A Life in Limbo

August came to a close with a weekend of partying with our friends from church.

The first was going away party for our friend Lisa. A young couple from our church, Ruth and Jesse, recently had to move out to Seattle due to a job transfer, and Lisa, who has apparently always wanted to move out west, decided to follow them. So Kelly hosted a party where we all got together and made a scrapbook for Lisa and did some awkward dancing in her tiny living room.

The next day, the Hanes and Cannariatos hosted a 1920s-40s party at their place. This is something they had been talking about doing for a while, and it finally all came together. Everyone dressed up, while Nick mixed gin beverages. There was even a small back room for poker and cigar-smoking. Very authentic. Overall, it was quite an exhausting weekend.

In other news, we have found a new place to live. We've been living in the small studio we moved into when we first arrived in Chicago 10 months ago, and for a while we had hopes of creating a community house with some people from church, but for various reasons that idea kind of fell apart. So now, we'll be moving into a 3-bedroom place with our friend Kelly next month. We're very excited, and I'm sure we'll share more details as we make the move. In less exciting news, we have technically already moved to a new place. After some miscommunication with our landlord, we had to move to a different unit within our same building when he thought we were moving September 1^st and proceeded to rent our place to a new tenant. We didn't realize the mistake until late last month, so we had about 10 days to get all of our stuff in boxes. Luckily, when the 1^st of the month rolled around, some people from church helped us carry those boxes down three flights of stairs to the 2^nd floor, and we were able to make the transition in about 3 hours. For now, we are living out of boxes, which is kind of a nighmare, and makes us all the more excited for October.

Also, I recently went and got our car window repaired. As some of you know, last month some coward busted out one of the windows in our car in order to steal our point-and-shoot camera and my backpack (which luckily, at the time, only contained my work uniform). If you're doing the math, this means the glass window was more valuable that the combined worth of our stolen stuff. We waited a few weeks to get the window repaired just to make sure we could afford it without slipping on any of our other bills. In the mean time, we had taped a piece of cardboard over the hole, and, after enduring several rain storms, it was starting to look pretty rough. In fact, the day before getting the window replaced, I had to reach back and grab the cardboard to keep it from flying free as I drove down the street. Fortunately, things are now repaired and the window is good as new.

Tonight, we are driving down to Lexington for a long weekend. Our friend Cam is getting married, so we're excited to celebrate with all of our college friends and visit some of our old haunts in Lexington, since we haven't been back since Christmas. I'm sure our next post will be all about our trip.

Who Wants to Have an Adult Sleepover?

Summer is coming to a close here in Chicago. The past several months have been packed with all the things you'd expect from summer in the city: we had the chance to take in some "Shakespeare in the Park," we enjoyed some local outdoor festivals (where we tried our 1^st bacon doughnut), and we grilled out at the community garden.

A few weeks ago, we even had a chance to see by brother, Jon, and his wife, Andrea...for about an hour. It was rather unexpected. They were flying back from a mission trip in Haiti with the youth group from their church, and they were supposed to catch a connecting flight home to Kentucky from O'Hare. Because of a delay, they ended up missing their flight and made the decision to “sleep” at O'Hare. So Cary Anne and I drove out to meet them, and we spent about an hour catching up and hearing about their trip.

A couple of weeks later, CA's birthday rolled around. After she opened her gifts, we decided to head downtown to eat at an Irish restaurant Cary Anne wanted to try. Sadly, as we were walking out, Cary Anne shut the door before turning to me and saying, “You have keys, right?” I did not. So CA managed to lock us out. Luckily, since it was just the push-lock on the knob, we were eventually able to successfully McGuyver our way back in to our own place. (You can read about the whole ordeal over on my comedy blog.) So we ended up at dinner at The Kerryman about an hour later than we anticipated. It was actually a really nice night, and we got to dine out on the patio. The food was good, and we were endlessly entertained by the people next to us who were far too old to be having a conversation sprinkled with gems like, “In a decade, I don't think people will be getting married, because if I like a guy, I just want to have sex with him, not fight with him about loading the dishwasher” and “You can come over to my place tonight. My wife is out of town. I mean, we're not gonna do anything; just an adult sleepover, you know?”

Around that same time, I had to venture out the DMV to register our car here in Illinois. When I walked in, I was “greeted” by a large, older man on a chair wearing the lifeless expression every DMV worker has in TV sitcoms. He handed me the proper form to fill out. About half way through, I realized that the title was solely in CA's name , and she was supposed to be present to sign the form. I looked down at the fine print and saw that forging someone's information on the form could result in a $10,000 fine and up to 5 years in prison. I walked back to the large man and asked him for advice.

“Couldn't you just sign her name for her?” he said, barely looking at me.

I looked back down at the fine print. “I could...I guess?”

“Well, geez, that's what I would do,” he said, looking off in another direction to inform that the conversation was over. In the end it didn't matter because CA ended up having to fax her ID and written permission to add me to the new car title. Overall, the whole process was about as painless as you can expect from the DMV, and now were legitimate Illinoisans.

Lastly, here's our 5 seconds-a-day footage from July. Enjoy...