Happy New Year!  2012 is going to be a good year.  I'm going to start out with a few things...

First off...

The other day we were leaving the house, and I noticed that my girlfriend's brother's car was parked in a pretty cool spot along the fence.  I decided I was going to try and take a couple pictures of it since it was night time.  I just got a tripod for Christmas, so I wanted to see how well I could get some low light shots. I think they turned out pretty well.  I parked my Dad's Mustang GT in front of it and took a few shots...  Enjoy!

So that was a few days ago.  Since then New Year's came and went, and we had a good time with our little mini trip to Chicago!  Here's the details...  

We left Saturday morning.  We got a Malibu as our rental car, and it was pretty decent.  We stopped along the way from Iowa to Chicago in Aurora and went to the big outlet mall and shopped around a bit.  It was nice to stretch our legs, but we didn't find anything that we liked.  We grabbed lunch at the food court, and it was kinda crappy.  Well...  Pretty crappy.  So we left and headed for Chicago.  We got to Chicago, and headed for Chinatown so we could grab a few things that she wanted.  Got all of that stuff, and walked around a bit then headed to our hotel.  We stayed at the Holiday Inn downtown on Wabash.  It was pretty nice.  The room was sooo tiny, but I'm sure that's expected for a downtown hotel like that.  We had a pretty nice view of the John Hancock building, and the rest of Downtown.  We left after we dropped off our things, and went to Water Tower Place to shop a little bit.  There wasn't much open by the time we got there, but we were still able to get a little bit done.  We started getting hungry again, so we started looking for a place to eat.  We walked around and found a place called Rosebud on Rush.  Stopped in and asked if they had any seating left, they said they had one table for two left, and everything else was reservation only.  We got pretty lucky there.  The place was really nice, and the food and service was really good.  I ordered the Ravioli di Carne, and she got some kind of tortellini.  After we were done there, we went back and walked around downtown real quick then headed back to the car.  We drove around Chicago for a while before we went to Navy Pier.  We started to head to Navy Pier, and the traffic was craaaaazy!  It was nuts to say the least.  It took us a while to fight through the traffic and people crossing the streets to get in and get a parking spot.  We did get in though, and got a really good parking spot right by the doors in the stained glass museum part of Navy Pier.  We got out and walked around to just kind of take everything in.  It was really cool, but it was soooo cold outside!  At this time the wind started to get really bad, so every time we went outside we got cold really fast.  She bought me a scarf at the gift shop to wear, since I forgot mine back at home.  It was a little bit better with the scarf, but it was still insanely cold.  We stayed inside and warmed up for a while, then went back out to walk up and down the pier.  We did that up until it was time to find a spot to sit and watch the fireworks.  We did get to snap this pic at the pier with part of the Chicago skyline behind us though!

Picture is kinda crappy since it was from the front facing camera on my iPhone 4.  We tried doing it with the regular camera on the iPhone, but we kept chopping our heads off!

We got our spot locked down, and waited for the countdown.  

3...

2...

1...

Happy New Year!!!  

I got my New Year's kiss from the best girl in the world, and it didn't seem so cold out anymore.  With my heart warm, and my girl in my arms we left with the crowds to end our long day.

BUT!  

We got hungry once we got back to the hotel, so I called the front desk and asked if there was anything open.  They transferred us to this place that delivers pizza late called Rocco Ranalli's.  We got ourselves a pepperoni pizza, and it was delivered to the front lobby within half an hour.  The pizza was great, so we ended our night on that note.  

The night went well, but they don't call Chicago the Windy City for nothing.  The wind howled through the buildings alllll night long!

The next day we went back to Water Tower Place and went to all of the shops that we didn't get to go to earlier in the trip.  I got a couple of shirts from Armani Exchange, and she got some gloves.  Then we got some stuff from Victoria's Secret, Candyality, and checked out all of the Derrick Rose stuff at the Adidas store.  We walked up and down Michigan Ave. and checked out a few more stores.  We stopped to get some lunch at a nice little place called Soupbox.  They had some really good soup (hence the name), and apparently have won tons and tons of awards for having the best soup in Chicago.  It was really good.  After that we went back up Michigan Ave. to Water Tower Place and back to the car to head home.

The ride home was crazy.  It was sooo windy.  The car kept getting blasted by the wind the entire trip back.  It was terrible!  We finally made it back safe though, and nice little weekend was over...  

:(

My New Year's went pretty damn well!  It was definitely one of the best weekends I've had in a while, and there isn't a person in the world that I would rather have spent it with.  

:)