Griff is lucky to have a seasoned Tillman teach him the pool tricks. These two start Sea Babies (swim lessons) in 2 weeks!

Cool Baby

We decided we should show a little update on the pregnancy……And I’ve been experimenting with photoshop a little bit.

14 Weeks

18 Weeks

22 Weeks

30 Weeks

The City of Chicago is in the middle of a budget crisis.  How do I know this you ask?  I will tell you.  When you get 3 tickets within a week for not having a front license plate after going 17 months without getting one, something is fishy.  I didn’t even know that I was required to have a front license plate.  One of these tickets was received while my car was parked inside of the parking garage attached to my apartment complex, with the front of my car inches from a concrete wall, meaning someone basically had to crawl on top of my hood to look down to make sure there was a plate.We would have probably received a 4th ticket had Molly not noticed the cop driving down our street and walked out and told him that we already had 3 and that we had just moved and were in the process of putting one on.

Fiddler on the Roof is one of Molly’s all-time favorite movies.  I had never seen it before we were married, an absolutely horrifying revelation for Molly (it was probably a good thing she found out post-wedding).  We were really excited when we found out that the play was coming to Chicago.  But, it went to the next level when we discovered that it was the farewell tour for Topol, the guy who played Tevye in the original movie.  This guy…..

So we made the huge sacrifice and walked all 5 blocks from our apartment to the theatre.  We had great seats on the 4th row and had an incredible time.  We couldn’t believe how good Topol looked and shimmied for a 74 year old.  Molly has told me at least 10 times today that I need to sing and shimmy like him every day so that I can be in as good of shape when I’m that old.   (skip to the 14 second or 38 second mark to see what I’m talking about)

I don’t know how many other cities are on the tour, but if you get a chance, we highly suggest you go.  Possibly the best part of the night, though, happened as we were walking home when Molly said, “that just made living in Chicago completely worth it”.  Translation:  I may have purchased at least one more Chicago winter from her.  I need to think of something to top it next year in case I need to buy another.  Suggestions?

We’ve been having quite the family discussion lately about the value of a wagon, meaning a station wagon vehicle. I personally think they’re fantastic but I do have to add a small caveat: some wagons truly are hideous and there’s no defense for them, but there are quite a few that I think are some of the best looking cars around, like this one below.

I’m fine with Molly not truly appreciating the wagon, she grew up in Arizona and thought that the word Granola referred strictly to a type of food and not a lifestyle.  However, I had to draw the line when the following statement left her mouth….

“I’d rather drive a mini-van than a nice wagon”

That’s when I knew things had gotten completely out of hand.  I mean, a minivan?  Really?  Over that fine automobile pictured above?  Who’s more right, Molly or me?  There’s no right answer here but I think she’s taken the hate to an extreme level that I don’t feel comfortable with when she brought the mini-van into it.

So, I decided to finally upgrade to a nice DSLR camera and try my hand at snapping a few photographs. Here are a few of the first ones I’ve done, thought I’d share.

Ferris Bueller’s dad works in the large glass building on the right. He may have taken this exact train to get to work downtown when he didn’t drive.
Taken from the Michigan Avenue bridge looking up the Chicago river towards Lake Michigan.

It’s cold in Chicago, as you can see by the ice in the river. But it didn’t stop Mr. Donald Trump from building the gargantuan thing on the right.

As many of you are, I’m sure, well aware, I follow the sport of baseball with a certain zeal. As each January comes to an end every year, I feel a twinge of excitement knowing that pitchers and catchers report to spring training in less than a month, this year it’s February 13th to be exact, but who’s counting. This year it means even more given the incredibly harsh winter we’ve had here in Chicago as being merely a symbol that spring does actually exist, and it will get warmer soon, but that’s a completely different issue.

So, back to baseball. Sometimes I think I may like the sport a little too much, follow it a little too closely. A majority of the time, I quickly dismiss this thought as being absurd. How could I not? It’s America’s pastime? However, something happened recently that made me second guess my extreme loyalty to the game. (Don’t worry, it didn’t last too long, just much longer than it normally does.)

I was at the gym a few nights ago at my hotel in Atlanta pumping some mad iron. A show called “5 Reasons You Can’t Blame….” on ESPN came on the big TV. I’ve seen this before, I enjoy the show, it just goes through 5 reasons you can’t blame things in sports on what seems would be the most likely culprit. For example, why you can’t blame the Bills for losing 4 straight super bowls, or the American League for using the DH, or Bobby Cox for the Braves repeated postseason failures, things like that. This episode was titled, “5 Reasons You Can’t Blame Steve Bartman for the Cubs losing”. My first instinct was to be excited that something baseball related was on, even better something about my Cubs. WRONG! I didn’t even make it through the introduction. Watching Mark Prior blow through the Marlins for 7 innings, then a double, then Bartman, then a walk, then a hit, then Gonzalez boots a double play ball, and then hit after hit after hit. While Dusty “the human toothpick” Baker sits on the bench and lets 23 year old Prior just get pummeled. Horrible, just horrible. I had to politely ask the others in the gym if I could change the channel, luckily nobody asked for my reasons why.

I thought I had completely put October of 2003 behind me. I had to turn my phone off for a few days to avoid the constant harassment from friends after another disastrous Cubs collapse. That night in the gym, however, proved me wrong. It brought back painful memories that felt all too real. As if it were happening again.

Now, to the point of all this rambling. Am I too emotionally invested? Is it abnormal to let a simple game cause so much emotional strife, or on the opposite end, happiness? (I haven’t experienced much of the latter since about 1994 when the 49ers actually fielded a real football team). I guess we’ll see, but I highly doubt anything will change.

This story may require a bit of background. I have been known to experience my fair share of aches and pains over the last few years. I attribute this principally to two things. First, I had a second, or maybe it was a third or fourth, cousin who was a catcher for the Houston Astros in the 80′s and because of this I thought it was a good idea that I should be one as well, even though I sent him some of my treasured baseball cards for him to sign and never received them back. For the 10 years I played catcher all the way through high school, I thought this was a great decision. Now, almost 10 years later, I’m beginning to second guess due to pain and stiffness I occasionally feel in my knees.

Second, I am an auditor. I sit behind a computer all day and make Excel formulas. (It’s a lot more exciting than it sounds, well, who am I kidding, no it’s not) This never hit home more than when I went to Arizona over Christmas. We went to Molly’s cabin in Pinetop where, much to my surprise, there was close to two feet of snow. I thought back to my scouting days and decided to do my good turn daily and shovel the driveway. All went well until I got a couple of killer blisters on my hand, think Excel here. Nelson-Watts construction would be ashamed.

So, needless to say, Molly sometimes thinks I am hiding in an 80 year old body, which I, of course, vehemently deny. Although, after reading what I just wrote, I am beginning to question that fact myself. During this same trip, I played racquetball with my brother-in-law Parker. Bad idea. I figured there wasn’t much to the game, I’m a pretty coordinated kid, I can hit a small ball with a large racquet. Boy was I wrong, Parker absolutely waxed the floor with me, it was both humbling and a little embarrassing.

Well, with all that being said, the night after I got worked over, my foot started to hurt pretty bad. I didn’t think much of it and when it felt much better a few hours later I officially stopped worrying about it. Well, the next morning it was much worse and the morning after that, when I was back home in Chicago it was so bad I couldn’t even walk. I figured I was even worse off than I originally thought, a game of racquetball did this? I couldn’t believe it. And yes, that is my pitching wedge that I had to use as a cane, it was all I could find and I couldn’t walk without it. Molly had a lot of fun with that.

After a nice visit with my local doctor, he said it was an infection. What? I thought my foot might have been broken, at least that would give me a decent excuse for the poor showing on the racquetball court. How in the world do you get an infection in your foot, when you haven’t gone barefoot anywhere and don’t have any kind of cut, dry skin, nothing? So, a few days and a lot of antibiotics later, foot was back to normal. Luckily enough for me, it bought me some more time to convince Molly that I’m not completely falling apart.

Just thought I’d share a little exchange I witnessed walking home from work awhile back. I’m in the loop, on Lake, which if you’ve been here you know is underneath the el, so the lanes can get a little cramped because of the poles holding up the El.

As I’m walking along, minding my own business, I hear a loud crash right next to me, 2 cabbies had just run into each other. Remember that I’m walking home from work, traffic can get nightmarish at this time of day. Two cars running into each other isn’t anything too out of the ordinary, but the next 2 minutes were. The 2 guys get out of their cars and start yelling at each in some unknown language, completely ignoring the line of cars growing behind them. That’s the way cabbies work anyway, they feel they pretty much own the roads and can do whatever they want.

To all 3 to possibly 4 of you who look at my blog every once in awhile, you know that my blogging talents do not come close to my bean counting skills, or just being rad skills. I’m also pretty bad at letting people know of events that some might consider important occur. So, if any of you 3 don’t know, then here you go. I’m engaged. Here’s proof.