Before I bore you with more slides from my vacation, some links:
The NYT has spent the last couple of days doing something I never thought it'd do, which is publishing stories about things I really want to read about, like subversive knitting, pretentious theatre and food philosophy. (On that last one, Pollan's advice to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" is pure genius on a number of levels.)
Which isn't to say that I don't frequently find things in the NYT to read, just that the past few days have been bountiful. And I am totally going to see the knitting show.
Anthony Bourdain has also been bountiful as of late, because his buddy Michael Ruhlman seems to be pimping him out .... or is it the other way around. Regardless, here's Bourdain's take on Top Chef and a radio interview with him and Ruhlman.
Just when I didn't think it could get any better, my favorite writer EVER has a new piece in The New Yorker. So much good stuff --and it's only Monday. If this keeps up, by the end of the week, Johnny Depp will be offering to fill my bathtub with chocolate and small woodland creatures will sew me a new wardrobe while I brush my beautiful golden hair.
And, now, the last of the Chicago stuff.

Frozen skaters being observed by a creepy disembodied (and disenheaded) face.
In keeping with my father's philosophy* of visiting a museum when you have time to kill in a new town, I spent most of Wednesday at the Art Institute.

Go Bears!
The Silk Road exhibit is stunning -- but my pictures of it aren't. If you do nothing else, stop by long enough to look at the Japanese prints.
While there, I took the obligatory tour through the Thorne Miniature Rooms, where a group of teenage girls from a local private school (I know this because they were all wearing identical fleece jackets with the school's name embroidered on it) kept going on and on in their outside voices about how they would *totally* live in Georgian England.
As for the reading itself, well, most of the crowd -- and for a reading on a freezing Wednesday night, it was a crowd -- was there to see Neal Pollack, who was, well, Neal Pollack and it was an Experience. It was great fun to hear Leigh Ann Wilson and I am a new fan. Plus, I got to hang out with Kim of the Hormone-Colored Days and Paula Kamen and talk like girls and sign a couple of books. Oh -- and eat frites. Love the Hopleaf's frites.
As it turns out, that actually isn't the last of the Chicago stuff. The rest, however, involves yarn and can wait.
*I have been to a lot of museums, all of them lovely, expect for the one that was chock full of aircraft from WWII. While I am sure that it was interesting to someone, it wasn't me.