At the last minute Lenore and packed up the car, put the dog in the back seat, and headed up to Chicago on Thursday. It had been her plan all along to be there, but there were a whole series of problems with the show this year. The main one being that it appeared to be cancelled on the Monday before it was going to start. Shortly after that it was maybe back on, but they didn’t know where it was going to be. Since they didn’t have a location,

Lenore couldn’t ship her artwork. No address, no shipping. So we had to go earlier than she had originally planned so we could take the work up ourselves. I wasn’t originally going to go with her, but we had to leave pretty early, and she wanted some help with the driving. I had nothing else specific going on and I have plenty of people I like to see in Chicago, so off we all went.

The show ended up being in the Merchandise Mart, and after a rather frenzied set-up day I think things went fairly smoothly.

After dropping Lenore off at the show, Vader and I headed up to threadless to have lunch with Harper. I was very pleased that I got to eat at one of my favorite restaurants again, Taste of Lebanon. You can read more about it on my Favorite Restaurants page. Their lentil soup is SO good. I can’t go there and not have it. Although this is the second time I have gotten it to go, and of course it’s still good, but I think it actually tastes better if you eat it in the restaurant.

After lunch Vader and I headed downtown for a radio interview. The night before we left, Charlie, the podcast guy from threadless, called me up and asked me if I would do a radio interview for his class at Columbia. I realize now that I never actually asked him what the interview was really for, but I assume it was a project for some sort of radio class he was taking. The interview went really well, and was a lot of fun. Like any guy (especially any entertainer guy) I love talking about myself and how great I am, so I naturally enjoyed that part. What made it even cooler though was that we were in a very professional room with very fancy and expensive looking mics, and we had our very own sound tech “running the board”. I don’t really know what that means, but she was doing some cool radio stuff on the other side of the little window in the wall. After the interview was over Charlie asked me to do a few yo-yo tricks for his classmates, and there was much rejoycing.

The next part of the day was to head back up around Andersonville for a run on the beach (with Vader doing most of the running), and after so much car time Vader was very happy to be able to run around and jump in the waves for a bit. When we were finished with our walk, we picked up Matiss from work and went off for an evening of video-games. It was a pretty great day all in all, and nothing makes a great day better than capping it off with videogames.
I spent a couple of days hanging out at Harper and Matiss’ house, and then went off to Geneva to visit Lenore’s sister and family for a day before picking up Lenore and heading back home on Sunday. Geneva is always fun too. Besides the good company and the dog walking, I get to play tag, hide and seek, and Lego non-stop. Also, before I left on Sunday, we all went to brunch at the Hilton (I think). They had an entire conference room just for the food. Not only did the omlette guy make a special omlette just for me, but after the meal you could go over to the glorious desert table, and dip your desert into the chocolate waterfall. Seriously. A waterfall of chocolate. I suppose it’s really a chocolatefall, but if I had said that from the beginning you wouldn’t have known what I was talking about.

Lenore sold three pieces at the show, and had a lot of interest. It was great. You can see hew work at lenorethomas.com