The Adventures of Jesse & Stephanie: July 2007

I hope you all are having a wonderful summer! I know I have personally been enjoying the weather here...and enjoying having an air-conditioner on some of these days! I hope you all had a great July 4th...we had a barbecue at our house with two other couples, then enjoyed watching fireworks go off literally ALL OVER the city...here, you don't need to go see the fireworks downtown, you can stand on your back porch and see like five shows at once! Of course, none of them are probably nearly as good as the actual show downtown (I assume, anyway, I've never seen the city's fireworks), but it's still fun!

The weekend of July 6,7, and 8, my family came up to visit! They got into town late Friday night and picked Jesse up at the apartment, then came to pick me up at work. We came back to our apartment and decided that ice cream sounded good, so we went down the street to the Tastee Freez. Saturday morning, Jesse and I got up and cooked a massive breakfast so that we would all have energy to go sightseeing for the day and we all left the apartment to catch the bus to go to the Lincoln Park Zoo. We walked around the conservatory there and then checked out the zoo, which was pretty neat. We then decided to head downtown. After eating lunch in the massive, two-story McDonald's downtown (seriously, it has an escalator AND and an elevator...crazy), we headed to Millennium Park in search of the famous bean. We watched all the little kids running around in the fountains down there and took a few pictures at the bean before realizing that we were already completely wiped out...because it was in the mid-90's outside!!! We decided to go back to our apartment and chill and recharge for a few hours, then we went out for some famous Chicago-style pizza for dinner that night. We just hung out at our apartment most of the day on Sunday because it was even hotter outside than it had been on Saturday, then we decided we all wanted to go to the beach. We drove to Montrose Harbor and there was a cop car blocking off the entrance to the beach, so we drove to the next beach...same story. We had no idea what was going on, but we were disappointed that we didn't get to go to the beach, so we just turned around and came home. My family ended up leaving around 5:30 that afternoon. I felt kinda bad because I felt like we didn't do much, but it was just WAY too hot outside to really, thoroughly enjoy the city...plus, we have three more years here, that's PLENTY of time for people to come and visit! I found out the next day at work that some of the beaches had been closed due to e-coli in the water...boy, am I glad that they test that water often!!!

We will be home next week for a much-needed vacation...we will be leaving Wednesday as soon as I am done with a meeting for work, and will probably be coming back either Sunday night or Monday morning. We're excited to be home, and especially to be able to celebrate both of our birthdays with our family and friends! Here are a few pictures from our weekend with my family...enjoy! There are more on my facebook account, and my sister has some on there as well.