Good Food etc...

I think I need to stop giving Daisy tennis balls. She loves them, and will chase them every time you throw them across the room, but she always ends up chewing them up into a million pieces and I end up picking all these tiny little rubber chunks out of my rug. And there are a bunch of tennis ball scraps around all the time, as pictured. But she likes them so much, I'll probably just keep giving them to her.

My mom gave all of the dogs (Daisy, Gus, and Jo) tennis balls for Christmas. They all had fun chasing them around for a few minutes...Gus and Jo lost interest, but Daisy kept destroying them for days...and we got a few to take home. I gave her one yesterday when I got back from Chicago, and you can see what it looks like in the picture...

I went home for a week and a half...we celebrated my dads birthday, my recent audition success, and of course, Christmas. The highlight of the trip (besides getting to see my parents of course!) was eating at two of Chicago's best restaurants in one week. The first was Arun's, a Thai restaurant: no menus...they just bring you a 12 course tasting dinner (6 appetizers, 4 main courses, 2 deserts...with 5 different wine pairings) The highlight of the meal was definitely the one bite salad...so much flavor in one bite...it was kind of insane.

My favorite of the two was Topolobampo...you may have heard of chef Rick Bayless from Top Chef Masters (which he won)...we all got the tasting menus here too...only 5 courses this time (with a wine pairing going along with each course)...each one of my courses used a different kind of mole (who knew there were so many?!?!?) It was probably the best meal I've ever had!

Heading Out...to Mexico

Merry Christmas to everyone!!! yay!!!

As you may (or may not) have read at my mom's blog...we are having a different kind of Christmas celebration this year. For what seems to be becoming a yearly tradition, I played (along with Alison, Jake + Kara Bancks) for a bilingual midnight mass in Logan Square. Its pretty fun even though its kind of late. This morning we drove down to Chinatown and had "Christmas Lunch" at a Chinese restaurant. The food was very good and then we stopped at Joy Yee's for Mango and Strawberry/Kiwi bubble tea...yum yum...

Then it was in the car and off to Milwaukee (I can feel Heather's presence near me...however I'm sure she is quite busy with the fam on Christmas and I'm seeing her in a week anyways). After some hotel room boredom we braved the ice fields (aka parking lots) and walked over to the movie theater next door to the La Quinta and saw Juno...I kind of loved it, but I don't have much to compare it to in terms of movies this year...I'm confident to say it was my favorite, but I only saw like 3 anyway. Wait, maybe 2.

Our flight leaves at 7am for Puerto Vallarta so the iPhone (yes, thats right, I have an iPhone now!!!! thanks parents + uncle) is set to 4:20am...I guess the airport is very close, so good thing we don't need to get up any earlier than that!!!

Conference Over

So after three very intense days and weeks of planning, the Shepherd Careers Forum is at last over. It was pretty cool to see all of the people arrive and be really excited about everything and have fun and do work and play/watch concerts and have discussions etc... But three full days (two 7:30am starts) with minimal breaks has its wear on you. Rachael and my big project was getting all of the food picked out and catered, and according to everyone attending, the food was one of the highlights. So I guess we did good! We decided to switch to Starbuck's coffee at the last minute too...which was a huge hit...sidenote for people hosting a conference: get Starbucks coffee because everyone will go crazy over it (and they get to carry around little starbucks cups all day and feel special). Over all I think it was a pretty great success and people seems really happy and excited about it! Things would have been much more enjoyable if I didn't have a pounding headache for three days...which may or may not be sinus related...I'll try and go to the health services tomorrow. Hope I can get rid of it soon!