Chi-town misadventures: productive procrastination, ill-judged parking decisions, and lots of eating

We're smiling because we have no idea what's about to happen in about... four hours. 

A word of advice: don't park in an empty lot in Chinatown at 10:40pm.  Because THAT'S how you get your car towed.

Warren and Cindy visited recently. We ate, we drank, we karaoked like true Asians, we ate and drank more, and then we parked in an empty lot in Chinatown at 10:40pm.  There's an impound lot next to our apartment building in downtown Chicago, but of course the towing company took my car to this place instead:

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The six of us trudged to the nearest L station back to our apartment.  We piled into a Zipcar and got on the freeway.  After missing our exit, Mike, Connie, Skyler and I end up driving through Oak Park in a red Toyota Matrix.  By the way, I don't know if you understand the absurdity of this situation, so go back and read that last sentence one more time. Connie keeps pointing out the windows that have steel bars on them, while I occasionally pick out potential drug dealers based on the exhaustive knowledge base I've built about drug dealing by watching The Wire.  It's all fun and games until we pull up behind a Lincoln Continental that slows to a crawl next to a small knot of hoodlums (Connie's words, not mine).  The rear right door of the Lincoln Continental opens and Connie shrieks "DRIVE BY! DRIVE BY!"


Yeah, Asians aren't racist at all.


Warren and Skyler at Smoque before the fiasco.  They are deep in discussion about.... 2k10 probably.

All six of us eating on the bbq:

Cindy and Connie.  Connie is blissfully unaware of the approaching misadventure.

A quick plug for my new favorite restaurant avec.
Overall: 9.5/10.0; easily the best restaurant I've been to in Chicago, probably top 5 favorite ever, including Michelin-starred restaurants in LA and Vegas.  This place is ridiculous.  We went here with W&C when they were here and then went back a week later with Ernest because it's that good. 

avec's best dish: chorizo-stuffed medjool dates with smoked bacon & piquillo pepper-tomato sauce


In other news.... Skyler introduced me to Rainmeter, which allows you to trick out your desktop with applets and also as a side benefit provides hours upon hours of distraction from anything actually useful you might want to do.  My desktop now looks like this:

Why do I need to monitor my CPU usage, my WiFi network connection or my D drive capacity at all times, you ask?  I don't.  In fact, I don't even care about those things.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.