archGFX

I would love to get 6 weeks of holiday time. Melanie's best friend from high school just left sunday morning. They're headed on to New York for a week, before going back home. And that's less than half of the vacation time they get.

This last week's been insane. Friday we drove up to Toronto to meet up with Melanie's dad, since he usually only flies over once a year. En route we stopped off for some roadside america silliness

i haven't been to battle creek since i was 5, and since then they've changed it from a production line tour to an advertainment mecca. It's now pretty much a shrine to Tony the Tiger™. Who wanders around, and occasionally wanders into the 'disco' for some dancing. Poor Tucan Sam™, though, isn't allowed to dance with the kids, since he's liable to clothesline someone with his unweildy 4-foot beak. The Brits were dissappointed that they didn't have the new ad from across the pond anywhere in cereal city, so kathryn just sang it for us.

The production line tour only comes after they've shown off all of the bizarre medical history of the kellog's sanitarium. Kind of irresponsible to be showing that stuff to kids, i think. Unless they're not really afraid of lawsuits resulting from kids trying to make their sick friends better with a sweatbox.

After a long-ass drive to the land of Timmy Ho's, we managed to find a place for the brits without having to resort to hotels. If ever there was a case for the canadian 'niceness' stereotype, it's the girl who put up our friends for two nights, based solely on our having hung out with us for 4 hours last year (well, and from chatting online for the last couple years).

Saturday we met up with melanie's dad and went out to the island for the day. Where they were handing out treatbags of.... Pam and Eggbeaters? Sooooo strange. Aftewards, we went and had some awesome moroccan food for dinner, and tried to find the cool indie rock fest on the lakeshore, but only succeeded in finding the band with ski masks, prison jumpsuits, and bad 80's covers.
Since we'd already seen cereal city, we decided to visit eminem on the way home. other than that, there's really not much else in the midwest.

The rest of the week in chicago was pretty much us sending them to air-conditioned shops and museums during the day, and after work taking them to the cool restaurants that aren't on the
tourist map.

After we drove them to the airport yesterday, we stopped in at Wizard World to hang out with Steve Prue, and watch the parade of costumed star wars geeks. and, of course, pikachu: