Spanking, Cupcakes, and a penguin conspiracy

The trip to San Diego for the show was pretty uneventful, actually. Other than overhearing one guy tell a female colleague “I will spank you so hard” on the trade show floor there was very little about the show itself that was blog-worthy. Even the booth babes were wearing full suits* Well, that comment and the information on the new scanners that virtually take off your clothes to search for weapons and explosives**, but that’s old news.

Last Saturday was the second part of the cupcake tour of the north side of Chicago and it was (again) fabulous. I’ve actually been invited to write a review for another site but I won’t know if the review itself would be worth publishing on another site until I get the actual article done. The long and short of it is of the eight places we visited, three really stood out for me personally:

  1. Sweet Mandy B’s - Really great cupcakes plus an incredibly broad variety of them. Mmm…banana chocolate chip cupcakes…

  2. Southport Grocery - Still my personal favorite, but the fact that they have only two kinds (vanilla or chocolate) loses them the top spot.

  3. Sensational Bites - Incredible variety of eclectic flavors with real “pop”. Not quite the perfect combos of cake and frosting that the first two had though.

Sunday was the last Cubs game of the year, and I had somehow managed to buy two tickets in the Club Box section along the first base line (10 rows from the field) for face value from the Cubs website. It was a gorgeous day – the weather was about 75 degrees, sunny, and although the sun didn’t hit us until the 8th inning, when it did it was pretty much the best day for baseball I’ve had at any of my games all year. Needless to say, the baseball gods obviously staged this in an attempt to get me to buy tickets to eight games again next year. I’ll show them. Sure, it was made more tempting by the fact that the Cubs rallied from 4-0 down to win – but I think I’ll only get tickets to 4-5 games next year.

This is why I like living in the Midwest***. Sure, it’s cold, but cold doesn’t blow your house down. Doesn’t it seem weird that South America and Antarctica seem like they’re the only continents that don’t have hurricanes? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they are the ones that have penguins. One wonders what the penguins know that we don’t…

* Yes, they were showing ample leggage, but nothing like the T&A fest that was the previous show.
**And sure, probably provide occasional thrills for airport security personnel. But honestly, given how many ugly people are flying these days I think that’s probably okay. I mean, can’t society throw those guys a bone by letting them look at something nice every few minutes as a break from their constant firsthand exposure to America’s obesity epidemic?
*** It’s a map of the paths of all global hurricanes from 1985-2005

Comments

towwas said…
Yeah, but I notice there's one hurricane line on that picture going right over your fair city. (Please disregard the 50 bazillion going over mine.) (I like the drama hurricanes here - by the time they get to us, they're just tropical storms, and they lead to lots of flooding and power outages in places where I am not.)
grrrbear said…
Maybe, but by the time they get to Chicago they are what we call "rain". For example, the one that nipped up to visit us last year was the remnants of a little cloudburst called Katrina.
Jay Noel said…
I love wearing my Cardinals jersey when I visit Chicago. It's great fun.

Funny, "towwas" means deodorant in the Philippine language.