Chicago Review

So, I'm back in the 'Nati. It never gets any easier to hear the pilot welcoming us to Cincinnati. Not that it's a bad city or a bad place to live, it's just not the greatest place in the world. Oh well, it is what it is.

The whole reason for going to Chicago was to give a fancy presentation at a fancy conference for public opinion research aficionados. The slogan for this year's conference was awesome: Freqs and Geeks.

I went with my co-worker/friend/P90X coach and we had planned on buying the conference t-shirt because the slogan was just so freaking fantastic. Unfortunately they only had them in large and extra-large, so we were forced to do without. We decided to commission an Etsy artist to make us our own custom shirts because we're geeks like that. I can't wait for them to get here.

The first night we were there we ate Chicago Pizza. So much for sticking to the P90X diet while I was there. I rationalized it by pretty much not eating anything for the entire day before pizza time, which I realized was probably a mistake after we met an old friend of mine for a drink and I was feeling pretty loopy halfway through my single Blue Moon.

Of course, it rained the entire freaking afternoon on Wednesday and pretty much most of the morning on Thursday.

In between the torrential downpours we wandered through part of Chicago.

We visited the American Girl store to see how badly Mattel ruined the brand.

Lynn was sad that all of the dolls had tiny yappy dogs and there were no Whippets or larger dogs to be found. I was sad that they discontinued the Kirsten collection. We were both sad that American Girl Place features a doll beauty salon, where you can get the doll's hair styled for the low, low price of $20.

We ate leftover pizza for lunch and then gave our super awesome presentation. It went pretty well, if I do say so myself. I think it was well-received, even though most of our audience leaned heavily toward the academic side of things and wouldn't know a web panel if it bit them on the ass.

After the presentation we did Core Synergistics. Yes, I did my P90X while I was out of town. Tony would be proud.

Of course when Friday morning came around it was bright and sunny, since that was the day we were leaving.

This was how sunny it was at 5:30 AM Chicago time. I love it!

Sure looks different in the sunlight.

This is quite possibly the cleanest city waterway I've ever seen in my life.

Yum!

All in all, it was a nice 48 hours. I wish we had more time to spend there, since we really didn't get to do or see anything fun. I told C that we'd definitely be making a weekend trip at some point. I'd drive up there just for the pizza.

Oh, and you know how sometimes you come back from a trip and you get to work and there's a list a mile freaking long of things that you need to do as soon as you get back? Yeah, that kind of sucks, doesn't it?