A Fascinating Story

On the Chicago Tribune website today, you can see one of the strangest stories I have ever seen. It is at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-ravinia-melee-both-sep05,0,3766938.story. This story deals with events at the Ravina Festival this past week. Most of you know that Robert's and my first date was at Ravinia and that it is a place we have enjoyed on many occasions. While we usually attended for CSO events, I would not have thought a crowd from a Donna Summer concert could be like this!

And no, we don't have AC yet. They were going to let Robert know what time they were going to be there today, but at 4:30 it's not clear that it's really going to happen today.

Tomorrow I am off of work and will get back to the work of unpacking the house and getting settled. I'll do it while trying to entertain Judith. We'll see how it goes!

Our entertainment this week, as last, has been watching the National Convention in the evening. In general, we thought Fred Thompson, as an actor, could do a heck of a lot better job presenting his speech, but had some good lines. Joe Lieberman was surprisingly good. Rudy Guiliani had some good lines but his "drill, baby, drill" line in regard to oil drilling (which the whole crowd then repeated with gusto again and again), was more than a little over the top for us.

And Sarah Palin did a great job presenting herself. I wasn't personally thrilled with everything she said (on both sides I greatly dislike the role of VP candidate as attack dog and prefer to hear what people are for rather than what they are against), but she did a great job presenting herself and her party. We'll see how John McCain does tonight. He's going up against the first night of football, and since we are currently without DVR because of AT&T incompetence, we will not be able to see both events. So, we'll watch John McCain and trust that the news will give us the result of the Giants/Redskins later.

We are excited that football starts this weekend. And I am personally very excited to see the Bears in prime time on Sunday night. I am looking forward to them crushing the Colts. I am still in shock that Michigan has lost its season opener two years in a row against a non-BCS team. Yikes! But Northwestern won and so the college season is off to a good start.

Judith is still into her NAKED phase, but she is also seeming to adjust to the new house. Going up and down the stairs constantly is not as much of a need. For this home we did buy two small storage ottomans for the loft and unfortunately Judith decided the other night to empty one, pick it up (it's as big as she is) walk it over to the stairs and throw it down. That got a MAJOR reaction from us. We've been stern with her throwing stuffed animals, etc., down the stairs, but an ottoman was too much. All we could think of is someone walking up to the half way point and turning that corner and being hit with an ottoman! Or even an ottoman going through the wall and causing us a huge hassle. Anyway, we were both very upset. I saw her going to do it, and yelled, "Stop! Judith, NO! Stop!" She didn't. I think that's something Robert and I have in common is that we both agree that the issue of her not listening to us when we tell her something (especially to stop) is concerning. We will be working on this in the coming weeks with some games and such, but if she's going to be out walking with us and such she has to listen when we tell her to stop.

Besides that she is doing well. She's been eating and eating all week, which is good for her. She really is enjoying the loft. Her bedroom has been less interesting except for pulling items out to the loft to play with. And she's shown zero interest in her walk in closet which is just fine, because we are quickly filling it with storage items (all child related, but it's a lot of storage!).

So we'll work on getting the rest of it together over the weekend. We really want to make the whole house easy to live in as quickly as possible. The kitchen itself is now even proving to be fairly well set-up and more efficient than our previous one (even if it is smaller). I think it's even possible to continue getting rid of more items to Goodwill and garbage. Yeah! The less we have, the better!

Enjoy your weekend. Stay cool! (Is it going to be 100 degrees anywhere else?) And we'll talk to you all again next week.