June 26, 2011

  • Gotta Love The Sweet Taste Of Chicago

    Over all I had a pretty good weekend after a pretty tough work week. It started with big news on Thursday which I will save for another post. Friday night I played poker. I have had a really bad run of poker for, oh, I dunno, something like the last two years. I guess in the grand scheme of things it's not nearly as bad as the bad run the Cubs have had for the past 103 years, but still I have not won a game in quite some time. Honestly, I'm not even sure if it has been two years since I last won a game. All I know is that it's been a long time and the past few months I have played very poorly. I was getting sick of losing when finally, Friday  night, I broke through and had a really good night, winning a game that had 12 or 13 people. So, yay me.

    Today was our annual trip to the Taste of Chicago. For those of you not from the area, the Taste of Chicago is every fat American's wet dream. It is basically a 10 day food festival in and around Chicago's Grant Park. My friends and I have been going for something like the last 15 years or so. Or maybe it's close to 12 or 13 years. I dunno, either way it's been a long ass time. The fest features a wide array of the best of what Chicago has to offer, at least food wise. So you can see how somebody like me, who LOVES food, would be all over such a fest. My friend Dave says it is his favorite day of the year and always says that he is in training year round for this day.

    We got to the Taste about as early as we ever this year, arriving before noon. In the past few months, I have had quite the appetite; I seem to be hungry damn near constantly due to me working out a lot. I skipped breakfast this morning knowing that I would be pigging out for the better part of 3-4 hours. Even though I had not eaten anything since dinner the night before, I was not totally starving as I thought I would be, but I was hungry. But, that being said, we seemed to come out of the gate sprinting. Most years we take a little bit of time to get going before stuffing the fuck out of ourselves, but today was different. I went right up and started eating the first few things I could get my hands on.

    We ate such a wide range of food; it was almost like the United Nations of food. We had African, Mexican, Italian, Polish, Irish, Cajun, American, among others and still did not even have some of the other styles of food like Chinese, Indian, or Vietnamese, yet it was all there should we want it. I spent my tickets so fast that it wasn't long before I had to buy more. I think I ate more this year that I had in a few years. Although I left being full, I was not so totally stuffed that I was uncomfortable, in fact I could have eaten more had we the time. But, I drank two bottles of water on the way home and that left me feeling uncomfortably full. Still, it was a great year; the weather was perfect.