As I was waking up on Saturday morning, it suddenly struck me: I hadn’t finished my online course! And Saturday was the last day! SH*T! So as soon as I woke up, I had my laptop on and was at the SchoolNet website trying to find my online class. Once I found it, I worked for an hour and a half solid trying to complete the week’s assignments. Since judiang wasn’t up yet and elsaf was occupying herself with her online shenanigans, it worked out just fine. I wrote a short research summary on Johannes Kepler and “unpacked” two Physical Science indicators and participated in the class discussion board, and then was done. Phew! (My original intent was to finish the class before I went to Chicago, but I goofed off Sunday & Monday and had no time on Tuesday. Well, not quite like that, but good enough!)

We had yet another Entenmann’s danish (different flavors each morning) to start our morning off right. And our main task of the day was to find a Japanese sushi place for lunch. I still intended to buy the girls some sushi (thus getting some for me, too). After much scouring of the WWW (including using the wonderful local.google.com – if you haven’t tried it yet, you should!) we narrowed down the places to one: Penang, a Malaysian restaurant & sushi bar. It was in Chinatown and we figured that was easy enough to get to. Judi talked about free parking and all that jazz, but when we got there, we found out things had changed a bit since Judi last needed to worry about parking. Still $5 wasn’t too much of a hardship.

Penang turned out to be across the street from the parking lot and catty corner from our usual dim sum place. And it turned out to have mighty fine sushi! We all ordered miso soup as a starter and then got our favorite sushis to munch on. I went with the maki combo – tuna maki, yellow tail maki, and my personal favorite, California roll. Turns out I hit the jackpot as they brought out this HUGE plate o’ sushi. So much so that I had to give some of my tuna & yellow tail maki away. I et all the California roll myself, of course. 🙂 (Besides, I have to protect Judi from POISON, AKA avocado.)

We left the place quite full and walked down the streets of Chinatown, stopping in a bakery to get some sesame buns w/ red bean paste and a couple other lovelies (mini mooncakes with lotus and some with red bean paste). We shopped in a few stores too, enjoying the neat-o objects d’art (and the tacky stuff too). But we didn’t stay too long – back to the new apartment to rest up and goof off.

Hmmm, I feel like I’m missing something between returning from Chinatown and eventually going to Lalo’s for supper. Elsa? Judi? Can either of you remind me what we did? Or was that it? Anyhoo, we’d agreed to meet with miz_em and her hubby for supper at Lalo’s Mexican Restaurant. Once again, Elsa did a fine job of driving us through the crazy traffic known as Chicago and got us to a parking garage near the restaurant. While we waited on Mr & Miz Em (heh), I ordered an amaretto sour & Judi got a margarita. Once we were all together, we ordered all kinds of wonderful food. I went with flautas, one of my favorite Mexican (American) dishes. Flute shaped tubes of fried yellow corn tortillas with meat & cheese (beef for me, thanks) in them. Guacamole (POISON for Judi), rice & beans as well. Very tasty. Chicago prices. Ah well! 😉

We had a wonderful evening talking with Em & hubby, but it eventually had to end. We wished her a Happy Birthday (giving many gift suggestions to him) and waddled back to the parking garage. As we were returning to the garage, we saw huge signs saying “SOFA” on them and I thought “Ah, wrong part of the garage. We’re parked in FABRIC.” Yes, I had the ticket to confirm that we were parked on the second level, called FABRIC for some reason. But as we moved closer, I saw the sign next to “SOFA” saying “MOUNTAIN.” Ah! It’s not part of the parking garage! It’s a sofa store! LOL – I admitted this to the gurls, and we all laughed.

Back home, we put on “The End of the World” which was the second Doctor Who episode of this new season. (Elsa had started the download of it almost as soon as it popped up online – ah! That’s what we did during the between meal time!) Once again, having a HUGE SCREEN to watch the new episode on was fabulous. And I really liked the second story. Yay for New Who being fabby! I knew it would! After Doctor Who, we got out the cheesecake and started watching Kill Bill Vol 1 (a DVD that Judi bought all by herself!) It’s still such an odd movie, but it did make me want to finally go see Volume 2. Maybe this weekend I’ll rent it?

We crawled to bed after the movie and slept soundly, because Sunday was to be TRAVEL DAY, where we met with many pitfalls to Trina getting home at a decent hour. Bleh! But more about that later.

PS: Damn fine weather we had yesterday & today! Let’s hear it for SPRING!