At work, my normal level of stress has gone up quite a bit, due to a project I am working on reaching a major deadline.  While after this weekend is over, this should calm back down to a nice and normal level.  At least I hope so.  Work has once again started to take over my life in a fashion that I do not like.  Anyways, I'd talk more about it, but I wouldn't want to express an opinion about work one way or another.

A little over two weeks ago, we had a wedding to go to and decided to make a weekend of it, so we headed up to the metro of Chicago for a visit.  Our fist stop on our weekend was to go to the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio.  After getting a bit messed up in our directions (thanks Iowa sign that misled us to go to Chicago almost all the way on I-80), we made our way up to the Oak Park area of the metro.  We avoided large chunks of traffic due the fact that it was the middle of the day.  You could tell the difference, though, once people started getting out of work that Friday.  We made our weight to the home and studio and even though it took us longer to get from Des Moines to Chicago, we planed for delays, so we were still early.  On a side note here, I normally struggle with staying awake on the drive to and from Cedar Rapids, probably cause I know it so well.  On the way to and from Chicago, this was not a problem in the slightest.  The people at the studio were nice enough to move our tour up from the last tour of the day to the one that was just leaving (moving forward about an hour).  This worked out well for us.  After the tour we wondered around the neighborhood to check out a number of other FLW designed or remodeled or etc homes.

Frank Lloyd Wright Oak Park Home and Studio

We drove over to the Unity Temple, thinking that perhaps we could make it in time to make the tour.  We didn't get there in enough time, but did get to take some nice photos of the outside.  Which turned out to be a good thing, since when we visited again, the day outside wasn't such a good day to take pictures.  I really like the way that it looks on the outisde.  It certainly looks different then most churches.  Oft times it seems as if churches go the cheap route (rent a space), generic route (this building looks like all the other buildings like this), or the classical cathedral style (this looks like all the other cathedrals, but cheaper.  Being from a religious tradition that I see more and more try to become the McDonald's of churches...at least in the way that they are built.  I see the same light fixtures and etc in many of these that I visit the same as all the other ones.  Instead of allowing for man to glorify the talents that he has to glorify God (in his mind, not mine), we have decided it's better to save money on these things.  Has our own greed overidden the wonder that we can create in the buildings around us?  Anyways the outside of the building was creative, and you can't really understand how this would necessarily be a good thing from the outside, but that was to be found out.

Unity Temple, Oak Park, ILAfter we took several pictures, we still had plenty of time before our dinner reservations, so we headed back to the neighborhood, after a short break at the Oak Park Library, to take more pictures. One of the first ones of the second trip was the Edwin H. Cheney House.

Edwin H. Cheney House, Oak Park, ILIs it odd that the house where FLW stole the wife of the person that paid him to build the house is under disrepair?  It did strike me as a bit funny.  We walked around, saw a few more homes and then headed down to the Marion Street Cheese Market.  We had a nice dinner, I drank copious amounts of water (I held back most of the day).  It was quite a nice dinner, I would go there again, quite delicious.  After dinner we headed over to Ben and Allison's home.

This was the first time I saw Ben, at least that I remember, since a time in college where I was, shall we say, less than sober.  Being that both Shannon and I are both not the best in situations in new places with new people, this actually went pretty well.  The situation puts you in a weird place. I have been following Ben on Facebook and twitter for quite a while and so when it comes down to it I do have a vague idea of what is going on in their lives, without the benefit of hearing the stories told in a more direct format.  I felt pretty comfortable as we sat out on their lovely porch and drank some wine (Shannon had a vodka lemonade) and told some stories from all over the place.  Some memories from high school and college, some closer in time to present.  I had some nervousness about doing this, but when it came down to it, I was happy I did and would like it to continue.  After a while, we headed out to go check into the Hotel we were staying.

Lets just say that the Lodge (Hyatt) at the McDonald's Campus (Oak Brook) is kind of hard to find.  Parking is inconvenient, no free (or even cost effective) internet, but the hotel is pretty nice.  It also has, apparently, the nations oldest buckeye tree (or at least the sign in front of the tree said as much).  We got in late and after going through a maze of hallways, we crashed.  The next morning we got up early, ate a mediocre and pretty expensive breakfast at the hotel and headed to the University of Chicago campus to go to the Frederick C. Robie House.

Frederick C. Robie House, Chicago, ILWhile we were allowed to take pictures inside the house, we did sign something stating that we could only use them for private use.  Being that, I one could interpret this place as either, I'd rather not post these.  Even on Facebook, where my wife posted a number of pictures, she didn't include any of the internal pictures we took.  Anyways, once we entered the house, I immediately fell in love with all the design elements of the house.  From the open spaces to the geometric shapes, the art glass windows, I felt like this could be my home, or at the least the kind of home that I would like to live in.  Not that I could come close to affording a house like this.  I guess for me the only real flaw with the house, for how I would want to live, would be the servants areas.  I wouldn't really want the kitchen to be so separate from the rest of the house.  But, if I were to depend on servants, it would make a whole lot of sense to have it separated that way.  One day, perhaps.  Anyways, after our tour we bought things and headed back to Oak Park to visit the inside of Unity Temple.

Natural light brightens up the entire inside.Lines create continuityinside Unity Temple, Oak Park, ILThis is a church I could go to, even if it was just to spend some quiet time.  My mind is not often calm or at peace, but upon entering here, I felt the sort of calmness that I like to have from time to time.  The thing I like the most about this is that there are no bad seats and there are so many places to sit that you get differing views to help keep your mind, at least on the building, if not the topic being talked about.  You see that generic church buildings?

We headed back to Oak Brook and had some Chicago Style pizza with Nathan and Jenny and their kids.  Then we spent the afternoon getting ready and then went to Wade and Kelly's wedding.  We had a lot of fun at he wedding and it was nice to see them both after so long and to see them both so happy.  The next day we went to the Brookfield Zoo with the Mattas.  I do like zoos, but zoos with a hangover aren't the nicest thing.  We did an abbreviated tour and headed back home.

The following week (last week) Shannon and I celebrated the 4th anniversary of our wedding.  We went to the place that catered our wedding (wow has it gone down hill) had some cake from the place that baked our wedding and groom cake, served by the place that catered our wedding (clearly the the cake was older then it should have been).  It kind of put a downer on the whole day.  Coming back from the downer, I'm still happy that she's in my life even after all these years.