It happens every once in a while

So, when I went to my closet before leaving home and decided to bring three jackets with me to Chicago, it turns out I was right (which happens every now and again)...Chicago's weather is as off its rocker as Michigan's.

Mary and I ventured onto the L today and boogied on down to downtown Chicago. We wormed our way through the subway turnstiles (in which I made a complete fool of myself and couldn't figure out how to put the ticket in, I heard an audible sigh of irritation wheeze out of the guy behind me and got all twitchy, but I really couldn't blame him) and walked out into W E T and C O L D and W I N D Y weather.

To say that it sucked would be the understatement of the century.

I had hoped to exhaust my camera today and irritate the hell out of Mary by stopping every six inches to take a picture of something.

I got nothin'.

I'm also convinced that whoever laid out this lovely city is lucky they are already dead and gone because the inhabitants and visitors here would likely murder them in the streets for strategically placing the buildings in such a way as to create a wicked wind tunnel. (You know how they call Chicago the Windy City? Its not a cute nickname, they mean it.)

So Mary and I soldiered on because even though we were wet and cold and swearing at the wind (who turned out to not care that we were cussing at it), we are nothing else if not stubborn. We scrambled to the Hershey's store and instantly went into sugar shock by walking through the doors. The odor of chocolate smacks you upside the head as soon as you enter, its totally awesome. I picked up chocolatey gifties for my mom and brother and sister-in-law and after we paid, we watched as two people practically had their arms ripped off when they tried to open the door to the store and the wind kicked it back in their faces.

I kind of hesitated, wondering if maybe it would be so bad if I spent the rest of the weekend inhaling chocolate fumes. But I could think of no good way to explain that to Patricia Bolton so I took a deep breath and we went back out into the city for the wind to play ping pong with us.

We decided to stop one more place and then head back to the hotel. A disappointment to be sure but we were beginning to feel that we were lucky to still have our heads attached.

We visited Rotofugi, where one can find such treasures as a teddy bear that smacks a person around, melting plastic fungus figures and all things odd in the toy world. We picked up some oddities and then decided that we could just walk back to the L station. (We had taken a cab to get to the toy store since it was a pretty good distance from where we were.)

Yeah.

We're stubborn. Not always bright, though. (It was a long walk when it the sky keeps spitting icy cold water on you.)

Turns out that we made a pretty good decision because we ended up walking right through Wicker Park. We found a kick ass bead store called Beadniks (where I procured some new skull beads for my collection and Mary picked up some pretty things to make a cool turtle necklace). Sadly they are website-less. But if you happen to be around the area, totally stop in there, very cool and extremely nice people.

We also visited Nina, a small but cool yarn shop. There was some kind of odd force at work in that store because I walked out with bright green and orange yarn and Mary's bag had deep rich forest colored yarn. This is completely out of character for each of us (she usually picks bright and I pick dark) and we pretty much chalked it up to the fact that our brains had been frozen by the weather and then blown out our ears by the wind.

We called it a day after that, figuring it wise not to press our luck. We stuffed ourselves back on the train and are now warm and dry in the hotel room. Cathy is slaving away at preview night and I'm all packed up and ready to go for Open Studios.

I'm getting twitchy about tomorrow, I'm ready to go. Bring on the quilters!!