Chicago trip and Power problems

Hey everyone. Sorry to get this out so late, but we were out of power since Saturday night, until Tuesday. Wednesday and today I have work, but since I woke up early enough, I figured I might as well write.

Monday was my Chicago trip. We had quite a blast - I didn't know that it was the first time my mom was in downtown Chicago to enjoy herself in it. The ordeal at the consulate took an overwhelming minute-and-a-half. I basically dropped off everything that I needed to there, he took a look at it, said everything looked good, and said it'll be mailed back to me later. So, we had gone 3 hours to Chicago for a two minute meeting; now it was time to have fun. We ate at the Grand Lux Cafe, on N. Michigan. They had great food, and for being an up-class dining area, it was fairly inexpensive. Before you ask, yes - I got pictures. Here:Coming in to town - a bit foggy, so you can't see the buildings clearly.

A clock tower we passed while heading on this road:

Also known as N. Michigan Avenue.

My brother, Calvin, enjoying his complimentary bread and butter at the Grand Lux Cafe.

Well, I wonder who this handsome bloke could be? The statue's nice too.
Another shot from the Cafe.

Another couple shots from the Grand Lux Cafe.

Just a random shot of Saks Fifth Avenue across the street from the Consulate.

The past week hasn't all been fun and games though. As I said, from Saturday night (roughly 7:30) to Tuesday night (around the same time), our power had been out. Monday was a nice way to escape a cold house. Unfortunately for us, when our power goes, so do most of our supplies: water pumped from our shared well has an electric pump, so no water; our waste pump is electric, so no flushing toilets (yuck!); our heating goes out; and everything is just more than a bit uncomfortable. We made it through, though; we placed blankets on the floor and made a makeshift bed for everyone in the living room, and had the fireplace going strong.

Finally, I point out this last little bit of good news:

That's right, folks. No longer are we living in the stone age: we've moved from 56k to EV-DO-based broadband! It runs quite nicely, too. I did a couple of downloads to check out speeds on it: svn (subversion - a way to work with source code with other people and place it in the same area, for those less geekily inclined) ran at an average of 150 KiB/sec. Quite an improvement over 3 Kib/sec we were getting with dialup.

A quick connection test here [dslreports.com] shows that I have a 1005kbps (divide by 8 for KiB/sec) down/353kbps stream, with a latency of 192 ms. Not bad.

Well, have fun everyone. I'm gonna take a shower and head off to work.