After nearly two weeks of what turned out to be an utterly charming holiday filled with a bountifulness of dear, dear friends and family, I am back in the land of the to-do list. Yesterday I pissed the hours away on Flickr and Facebook, but today I strapped myself into my red chair and got down to business. Besides work (which is a little complicated, but fine), I now have at least three doctor’s appointments I need to schedule, many emails to answer, an apartment to clean, reading to catch up on, clients to badger and please, and—the indignity of it—I find that I am responsible for planning and making my own meals again.

Okay, I lied. That last one isn’t an indignity. It’s a tremendous pleasure. We’ve cooked dinner every night since we got back (yes, including Wednesday, and our flight didn’t get in until 6:10pm) and this evening another marvelous staple is on the menu: our favorite bacon-tomato-mushroom pasta. It contains fully a cup of white wine (which is a lot, but still leaves quite a lot in the bottle for later), is simmered until the bacon all but disappears, and winds up so rich and delicious that it is served (on long strands of green spinach pasta) without a whit of cheese.

Tomorrow we’ve decided that we’re bringing the holiday back to Chicago and heading to the Loop for an afternoon of great coffee and magazine reading in the Intelligentsia cafe. No work is allowed. (Ross will have a far harder time sticking to this than me.)

For more Boston, go here. Also, stay tuned for a future entry on the subject of “How a Person Can Put Her Entire Life on the Internet and Still Consider Herself Extraordinarily Private.”

When one has been very good about not eating anything dessert-like for several days, and when one has worked quite hard and thinks that to reward oneself one should take a walk to the cafe down the road and buy oneself a small, sweet treat, and when one has picked out (with glee) what one thinks is a slice of banana-chocolate-walnut cake, carried it over to the park across the street, and opened it up to enjoy it next to one’s husband (who is happily consuming a luridly colorful Rice Krispies treat with Froot Loops), and when, in the midst of one’s joy, one discovers that what one has purchased is not, in fact, a delicious banana-chocolate-walnut-cake, but a foul and pestilential fruit cake, then what one is tasting in one’s mouth is not only the cloying tang of candied cherries, but also the ashy, gunmetal flavor of disappointment.

It pretty much wiped us out.

I’m really sorry I haven’t had much to report here lately, but that’s because I’m entering my summer slowdown; it happens every year, as you know, when body and brain start to ease into the languid pace of warmer weather and thoughts run slow like simple syrup. I’ll get over it (maybe) and post more (hopefully) and you’ll forgive me (definitely?).

…is pretty hellish for people who dislike crowds in general, and screaming crowds of children in particular. I really ought to have realized that; it was the same when we went to the free day at the Field Museum a few months ago (winter is just as bad as summer, come to think of it). Oh, well. We got to see Michelle Kaufman’s gorgeous Smart Home: Green + Wired exhibit in relative peace, since they limit the tours of the house (which induced in us a never-before-felt urge to buy shiny property) to 20 people. That was yesterday. Also yesterday, the baking of the second iteration of the banana-chocolate bread we made last month, and the watching of Miller’s Crossing. I can’t tell you how much I love that loaf pan. Well, maybe I can: slightly more than I love Gabriel Byrne.

Today was gloriously quiet. I worked. I went out in the afternoon to take a break on the swings and ended up next to a frickin’ cute little boy being pushed by his mom; I glided slowly so as not to shake the swing frame too much, and it was probably the most relaxing thing I have done in weeks.

I have done many, many relaxing things in the past few weeks, including drinking six glasses of wine while sitting on grass listening to an orchestra and chatting with a bunch of friendly folks. So I know from relaxing.

In a minute we’re going to have more banana-chocolate bread, and tomorrow we have a Wordpress upgrade scheduled that may cause Distances Between Ports to go down for a while, but to make up for how complicated it may be—we’ve skipped a couple of upgrades, so it might be kind of tricky to convert all my incredibly stylish touches to the new platform—we’ve promised ourselves some deep dish pizza and soda. So if you do come by and notice that my blog has disappeared, just imagine that there is a post on it that says, “Upgrading Wordpress. Very full.”

Did I already tell you the aroma of chocolate in downtown Chicago is very, very real? Ross and I have smelled it many times now, walking under and amidst the towering buildings of the Loop.

Today I noticed that there was a scent wafting out of some of the buildings—including the one pictured below—opposite the hospitals on the University of Chicago campus that was reminiscent of nothing so much as coconut sticky rice. This city must like being perfumed with dessert.

Unfortunately, the rain we’ve had lately seems to have caused some amount of sewer backup in Hyde Park, so not every walk I take these days is that fragrant.

I am stopping work now, even though I am in the middle of something, because there is absolutely no reason (except for my stupendously powerful need for completion) for me to finish this tonight. It is not due until tomorrow at 11am and it will only take me an hour to get it done. I need to let go.

Ross’s research project is going well! Yay! His face is sweet when he is excited.

I think we are both obsessed with food. But then I’m beginning to think that everyone is obsessed with food. I think it is a national phase we’re all going through together, like blogging and suddenly becoming interested in photography.

Anyway, I don’t mind. It’s not a bad thing to always have on your mind.