A Post from Liz's Fabulous Friend, Hope

(Photo: Hope, Liz, and our fabulous friend Jamica)

This looks fun. I want to blog too. How do I blog? I have never blogged. I don't want my own blog, I just want to blog with you. Is that possible, will your husband be jealous? Or, maybe he will just want to watch. Please address this on your blog so I can blog with you. - Hope

Dear Hope,

Naturally, I will have to discuss it with my fabulous friend Stephanie, whom you met when you were visiting Austin. But I think she will agree that your interest in minutia combined with your strong opinions about all of life's oddities (like when the TSA wouldn't allow lip gloss on airplanes) and mysteries (why that one guy who works at our former employer only seems have two shirts in his wardrobe) make you an outstanding addition to our guest blogger team.

- Liz

For those of you interested in Hope's background, let me give a brief bio. Hope was born in rural Nebraska but escaped after graduating from small private college. She went to law school and got her LLM in Chicago. We used to work together but now she has a job as an attorney with a big law firm in Chicago so she works about a million hours a week. One cool thing about her job is that if she works late (which she does every night) her firm provides dinner for her. So she doesn't ever have to go grocery shopping which is good because she has no time for that and there isn't a grocery store near where she lives.

Hope has an awesome condo in Chicago in an artsy area called Bucktown. Now, Hope and I disagree about whether or not she should live in that neighborhood. Obviously, she thinks she should live there or she wouldn't have purchased her hip, cool loft-ish home. I think her apartment is too far west and you have to walk like 5 block to get to the el. And its hard to find a cab out there. I have always referred to Bucktown as "the black hole" because it was just just too far from where I used to live in Wrigleyville which was right by the lake. However, there are tons of cool bars, restaurants (the Blue Line is my favorite), a couple of really nice nail salons, and tons of hip and cool shops. Hope loves shoes and there are some awesome places that sell shoes in her neighborhood. Personally, I think that is why she lives in Bucktown...for the shoe shopping.

Now, if you are from Texas and you are reading this you might think that "shoes" means flip flops which is all anyone in Austin ever wears. But (and this will come as a shock to you Austinites) in places like Chicago people have to wear mostly closed-toe shoes most of the year. Yes, you heard right. There are places that are too cold for flip flops. Chicago is one of those places. Many people in Chicago wear snow boots like Timberlands in the winter because they keep their feet warm and dry. Hope is not one of those people. When Hope buys shoes she buys high-heeled (at least 3 inch heels most of the time) shoes that she wears all the time. She walks to the el in her heels, wears them on the train, in the snow, in the rain, on the sidewalk, and everywhere. Hope doesn't have any Timberland boots but she does have some lovely high heeled black boots. So, Hope always looks like a model even though she has now lost 3 toes to frostbite which is another reason she always wears closed-toe shoes. But that is a topic for another blog entry.

Hope was the Maid of Honor at my super-fantastic wedding in Cancun. Also she (literally) planned the whole wedding and made all the invitations, menus, save-the-date cards etc. If it wasn't for Hope I don't know what I would have done but I can say for sure that my wedding wouldn't have been as wonderful as it was without Hope. She knows everything there is to know about wedding planning and maybe one day she will start her own wedding planning business. If she does, we will for sure write about that in this blog. Also, maybe we would offer her some marketing help.

So that is a brief bio about my fabulous friend Hope who may become a contributor to our blog as long as (a) my fabulous friend Stephanie says its OK, and (b) Hope has the time in between work and shoe-shopping to write some non-legal stuff for our blog. Yeah, that is right Hope, you cannot just take legal jargon from the stuff you have to write at work and cut/paste it into our blog. You have to write about random topics like movies, or TV, interesting articles in the Star, or idiosyncrasies of people you know (or don't know).

Stay tuned to see if Hope winds up being a contributor to this blog or if she, instead, uses the time she could be writing to go shopping.