A Trip to Chicago

I went to Chicago for a few days to visit with the IBM team there and to meet a couple of my soon-to-be fellow travelers. I learned a lot that will be helpful when I'm in India about some of the programs we do or will be supporting at some point. We are responsible for the Consolidated News Desk and I'm pretty familiar with that. Tribune is putting in another consolidated system - Discus - for Circulation. I learned a lot about that and understand how that will be working a bit better. The weather was hideous the week before, so I was a bit concerned about getting out and about. But it was beautiful. The hotel is next door to the Tribune Tower in a very pretty part of Chicago. Lots of good restaurants. I was very brave the first night and went out to Joe's Crab place. The food was fantastic. Ordered 3 appetizers and a lovely martini. One of the things I want to do in India is to show the wonderful food I'll be eating. So I decided to practice at Joe's.I know, doesn't that look appetizing! I was seated in the bar. It was very crowded, being ash Wednesday in a fish restaurant. I was alone at my table, highly happy because of the martini and my boldness in going alone. A nice dentist was at the table for a while. He was giving a lecture about some arcane part of dentistry at the conference in town. You never know who you will pick up in a bar. Well, Joe's is known for it's snow crab, so I got an appetizer. I was a little embarrassed to take the picture when there was really crab in these shells. Can't think of what emboldened me enough to shoot a picture once the crab was dispatched.

Oh, yea, the martini. These were my other two appetizers. A crab cake and, because I felt I needed a vegetable, artichoke's Rockefeller (stuffed with spinach and other good things I don't know.) As my friend, Rachelle would say, Oh My God. Actually that seems appropriate on Ash Wednesday. This was fabulous and way too much food. It became breakfast the next day. Not the martini. I'd polished off all those olives long before I hopped off that bar stool.

But before I left I meet some other visitors to Chicago, this time from Kellogg. I recommended this fantastic cheese cracker to them and started to talk about work. They develop new breakfast products. I guess they weren't thrilled with my oatmeal diet. Karen will cringe when she hears that I told them the evils of corn. Their eyes didn't glaze over once. They said they would be sending me tickets to Disneyland. I haven't received those yet. I guess you can't believe everything people tell you in bars. I hope they believed me about this cheese cracker.
The rest of the trip was all work. I'd stay so late at the Tribune printing facility, oddly named the Freedom Center, that I'd just get room service. I should have taken a picture of the wonderful blue cheese burger I had.