That's My Bix!

It’s been a week of indulgence at Casa Bix and the forecast is more of the same. It was our anniversary on Saturday and Esteban’s card made me weepy (damn him! The thing about our relationship is that Esteban as schmoopy as a 13 year old girl after a couple’s skate and that leaves me to be the default non-schmoopinator, except that secretly? Totally a schmoopinator. And there’s no crying in baseball, damn it!) and then we exchanged our gifts. Apparently the traditional 5 year gift is now British DVD Box Sets, as I got him the entire Red Dwarf series and he got me every Absolutely Fabulous and also Love Actually. He also proved his true undying love by buying me Master and Commander, even though he knows how Russell Crowe pines away longingly for a nibble on the Weetabodkin. Esteban is very secure, apparently.

Then I had been waffling about what we were going to do on Saturday (which was sort of an extra special anniversary because not only was it our 5th, but we also got married on a Saturday, which somehow makes it even more right. Also, double-oubly-bubble special is that this year my birthday is also on a Sunday and I was born on’ yep.. a Sunday! I don’t know why I get off on that kind of thing, because really, anniversaries are no more magical than the 803rd day you’re married or the 1431st day or whatever and plants don’t know what day it is and what day they are born, but for some reason, it seems like grooves on a record lining up and peeking over across the years to see exactly where you had been when. If that makes any sense at all) and couldn’t decide whether we should go to Chicago and frolic with the sharks at the Shedd or if we should just lounge around and do nothing but play on our various computers and listen to the constant thunder and rain and try to soothe the cat? I have wanted to see the sharks at the Shedd since they started building the damned tanks, but I’m actually going to see sharks at Mandalay Bay next weekend and it seemed insane to go so long sans sharks and then have one crazy sharktacular binge in seven days time.

Finally, Esteban convinced me that it would be fun to drive down to Chicago and we could go to Morton’s, which he has been dangling in front of my nose for years. So we loaded up the iPod (which, by the way, owns my ass), complete with the shiny new iTrip, and headed out the door. Except that the iTrip wasn’t syncing and didn’t want to work. We sat in the driveway for twenty minutes while Esteban fiddled with it. Finally I went back in the house to make the sandwich that Esteban had assured me there wasn’t enough time to make, and then told him to forget the iPod and we’d do it the old fashioned way by dealing with our prehistoric 4-disc changer. However, Esteban studiously made a point of timing a bathroom break when we were passing an electronics store and we managed to cobble together a nonPod solution and soon were grooving out to an obscene number of mp3s.

We scurried down to Chicago and found the Shedd by way of my haphazard (I like to think of it as organic and perhaps a touch shaman like) navigation by which I pointed at downtown and the Lake and then said ‘The Shedd is betwixt those two points’ somewhere’. It infuriated Esteban but we found it nonetheless, paid $12 to park under Soldier Field (seriously, was that always there? I totally don’t remember that being there! Or is it really a spaceship that sort of plunked down and took up valuable lake frontage?) and hiked up to the aquarium. I was getting giddier with each step. Sharks! Houston! We have SHARKS! Oh the shark joy at its finest. We stood in a (purgatory) line and I was hap-hap-happy. Sharks! Oh the joy that is a big carnivorous cartilaginous fish! Squee!

Except that when we got literally twelve feet from the entrance, a squat displaced DMV worker came out with a sign yelling, ‘The Wild Reef is sold out! No more Wild Reef today!’ and changing the price of admission to disregard the shark exhibit.

I came very close to bursting out in tears like a spoiled four-year-old in a grocery store line, pointing at the Pez dispensers. Sharks! No sharks for you! You want the sharks? You can’t handle the sharks!

We turned away from the line and then wandered back to Soldier Field and retrieved our car. Aw man. Esteban, however, pointed out that I could now go shopping at Woodfield, something that we wouldn’t have had time for had we sharked our sharky sharkness. Which, honestly, is probably the only thing that would be heartening after such a tragic turn of events.

Thus, it was so. We embarked out to Schaumburg and I tottled around the gigantic and erratic mall until I found a Lane Bryant directly adjacent to a Torrid. It was painful, torn between two lovers, the lady and the tiger and all of that. I wrenched myself out of indecision and ran into Torrid, where I scored a new t-shirt, two pairs of punk girl shoes (or, in the case of the red china flats, wannabe punk girl shoes), a necklace, and a skirt (which I will never wear because it is so short that you can see my ass when I am STANDING UP, but it is tres cute just the same). Then I wandered into Lane Bryant and found a pair of jeans and a pair of cropped striped pants that I am going to return because I will also never wear them but rather because they are fugly and I don’t know what came over me). Then Esteban and I ran to Ikea to pick up some brackets for Esteban’s desk, but I waited in the car and took random pictures of myself, the parking lot fixtures, and a kid also waiting in a car but wearing a scary Halloween mask.

 

Then we went to Morton’s for dinner, which was divine. I ordered a ridiculous amount of food (lobster bisque, Caesar salad, New York strip, asparagus, wild mushrooms, and Godiva hot cake) and didn’t finish one single thing. Mostly because it was our first real meal of the day (minus the sandwich in the morning) and we were both starving. Not, by the way, a good strategy at a place like Morton’s. In fact, I would recommend that you eat a full meal and also perhaps a lot of very heavy bread before ordering, as our bill came to a shameful amount of money; money that would have been better served invested or even say, stashed in a money market account. But ah well’ good steak. And also, there was a lobster on the menu cart and when our waiter picked him up, he splayed out his arms like ‘haHA! I’m alive! Fooled you all, ya bastards!’ Because all lobsters should sound like crotchety old men. But then he probably got eaten by someone, so he really had a right to be somewhat curmudgeonly. (He was still on the cart when I got my bisque, so don’t look at me, mister.)

(Or, um, missy.)

After that, we endeavored homeward, as we didn’t feel especially like dropping another $100 on a hotel room after we just had expensive food babies. On his assurance, I promptly sacked out in my reclined seat (having had the good sense to bring one of my down pillows along as well). Esteban made it to somewhere north of Sheboygan before needing to pull over and take a nap. When I woke up, and looked around, he had parked us at a self storage lot in the middle of nowhere. We were surrounded by forgotten recreation vehicles, abandoned cars, and a school bus that was painted red with black windows. I immediately got freaked out, because it was all so eerie and we were under a big spotlight, totally exposed, but around us, there were fields lit by a half-obscured moon and just any second, there were at least half a dozen scary mental patients escaped from an asylum nearby who were going to jump up on the roof of our car and smash in our windows and bury us in a field with our legs sticking out (traumatized by the rather dreadful movie Hotel Hell much? You think?) or perhaps bikers. Bikers who like to eat brains. Or something. And also, what was with Hell’s School Bus? Who paints a school bus red with black windows?

I told Esteban that it was creepy. He sighed, sat back up and pulled out. I offered to drive but he said that he had gotten enough of a second wind at Lucifer’s Storage Facility to make it the rest of the way. I stayed up with him, plugged the 80’s genre into the iPod and together we made it home, singing ‘All Through The Night’ together. Which I couldn’t even make up because it’s just too twee.

Sunday and Monday are more or less a blur to me. I did some grocery shopping, did a ton of (fucking) laundry, cleaned the living room, cleaned the bathroom, scrubbed the floor in the bathroom, did all of the dishes, and caught up on my TiVo (Oh, Colonial House Don’ you just got hotter and hotter. And I don’t care about your camo pants, Don Wood. Keep them on, take them off’ you’re hot no matter what). There was probably more but all in all, it was deeply satisfying and also makes me wonder why I’m spending money on things like expensive soup and flying to Las Vegas to drink vodka with friends when I could put a mosaic tile floor in the bathroom and a retro polished steel backsplash in the kitchen. Or, you know, something other than half plywood on the floor. Details, details.