Chicago on a Friday afternoon

Hanging out downtown with Ray

I had a Friday off before a long scheduled Master Nikon i-TTL Flash class in Chicago on Saturday. I called my cousin Ray in Joliet and arranged to spend the night at his house on Friday so I wouldn't have to drive all the way from Bloomington on Saturday morning.

Since I had the Friday off and nothing else going on I decided to head to downtown Chicago Friday afternoon to take pictures of one of my favorite things in the whole world, "the bean" at Millennium Park. My cousin Ray is a retired teacher with time on his hands so he agreed to come along.

His daughter Katie is a first year law student at De Paul. After we had walked around down town for a while we went up to visit with Katie for a while and take her out for dinner. Katie is very busy studying for her law school finals. Hanging out with us for a little while was the only break she took all day!

Did I mention it was cold? Honest, about 15 degrees near the lake where we were. I can report it wasn't cold enough to freeze the balls off a stainless steel moose. We were dressed for it. Ray had a couple of pairs of Carhart coveralls, Ray had a hat, I had my beaver hat, we were set!

Looking at the photos, I guess we didn't look like typical tourists but we were warm. I know we made impressions on several people however because I caught them taking pictures of us.

So after we had walked around for a while we headed up to see Katie. We walked to a little bar for dinner a few blocks from her house. It had gotten colder. On the way back Ray and I mentioned how warm we were and we were skeptical Katie was warm in her down jacket, hat, and scarf. Being the good father that he is Ray offered to buy Katie coveralls like our. Katie said something like, "If there was a nuclear winter and everyone else had frozen to death and I was the last woman alive, I wouldn't wear coveralls like those." It's good she's thought things through and knows what she likes and what she doesn't.