Happy Holidays

Ah...the week before Christmas. Finally, I am done with working for the semester. Of course, this does not mean I am done doing work. But at least I am not driving anywhere next week and can stay home and work. It finally feels a little bit like break. And, of course, we had a bit of a snow storm last night to make it feel like the holidays. We didn't get the 9-12 inches they said we might, but we did see probably 2 or so.

Ken and I braved the storm last night to go out for dinner. I've been craving Mexican food lately, and Ken has been a sport and gone with me. For those of you who don't know - Ken's idea of Mexican food includes only tacos: shell, meat, the tiniest bit of cheese, and ketchup. Yes, ketchup. He doesn't eat beans and is so-so on the rice. That doesn't sound very Mexican to me. Needless to say, going out for good Mexican food is kind of wasted on him. But he indulged me and we ate at a Tex-Mex place in Bolingbrook where I had a chicken chimichanga and he had a hamburger.

We've been bad in terms of eating out this weekend. Friday night neither one of us felt like cooking, so we tried this place we'd heard about called White Fence Farms. It boasts of having the world's greatest chicken, and apparently it's been around for over 50 years. Now, we are particular fans of the Del Rhea Chicken basket here in Illlinois. We love it - the atmosphere is great: a huge fireplace with lots of chicken decor. They have really good soup and rolls and Ken speaks highly of the chicken itself. It's one of those old Route 66 stops and has been around since the 1940s. But on Friday we decided to branch out and try White Fence Farms. We both gave it about a 3/10. Ken had the chicken and I had whitefish (so we could try something different). The fish was ok, but had far too much breading. I thought the chicken was fine--nothing to write home about, but ok. Ken said Del Rhea's was far superior. They didn't have rolls or anything and the place was so big that we felt a little lost. They did have a lot of nice decorations, antiques and whatnot, but it wasn't something we'd try again. Plus, Ken was very distracted the whole time by a woman eating there who was wearing a lightup holiday necklace. The thing kept flashing throughout dinner and it was driving him nuts.

Otherwise, the weekend's been pretty quiet. I spent most of the day working on editing and got a lot accomplished. Ken did various organizing projects. We took a couple of breaks in between working and managed to watch the whole movie Rudy, which we found at a thrift store for $1. I also spent time cleaning the apt. which has suffered from us being very busy. It now looks and feels a lot better.

We've had our Xmas decorations up for a while and so here are a few pictures. We don't have a fireplace, so we improvised on the stockings, hanging them on our big TV cabinet (normally, the doors are open and the stockings hang on the inside). When we move back to Iowa, I believe we'll be renting Ken's sister Kathy's house which has a fireplace, so next year, we may actually hang these correctly. The cats, of course, have their own stockings. We had to get one for Artimus, which he really got into as you can see from the picture. Tucker appears to be interested things other than his stocking. We also got the cats a few toys last weekend for the holidays. Ken picked out squeeky mouse and I picked out a catnip mouse. Tuck loved the squeeky one while Arty was mildly interested in both.