In an effort to stretch our bellies for the big feast, new Chicago friends and I cooked ourselves one helluva deliciously starchy meal.
I contributed macaroni & cheese. Cooking for eight proved to be a slight macaroni disaster considering my for-one equipped kitchen and my poor math skills. I took a delightful recipe built for two and expanded it for our party.
Carry the one
And two pounds of pasta later, I'm mixing all the necessary parts in a cleaning bucket.
But the feast was a success!.
My stomach was stretched and, with in a warm and happy Chicago apartment, the holiday season official kicked off.
I flew home for turkey, family and, most importantly, a Lola muffin.
It's hard to pick just one out of the hundreds of glamor shots I took of the peanut, but here are a few favorites.
R got to play too!
With the food and Lola fest under my belt and a quick visit with R, it seemed I would be mentally prepped for the last two weeks of the semester.
Except that I had to fly home. And it was snowing. And O'Hare sucks.
With a delayed flight I had three hours to kill in Bradley International airport to do...absolutely nothing. Bradley is actually made only of Styrofoam, plastic and polyester. It is SERiously lacking in activities, food or even pretty get-away pictures to look at. I gazed at my own reflection eating a McDonald's salad for two hours until the sweet sweet sound of my flight being called woke me out of that nightmare.
Had there not been a devil baby with a fire alarm-pitched scream on board I might have had to dwell on the turbulence that bopped the plane around the cloudy skies like a ping-pong ball. Lucky for all involved, devil baby kept us right distracted for the duration of the two hour flight and hour-long taxi.
After memorizing the contents of the Sky Mall catalog (p. 104: Slanket - hint hint, Santa) and the balding pattern on the back of the gentleman's head in front of me, it became clear that I have lost my travel patients. Yet, there is nothing you can do. you scan the airplane/airport/baggage claim/taxi line and you just see thousands of blank faces that have been able to swallow the red hot anger caused by a simple weekend of travel.
I'm sure Sky Mall is already on the case. Looking into the weirdo inventive abyss to find the next neck pillow-foot massage-stress ball-popcorn machine that will fold into a tiny carry-on meeting all FAA standards.
Did I mention I have two weeks left? Yup. Two big fat and full weeks until my first quarter is over. Craziness.
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