The green, 2011

A few scenes--a very few scenes--from the extended St. Patrick's Day week in Chicago:

Saturday, March 12: the Chicago River is dyed green. Too early in the day for me, but I did see it live for the first time in 2009. I went by in early afternoon, and as always completely missed the parade downtown. No signs of it at all except vendors, and teens on the way to drunkenness.

  

I guess I wasn't in the right place to see the river bright green:

But Monday the 14th (no longer any South Side Irish Parade on St. Pat's Sunday to endure), I heard from someone on Twitter that the river was still green, so I biked the miles downtown and back just to check it out. Taken from a little west of the previous shot, it's greener. I don't get it...more sunlight? The dye shifted in the river?

I had my first visit inside Hoosier Mama Pie Co. on W. Chicago on the way back (though I had had their pies before), a rare time they were open on a Monday, for Pi Day (3/14).

On St. Patrick's itself, I checked my Twitter list of Chicago businesses to see who had good specials. Swim Cafe on W. Chicago, a place I don't get to nearly enough (especially since they have the lowest-priced bottomless coffeeshop coffee I've seen in the greater West Town/Wicker Park/Logan Square area--$2.25 when I've seen $3, $3.50). I had the Irish stew I'd read about, a creamy vegetable soup. With bread: this was a lovely presentation. Breaking the square format here:

I biked home with a couple goodies for later. This was the only overt sign of the day, seen on Milwaukee Ave. around 3:15 pm:

I stopped at the local liquor store later. Guinness seemed too obvious so I picked an Irish cider. This is the corned beef and cabbage hand pie I got from Hoosier Mama before the Swim visit, and a green velvet cupcake from Swim. There was a chocolate-beer one, but I'd had a Guinness chocolate cupcake from Milwaukee last week. And a vegan one; I was curious but only wanted to buy one, and I've been hooked on red velvet for a couple years now. (I'm sure someone somewhere does a blue velvet cupcake...)

The hand pie was fantastic. Notice you can almost see through the bag. The cider was fine and cupcake delicious. Beyond that: completely avoided bars, all week. I'm curious about Irish soda bread and wondering if I can still find some post-March 17...

last holiday-themed post

Maybe. These photos are just too sad for my Flickr account, so here you are. The lousy weather meant I didn't try to go to Iowa for Christmas. Then my family called on Christmas to see if I'd come the next day or later, but by then I'd given up on the idea of going, and besides I'd started coming down with a cold the night before (when I had a nice night out with an out-of-state friend here to visit her family, going out for a big dinner in Chinatown and drinks in an apartment in a former paper factory, I think it was). So I didn't go to my hometown, didn't have family here, and didn't know if it was okay to call friends (some of who turned out to be here, and would have invited me to dinner and to get glogg at Simon's [which was kind of my dream day if I was stuck here] if they'd known I was also in Chicago). But I was too sick, not very sick but sick enough I didn't want to make things worse, that I couldn't have gone out with them anyway. Nor could I go out and have fun seeing what was open in the Thai neighborhood, or ride Metra when hardly anyone was on it, or check out an unguarded abandoned building.

So on Christmas I had a cold, and only went out (because I needed to go somewhere, briefly) to the 24-hour Starbucks at North and Wells (open till 7 pm on Christmas, however). My breakfast was a large venti eggnog latte and lemon pound cake, and I spent a few minutes reading a coffee-table book on the past few decades of the Boston Bruins.

When I got around to dinner, I made some cheap staples (soup and macaroni and cheese) from Family Dollar, but fortunately I had salad ingredients from Treasure Island and a beer from Olde Main in my hometown, so the dinner wasn't too pathetic. Also, in the evening my friend in Boston called and it turned out he hadn't gone home (Albany) for Christmas either because of car trouble, so we had that to talk about, and hockey, lots of talk about hockey (I still don't have a Chicago friend to regularly talk sports with).

Dessert/late-night snack was hot cocoa (Penzey's mint mix) and cookies from another friend. I didn't get to make any cookies this year. What I didn't do for Christmas (cooking, decorating, sending cards, giving or getting gifts), and won't be doing for New Year's (though at least I'm going to the Blackhawks game, the last one I got a ticket for before the prices went absurdly high), would fill volumes. So, I'll try not to think about it too much. It wasn't a terrible day, but I can't believe I did so little. Except listen to the all-Christmas-music lite station incessantly for weeks (as noted previously). And it did switch, right at midnight, to a non-Christmas Tom Petty song.

Next up (what I should have blogged tonight, but I want to get back to that Bruins book so I can technically finish reading it in 2009): the impending closure of Standee's, the 24-hour grill in Edgewater. Which the Chicago media hasn't covered much, maybe because this happened so suddenly? And they're supposed to move across the street, but we'll see...They have amazing stories to tell there. And when I ate there with a friend the other day, the food was the best I'd ever had there. Go figure, I start to like the place right before it closes.