Team "Rhymes With Bunt"

2009 Chicago Players Sports Group 12" Co-Ed Softball Summer League CHAMPIONS!



Who knew such a rag tag group could bring so much awesomeness.

A Guide to Living in Chicago

My friend Chuck just posted something similar about L.A.

I have been a resident Chicagoan for five years, living within the city limits, but have been dancing outside those lines like a concertgoer at a port-a-potty all my life. So here it is, Megan's Guide to Living in Chicago, the second city.

Far North Side: Uptown, Rogers Park, Andersonville, Edgewater

I don't know much about these areas simply because I don't go past the Irving Park exit on Lakeshore Drive. I know that Andersonville has some amazing Swedish bakeries. Oh and these areas are all along the lake and happily ethnically diverse. However, my friend lived in Uptown for a while and though it is much cheaper to live there, she said she couldn't take her dog for walks at night in some areas. Such is life in all big cities. Make the trip to the burbs in only 15 minutes!

Far Mid-North Side: North Center, St. Ben's, Roscoe Village, Ravenswood, Lincoln Square

This is my hood. I live in North Center. It's a nice mix of being about a mile away from Wrigley Field and being far enough away to avoid the non-existent parking and constant traffic of drunk people in the summertime. It's a family-oriented area and if I ever have a family, I would park them in a huge five bedroom lot in Ravenswood, with a ginormous wrap around porch and a yard. It's a little quiet for me, but there are tons of great restaurants down Irving Park Rd. and Montrose Ave. Lincoln Square is the "home of the Bierstube" so if you like drinking beer from a boot and eating pretzels as big as your head, "Prost!". Moderately expensive.


North Side: Wrigleyville, Lakeview East & West, Lincoln Park*

This is my favorite area of the city. I lived in Lakeview East for two years and Lincoln Park, right on the border of Old Town for one beautiful year. My years in Lakeview were the best, I think. Sharing a tiny apartment right on Halsted St. next to Clark St. Dog and Binny's Beverage Depot. Everything was right outside my door, the lake just a short bike ride or walk from my front steps. Again, close enough to Wrigley to feel the fever and be amidst a sea of blue and red, but far enough away to avoid the real crowds and tourists. Lakeview and Wrigleyville are both younger neighborhoods, so if you don't mind a kegger or two next door on game days, you'll be fine. You can find apartments dirt cheap in these areas if you look hard enough, but they won't be super nice.

*Lincoln Park encompasses the following areas: Depaul, Old Town, Lincoln Park, and Park West. Lincoln Park is probably one of the most expensive areas to live outside the Loop or Gold Coast. It's 'old money', with huge graystones sweeping across streets lined with trees and kids on big wheels in Lacoste polos. Its yuppie central, beware. Old Town though is great, very artsy, close to the lake, unique apartments, great restaurants and shopping. However, once you go south of North Ave., not so nice. Parts of Cabrini Green still loom over Division and Larabee along with a slew of other Section 8 housing. Depaul is nice and you can find a cheap place there because it's mostly students in the area. Park West don't even try to afford. Plus it's all old women with small dogs yipping at your heels yelling about you biking too fast.

Near North Side: Gold Coast, River North, Mag Mile, Streeterville, State Parkway, River West

For the longest time, Near North was the only place I wanted to live. In a fabulous, loft right on the River, where I could see the architecture tours floating by, pointing out my building, tourists staring in awe at the interesting people who must live there. A lot of people don't know that the River North area has the largest concentration of art galleries outside of Manhattan. However, if you're a starving artist trying to make it big, it will be hard for you to live in this area. Club kids and trust fund babies have started to inhabit the lofts and condos here and you will hate it.

The Gold Coast is absolutely beautiful. Tree-lined streets with statuesque brown and graystones hulking over immaculately kept historic sidewalks. Every other street, Oak, State, Walton has a different designer boutique you can spend your hard earned divorcee dollars at as well as Chicago's only Lamborghini dealership for miles. You can actually feel the horse-drawn carriages and women with parasols that once walked these cobblestone streets. Gorgeous. For the amazingly wealthy.

No one actually *lives* on the Mag Mile, one of the craziest, busiest streets in Chicago. Lined with tourists, you can find Water Tower Place, the Hancock Building, our flagship Marshall Field store turned Macy's, and the Drake Hotel. Steer clear of Niketown and FAO Shwartz or suffer getting sucked into the vortex of tourists that gather in front, cameras pointing toward the sky.

The Loop: Loop, Printer's Row, South Loop

The Loop is mainly for the masses of working people in Chicago. Skyskrapers, tower after tower after tower reaching toward the sky. Thousands of well-dressed people file out of Union Station and Ogilivie in the morning, trudging to whatever corporate job they chose months, years, decades ago. Though there are tons of restaurants and shops and theaters open during the day, The Loop is dead on the weekends and nothing is open on Sunday. Nothing. Crickets chirping.

Printer's Row and South Loop have only recently started to be built up. When I first moved into the city, I almost rented a condo on 14th and Michigan Ave. in a brand new construction building. We finally decided against it, because there was absolutely NOTHING in the area except the random scary warehouse and homeless person. Not a very habitable environment for two fresh out of college aged girls. However now I wish I had that condo on 14th & Michigan. South Loop is vibrant and bustling, tons of brand new affordable lofts have been built in the midst of trendy restaurants and quirky coffee shops. Printer's Row is what is sounds like. Originally the buildings were printing and publishing houses turned residential lofts. Expensive, but historic and the Printer's Row Book Fair in the summer is awesomely amazing if you are at all literary.

Near South Side: Dearborn Park, Museum Park, Prairie Avenue Historic District

I really love this area. I have been reading "Sin in the Second City" by Karen Abbott which is all about the famous brothels and whorehouses in the Levee District during the early twentieth century. After taking a tour of the Prairie Street mansions with my dad last year, I can tell you this area is rich in history and worth a walk through. Not so livable, as everything out there is a historic landmark of some sort, but I did see some nice new row homes going up. Kind of cool to think you could be walking the same streets that Marshall Field and George Pullman once strode. Dearborn Park and Museum Park are where Soldier Field, McCormick Place and the Museum Campus span: Field, Adler & Shedd. Not residential at all.

West Side: Humboldt Park, Bucktown, Wicker Park, East Village, West Town

Many of my friends live in Bucktown or Wicker Park. Several years ago it was considered the new 'cool' area to live and much more affordable than the north side. Now so many people have moved there and so many trendy restaurants and bars have opened that it's not as affordable, but its still pretty damn cool. Most people would say that 'hipsters' and 'anti-yuppies' flock to this area. Bucktown is great for a night off from the frat guys and trixies of Lincoln Park and Wrigleyville, when you just want to drink and mingle with the intelligentsia of Chicago. Hey, you're emo? Bucktown loves you, too. Still some shady areas so watch out.

Near West Side: Tri-Taylor, University Village, Medical Center, Greektown, Little Italy, Fulton Market District

In my opinion, Near West is going to blow up in the next ten, fifteen years. Right now there are sketchy areas and it's still a little dirty in parts, but I see the potential. Greektown is what it sounds like. University Village and Medical Center are named for being so close to UIC, so many students live there. Its affordable because it is still not considered a hot area, but nice because the university has subsidized most of the housing. Tri-Taylor and Little Italy are like walking back in time. Take a walk down Taylor Street and you'll get the full Italian-American experience. Oh the smells, oh the food. Ridiculous. Housing not so good, but getting better. Al's Beef, people. Al's Beef! Fulton Market is also growing. I would consider it to be similar to River West or River North with the trendier lofts and condos going up in all the old warehouses. Still kind of isolated though, so if you need to be in the thick of it, might not be for you.

Lower West Side: Pilsen

Cool, up and coming artsy area, huge Mexican infuence still present. You can find great lofts for cheap, but you are still in the middle of nowhere.

South Side: Chinatown, Bronzeville, Hyde Park

Wentworth and Archer have literally the Rolls Royce of authentic Chinese restaurants of anywhere in the city. You have not lived if you haven't tried a ham and egg bun from one of the many bakeries in the area. I don't know about living there, but you should at least visit once in your Chicago experience. Hyde Park I also don't know much about, but if it's good enough for Barack Obama, it's good enough for me. Lots of cultural stuff to do out there.

Souf Side: Bridgeport, Beverly, Evergreen Park, Morgan Park, Mt. Greenwood

Not to be confused with "south" side, the SOUF side is where, according to the residents, you can find the TRUE Chicagoans. This is Ditka's DA BEARS South Side. Polish sausage South Side. South Side Irish South Side. It's Comiskey and U.S. Cellular, Sox Park South Side. The real, blue collar, Bud Heavy drinking, church going, Western Ave. loving South Side. God love 'em. I do!

Oh and any neighborhood you find yourself in in Chicago, it takes twenty minutes to get to the highway.

This now concludes our tour through Chicago's neighborhoods. Questions welcome.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

For the past 48 hours in Chicago it has been raining, sleeting and last night around 9 pm it finally started snowing. Now that it's here, I've officially commenced what we'll call the Season of Complaining.

I've lived in this city all my life, so I consider myself a "Chicagoan". I say "Ma" instead of "Mom" and drink Old Style like water. I know the grid system, hate the Kennedy and can tell you who has the best Italian beef in the city off the top of my head.

But no matter how many years I spend in the city, no matter how many pounds of snow I shovel off my car year after year, I still become a little whiny bitch for the first few weeks once that first snowflake hits the ground.

You'd think I'd get used to the freezing cold winds that even the warmest coat can't break, the slushy, five seconds away from spinning out of control every time I change lanes morning commutes, the slow and inefficient way in which the Chicago DOT responds to the weather report. I know all this, and yet I still complain. Why?

Because that's part of being from Chicago. We complain.

We complain about the Bears, we complain about Daley, we complain about the expressways. We complain. That's what we do.

I know that winter means I'll walk around for about two months with the cuffs of my pants soaking wet. I know that it means once Dec. 1st hits, I will have about only one 6x6 area of street that I can actually park on that's not now considered a "Snow Route". I know that it means that I will have a choice between turning on the heat in my apartment and paying the cable bill and damn it, the Food Network wins every time.

I know all this and I still choose to live here because once that first crisp, white snow falls, all the dirt and grime and muck we've become innoculated by every day is washed away and I all at once remember that I live in the greatest city in the world.

Happy first snow storm Chicago!

p.s. Happy Cyber Monday, too! I'm going to spend the rest of today happily in an electronics-induced coma. Mmmm gigahertz.

The end of an era.

In less than a week I will enter into the world of single livingship. After having to share living quarters for 28 years (keep in mind, I didn't even get to be alone in the womb!) it's about time.

My current roomie and I have had some great times. There was this night. And our oh so lovely relationships with our many property managers. But we got by, even prospered.

So I just wanted to give a shout out to one of my best friends who has shared the good times and bad times with me for the last three years. There will always be a seat at my table, always a spot on my couch, always a second glass to be poured. Thanks for the memories.



Let's go make some more!

Hey look!

It's me at a White Sox game and I'm smiling! GO CUBS!

I love you Eddie Vedder and I promise not to stalk you.

Last night the stars aligned and my karma finally kicked back into gear. I drank with Eddie Vedder.

Here's how it went down. My friend Katie works for the Cubs. She books all the talent and celebrities for the 7th inning stretch and to throw out the first pitch. It's basically a dream job...hang out at Wrigley all day and entertain stars and professional athletes. Anyways, Eddie is just one of her many celebrity friends.

So she texts my roommate to come down to Stanley’s, which is the bar below my apartment. I'm lazing around on the couch at my neighbor's place when my roommate runs in and is like, "Didn't you get my texts?" completely breathless. I said no, and she was like, "Get up, get dressed. We're going to Stanley's. Eddie Vedder and Chris Chelios are hanging out down there and Katie got us the in!" So I go down there and who the fuck is she sitting with, but Eddie motherfucking Vedder? I almost shit myself. No, you know what? I may have shit a little.

This man is my god. I don’t have religion, I have Pearl Jam. It was insane. A warm wave came over me. My cheeks started burning and my hands grew slick with sweat. This is one of those once in a lifetime moments, I thought to myself.

But I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I couldn't even bring myself to make eye contact with him. I was totally frozen with apprehension. It was as if my whole body had petrified upon taking one step into the bar. I was cemented to the ground.

I've met a lot of celebrities and I've never lost it like this. This man made me LOVE MUSIC. See this post about Pearl Jam. Now you understand the reason for all of the above.

I did end up loosening up, as my roommate can attest. At one point, as we got up to leave, we made eye contact briefly. And no, it wasn't soul shaking, it wasn't awestriking. He's just a regular guy, like me or you. I threw up the peace sign and he graciously flashed it back. My insides warmed.

I had my camera, but felt that these moments should be memorexed in my mind. These type of moments are so rare and not everything needs to be captured. You end up missing the real moments with your face behind a camera.

So I snapped the above shot as we were leaving. Just one photo.

I can die happy.

Air & Water Show, Lake Michigan 2008

In the meantime, enjoy these photos from the show this weekend.



It was a perfect day!

Awesomefest Prequel?

I got nothin' today except for that my best girl ever is coming to Chicago this weekend.



Not the best of circumstances, but I'm delighted nonetheless. :)

Snow makes everything infinitely more impossible.

For the past 48 hours everyone in Chicago has been talking about the massive snow storm we were about to get. And now that it's here, I've officially commenced what we'll call the Season of Complaining.

I've lived in Chicago all my life, so I consider myself a hard core Chicagoan. I say "Ma" instead of "Mom" and drink Old Style like water. I know the grid system, hate the Kennedy and can tell you who has the best Italian beef in the city off the top of my head.

But no matter how many years I spend in the city, no matter how many pounds of snow I shovel off my car year after year, I still become a little whiny bitch for the first few weeks once that first snowflake hits the ground.

This is how it usually goes down:

It will take me longer to dig my car out of the snow than it normally does to make the full trip to work. After pulling the reverse-drive, reverse-drive until smoke literally envelops my car, I will dejectedly get out of my car and begin to dig my wheels out with my hands. And this will all be transpiring on Lincoln Ave., one of the busiest streets in Chicago where people will continue to drive past my hunched over figure, spraying snow from their back tires into my face. Thanks. Really. And of course I won't have a scraper or a brush, which are both kind of necessities in dealing with Chicago winters. What can I say? I'm an asshole.

After you sufficiently freeze your ass off on the street, it never fails that once you get on the road, highway, expressway, etc. that your windshield wipers somehow get covered in ice, even though you cleared them out not once, but twice before you left. And obviously you get stuck behind an oversized Vienna Beef hotdog truck that continuously spits up dirt and sleet right onto your front windshield. Let me just get rid of that, you think, but then you fire your wipers up and they tear across your dry windshield, with huge ice chunks grinding rock-sized grooves into the glass.

So then you'll do what any normal person would do and open your driver's side window, still trying to maintain the 75 mph you were cruising at and heave yourself out just far enough to grab the wiper as it comes back up. Only, maybe you grabbed too hard because now the wiper is in your hand, but you're back inside your car. DAMN IT. You just broke your wiper blade right off. MOTHERFUCKER.

Swearing and squinting, eventually you'll make it to work an hour or two later. You'll park, ride the elevator up to your floor, sit down at your desk and without fail, the office douchebag will stick his big fat head into your office and say, "The roads are a mess today, huh?" then laugh that goofy ass laugh that drives you nuts and walk away. And he'll be wearing snow boots.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

You'd think I'd get used to the freezing cold winds that even the warmest coat can't break, the slushy, five seconds away from spinning out of control every time I change lanes morning commutes, the slow and inefficient way in which the Chicago DOT responds to the weather report. I know all this, and yet I still complain. Why?

Because that's part of being from Chicago. We complain.

We complain about the Bears, we complain about Daley, we complain about the expressways. We complain. That's what we do.

I know that winter means I'll walk around for about two months with the cuffs of my pants soaking wet. I know that it means once Dec. 1st hits, I will have about only one 6x6 area of street that I can actually park on that's not now considered a "Snow Route". I know that instead of turning on the heat in our apartment, I should just plop a big metal garbage can in the middle of my living room and burn my money in it homeless person style. ComEd you can kiss my ass.

I know all this and I still choose to live here because once that first crisp, white snow falls, all the dirt and grime and muck we've become innoculated by every day is washed away and I all at once remember that I live in the greatest city in the world.

Happy first snow storm Chicago!

I think I'd rather just live in my car.

The seats fold down into a comfortable recline, the cup holders are conveniently located, what more could a tenant ask for?

Hmmm...let me think...how about a livable apartment in the city of Chicago?

Apparently, when you're looking for an apartment, that criteria is simply out of the question.

Let's go back to 2005 when I moved into my lovely Lakeview apartment. My roommate and I probably searched for two months straight before settling on the place we live now. The thing is, we had high hopes, high expectations, and someone should have told us that that is just not practical when looking for an apartment.

Basically, what we came away with was a 700 sq/ft hot box money pit. Seriously, we turned our air conditioning on in April and it just cooled down our apartment yesterday.

For starters, our leasing agency is a joke. DO NOT RENT FROM ENTERPRISE LEASING. I'm just going to go ahead and put that out there. It took them three months and threatening to hold our rent in escrow until they replaced our dishwasher. Oh and it wasn't just broken. There was filthy, disease-infested water standing in the bottom of it just breeding West Nile. Finally they came and replaced our dishwasher with an even older one, and left the broken dishwasher on our back porch for three more months.

And then there is the shower. It's hard for me to even talk about the shower.



Every morning I wake up and take what can only be described as the worst shower in the world. Every morning I do this because I have no other choice.

Here's how it goes down.

I have to set my alarm for twenty minutes earlier than I want to get up, just so I can run my ass in my skivvies to the bathroom to turn on the shower, full blast, as hot as it can go. Even though I do this, it still comes out freezing cold for the first fifteen minutes.

After that I run my ass back to my bedroom and jump under the covers until my alarm clock's snooze alarm rings again. Then I roll around in my bed for about two minutes more, cursing and moaning, running the gamut of emotions from strong anger to optimism. Finally I get out of bed and run back to the bathroom and get in the shower.

Most often the shower is still on the chilly side when I get in, which you know...is really pleasant. I probably should preface this with a description of my actual shower head. It's not one of those you know, normal shower heads with the plastic part with the holes in it where the actual water comes out.

Its just a pipe sticking out of the wall. Seriously.

It has a metal "filter" over the pipe's opening that looks like someone just stabbed it with a knife a few times to make holes for the water to come out. This causes an erratic spray of water to actually come out of the "shower head". Because of that, the stream of water is stronger on one side of the shower than the other and it's basically like a jet stream. So the right side of the shower is like a light misting, while the left side of the shower burns laser beam holes through the left side of my body.

The only problem with this is that if I actually want to rinse the shampoo out of my hair, I have to stand under the jet stream which is not actually that harsh, but in my shower the temperature is...well...tempermental.

As I mentioned before, when you first turn on the shower you have to turn it all the way to the left, as hot as it can go because it takes fifteen minutes to heat up anyway. Once you get in, it's still not very hot, but then all of a sudden...maybe three minutes into my shower, it will get unbearably hot. At that point I have to stand under the jet stream to turn the nozzle maybe a millimeter to the right which will then make it extremely cold for a minute before it actually gets to the right temperature.

I am almost positive the people who live upstairs think we run some sort of S&M thing through our apartment from the screams coming from below in the morning. I literally horror movie scream every morning. If my roommate is asleep I scream silently. It's a horrible experience.

Oh, and I forgot to I mention that our tub is incessantly clogged, even after seven trips from the landlord's maintenance lackeys. So when I initially get into the shower, there is about a foot of standing water in the tub--and it's freezing since it takes so long to heat up. I don't even want to know what kind of bacteria thrive in that disgusting water. I've thought about buying a pair of rain boots or weighters just to take a shower.

And a bath? Well, that's not something we talk about.

So every morning I stand, hopping from one side of the shower to another in a foot of my own shower water, soap in my eyes and screaming. Trying to avoid touching the mold growing on the window sill--oftentimes entertaining the low cost option alternative of growing my own penicillin in my shower to avoid prescription drug costs.

Maybe this is why I'm not a morning person.

But as usual, I digress.

Apartment hunting. We've been at it for about three weeks now, only to realize we found "the one" at our first appointment. Of course, if there's an available apartment in this building, its not going to last. And it didn't. And because of my unreasonable optimism, I thought, "Well, we can't just settle for the first apartment we see, right?"

Yeah, actually you can. And you should.

Needless to say, when I realized my mistake, the apartment was gone. So we went back to the drawing board. We saw big places, small places, places in the South Loop, places in West Town, shitty places, amazing places and everything in between.

And finally, FINALLY we found something we both loved. I remember turning to Laura while the guy was showing us the place and not so casually whisper-shouting, "I WANT THIS APARTMENT."

Here's the problem. There were about 12 other people who were not so casually whisper-shouting the same thing to their respective roommates. As we waited outside in the rain for applications, I turned to Laura and said, "Am I gonna have to throw down today?" I mean seriously.

What ensued was an epic Battle Royale of scheming, conniving, hair pulling, and cattiness. This is Chicago people. There is like one acceptable apartment every 20 blocks.

Ok, so maybe it wasn't that dramatic, but I did have to take down a gay couple, but they were easy targets. Actually, to my satisfaction, all we had to do was flirt a little with the rental agent, who I'm not so unassumingly having a steamy, over the phone, love affair with. My roommate met him in the Loop yesterday to drop off our application fee checks and jokingly told me he complimented her on her hair. *Cut to me smothering her in her sleep*

No, but seriously, while the rental agent was showing us the apartment, Laura stopped me mid-sentence as the words, "Who do I need to..." came out of my mouth.

Apparently, she thought I was going to say, "Who do I need to blow to get this apartment?"

I mean, that's my style and all, but come on! I have tact! Well, some. Ok, very little.

To make a long story short, pending our current douche-bag leasing company doesn't completely fuck us, we'll get the apartment.

And here's the best part...Don and Jebus, you'll appreciate the value of this: It's right above Sedgwick's the local Lincoln Park Iowa bar.



It's a match made in heaven.

Duck and cover.

Today marks the beginning of this weekend's Air & Water Show in Chicago. It's fine and everything, if you like boats and planes and all that shit. Which I don't, but whatever.

Here's the thing though, every year without fail, I forget what weekend the show is and then when the planes fly over at Mach 10, like 50 feet above my head, I think we're being divebombed by terrorists.

I live right by the lake, so literally, the skies darken and my apartment shakes. Last year my dad and I were unassumingly walking down Broadway by Wellington, with our iced coffees from the Bobtail and a huge F150 (I know that's a truck, but this is my story) fly overhead. I totally pushed my dad out of the way and took cover in an alley. Hey, if the apocolypse is coming, every man for himself.

Not to mention the traffic and the mouth agaped tourists just standing around looking at the sky in the fucking parking spot I am trying to parallel park my car in.

So that's my post for today. The fucking "wings and waves" have invaded Chicago again. F-ing a.