Hello, was Saturday's weather perfect or what? It probably hit 16 or 17 celcius* here in Chicago. Everyone was out and about! The lakeside paths were experiencing heavy traffic from runners, bikers and dogwalkers. And there were shadows. Real shadows! Cast by the sun!
I wore my thongs (aka. flip flops) out and for a few blocks, I just had a t-shirt on. Yeah, that's right. I was walking around outside with just a t-shirt on. I'm sorry about the dramatic italics, but this is huge. This hasn't happened since October 2007! My feet were chuffed to be experiencing my (not so) new neighborhood for the first time and my pasty white arms were squinting from the sun. Of course, I quickly got cold again and had to put my jacket back on. Some ambitious people were walking around in thongs, shorts and t-shirts. I would have done the same, alas I am not crazy.
We tried a new pizza place in Andersonville called Great Lake for late-lunch. My coworker Hugh is friends with the couple who own it and a few weeks ago the place received a great review from Drive Thru, the restaurant blog of Gapers Block, "a site about Chicago." We'd tried to visit a few weekends ago, but couldn't find it even though we stood less than 15m away from the storefront at the intersection of Clark and Balmoral. The reason is that Great Lake is a bit off the main drag, and they don't have a sign out front. It's almost as if they're hiding. Or wearing the costume of a boring store.
But yesterday, we walked up Balmoral to Clark from the other direction and found it. It was a happy moment. And oh man, the store is so incredibly cute. Plus the pizza was great. And the wife was sitting at the counter knitting with a ball of twine. Maybe to make a net? I'm not sure. I thought it was cool she was knitting with twine. I've decided we're going to be regulars.
* The word "celcius" is getting red-lined by Typepad's spell-check. I just looked it up and apparently "celcius" is a common misspelling. It's meant to be "celsius" after a Swedish guy from the 1700s called Anders Celcius. I mean, Celsius.
Here are a few photos from Great Lake and also one from the place where fancy boats rest during the summer. The word I'm looking for might be "dock".
I guess I had a smudge on my lens. You can see the smudges in the top left corner of the first and last photos. Grr.
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