It’s been a quiet week here in Chicagoland¹, my interim hometown. The weather this weekend was nice², and now that the weekend is over, Mother Nature has provided us with some much-needed slow, steady rain. That might dampen some spirits, but Doc Och is happy because he just learned that his daughter, Jennie will be in town for an extra day.

They got a little bit of a late start headed into work this morning. Doc Och woke a little bit late, noted that the forecast was for an increasing chance of rain, and decided to go for a ride on Ellie. He was unusually distracted this morning – he actually forgot his bike helmet for the first 10 minutes of his ride, and had to turn back.

He and Jennie headed to the office around 8. When they got to the Loop, Jennie set off to explore the Riverwalk and Joe headed in.

Enough of that third person stuff. I was trying to write in the style of Garrison Keillor, but I don’t really have a funny story, so….

Our security badges didn’t work today – I guess they had been set to expire on Friday. It wasn’t worth getting them renewed for what we expected to be a couple hours of work, so we snuck onto the floor. We (Shanzeh, Courtney and I) cleaned up the room. There were still post-its with ideas hanging around, giant sheets of paper from easel pads clinging to the walls echoing the status of all the girls projects. We were there to complete the return of materials to Accenture – staff laptops, security cables, security badges and unused lunch vouchers. We expected to be there until about 10:30, when our laptops were scheduled to get picked up. They did get picked up then, but it was almost noon before the other materials were. There wasn’t much we could do without our laptops, so we played paper games (Jen had returned by then) until we were done. Afterwards we went out to lunch.

Jen and I came home and hung around until it was time to head to the airport. I rode with her – the ride back is free for me, and this way we didn’t have to buy a transit pass. I got home, finished up some work, and then got a text from jen saying her flight was delayed. Over the next hour or so, I got texts saying that her flight was delayed further – most likely due to the storm in Baltimore, where she was due to layover. I was concerned that her arrangements for travel from the airport to her home would fall through. After some quick calls and texts, we got a plan going for her to stay here another day and fly out tomorrow. It works out better for her ride back home, too. Win, win, win. Now we are headed back to Jsmile51 for a reprise of Saturday night: a rainy walk to enjoy some dessert.

Footnotes

¹not really, 26 people have been murdered in Chicago in that time.
²with the exception of that one freak rainstorm