no smoking

starting tomorrow tonight at midnight, Chicago is smoke free.
i can't wait!!

Holiday posts

in Trans Atlantic Family:
Christmas 2007
pre-hangover-hockey activities in canada!

Happy holidays!

Holiday travel

we spent the last week away for holidays, in Cadillac and Canada. more stories and pictures to come... today we're taking it easy and relaxing after the looooong drive back from the cabin.

oh, and it's our anniversary!

haunted

i'm being haunted, or more specifically, my dreams are being haunted, by a guy that i hardly know, who is the author of a paper that i was refereeing earlier this month.
it's the 2nd time that guy was in my dream. the first time i saw him on tv in my dream, and last night he gave a talk (and was much more eloquent than in real world).
it's one thing to dream about work, but why do i have to be haunted by obnoxious people???
anyway, i don't know why this happens.

full house

ben's back home, and we are all much happier :)

Office

my office mate is constantly talking to herself and it's driving me crazy.

it's beginning to look a lot like xmass

it's my first time being in america in the season before xmas. it's crazy. everything is decorated for xmas well before thanks giving, the radio is playing holiday music, and most of all, there's xmas commercials on tv all the time. it makes you feel like there's something really WRONG with you if you're not out there SHOPPING every waking moment. and if you do go shopping, you should definitely buy a new car, diamonds and/or 50'' hi-def TV, if you want your family to love you. sort of crazy.
anyway, i really like how things look this time of year. especially since we got some snow, and it accumulates on the leafless trees and the little lights shine through it.. fabulous.
ben is flying to the canary islands tomorrow for a few nights of observations, so before he does we took some time to put up some holiday spirit on the walls!


the cat is a part of our Halloween decoration, but we liked it a lot, so he gets to stay for now... (assaf, the daylight picture is for you!)


some of you may recognize the snowflakes, bells and balls from our wedding in cadillac, almost a year ago :)
bigrit, the guys wanted to say hi to you and sam!

...my latest projects

a white-pink-purplish afghan, that had just reached its destination in Pasadena...


and these two, are to finally be kept at home!!

i'm working on some more fall color blankles:

first snow

the first real snow had the city looking incredibly clean and fluffy. we didn't have a camera, but luckily our friend Chris did take a few pictures a couple nights ago!
here...

fetch

lately gray scrooge and i started playing fetch. he has a bunch of rubber balls that he can catch with his mouth. i throw a ball for him, he runs after it, catches it in his mouth, and brings it back to me. we play like that 10-20 times before he gets tired and then he just lays there with his ball.
once a week i have to go around and find all the balls that he lost under the refrigerator, oven, dresser or couch.

Chicago Blackhawks

This post is a couple weeks overdue. It also happened while Kevin was in town. We all took a trip out to the United Center where the Chicago Blackhawks play hockey. My buddy Ken joined us as well, and served as the navigator. Tickets were $15 apiece and parking was $11. Not too bad, especially compared to the Detroit Red Wings. Our view was still pretty good (see the two pictures to the right).

I don't know much about soccer, but I'm told the rules of ice hockey are much like those of football (i.e. soccer if you're American): you try to score goals and not go offsides. It's soccer for people that live in snowy weather. Canada usually produces the most and best hockey players, but there also many Russians, Scandanavians, Czechs, Slovakians, Americans and some other nationalities that play in this league, the National Hockey League (NHL), which most would agree is where the best players play.

Keren took a bunch of pictures and put them in Picasa, here, if want to see them. The United Center holds about 20,000 people. About 1/2 were Chicago fans, and 1/2 Detroit fans, including Kevin and me, so there were a lot of insults traded between fans which I won't reprint here.

Hockey is a violent sport; people run into each other fast and get penalized for it by sitting in the penalty box for 2 minutes, or as Keren says, "they go to jail". In fact, people often say "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out". The hockey game broke out alright, but we got lucky and saw a nice fight: a 30 second bout between Parick Sharp (red - Chicago) and Tomas Kopecky (white - Detroit):

From left to right, you can see the 1) fight start, fists flying 2) the players fall to the ice, and are broken up by the referees, and 3) blood from Patrick Sharp's forehead staining the United Center Ice. Play was stopped briefly, as both players were sent off to "jail" and the blood was cleaned from the ice. If you want some in depth analysis of the fight, who people thought won, and a nice YouTube video of the whole fight, I encourage you to go here, a whole webpage for the fight, maintained by Hockey Fights. "Hockey Fights" is indeed one of the truly great products of the internet age. Now I remember what I was thankful for at Thanksgiving.

Although the Red Wings player (Kopecky) won the fight, Chicago won the hockey game, 3-2. All in all, this is a pretty good bit of entertainment. $40 for two people for major sporting events in the U.S. is definitely cheap, still a little more than a movie, but not outrageous.

Some people may be suprised to know that the United Center, where the hockey game was played tonight, is also home to the Chicago Bulls basketball team, Michael Jordan's old team - that's right, they play basketball on the ice. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good link or pictures of the process, but after each hockey game, they place giant wood partitions over the ice, remove the wall around the ice, and play basketball! This had to be perfected. In the 80's and early 90's when they first tried this, the basketball floor would get too cold and water would condense on the floor, forcing cancellation of the game due to players slipping and being injured.

Just in case you don't belive me, look at Keren's photo album (you can see the statute a lot better), or see my blurry picture with Keren in from of giant Michael Jordan statue just outside the United Center: