April, this month is so premium.

April flew by here in Chicago, highlighted by several fun events...

First, Cary Anne and I had the chance to see some live theatre, which, sadly, is not something we get to do very often. Luckily, I found a good deal on some tickets at a small theater in Evanston the week before the show closed. The production was "Everything is Illuminated," which was an original adaptation of one of mine and Cary Anne's favorite novels. I decided to make the date a surprise for Cary Anne; I told her to get dressed up and made her wear a blindfold during the car ride. The production was very entertaining, and now Cary Anne is insisting we be more deliberate about seeing live theatre.

Not long after that, my parents had the opportunity to come visit. My father's work sends him to the area for training every now and then, and, of course, my mother insists on tagging along. The last time my parents came to visit, CA and I were still living in our studio in Roger's Park, so we got to show them our new(ish) apartment and neighborhood. Though we were only able to spend about half a day with them, we still got enjoy lunch and take a walk along Lake Michigan. 

The next weekend, a group of us from church went to see our friend Lana's piano recital. Lana was graduating from Moody, a local Bible college, so it was her final senior performance. Of course, she did amazing, and now she has moved off to New York to pursue her dreams. After the recital, Kelly and I hopped on the train and went to the Chicago Theatre to see Jim Gaffigan's newest stand-up show. We had bought our tickets a little late, so we weren't exactly close to the stage, but there's not really a bad seat in the Chicago Theatre. It was a great show, and I'm sure Cary Anne grew tired of us quoting it for the next several days.

At the end of the month, our friend Craig announced that he was moving to Kentucky, to be closer to his family, so we invited him over for a farewell dinner. We told Craig that we were going to cook up some steaks, and he offered to bring over some crab legs that he had won in a local meat raffle. (Yes, I said meat raffle.) So, the dinner turned into surf and turf night, which is probably the fanciest meal we've had in this apartment so far. The evening was great. Craig was a huge part of the muscle that helped get all of our stuff into this 3rd floor walk-up, and he has been a big part of our church over the past several months, so we're really going to miss him.

Pie and Pancakes

If you've known me (Spencer) for over a year, you probably know that I enjoy celebrating Pi Day. It's not because I enjoy math so much; it's because I was raised in America and have learned to make even the flimsiest of excuses to eat large amounts of food. So each year, I like to buy a pie or two and share them with friends. This year, Cary Anne and I had our artists community group on Pi Day, so I shared it with them. As you can see, everyone seemed to enjoy it.

After Pi Day, our church started to get prepped for Easter. The central location of Community Christian wanted to use our campus to film the video that would show at all of the campuses on Easter Sunday, so two weeks prior to Easter many of us volunteered to take part in the filming. The rough part was that even in the middle of March, Chicago was still firmly within winter's grasp (as you can tell from the ice on the lake that was thick enough for people to stand on). The freezing temperatures and frigid wind made filming on the lake shore quite unpleasant, but the video itself (a modern retelling of the story of Thomas) turned out quite well. You can watch it here.

For our Good Friday service, we met at a local house that can be rented out for meetings and art showings. The theme of the night was, "Everything is different, but nothing's really changed," which was apparently inspired by the William Fitzsimmons song since we played part of the song during the service. At Community Edgewater, we tend to embrace the somber tone of Good Friday, setting the evening aside to think about what it would have been like for the disciples on the night Jesus died considering everything they had just invested the past 3 years of their life in was suddenly (seemingly) nothing. Inside the rented building, the whole first floor was gutted, with only the skeletal structure beams holding up the place. There were several tables set up with half-eaten food to show what it would have been like for the disciples to have returned to the uncleaned upper room after Jesus was betrayed. Everything is different, but nothing's really changed. For a while, we wandered around the wood beams and tables while our friend Patrick played the chello. After that, we moved up to the third floor of the building, which looked like a finished attic from the '70s, completely with orange shag carpet and wood paneling. During the service, members of our community shared stories of deep loss from their own lives.

Last Easter, our church had a small service on the shore of Lake Michigan. But this year, with our rising attendance and Chicago's dipping temperatures, we decided to just meet at our normal location, Swift Elementary. However, we did want to do something a little special, so we got back in touch with our Southern roots and had a pancake breakfast. Craig and Abby manned the griddles set up in front of the school. With the free breakfast in plain sight, we were even able to offer pancakes to random passer-bys. During the Easter service, the same people who shared stories of loss at our Good Friday Service talked about the hope that emerged from the darkness. Overall, it was a great Sunday, and we all kept hoping that, with Easter over and April beginning, Spring would show up sometime soon.

Birthday Bonanzas

If you'll recall from our last update, our friend Ben had a sketchy karaoke birthday party back at the beginning of February. Not wanting to be outdone, our friend Jackie convinced a local bowling alley to open up about an hour early so she could have a private bowling event for her birthday the very next weekend. One of my favorite comedians, Jim Gaffigan, says there are two types of bowlers: bored people who can think of nothing else to do before they die and hipsters who think bowling is ironic and funny. Both were present at Jackie's birthday, along with a 3rd: people who take bowling very seriously.

Thankfully even the serious bowlers had a great attitude because none of us were very good. (You know the bar is set low when your friends are cheering because you broke 75.) Both gutter balls and strikes were met with encouraging high fives. When you're playing with a bunch of non-bowlers, it's also entertaining to watch people's form. Kelly goes with the one leg hop...

Ben goes with the barely-keep-from-falling-sideways...

And Amanda goes with the try-to-look-professional-but-end-up-tossing-my-ball-into-the-next-lanes-gutter. That's exactly what happened in this photo, and I was very excited to get the shot. Notice the red blur flying oddly high in the air? Yep, that's not normal.

At the beginning of March, our friend Betsy came into town. Betsy was involved in theater with us during the one year she went to University of the Cumberlands. She transferred to a different school in 2009, so we hadn't seen her almost 4 years. She was in town visiting the Art Institute since she's considering going to grad school there. We met up with downtown, and grabbed dinner. It was nice to catch up, and we tried to tell her about all of the great reasons to move to Chicago. (Though do really need any more reason than "we live here"?)

Towards the end of March, we decided to host Kelly's birthday at the apartment. Earlier, Kelly and Amanda had decided that we should throw a Beach Bash since everyone was growing tired of the continual bleakness of winter. They decided to call the party "Leave Your Pants at the Door," and it was decided that no one would be allowed in unless they were wearing shorts. A few days before the event, Kelly went out and bought a bunch of beach-themed items, so on the Friday night of the party I came home to kiddie pool and an inflatable palm tree in our dining room and a blow-up tiki statue in our office. To be honest, it really looked like we were about to host a beach-themed Vacation Bible School. Except for the fact there was a little male nudity...

You can't have a pool without a lifeguard on duty, right? Safety first!

As the evening set in, our apartment began to fill up, fast. It quickly became clear that this shindig would be more intense than the s'mores house warming get-together we hosted when we first moved in. Our hallway became crowded with discarded coats and pants and our dining room table couldn't hold all of the drinks and snacks people were bringing. Our apartment became divided into 3 different sections: the living room became a dance party, the kiddie pool became a place for people to converse, and, with a little help from my tripod and DSLR, the office was transformed into a photo booth. There was laughter and music, and a blender full of fruity cocktails was continually being passed around. Thankfully, everyone seemed to have a fun, relaxing, and safe evening.

The next morning, our apartment was a hot mess, but Cary Anne, Kelly, and I had a good time sitting around the table looking at all of the pictures from the photo booth.

Only 4 more months until Cary Anne's birthday!

S is for Super Bowl, Singing, and Stuck

February kicked off the same way it does every year...with the Super Bowl. This year, Ryan and Sarah, a young married couple from our church, invited a bunch of us over to watch the big game. There were all the makings of a good Super Bowl party: a big screen TV, plenty of junk food, and a nice ratio of people who were way too into the game to people who were confused as to what was even happening. Cary Anne and I are not really into professional sports. (A big surprise coming from people with Theatre degrees, huh?) So when it comes to situations like the Super Bowl, we tend to just root for whichever team is from a place close to one of our hometowns. Cary Anne grew up in Virginia about an hour away from Baltimore. So for one night, we were Ravens fans. Overall, we had a fun time watching the game, even the half hour when there was no game to watch thanks to a power outage at the stadium. And in the end, our root-for-the-not-really-your-hometown-team-but-close-enough plan meant we got to celebrate a victory.

In February we also had a great time celebrating our friend Ben's birthday. Ben's birthday is actually at the end of January, and at that time we had a small MAN group celebration. (MAN group is what Ben, Josh, and I call our discipleship meetings. Every Wednesday night we get together just to talk and hang out and "do life together," to steal a hip churchy phrase.) So one Wednesday night we had pizza and wings and birthday cake. Since Cary Anne was home that night, we allowed her to partake, and we were a (wo)MAN group for just one night.

Later Ben wanted to have a real party, so he invited a bunch of people out to karaoke one Sunday night. In Lexington, Cary Anne and I would sometimes go to karaoke at a shabby bar with some of my co-workers from Krispy Kreme. We didn't go that often, because a lot of times it was just a continual stream of barely sober people singing sad country songs. They would give us weird looks as we would scream-sing 80's power ballads. Ben's birthday was not that kind of karaoke. He had rented all of us a private room, which is not even something I knew existed in the karaoke world. When we pulled up, the place looked suspiciously like a place where you would go to get an exotic message, complete with the poster of a woman holding a microphone provocatively close to her open mouth. We walked into the small lobby where there was no front desk or sign, just a door to the left and a door to the right. We decided to take the door on the right. It led down a long hallway with rooms on either side, which didn't do much to ease the sex parlor vibe. Eventually, we came upon a bar, which also served as the "front" desk. We told the bar tender we were with Ben, and he pointed to the door at the end of the hall. I pulled my sleeve down over my hand and used it to open the door.

Inside was basically a mini night club, complete with flashing lights, several big screen TVs, and couches on every wall. As we all crowded in, the mood changed from weary to jovial. There was not a lot of sitting around and listening to people sing. Pretty much every song was a group sing-along, and by the end of the night, the room had just turned into one giant dance party.

A couple of days after Ben's birthday, Cary Anne got stranded at the movie theater late one night. The church small group she and I are currently in is dedicated to recognizing creativity as a spiritual gift and sharpening your artistic discipline. Part of the curriculum encourages you to take yourself on an "artist's date" every week, which means taking time to treat yourself to an activity by yourself every week that your inner artist will enjoy. (Like all artistic curriculum, it's a half practical / half hippy non-sense.) So Cary Anne went to the movies by herself, but when she came out she realized her driver's side wheels were on a sheet of ice and her passenger side wheels were in a deep puddle, and she couldn't get enough traction to move. Kelly and I drove to her to try to rescue her. We threw salt down on the ice and tried to wedge a board into the puddle in an attempt to gain some traction, but after 15 minutes we still hadn't made much progress. Eventually Kelly said, "Why don't we just throw this mother in neutral and push?" After we started pushing, Kelly managed to step right into the ankle-deep frigid puddle. Our shabby condition attracted the attention of a couple of passer-bys, who decided to lend a hand. "Whoa, it's icy over here," one of them said. Yep. Hence the stuck car. Luckily, after a few minutes of pushing, we managed to get the car out onto the road.

This is the type of winter nonsense people warned us about before we moved to Chicago.

New Year, Same Shenanigans

My mind thinks it would be a good idea to update this blog every couple of weeks, but apparently my disciple thinks once every month and a half is sufficient.

I last left off at the end of 2012. After spending Christmas in Colonial Williamsburg with Cary Anne's family, we flew back to Chicago for the last several days of our vacation. Our friends, the Hanes and the Cannariatos, were nice enough to invite us over for New Years Eve. When we showed up, their apartment was already half full of people from our church. Most were sitting around talking, but others were engrossed in the children's game Mr. Mouth. (Our pastor, Rich, was talented enough to play and text at the same time.) As the time stretched closer to Midnight, I decided to get festive by decking Justin out in some streamers. He seemed into it. Of course, at midnight there were cheers and hugs all around, and by 1:30am, I was laying on the hardwood floor dreaming of getting into bed. Clearly, I've become an old man. 

So far this year Cary Anne, Kelly, and I have tried to be more intentional about having "family dinners." With our busy schedules, it's often hard for us to find time for quality conversations and quality meals, despite the fact we all live in the same 3-bedroom apartment. Cary Anne stepped up to bat to make the first family dinner. We walked down to the local deli and picked up some quality steaks which she prepared with some mashed potatoes. She really set the bar high for Kelly and I.

About a week after that, Morgan invited us to a surprise party for her husband Zach. This was another soiree also hosted at the Hannariarto's place. Morgan organized a sports-themed event full of friends and family and co-workers. As Zach walked in, he was bombarded with shouts and silly string. Like every good party, there was plenty of good food and ridiculous games. (And by ridiculous, I mean it required Sarah to wiggle around the room making a hand vagina.) Later, Zach opened his gifts. For a couple of weeks leading up to the party, Zach had been telling me that he had been wanting to get into comic books so I went and grabbed him a couple of titles I thought he would enjoy. Since then, we've bonded in our nerdiness and gone to the comic book store together a couple of times. Our wives are very proud.

Around the middle of January, Cary Anne and Nick spearheaded the development of an Artist's Group at our church. For months, we had all been tossing around the idea of wanting to create a time and space for all the artists in our church community to get together and just work. The idea is still being developed, but for now the ball is rolling. Every other Saturday we all get together at an apartment and bring whatever we are working on. Some people paint, others write, and others play music. It's a little scattered, but it's exciting.

Lastly, you may or may not remember that back in May I decided to start filming 5 seconds of my life everyday. It was hard, so now I've scaled things back a bit. Just like with updating this blog, I've been particularly slow in editing the footage. Here's my latest update...

Hopefully, it won't be another 6 weeks before I get around to updating this thing again.

A Good, Old-Fashioned Christmas (Somewhat Literally)

One of the things we we're most excited this Christmas season was getting a real tree. After we got married, Cary Anne's aunt was nice enough to send us a hand-me-down artificial tree. But Cary Anne's family used to go out some years and chop down their own tree and my family always had a real tree, too, so we missed that. Towards the start of December, CA, Kelly, and I walked to our local garden center to find the right tree. After winding our way through dozens and dozens of pines, we finally found one that seemed tall and full enough and reasonably priced. The half a dozen block walk there didn't seem so bad, but for some reason felt longer when we were carrying the tree.
"I should have done more push-ups before attempting to carry this thing," I said.
"Then you would've just been sore," Cary Anne replied.
"No, I mean more push-ups in life. Not just today."
When we finally got the thing up to our 3rd-floor walk up, CA and I prepared the tree stand while Kelly removed sap from our clothes using peanut butter. Over the next couple of weeks, we decked the thing out in lights and ornaments and ribbons.

After the tree was up, the rest of the holiday season was exactly what you would expect. Our church Community Group had an ugly sweater party, where we spent the night eating lots of snacks and playing games. We also made a short weekend trip down to Lexington in the middle of December since we decided to spend the week of Christmas in Virginia with Cary Anne's family. It was a ridiculously short trip: 13 hours of driving for less than 40 hours of visiting. But we did at least get see family and friends. I even stopped back in at Krispy Kreme to say hello and get some free donuts.

The Friday before Christmas, we flew into DC to meet up with Cary Anne's parents, along her brother and his wife who had flown in a few days before. The next day, we all crowded into the van and headed down to Colonial Williamsburg.

Ever since I've known Cary Anne, she has talked about how much she loves Europe and desires to move away from America. But that attitude completely changes when it comes to Colonial Williamsburg. Whenever I would make fun of it, she would vehemently defend it like she was the daughter of Uncle Sam himself. Christmas in Williamsburg is a bit of a family tradition for CA's family, but they hadn't been since 2007, so CA was excited...maybe too excited.

We spent the week exploring the rustic, old buildings and meeting all of the character actors: the wig maker, the cobbler, the butcher, the baker, the candle stick maker. Cary Anne enjoyed learning about their sewing techniques, and I enjoyed watching the men fire off the cannons. During the day we would explore the old Govenor's hedge maze, and at night we'd all head back to the resort where we would eat dinner as a family and play games. The weather was pretty nice, too. It was so warm on Christmas day that Cary Anne and I went to play mini golf, which is an activity I never thought I take part in on Christmas day.

Overall, it was great trip and fun opportunity to bond more with CA's side of the family, but it's always nice to come home again.

Do S'mores Go Better with a Red or a White?

About six weeks after we moved into our new place with our friend Kelly, we decided the apartment was finally organized enough to throw a house-warming party. Though the walls were still pretty bare, the furniture was in place and the dishes were in the cabinets, so we moved what was left of our boxes into the back bedroom and invited our friends over.

Since the fall was beginning to transition into winter here in Chicago and since we wanted to make use of now having a working fireplace, we decided to make it a s'mores party. So we went to Costco and bought chocolate and graham crackers and marshmallows in bulk, and in the Facebook invitation that went out, we encouraged people to bring firewood. Whether it was a whole bundle or just a few sticks found on the side of the road during their walk to our place, we figured anything would help keep the fire going for a few hours. But this is how I know we go to a progressive church: no one brought any wood at all. Instead, all of our nearest and dearest Christian brother and sister (who were the bulk of people we invited) showed up with various forms of alcohol. Though I may prefer to pair my s'mores with milk, others apparently prefer champagne or ale. Either way, the party went on smoothly...though with a limited amount of firewood.

A couple of weeks after our housewarming, Thanksgiving arrived. Like last year, Cary Anne and I planned on sticking around Chicago for the holiday, and luckily most of our friends decided to do the same, so we arranged a couple of potlucks. The night before Thanksgiving, Cary Anne found out she would be largely responsible for cooking the turkey, a task she had never before done. So on Thanksgiving morning, she headed over to Nick and Michelle's place (since they were hosting the potluck) to get started, while I stayed back to oversee a couple of casseroles. I am by no stretch of the imagination a cook. I've managed to mess up instant mashed potatoes in the past, so I was a bit nervous, but thankfully things turned out OK. By the time I arrived with the dishes, the table was already full of delicious looking food.

Josh was brave enough to step up and take on the turkey carving responsibility while the rest of us piles our plates high with green beans and sweet potatoes. Cary Anne did a great job with the bird considering her total lack of experience, and we all spent the afternoon eating way too much food, talking about the recent discovery of a meth lab in a Kentucky Walmart bathroom, and watching reruns of "How I Met Your Mother."

Later that night, the two potlucks merged for a night of board games and dessert at our place. Our kitchen counter became crowded with several different kinds of pie as we stood around drinking coffee and talking about our day. Soon, we decided to open up the board games. One of the highlights of the night came when we opened the "Cranium" box and realized that the playdough used in the game had grown hard and was starting to crystalize and mold. I told my friend Ben I'd give him a dollar if he put it in his mouth for 2 minutes. I said it as a joke, but to my surprise he actually did it. Somewhere out there, there's cell phone footage of him enduring a very long 120 seconds of a mouthful of germy clay. I ended up giving him $1.50 for sheer commitment and ballsiness.

Overall it was a great holiday, and the next day, on Black Friday, Cary Anne went crazy at Michael's, buying up all the Christmas decorations she could fit in her cart. Within days she had our place decked with garland and wreaths. But more on that next time...