Weekend update, late as usual
So I actually had written up a nice somewhat short post about what I did over the weekend already. I hit save and then Squarespace decided to crash. So yeah that was an hour of work down the drain. Plus it’s been a while since a post so I wanted to get something out there for you guys. This past Sunday actually was quite nice on the exercise front. So I guess I’ll make an even shorter more concise version.
I don’t remember what I really did Friday, I think I finished the lawn work and cleaned up the house a bit but I was pretty wiped from work, that’s for another blog. To be honest, I also have been taking it easy since the Cinco, as of writing this, almost two weeks later, my heel still hurts along with my knee. The knee isn’t bad, but man the heel, especially when I wake up or sit for a while. I also knew that I would really be doing a good amount of walking Sunday so I decided a rest would be good.
Saturday was pretty easy going as well, got the summer car out of the garage and gassed up. Took it and my buddy Mike on a trip to my comic book store, Comix Revolution in Mt Prospect. This time around I was able to look around, since I didn’t have the little one. My wife and mother in law took her to the Long Grove Chocolate Festival, it’s become an annual thing for them. Anyway I picked up the two trades JLA #1 and The Flash Blood will run. Odd, I’m not usually a DC fan but lately have been reading more….still don’t like Superman and Aquaman though but I digress. I also picked up two My Little Pony comics for the daughter.
So I spent the day watching some TV and reading comics, oddly as I was reading the My Little Pony to my daughter I was surprised to see a plot line about city hall and what it takes to run a city, it even got into bureaucracy issues and red tape….go figure.
Now for the good story, so Sunday rolled around and we had Cubs tickets, it would be our first trip to Wrigley this year and we wanted to see the new big screens or whatever the hip kids call them these days. It was my wife’s birthday on Tuesday so this would be a nice way to celebrate early, plus our friend wanted to take her to breakfast about a half a mile away or so at a place called Ann Sathers. I had never been there but heard good things about it.
We had to get there around 9am so we headed to the Addison bus right after dropping off our daughter at my parents. We got down there around 9:15am and walked to the restaurant, which didn’t disappoint. I don’t remember what anyone else had, but I had Salmon Eggs Benedict and it was pretty good. When we finished it was only about 10 or maybe 10:15 so we took a walk with our friend for a bit, then walked her to her car. We then headed back towards the ballpark.
As we approached Wrigley, I already knew the gates wouldn’t be open, so we started looking at some of the bars to stop at. There were a good amount of newish ones (I say newish because to me they’re new but I haven’t walked down Clark Street in probably 3 years) We decided to stop by Vines on Clark. It turned out to be a pretty nice place, huge outdoor seating with a view of the front of Wrigley, a big sun room kind of area where the doors are open when its nice out, actually even the restaurant part had big doors that were opened bringing the outside in. It also had a good beer and wine selection and our waitress Abbey was great as well. I wasn’t really hungry again, but they had white humus so of course I had to order it. Between the breakfast and humus, we didn’t eat anything at the ballpark, which broke our normal tradition.
We headed to Wrigley after a couple of beers and headed for our seats. For those of you not familiar with Wrigley there are giant ramps you walk up to go to the seats. Our seats are on the highest level so there is a lot of uphill walking. Enough that made me want to make base camp at one level and make for the summit (aka our seats) in the morning. So after the trek we got to our seats and sat down to watch the teams practice. We had been sitting maybe two or three minutes when we were approached by a young man, probably in his late twenties with a Cubs hat, khakis, Cubs jacket and an employee badge, he was also carrying two little purple gift bags.
So he walked over and said he was with the Cubs front office, at this point I saw that he also had a stack of tickets in his hand. He asked if we wanted to upgrade our seats. The ones we have are part of a season package and they actually are pretty good, first base side, nothing blocking them and you see the whole field, but since it was my wife’s birthday I figured I should at least ask how much. So I asked how much and he said no charge. My wife than asked what the catch was.
He told us that the seats we would be moving into were purchased by a company called SPG (turns out they own the Westin, W and aloft hotel chains amongst others) and for the ad promotion we would need to wear hats with their logo and wave at a camera at the end of the first inning, that was it. Oh and we’d be on the new big screen! So we agreed and had our 15 seconds of fame! We also met a nice guy and his daughter from New Jersey, his daughter Izzy took a photo of the screen while we were on because her dad did a little photo bomb! She was nice enough to text it to a total stranger so we have the photo which came out pretty good! Oh and did I mention that the seats were first base side like 7 rows from the field? It was pretty awesome.
So all in all it was a great day and I had blown past my daily goal before we got to our seats, so everything else was just icing on the exercise cake. It was too bad the Cubs lost and broke their 6 game win streak but still it wasn’t bad at all. I even watched what I ate (somewhat) the whole weekend. So below are some pictures for you to enjoy and as always thanks for all your support and thanks for reading!
-John