To Chicago twice in one week. Hit or miss – the snow and New York City.
Steve & Heike came for brunch on Sunday – we had blueberry pancakes and sausages and crispy tofu (kind of like this but I do it different – maybe tofu cubes can be a post on the other blog) and a winter fruit salad.
Mark went off to Chicago, and I made vegan rice pudding and watched Downton Abbey and Shameless. I was trying to use up some almond milk, but I didn’t like the results – I think it’s going into the compost.
Monday I had a pretty normal work day, but lugged everything I needed for an overnight, and then left for Chicago on the 4:30 bus. It snowed about an inch in the morning, then rained. Pretty miserable when I was walking to the bus, but once I got on, as I told Rach, I had absolutely nothing to do for four hours except read and eat chocolate. One mistake I made was turning the iPhone camera selfie-style just to see what I looked like – and there was a little old lady.
Tuesday I had to be on a panel at a conference at 10:00, so Mark and I walked up Michigan and had breakfast at Le pain quotidien. I had a bowl of steel cut oats that looked a lot like the below, except with Chia seeds thrown on top, somewhat annoyingly, and I had to beg for milk.
Recipe here
The panel was just fine, except I got a nosebleed right before I had to speak – that’s kind of a new one for me.
I walked to the train, and picked up a half sandwich at Pret a Manger, and a coffee at Starbucks. I ate the sandwich and drank the coffee in the train station, and bought a cookie and a water for the train, at Corner Bakery. On the train when I had time to look them up, I thought it was kind of amusing that I found calorie counts for all these “fast casual” restaurant foods in My NetDiary – but it makes sense – and also realized that I had consumed my full day’s calories by about 2:30. Which didn’t stop me from munching some peanut butter and pretzel crackers when I got home – I had online class at 7:00, so felt I needed fortification. And I had a hot cider with some brandy, because Megan was already having a beer, by the time I came down after class, and didn’t want a glass of champagne, to toast her golden birthday. But now I feel really too full.
The snow missed New York City, and I had two near-miss iPhone disasters. First, when I was on the bus, I opened a bottle of fizzy water – and it just poured out, onto the New Yorker in my lap, which had only just seconds before been cradling my phone, until I moved it to my coat pocket just in time to miss the flood. And when I got to the train station, when I exited the bathroom stall, my phone jumped out of my coat pocket and fell harmlessly to the floor – again good timing – missing the toilet, the gutter, all manner of dangerous places.
