What Do I Do When The Wife is Out of Town?

What do I do when The Wife is out of town? In reality, she and The Short One left Friday afternoon and she will be back on Saturday night so it barely counts as being out of town…but I am at a loss for what I'm supposed to do. I would like to do something productive that I can point to when she gets home and say "Look what I did while you were gone". You know, like building a book shelf or making a ceramic pot. Rather than being able to say "Look at the shelf I made you" or "Look at the pot I just pulled from our kiln", I would end up saying "Look, I cut off my thumb" or "Look, I burned down the house".

So, productivity while The Wife is gone will have to look like making the bed (check), taking The Tall One to breakfast (Waffle House, mmmm) and writing my blog (work-in-progress).

View from Willis Tower

Speaking of being out of town, The Family and I went to Chicago for The Wife's birthday this past week. The original purpose of the trip was to go to the U2 concert - review posted here (The U2 tickets are a story on their own. I'll blog that around Christmas, though.). We were only there for three nights, but when I plan a trip I can cram a lot of activity into a short amount of time (talk about productive!). We saw a concert, museums, tours and the second largest ball of twine in the world. Plus, I took a lot of pictures of buildings. How many pictures, you ask? Well, let's say that after day two I had to go through and delete pictures from the digital camera to make room for more pictures of buildings. For the most part, photos of The Boys were preferred to those of buildings during the "culling process".

In addition to learning that I like to take pictures of buildings, here are three things The Family learned on the trip to Chicago.

1. The days of the "kid's menu" are definitely over for us. While it is a little more expensive eating out these days (especially at a nice restaurant) it is fun to see The Boys learn to eat more than chicken fingers. Chicago has tremendous restaurants – which is not news to anyone. For The Wife's birthday, we went to a place called Kinzie Steakhouse. Other than the U2 concert The Boys said the highlight of the trip was the steak that we shared that night. Part of it was the novelty of ordering a FORTY-EIGHT OUNCE PORTERHOUSE, but part of it was how perfectly delicious that steak was. Another night we ate at Giordano's and introduced The Boys to real deep dish pizza. They weren't sure that they would like it, but they were both impressed. We'll stuff them full of fruits and veggies when we get them home – at least that is what a good parent might do.

2. Chicago knows shopping. The Magnificent Mile (which I kept calling "The Miracle Mile") is a stretch of Michigan Avenue that contains nearly 800 shops, hotels and restaurants, yet not a Wal-Mart in sight (even from the John Hancock Tower Observatory). It is not, however, just the overwhelming volume of the retail smorgasbord that is impressive. It is how it is set up. For example, across the street from luxury jeweler, Cartier, is luxury lingerie shop, La Perla. Next door to Tiffany & Co? Victoria's Secret. This is marketing strategy that I'll call "Complimentary Consumer Opportunity". It's like when you go to Kroger (not one of those on Michigan Avenue, either) and the birthday candles are next to the Betty Crocker cake mix. Or Smucker's Jelly a shelf below the Jif Peanut Butter. Or, as Cal Noughton, Jr. told Ricky Bobby they go together like "Chinese food and chocolate puddin'". These Mag Mile marketers really know what they are doing (Here's a diamond, now go buy a nightie...for the record, we bought neither on this trip).

3. They watch Wheel of Fortune in downtown Chicago, too, right? On our last day in the city as we walked through Millennium Park, The Wife and I talked about how nice the downtown area (at least inside The Loop) had been planned. You are an easy walk from restaurants, shopping, parks, the lake front, concerts…basically everything except a Wal-Mart. And for a brief moment we thought what our life style would be like if we lived there. We quickly came to the conclusion that we would still spend most evenings at the ballpark with The Boys. The nights we weren't watching baseball, we'd be watching re-runs of Everybody Loves Raymond on WGN. When I think back on it, the only families we saw out in the city were tourists. All the locals were either singles or young (kid-less) couples. I suppose the forty-somethings with kids were busy seeing what Vanna was wearing.

Well, The Wife should be home soon. I'll see if I can find a couple of other low-effort, high-visibility tasks I can accomplish before she gets here. At least the blog is done, honey. And all ten fingers are still intact.