Filler. Fluff. This I attribute to the approximately 2304069808 term papers, final projects, TPAs, and the like that I hastily manufactured in college, nights, hours, mere minutes before they were due. And see, now I've successfully written an entire paragraph telling absolutely nothing of Chicago and my new life in it, which is in fact the whole purpose for this blog.

Here in Chicagoland, I feel like I should carry around a little notepad with me. You know, one of those 3 inch spiral ones that has some absurdly colored cartoon bunny or otherwise chaotic picture splashed across the front. The ones you get from the highly coveted Treasure Box in elementary school. Or the dollar store if you're a frequenter of such establishments. This notepad would serve the purpose of me making a list, a running record of my ah-ha moments here in the Mid West. And of those there have been many. The most recent thing Chicago taught me is the absolute heinous effects that cold weather can have on a car. Since I've never lived outside the comfort zone of sunny Southern California where the temperature never drops below the 30s on the very coldest Elsinorian night, I was completely unaware a car, more specifically my car, feels that life is not worth living when the thermometer dips below 20 degrees. Add that to the list. 

Having only recently obtained employment as a nanny for an absolutely fantastic family, the majority of my days in the past month have not included driving. In fact, I have not been to the gas station since December 29th and have driven less than 150 miles since then. Apparently, unbeknownst to little ol' Californian me, when gas sits for too long in a less than full tank, condensation from the outside air can form and collect and result in frozen gas lines which results in a car that won't start which results in a very sad me. Or something mechanical to that effect. I'm terrible at science. For the second night in a row I have experienced this terribly frustrating and annoying phenomenon that is a direct result of the North Pole-like climate in which I currently reside. I've realized that it's in my best interest to take dear old Schatzi in to a mechanic to see if there's anything that can be done to prevent this problem from reoccurring. Sighhh. 

***

I'm going to make a genuine effort to blog on a more frequent basis. Not because I think my life is oh so important that everyone needs to know my daily happenings. But because 2,104 miles is the farthest I have ever been away from home, my family, my friends, and other various things I miss, such as my dogs and Thai Pepper in Huntington Beach, and weather that gets warmer than 34 degrees which is in fact the warmest day I have experienced this month. Side note, I just looked up the difference between "furthest" and "farthest" for that last sentence and finally learned the difference between the two. Farthest means physical distance, whereas furthest means figurative distance. Is it pathetic that I am 26 years old and am just now learning that? The point of all that incessant blabber was to say that, if you want to hear from me more often than you currently do, check in here from time to time. I'm really, really, really GOOD at talking. A lot ;)