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A side benefit of food poisoning is that I got to sleep quite a bit after a few days where I hadn’t.  I rose for breakfast, made acquaintance with Amelia, skipped breakfast, and went back to bed.

For the afternoon, I wanted to take a tour of Chicago and we arrived at the Chicago Architecture Foundation just late enough to not make one, so we made our own.  Millennium Park features an unusual number of public art pieces and is the second leading tourist destination in the city.  The Cloud Gate reflective bean sculpture is a popular photo spot and I was in no way exempt from its draw.

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Infinite Portraits

Suzie wanted to see the Newberry Library and on the way there Ryan was mocked for not wearing a coat yet me wearing shorts was largely unobserved.  Hm… At a crosswalk, I got separated from the rest of the group and made my way towards the Newberry zig-zagging my way there.  This was a part of Chicago I hadn’t seen before, the city heart where commerce intersected residency and the buildings were merely nice as opposed to notable.  Pedestrian traffic dropped off much quicker than I expected once one left an arterial road.  By the time I was at the Newberry, the streets were largely empty.

They day had turned chilly, so Newberry wasn’t so much impressive and grand as simply warm.  Their public display was sparse as is expected in a research library but it fulfilled my need for a place to sit down.

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Minutes Before Close

We walked to Amelia’s apartment and a reality was put to a location that had previously only existed as her background in Google+ hangouts and we passed time until we could pick up dinner.

I retired early again, not entirely feeling recovered from what ever had lain siege to my GI tract but I did get a chance to poke at my photos where I found a new favorite.

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Ready to Go

I like almost everything about it except the part where it gives the impression that I like cars.

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Today I will drive from home, to Philly, to Cincinnati, to Decatur, to Chicago with possible help from someone with no real distance driving experience.  I agreed to the Decatur stop without much thinking and had forgotten that Decatur is only the way to Chicago, but from Missouri, not Ohio.  Not one to break a promise, we scheduled our dinner stop there.

The first four or five hours of driving were uneventful and I was glad Brooke took over long enough to let me nap.  I was roused a few times by the rumble AKA “good morning!” strips on either side of the road but these klaxons of driver education sounded less often as time passed.  I took the wheel again after about 100 miles and drove the rest of the way to Cincinnati.  We picked up Suzie and her tiny hat and continued to Decatur.

After sitting down to dinner, an old man came over to our table and asked me when the rest of my pants would arrive and walked away.

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Troll Man

Midway through the meal, I started feeling ill and wonder if it was the chicken salad from lunch fighting with the chicken salad from dinner.  I was sweating heavily and cringed slightly at the request to get ice cream.  We went to a Dairy Queen that was either on its way to demolition or renovation but was not open regardless.  I queried the GPS for ice cream locations and it spat out “Cow Depot”.  We went to this stop which was now a laundromat.  We found The Dairy Maid on the way back to drop off Aaron and ice cream was had.  I drove for a bit more and Brooke took over a few hours outside of Chicago.

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Softserve Quest

I woke up a few times on the ride to Chicago and shook and rolled my head violently and the rest of the car probably thought me posessed.  Once we landed, I made my way to Peter’s apartment, then his bathroom, then the guest bedroom, then the bathroom, then the living room, then the bathroom and took a nap which proved to last the whole evening.  At this point, whatever had lodged itself in the walls of my constitution was fully developed and I learned that projectile vomiting is a lot like riding a bicycle, you never really forget how to do it.

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I received a note of good news during the work day, well above what I thought I would, and I yelled “Action dinosaur with hat!” a favorite phrase of mine.  At that moment, the Hispanic fellow from housekeeping was coming through and looked at me as I yelled that line.

Him: ¿Que?
Me: Dinosario de accion con sombrero.
Him: *stares at me* Si, señor. *Resumes collecting garbage*

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I leave for a trip to Chicago on Friday and am trying to get my sleep schedule ready for that 16-hour driving day and decided to see if a sleep aid could help with a reboot.  The box directions said it’d take about an hour to start working and after about 45 minutes I felt a bit drowsy.  Over the period of the next two hours, I received four phone calls, more than I normally receive in a week, and I only remember the first two.  The last two involved me, apparently, walking someone through tabular integration and troubleshooting why a Team Fortress 2 server wouldn’t properly start.

I woke up a few hours later, neither awake nor sleeply but in a hypnopompic fugue state.  While sleeping pills don’t appear to much help me sleep they do seem to improve my abilities to walk people through tricky problems.

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A decree came down from on high that all employees at my firm needed to be present between 9 AM and 3 PM Monday through Thursday.  This destroyed my normal schedule of working “whenever I arrive to whenever I leave as long as it adds up to 40 hours in week”.  I dutifully arrived at 8:58 AM and put out the cheesecake I had made.  It had a homemade graham cracker crust, was fruit-topped, and had a twin.  Normally, such a treat would be gone shortly after lunch, but today I had 1.5 cheesecakes left at the end of the work day.

Screw you, New Years Resolutions.

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Mom: I’m having a problem with my laptop.
Me: What’s wrong?
Mom: Something with the keyboard.
Me: Can you be more specific?
Mom: The B and I keys don’t work.
Me: They don’t work?
Mom: No, nothing happens when I hit the keys.
Me: Have you just not used it?
Mom: I do.  I just, work around it.

How do you work around missing two very useful keys?  I checked emails from my mother over the past few days and they contained the letters B and I.  When she brought the laptop over later that day, she indeed did not have a functional B or I key.  Go, mom.

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2011 as a year was kind to me.  I lost 95 lbs, that’s kind of cool. I spent a good amount of time with those close to me, somehow managing to visit Chicago or see Peter 7 times and visit Cincinnati or see Suzie 11 times.  Distance is for chumps.  I didn’t write about it much, but I had the first notable relationship of my adult life this year and it fit neatly within the calendar year starting with a trip to Cirque Du Soleil in January and ending with me holding my phone and a sweater vest in a Kohl’s shortly before Halloween.

I cried a lot this year, and this is my short list of when:

There are a few others but they are private, not in the sense that I wouldn’t share them but in the sense that I wouldn’t know how to.

I have some things I’d like to do in 2012 but “resolution” would be too strong a word.  I’d like to start reclaiming activities I couldn’t do as a larger person and ice skating fits into that.  Hang gliding, skydiving, and breaking into abandoned buildings all fit in that category and these I look forward to trying.  If I can finish the year around 210 lbs, I think I will be satisfied.

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I had nothing planned for New Years and I am fine with this.  Normally, November through New Years is a string of unremarkable parties and events but this year I went from running a holiday party, to a good Thanksgiving trip, to a fun NYC trip, to trying ice skating for the first time.  Any of these would have qualified as a highlight in previous years and I had all these in a period of 45 days.

I still hurt from yesterday’s falls while ice skating and spent the day as real men spend their New Year’s Eve, re-seasoning my cast iron cookwear.  I was in bed by 11 PM.

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A friend indicated she wished to go ice skating, and I, not wishing to look like an idiot, immediately took on myself the task of gathering as much skating experience as I could muster.  Mike and Kacey offered to take me skating and we went to IceWorks in Aston, Pa for me to lose my skate-ginity.

The first step was getting skates.  Since I normally wear a size 14-15 shoe and was told to get snug skates, I got a pair of size 14 skates that appeared to be made out of Caribou leather and bone.  Lacking a jackhammer or marlinspike, I forced them onto my feet as best I could and made my way onto the ice.  At this point, I didn’t know how one was supposed to skate but having one’s ankles canted at 45 degree angles didn’t seem like the right way.  I made a lap and felt like my ankles were on fire so I got another pair of skates, this time a size down.  Somehow these went on much easier and I began ice-walking with enough sucess that Mike mocked me for ice-walking instead of ice-skating.  Thanks, Mike.

After my second through fourth lap, I gained the ability to glide for very, very short distances, and having already fallen (my first fear) got to face my second: Being terrified of cutting a child in half.  I see it perfectly in my mind’s eye, I’m gracefully gliding, possibly looking over my shoulder giving someone a devil-may-care smile when an innocent child reachs for his or her mother, falls, and descends to the ice.  I look forward, see him or her, and not being able to stop, cleft the youth in twain and become the Solomon of the ice.

After a few more laps, I felt that I could go short distances without staring at my feet and for about 30 feet of every lap could talk with Mike or Kacey as they passed.  During one such lap, a child fell in front of me.  Knowing I couldn’t stop in time, I attempted to stear around, and did, so much so that I was now going backwards.  In my attempt to face forward, I fell and fell hard.  I stayed on the ice for a moment and was able to make out the outline of my keys, fitbit, knife, and change in my pocket in screaming pain receptors and learned quickly that there’s no reason to bring yours keys with you onto the ice.

I hurt, my Fitbit was shattered, my pants and shirt were wet, but today, I killed no children.  Victory.

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When I make a print of a picture I’ve taken, I put it up in my office at work.  I take these down and put them up at home at the end of each year so today I took down all my pictures.  I sent out an email to my coworkers saying they were welcome to any they wished from the stack next to my desk.  No one took any pictures while I was there but when I went to get a drink or work in the lab, I’d return to find that one or two pictures had been taken.  I felt like I was being robbed by gypsies.

I asked a coworker if he wanted a print he always thought was nice and he declined.  Later in that day he came up to me with that print that he’d taken from the stack while I was at lunch and asked me to sign it.  I felt tickled.