Chi-Town

You may be wondering where I ran off to since my last post in which I essentially begged you to officially follow my blog.  Sorry about that.  See, last Thursday Ian and I left for Chicago to attend a professional conference for 4 days. We had a great time touring the city (and shopping!) while playing hooky from the conference. This trip was also a chance to see so many of our friends from UT who were also attending the conference.   On Friday night, some of our former supervisors organized a UT reunion of sorts as they have done for years and there must have been 20 of us Volunteers or more.  It's weird to think that I have to travel to Chicago to see my friends from Knoxville...but I'll take it any way I can get it.  That day we walked over to Milennium Park and saw "the bean" (formally known as Cloud Gate) and the other amazing sculptures.  Here are some pictures taken by Ian in the bean's reflection.

Ian took so many amazing pictures on this trip.  I can't wait to print and frame some of them.  I also couldn't wait to take advantage of all the great shopping Chicago has to offer.  We only had a few hours to spend in the stores so Ian and I chose the big guns...you know, Filene's Basement and Nordstrom Rack and of course my most favorite store in the entire world...Anthropologie.  I would live in an Anthropologie store if I  could.  That probably has something to do with the fact that their home goods are so expensive that I know I could never afford to buy them for MY house so I would HAVE to live in the store if I wanted to be surrounded by things from Anthropologie.  Oh, the pain.  I tell myself that I go in there "for inspiration." Ian knows better.  (It's probably a really good thing that the closest store is 3 hours away from where we live.)For Valentine's Day he picked out this beautiful black winter scarf from my favorite (online)store....my first Anthropologie garment.  (I have a little ceramic incense holder that I bought at the Atlanta store on clearance a looooong time ago.)  If you haven't yet witnessed the magic....here's just a glimplse!