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Recently, my friends from Bellingham, Matt & Chelsea (we studied in the MA program at Western Washington University), came through Chicago for a visit. Matt defended his dissertation (though, his PhD is European where the dissertation is called, simply, thesis) on Tuesday, and he is now Dr. Matt Holtmeier. They flew in on Saturday, and I met them at the airport (Did you know that it now costs 5 bucks to take the Blue Line FROM O’Hare!!!???). I took them to get Chicago-style hotdogs, and the next day we had Chicago-style Pizza.

On Sunday, we took them down to the Loop, walked around Millennium Park, rode the brown line, and then came home for the pizza and to watch Magic Mike. (Uh, that film is fantastic. I love Soderbergh. As we watched, we kept saying “THIS IS SO SODERBERGH!” If you don’t know the work of Soderbergh, his best film is Traffic, and he’s also known for the Ocean 11 films. I totally get why people hated the film. It’s not just man-meat for 2 hours. It’s about the characters’ interactions more than the buff men dancing. My wife and Chelsea were into that, no doubt.)

It was great hanging out and talking about Bellingham, Grad School (all drama, people we didn’t like and what they’re doing now, people we did like and what they’re doing now,) Bellingham beer, coffee, food, and what our old profs are up to, etc, etc, etc, and a lot of talking about film.

Emily, Mat, and Chelsea get along well—they’ve all known each other since we started dating back in Bellingham. Elliot was super comfortable around them and was crawling all over them. I didn’t do any work at all. I had stuff due for thesis, for work, for applications, but I put it off. That’s actually what I’ll be attacking when I’m done with this blog post.

There’s something really great about friends visiting, especially the ones where it feels like you just hung out the other day. We miss those two and told them they should just stay and live with us. But, Matt had to go defend his thesis in Detroit, then head back to Bellingham to teach.

Oh, before I forget: it was Jacob Victorine’s birthday. There was a surprise party, cake, beer, snacks, Game of Thrones, political discussions, and whiskey, among other things.

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I hope you all got to see some friendly folks over the break. It was nice for us to get that privilege, since we couldn’t really travel.

Alright, who’s ready for this semester?!