Weekly Round Up: Life in the Big City

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  This week we celebrated spring break in style by loading up the family truckster and heading to Chicago.

Life in The Big City

Our family spring break tradition is going to Chicago to hang out in the big city and to visit SIL #2 (previous trips here and here and of course my solo trip two weeks ago here).  We put the tradition on hold for COVID and this week we brought it back.

We rolled into the city on Wednesday evening and got ourselves checked into our hotel and then headed out to have dinner at my SIL's.  She fixed us up with beef tenderloin, baked potatoes, green beans, salad, and brownies.

Thursday was an All Day Museum Day at the Museum of Science and Industry.  And when I say "all day" I mean that we were there when it opened at 9:30 and left shortly before it closed at 5:30.  Sadly our favorite exhibit the U-boat tour was sold out but we still got to see everything except inside the boat.  SIL & family made us dinner again - chicken parm and chocolate chip cookies.

We took it a little easier on Friday by merely walking a mile to the Chicago River and taking the architecture river cruise and getting the low-down on all of the city skyscrapers.  In the afternoon we had some down time and I got my long run in while my fellas worked out and had pool time at the hotel gym.  That evening we met up with my SIL and went out for sushi.

And finally on Saturday I took my crew to the art museum so that I could revisit American Gothic and they got their fill of the armory room and the Thorne Miniature Rooms or "tiny rooms" as I had described them.  From there we had our final dinner of takeout pizza with my SIL and the next day we headed home.

Food recap - I came home with SIL's beef tenderloin and chocolate chip cookie recipes.

Workouts

For our previous Chicago trips I've always stuck to the hotel gym but not this time.  The weather was looking decent so I went out on the town.

On the first day I got up at daybreak and ran on Michigan Avenue all the way from the hotel down to Grant park, which was fine apart from having to stop for traffic lights.  That was the All Museum day which left me exhausted  My long run for my half marathon training plan was only 7 miles this week, so I decided that if the timing worked out that I would do it but otherwise I would skip it so I slept in on Friday.

As it worked out there was plenty of time in the afternoon to run so I headed out to the Lakefront Trail.  This is not the view that I have on my typical run.

This run stands out as the only long run that I've ever done on vacation and one of my favorite runs of the year.  The miles flew by.

The only drawback is that in places the trail is very close to the water and and toward the end of my run an incoming wave splashed my feet.

In theory I *could* have run on Saturday or even Sunday but it just didn't fit with the vibe of vacation.  I'm running out of long runs for this training cycle - an 11 miler next week (which I will be folding in to a 10 mile race), then 8 miles and then race day.

Watching

Required viewing for our trip to Chicago - The Blues Brothers!  I adore this movie but I haven't seen it enough times to be able to quote it.  When we were driving to CHI and were 100 miles out I of course announced it to the car and my husband countered with "it's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark out, and we're wearing sunglasses".

 

Reading

Not a thing.  Between getting ready for vacay and hanging out with family there was no time for reading this week.

Werk

Picking up from last week where I'd applied to a couple of jobs just to apply and of course they picked me for initial recruiter calls:

• The recruiter for the crypto company is overseas in the same time zone as my current employer so it was very difficult to schedule the call.  We finally found a time and then she canceled.  She asked me for more times when I could talk and then never got back to me.  No loss since I was always lukewarm on crypto to begin with.
  
• I have an interview with the 2nd company this week.  I guess I'll call them Thing 2 for now;-)  I originally was hesitant to apply because their Glassdoor reviews were decent but not stellar.
• Good stuff: upon further research, I learned that the company does something cool and useful to the world that is easy for me to understand.  When the recruiter asked "what interests you about our company?" I was able to give a genuine and coherent answer.
• Bad stuff: although the job title and job description match what I do, the way the recruiter described the role seems like it might be something different.  The recruiter gave several incomplete/contradictory answers.
  
• Good stuff from bad stuff: I was frustrated with recruiter's vague answers to my questions and had pretty much written this one off when she asked about salary.  Since I didn't care one way or the other I added $10,000 to my dream number.  She said "oh the top of our range is $5,000 less than that but we have x,y, and z perks".  I said "yes, that sounds like we're in the ballpark".
  
• Where it goes from here: either I will be able to fill in the blanks when I talk to the supervisor next week or this is the wrong job.  I'll keep you posted.  Here's what I know so far about how they fit in to my list:
  

• The surprising development with my current job is that the HR Bigwig who I witnessed having an epic meltdown a few weeks ago is leaving the company so now 2 out of the 2 problem people are gone.  This reduces my issues with my current job to being bored and getting a continuous negative vibe from a bunch of unhappy employees.  But it's a fine place to hang out until Job Charming comes along.