So for our third year in a row, we participated in the PAWS “Run for their Lives 8K Run and 4K Walk” along the beautiful Chicago lakefront. (PAWS stands for Pets Are Worth Saving and is a local no kill animal charity in Chicago.) The participants this year included Dave and I, obviously Hefner, Grandma, Grandpa, Jack, Andrew, my Aunt Kathy and her golden retriever Cody and Jack’s girlfriend, Kristin, with her yellow lab Austin. This was the biggest group we have had yet and it was a lot of fun!

In the past years, we have walked with our good friends Austin and Kara and their adorable chihuahua Lola (who have since moved out to San Diego—boo!) and another year with Grandma and Jack while my dad did the 8K run. Every year the weather has been perfect, fairly warm and sunny, so the walk along the lake has been particularly beautiful. It starts along the path at Montrose Harbor and is basically a big loop. Owners can sign up to walk with their dogs or run by themselves. It is so fun to see all the different sizes and breeds of dogs walking, pooping, peeing, sniffing, barking along the lakefront! Hef is definitely on overload when he is there and has a blast!

PAWS does a great job of putting on quite a show. When we arrived, Montrose Harbor was packed with tents giving out tons of dog stuff. There is a local radio station covering the event, so lots of loud music. Some dogs and owners were walking around in costumes for the Halloween costume contest. There is a food tent with bagels, water, yogurt, bananas, Ann Sather cinnamon rolls (awesome!) and other great treats for before the walk/run. After, they usually have pizza along with a Adopt-a-Thon for some homeless pets. And what event in Chicago could be complete without the Jesse White Tumblers?!?!

The cost is about $35 per person, which seems a bit pricey but it is for a worthy cause. The fee also includes a goody bag with coupons, advertisements, the PAWS magazine and a long sleeve t-shirt commemorating the event. Only a small price to pay for a fun-filled morning spent getting some exercise with my family and dog while enjoying Chicago’s beautiful lakefront. Definitely worth it in my opinion!

From Hef’s Bedroom:

I give the PAWS Walk 5 outof 5 paws. I get to walk with all my friends and get lots of treats and attention. A day centered completely on me!!! Too bad the PAWS Walk is not every weekend!

I love Nail Art–it is just that simple. Since it has been about a year since my first visit there, I feel it fitting to write a raving review. I am quite obsessive about my nails and until Nail Art, had been painting them a home myself, which I have to say I was getting pretty good at. However, Nail Art has completely changed everything. Let me tell you how much I love them.

As I said, I have been going consistently every week for a year now. Occasionally I will get a “mani pedi”, but typically it is just a “mani,” as they like to call it. It is very inexpensive, so that means it is easy to go often. I think it’s $14 for a manicure–pretty sure. They have a Monday and Tuesday special where you can get a “mani pedi” for $35. What a deal! Also, you don’t need an appointment. What?!?!?! Just walk in whenever you want to and they will fit you in, no problem. CJ, the owner, is so accommodating and the rest of the staff is so nice and friendly. At first I thought to try and stick with the same person, as I am accustomed to do with other places, but they are all so good it really doesn’t matter. The manicures really last all week, so chips are not a problem. Shout out to Sara, Tina, Erica, Hannah, Sunny, Uma, and Judy! Since I am cool and I am a regular, everyone knows me.

They recently expanded and remodeled the place and the décor is very tranquil. Perfect for relaxing on my lunch hour. I especially love the massaging chairs they have at the pedicure stations. There are some small private rooms in the back where they do chair massages (AWESOME!) and facials, which I will be trying soon. They feature Essie and OPI nail polishes and even paint cute flowers on the fingers and toes of the little girls that come in. How cute! The manicures include a great arm/hand and shoulder massage out of the deal and they even rub you with a hot towel too. Nail Art has a frequent manicure card, which may be the best part of this place. If you get 9 stamps on your card, your tenth mani if FREE! Honestly, this place is just the best. If you haven’t already gone you absolutely have to go. You will not be disappointed!

Nail Art
917 Ridge Road
Wilmette, IL 60091
(847) 251-0351

About two weeks ago I finally got around to tiling our kitchen backsplash — something we have been talking about doing for a year or so. Have I ever tiled a backsplash you ask? No. In fact, I’ve never really tiled anything, but like any good husband I confidently told Alex, ‘No sweat. I can get this done in a weekend!’

The Tile

We had picked out the tile months ago and had it sitting in the garage all summer. Funny how household projects all seem to follow this pattern. We (when I say ‘we’ I mean ‘Alex’) chose multi-color glass tiles that came in 12in x 12in mesh sheets from a tile warehouse in Niles where I was mistaken for a Romanian forklift worker. I was waiting next to the forklift as one of the workers was in the back of the warehouse getting our tile when another customer walked up to me and said, and I quote ‘Are you Romanian?’ while handing me his receipt. Interestingly enough this is not the first time I’ve been mistaken for a European. On a flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, I had a flight attendant recite me my full dinner and drink options in German before I stopped her and explained that I don’t speak a lick of German.

The Plan

As I said, I’ve never tiled anything before so I went to the best source of how-to information in the world, the internet. In a matter of minutes I was a tiling expert and was pretty confident I could build an extension on the back of our house with the help of the internet, but that’s another story. With my list of materials in hand I set off to the best source of tiling materials in the world, Home Depot.

The Execution

Three things I learned while tiling.

• Tiling is a Mess

The grout was flying everywhere, behind the stove, on the countertop, in the sink and in my hair. Everywhere!!! What a mess, I swear it took me longer to clean up than it did to grout the tile.

• Cutting Small Glass Tiles is Impossible

The glass tiles were approximately 3/4in square in a 12in x 12in mesh sheet making them flexible and very difficult to cut with a wet saw. To make matters worse the clamps provided by the almighty Home Depot saw weren’t made to fit our specific tile. Lets just say that safety flew out the window after a few scrap sheets were wasted. It wasn’t pretty, but with the help of a pair of vice grips, a couple of shims and a home made clamp I was able to cut a few tiles to fit in the corners.

• Glass Tiles Look Wonderful

You can judge for yourself, just take a look at the before and after pictures, but I think it made a huge difference. The kitchen looks great and it was well worth the effort!

The Aftermath

Unfortunately for Alex, I’m ready to take on any tiling project. I already have plans for the kitchen floor, bathroom floor and shower. Watch out world, tile man is coming! Now I just need a cool green spandex suit like the guy on Always Sunny.

What’s one of the best things about summertime in Chicago? The Air and Water Show of course!!!

If you haven’t ever gone, you are missing out–seriously. Can you think of anything better than spending a beautiful sunny afternoon along the lakefront drinking a cold one and pinching your ears shut as a F14 fighter jet goes screaming past you? Or watching a plane make smoke loop-d-loops and then go straight into a dive bomb, only to pull up at the last second before almost touching the water? I don’t think so! And honestly, the ONLY way to watch the show is from the water. Lucky for us, we ended up watching the show from a beautiful boat this year and it was incredible. It definitely made the experience of watching the show from the water even better.

We took a lot of photos and videos of all the action. Check them out below!

Chicago Air and Water Show

Pictures from the Chicago Air and Water Show 2010. Blue Angels and others.

11 Photos

Here goes my first attempt at blogging. Alex is in full blog mode already so it’s going to be hard to keep up, but I think I’m up to the challenge. Unfortunately for many of you my posts will more technically focused; how I’ve created and configured the blog, tools I’m using, useful websites, etc… I’m only going to apologize once; it’s what I enjoy doing and subsequently writing about so you’ll just have to deal with it. Hopefully there will be a few interested parties who either want to do something similar or share their advice with me. Now that we’ve got the formalities out of the way let’s move on.

WordPress

Why WordPress? Simply enough, it seemed to be the industry standard from what I could tell in my research. By research I mean Googling. Off topic for a moment, but do you think Googling should be classified as a skill? I think it should. I often ask interviewees this question. Many of them are a bit perplexed by the idea at first but through some prodding they come to the understanding that in our field it is extremely difficult to know everything about a particular programming language, software, browser, etc… and if you can find the specific nugget of information you’re looking for in a shorter amount of time than your colleagues it might be classifiable as a skill. You should Google the term ‘Googling, or ‘Is Googling A Skill’, it’s interesting. Back to the topic at hand, WordPress seemed like the best choice for our needs, it has a well established blogging framework, easy to navigate admin section, a plethora of free templates and utilities (plugins) and was easy enough to learn in a day or two such that I could customize our site to our liking. If you know PHP you’ll be able to easily understand WordPress. Plus WordPress is Open Source, which I tend to prefer (that’s a whole other topic). Check out the history and documentation for more information.

Free WordPress Templates

When starting our site I immediately gravitated towards free WordPress templates for three reasons; I didn’t want to waste the time to create a WordPress site from scratch, there are plenty of free templates available online (I’ve listed a number of sites below that I perused in my search) and of course they’re free. There are also plenty of WordPress themes that cost a pretty penny and most likely worth it (better SEO management, customization, etc…), but my suggestion when starting a blog is to limit as much of the overhead costs as possible. Most bloggers warn that making money blogging takes months to years to see decent returns, so I figured we’d start small and see what happens. I focused on free WordPress templates which already contained customization for Google Adsense.

• 18 Adsense Optimized WordPress to Maximize you Contextual Ad Earnings
• 21 Free AdSense-Ready WordPress Themes

Once we decided on a theme (honestly this took over two weeks as Alex and I have different opinions on look and feel) I installed WordPress on my local machine to get better handle on it. It wasn’t too difficult and the WordPress documentation helped a ton. To be honest, the basics of a WordPress site are rather simplified for the user which is great. There are few things you must do and the rest is styling and customization.

Bluehost Hosting

After deciding on the theme it was time to purchase a site and hosting services. I had used Bluehost before (davealexwedding.com – sadly we didn’t keep this site going) so I was comfortable with them and after some more quick ‘research’ I found them to still be one of the top rated hosting sites. The price was good ($4.95 / month for a 12 month contract) and WordPress installation is literally a one click setup. The total time for purchasing the site, installing WordPress, uploading our files and the site being up took a couple of hours. It’s still a little early to report on any down time or customer service issues so we’ll see how it goes.

That covers the initial setup of the blog. Overall it took us approximately two weeks and most of that as I said was deciding on a theme. For the most part it was a pretty painless process and having done it once I could easily get a blog setup in as little as a day. However, since the blog has been up I have done quite a bit of customization, Adsense and SEO management that have proven to be a little more difficult. I’m still working on these areas and hope to have a post up shortly with more in depth information on how we are approaching these areas and how that affects our progress of reaching our goals.

Welcome to TheChee! My husband Dave and I have been tossing the idea around for years of starting our own business or website. The long term goal would be to supplement a large portion of our current income, in the short term we’d be happy with a little extra spending cash and the opportunity to work and collaborate together. We both love our jobs. I currently work with my father running his dental practice and Dave works at a local software company, but this may help us get away from the 9 to 5 (more like 8 to 6 these days, Dave!) in the future. Also, one of us could stay home and not completely lose a source of income when we decide to have kids. I could just see Dave as Mr. Mom, that would be a sight!

Each of us has various interests and ideas making it difficult to decide on a specific concept. Dave and I met at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I majored in Industrial Design, which is fancy name for product design. I started as a general art major and at the time it seemed like one of the few specialties to avoid becoming a starving artist. It was a ton of fun and I met a lot of great people, but I should have minored in business like my father encouraged. Kids, make sure you listen to your parents! I enjoyed it, but honestly I don’t miss it at all now that I’m not doing it. That’s a good sign, right? Dave on the other hand majored in Computer Engineering and continues to work in the industry, although he’ll be the first to tell you that most of what he learned in school isn’t applicable in the workplace. Kids, make sure you don’t listen to that!

We’ve decided to blog about a variety of topics; living and starting a family on the Chicago North Shore as a younger couple, local events and festivals, restaurants in the area, outdoor activities and dog friendly places for our adorable yorkie Hefner and even a bit of our interesting personal life – yeah right! Additionally I’ll be discussing my ongoing struggle with starting an online bakery and Dave may document is progress with developing an iPhone application. We’ll also keep you posted with our progress on achieving our goal, our time frame is two years but hopefully it won’t take us that long!

We hope you enjoy our blog and find some useful information about the Chicago North Shore!