Birthdays, babies and... Chicago

Last week was Scott's birthday, and to celebrate the exciting event I cooked a fun meal. He requested double-baked potatoes and stuffed cornish game hen. Luckily for me, the local butcher had pre-stuffed hens all trussed up and ready to go, so it was a pretty simple meal, and very delicious! The Strongbad messenger bag that I got him was also a big hit.

The next day, a business trip to me to the depths of Illinois in the depths of February. Not a time of year that I'd particularly recommend, but Chicago is a fun town. The below shot is from Millenium park, where a modern art installation shaped like a giant jellybean reflects the city skyline, very cool.

Chicago is also home to Oprah!

But we didn't get tickets so no story there.

Meanwhile, I had heard good things about the restaurants in town, and so was particularly interested in visiting a few while there. On the recommendation of a friend, we visited Avec, which is now an all-time favourite of mine. I loved the modern and casual vibe, the fantastic and inventive dishes, and our waiter who looked like a rock-star dropout.

But I think the style of Chicago dining is generally much more... traditional, shall we say. We had a couple of memorable lunches; a work function at Les Nomades, a classic french restaurant in a charming brownstone building and, at the conclusion of our duties, a late lunch at RL, the Ralph Lauren restaurant. Both restaurants are located just steps from Michigan Avenue and the famed 'Magnificent Mile' of lots and lots of name-brand shopping. Anyhoo, back to the point, Les Nomades is old school & understated, in the way of a hundred French restaurants around the globe. Very nice, very good food. RL, on the other hand, is like nothing else... it's kind of like a fake private club - which could be funny in an ironic kind of way - except the people dining there seem to think it's a real private club. Weird. We saw soooo many 'ladies who lunch', almost every table on a Friday afternoon was a circle of women with frosty blond hair and expensive purses.

I, on the other hand, was busy trying to commit petty fraud. Darlene, a colleague I was travelling with, and I had gotten our credit cards mixed up the night before at dinner, and she decided not to join us for lunch. So I blithely handed over 'my' card after lunch, only to realize just before adding my signature to the bill that I was not in fact, the card holder.

I'm happy to report that we were both very well behaved and refrained from racking up extraordinary charges on one another's cards. (Except that bottle of Veuve Clicquot vintage reserve... my apologies, Darlene.)

I also had the time to take in some culture while in Chicago (I'll admit, the cold temperatures encouraged me to stay inside during my free time.) The Chicago Cultural Centre was fantastic, although my visit to the Art Institute of Chicago was a bit abbreviated as I only had 45 minutes before closing. Nice impressionists, though wished I had instead found their collection of modern American painters. Next time.

And then on Thursday night, just as I was returning to the hotel after a night out (at Avec, actually), I got the phone call that my little niece had arrived! Kate Amelia French, what a beautiful name. So on Friday I rushed out and found a cute little outfit for her, and when I came home, Scott and I headed over to meet her and hug my nephew Dawson.

It's going to be fun having a niece!

This weekend I tackled telemark skiing and won. Well, sort of.

It was a trip of fun and revelry with friends at Sun Peaks ski resort. Of the group of eight that we headed up with, five friends - including Scott - had long ago embraced the challenge and apparent rewards of free-heel skiing. Five years of endless nagging, cajoling, teasing and convincing had pushed me into agreeing to rent telemark gear and give it a go. The last two members of this band of eight were newbies to the sport of skiing entirely, so I knew that I could stick to the easy runs with them, even if the rest of the group was itching to go higher and steeper.

Telemark skiing involves a style of turning down the slopes with one foot ahead of the other - different from the standard alpine-style skiing of parallel legs and feet. In order to put one foot in front of the other, both knees bend, and the back heel comes up, kind of in a deep-knee walking - or lunge - position.

It turns out that years of watching Scott and the others master this technique paid off, because I was able to copycat their style pretty easily, even if my execution was a little shaky. But as you can imagine, repeating this turn all the way down the mountain requires Herculean leg strength and control, and by late afternoon each day my knee-bends were becoming microscopic and my heel was barely leaving the ground. The bane of my weekend was crossing my skis, again and again and again. The more tired my legs got the less control I had, then that damned back ski would start flapping in the wind and cross over the other, and down I'd go.

However, the classic wipeout of the weekend came when I was in full control, and busy trying to demonstrate 'proper' technique to our newbies on how to stop on a steeper slope. I stopped alright - and felt my heels come off the skis as my whole body fell forward past my ski tips and whap! I hit the soft snow like a giant tree being felled. "I really hoped you weren't hurt," Carla said afterward, "because I really needed to laugh."

So it seems I'm like the idiot savant of telemark skiing ... quick to pick up the basics, but slow to develop any skill. I'm not sure I'm ready to give up my downhill equipment just yet, but I'll keep working on the telemark and see where it takes me.

Meanwhile, our apres-ski time was spent lounging in our winter palace. The house we rented turned out to be a rock star pad. Scott particularly enjoyed living up to the roll.

Had we known that the kitchen would be bigger than most of our homes - and decked out with top-of-the-line-appliances - we probably would have gone crazy with the cooking. But even so, we had some stellar meals and all the extra space and food was put to good use when local Kamloops and Sun Peaks friends dropped by to visit.

Good times!