i love my family. immediate and extended. its always so much fun to hang out with them and to be surrounded by them. i think i have a pretty special family. and i am thankful for all of them. words can't really describe my family but as crazy as all of us are together...the times together are full of laughter and love. from my parents to my HUGE extended family of great-aunts/uncles, aunts/uncles, cousins, etc my niece-cousin (is there such a thing?) is SO ABSOLUTELY FREAKING CUTE...i love her. freaking adorable. on another note...i freaking HATE driving to and from the city of chicago to the suburbs...let me tell you about the driving fiasco that was simply supposed to be a drive from chicago to family home base in naperville... beginning time of trip- 7:30 PM: okay so we were going to go back to naperville...pick up stray people at home there (ie. babies, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc) so we could all get some good ol' chicago style pizza...from lou malnatis of course since i insisted for the out of town folk for them to try the best plan changed to just driving straight to the restaurant and picking up the pizza to bring home...so instead of taking 55 down to naperville uncle said it was better to take 90/94E then to 290 then to 88 to get to downtown naperville sooner....ok cool problem was by the time we found a freaking on-ramp to 90/94 that wasn't closed/under construction we had unknowingly passed the 290 junction on 90/94 and should've taken 90/94W to get back to it. by the way we took a detour into chinatown to get joy-yees since we ended up there to get on 90/94...peter fell asleep in the car cause the bubble tea line was ridiculous...ok so back to 90/94E...none of us considered looking at a map so we didnt think anything was wrong...until we hit 80...and then we looked at the map at was like WTF we are going totally south... we were like hmm maybe we should turn around...but that got vetoed when we saw a huge accident and ridiculous traffic going back the other way...so we went on 57...and Peter got a kick when the signs said Memphis, Wisconsin, and Iowa...made me take a picture cause he never thought he'd see a sign like that did i mention the map we are navigating from was not a good map at all and was like one of those from the rental car company that only had the bare neccessities on it...we ended up on the very edge of that map south of orland park...ORLAND PARK???!!! using that map we also failed to realize that where we thought we could get back onto other highways...there weren't junctions there either...the highways just simply crossed... so looking at our map we decided to take local back cause it wasn't worth it to go back on the highway...so we took local back to try to find 55...and the best line of the whole trip was: peter: I see 55!! I see 55! It's about freaking time...finally!
me: um peter....that's the speed limit
peter: #$#$ &*&#$*&%... there were lots more moments on this detour road trip and really i simplified the complexity of how we managed to get so off track but too much to write and you just had to be there in conclusion: arrival time was 9:10 in naperville at home...did i mention we were supposed to pick up the pizza at 8:05? we didn't even pick up the pizza... what i learned: driving into and out of the city stanks...much thanks to everyone who drives into the city to play with me! | 
