Iowa was kind enough to welcome me back with humidity. I told it to go jump in a lake...or the Mississippi, I'd be okay with that

I'm "home" again

I spent so long in Utah that it was a little hard to come back

Lots of tears were shed, and lots of anxiety was felt, but in the end there was only (mostly) joy for getting to see Hubby again

I decided to fly into Chicago because the other airport is really small and was a little expensive to fly into and the flight times were all a little crazy

I'm most definitely not the type of person that likes to get up early in the morning, so anything from 6-8 is a no go

And if I had flown into Des Moines the options to fly out were either 6 am or 8 pm, putting me in Des Moines way late and it's an 1.5 hour drive for us, so that was a no go

My flight into Chicago landed at 6, and with a 3 hour drive, that put us getting home at 9, which is totally doable 

Or so we thought :)

Hubby's body was tired of being in the car, and I was tired after the travelling and not getting a lot of sleep and didn't think I could stay awake for the drive

And since I'm the primary driver in the family, we decided not to risk it so we found a decent priced hotel room and stayed in Chicago for the night

Except it wasn't really Chicago

Outskirt Chicago = cheaper than downtown Chicago

Imagine that

After we got dinner

(which, I have to say, was amazing...a little, authentic Italian restaurant that I wasn't thrilled about because pretty much everything had to do with fish [because hello...Chicago...apparently since they're near a lake that means they have access to fish or something] but our dish was amazing, especially the bruchetta we got...it was hands down the best bruchetta I've ever had)

(just so you know)

We didn't really want to dawdle cause we had this waiting for us me

Sooo nice

It was a beautiful soaking after a long monthish at work

We went to see a movie while in town 

And I insisted we go to a theater in downtown Chicago since in my head the theaters there had to be way better than our theaters

(I'm not impressed with our two theaters)

I'm not really sure what my head was thinking

The theater we found was under construction

And was in a high rise building

And was small

And I honestly don't know why I expected otherwise

Chicago and Orem, UT are very different

Either way, it was still fun

We saw X-Men which was so amazingly good

I loved it

And then, because apparently trying to drive to the theater and trying to find parking wasn't enough,  I decided we needed to brave through the streets one more time so we I could see the Sears Tower

Cause Hubby could really care less

That was nuts

And then to top it all off, I'm not a heights person...so I didn't even go in

This is as close as I got

Pretty ironic that a person who doesn't like heights was so insistent on wanting to see the tower, I know

I was kind of debating on whether or not I actually wanted to go in, but as soon as I saw the height of the tower in person...no way, Jose

And a few more pictures of our time in Chicago

(I was lucky to find this handsome guy at the airport who was nice enough to give me a ride)

(view from our hotel...beautiful!!)

(the two on the left are just for parking)

And then, stupidly, we left tried to leave downtown at 4:30

Hello rush hour traffic

An hour later, we were finally 15 minutes out of downtown, far enough away that we were finally able to drive over 5 mph

My right calf is also slightly more muscular now than my left

From all the stop and go

So that's something I'm going to have to figure out how to fix

Maybe while I'm sitting doing homework I'll just flex only my left leg

And then we saw this on the way home

I just had to stop and take a picture

It was pretty much fate

To top it all off, I came home to this

 Which was really sweet and cute

But then I looked in our fridge and saw a few interesting things...

And that's only a few of them

There's also this that happened

You know that adage "when the cat's away the mice will play"?

Apparently that's what happened with the Hubster while I was gone

This is not where our computers belong

But he decided that he wanted to his computer up to his huge TV and really enjoy life

I'm convinced the sweet note I got was to make up for the all of the "bachelor joys" I found when I arrived back at the house

Anyway...

When I got back I conceded that we could have our computers out there for a little while

Just until we caught up on all of our shows that we didn't watch while I was back home

But we moved them back into their designated homes as soon as we had a second to breathe

Which actually happened to be tonight

It'll be nice that our computer desks can actually fulfill the measure of their creation

He also informed me at some point after arriving back home that he had a missing sock

And that he had looked for it everywhere but couldn't find it

So it was stolen by the sock gremlins

He was sure of it

So he converted the lone sock into our chalkboard eraser

A few days later he was at work and I was folding laundry 

(I'm convinced there was enough laundry for 3 batches worth in our laundry tub)

And guess what I found?

The illusive missing sock

Turns out it wasn't so missing after all

Anyway, life here has mostly settled down now

Hubby just keeps getting busier at work and I keep plugging away at school

But hey, at least I can work on equaling out my calf muscles while I do homework

Between that and always having an extra sock to throw me off, I'm sure I'll stay pretty busy