I'm going to the windy city tomorrow

I like the way that the second C and G softly ricochet around my mouth when I say “Chicago.”

I hadn’t really thought about the city a lot until I knew that I would be going there. But I knew that it was one of those giant cities that was different from New York and Los Angeles, the first two biggest cities in the US. Chicago is the third biggest, and I know it has its own identity, even if I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it is. I think I'll know more after I visit it.

Chicago reminds me of red, the world fair, deep-dish pizza, and that really big fire. Oh, and Michael Jordan and the Bulls. I know it is a windy city and that it is really cold.

I go to Chicago for the first time in my life tomorrow. I am excited to eat, fly, and hear other accents. Those are my favorite things about traveling.

Eating is the best part of any trip. I love eating good food.

I will miss Sam while I am gone.

Nothing as lovely as a tree

We took in a stray tree a few days ago. We just found it on our apartment doorstep and couldn’t bare to send it back into the cold.

We weren’t sure about its breed, but we knew it was sick and hungry and that it needed our help.

We’ve never been parents, so we turned to one of the experts for help--Sam’s mom, Sue.

She suggested some disciplinary tactics...AKA pruning. Sam lovingly started working with our newly adopted child, clipping away and cleaning up the poor little tree. Although the mother in me kept saying, “You’re being too hard on him!”, Sam kept trimming and shaping the disheveled tree.



I know that it doesn’t look like much now, but at least no one can accuse us of being sissy parents.

We are working on nurturing this little guy back to health. Our apartment is not well lit and painfully small, but we hope to turn it into a positive environment for the tree so it can grow up healthy and strong.

-Meg