Weekend highlights

Lots of new experiences this weekend. On Saturday, we finally made it to a Chicago Fire game, which was surprisingly easy to get to. Just past Midway airport. The stadium is new and there's really not a bad seat in the house. We recommend sections 113-115, though, where we moved for the second half. They are some of the cheapest tickets, but give you a great view of the whole field. We also were enticed by the ice cream nachos for sale, but sadly they were sold out by the time we decided to try them.

On Sunday, it was Nick's birthday, so Resa arranged for a surprise trip to Korean BBQ where we and eight of their friends all gathered. If you've never had Korean BBQ, you are missing out! It's awesome. I first enjoyed it with some of my more cultured friends in my NYC days. Love love love it. Resa and Nick go so often that the staff at Chicago Kalbi knows them. They were very excited it was Nick's birthday.

After dinner, we went to play whirlyball. Seriously. At first I wasn't going to play, I was feeling a bit apprehensive. But we needed one more player for even teams. If you've never heard of it, it's basically like lacrosse in bumper cars... and the bumper cars have no breaks, so you have to hit someone or a wall to stop. It was actually ridiculously fun, until last night when the soreness from being bashed into and the bruises from the steering rod and the seatbelt buckle all started setting in. Maybe I'm too old for whirlyball. I also almost got my hand crushed to smithereens when I moronically reached my hand instead of my ball-catching-thing (what do you call that??) out of my car and grabbed the ball from in front of my bumper right before someone smashed that bumper into the wall. Totally having flashbacks of that idiotic moment. Ugh.

That was not the end of the fun, as the whirlyball place also has laser tag. (Not to mention air hockey, darts, pool, etc.) So our whole crew trotted off for a session of laser tag... but it turned out the team we were playing shows up for battle every Sunday night. Whoa! Then there was also the little matter of no one explaining things like guarding your bases and hitting the other team's targets, so we started out quite quite disorganized. We started to figure it out during the second game, but we were still slaughtered and we were all drenched in sweat from running and wearing the laser pack. But the good thing about laser tag is that once you are hit too many times, you can run back to base and recharge, so you're never out of the game and you really don't care about winning, just playing. This coming from crazy over-competitive me! (Okay, I wanted to win, but I wasn't sad that we didn't as I would have been if we were playing, oh, Trivial Pursuit. :)

On the whole, I preferred laser tag to whirlyball. It's non-stop sprinting and ducking, so it's also a darn good work out. I've still got some weird numbness in my thumb from holding down one of the buttons on my laser gun though. As lame as this may sound, we are definitely going to go play laser tag again some time.

Oh, and I beat Rob at air hockey. Worth mentioning because when it comes to really anything that involves coordination, Rob is always victorious. So that was pretty sweet.