[This post is from last night, but, thanks to SBFC (I�m sure we can all figure out what he F stands for�), I wasn�t able to get on line to post it.)]

It�s been humid and alternately sunny and raining torrentially today. Purely tropical. As a result, I was inspired to cook Mexican tonight and put some of my rapidly expanding mint patch to good use in mojitos. Yum. Consequently, I now have virtually nothing to say that makes any sense. Of course, I probably would have been brain dead anyway, as I spent much of the afternoon trying to figure out how to explain 12-tone music to undergraduates who are totally flipping out at the first sign of dissonance. Perhaps I should bring a round of my mojitos to our review session next week. Except that I think most of them aren�t of legal age. They�ll have to settle for cookies.

Meanwhile, I�ve spent the evening, when I should have been working, trying to figure out what we�re doing tomorrow night, as we � gasp -- have our favorite babysitter. Logistics are very complicated out here. We have ruled out going into the city, as the travel time alone blows half our babysitting budget. But we�re at a loss. We�re not good at being suburbanites. We�re used to being able to just go out, find some place to eat and stumble around on foot until we find something else interesting to do. In the suburbs, one must plan. And drive. Not necessarily in that order.

Planning � we�re not so good at that. The last time we attempted to go out, we did so without an agenda. We ended up going shopping at a nearby �Lifestyle Mall� (whatever that means), followed by a very pleasant dinner. But by 8:30 we were done and while we cruised around looking for something else to do, we were unsuccessful. The streets were empty. 9:00 on a Friday and no one is out. Depressing as all get out. It seems that any time we try to plan one of these evenings, we end up desperate to move back to the city.

I miss the sense of ownership you get from knowing the secret good places that you know when you get out in the city on foot. I hated Chicago when I first moved there, because I felt it wasn�t such a foot friendly city � I was used to New York with subways always at hand and everyone out on the streets. Chicagoans seemed locked in their cars. The downtown area was such a ghost-town at night, that I had trouble finding a place to eat near the symphony. Eventually, I learned that I had just been applying my feet to the wrong bits of sidewalk and I�ve become a passionate convert to the Windy City. I�ve lived here more than three times as long as I�ve lived anywhere else in my life. Ich bin ein Chicagoan.

Really what I�d like to do tomorrow night? Have spinach salad and gazpacho at Bite on Western, washed down with some BYO wine, followed by an exquisite plum tart in an almond crust, all for an insanely low price. Then I�d wander next door to the Empty Bottle, where we�d play pinball and drink Old Style while waiting for the band du jour. Later, we�d stumble into the night, dodging old men likewise stumbling out of bars (they are singing in Ukrainian, we are not), and collapse in my miniature bedroom, in my miniature apartment that is half kitchen, hoping like hell the housekeeping (or lack thereof) of the bachelor Ukrainians downstairs hadn�t driven the cockroaches up to my kitchen again.

I don�t want a night out. I want a night back. Maybe I should be looking at real estate ads instead of movie listings.

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