One of my favorite blogs on the Internet is Stuff White People Like. A witty collection of entries centered around the pretentious possessions and personal beliefs that make us positively Caucasian. And I never really stopped to think about how white I truly am, until I assessed my surroundings tonight. Let’s take a look.

For Father’s Day, I got my dad (and myself) a pair of tickets to see the Cubs take on the Cincinnati Reds at Wrigley Field. Wrigley truly is a vintage ballpark, capturing the era of baseball bygone. Coming from Cincinnati where tickets aren’t such a commodity, it was cool to be part of the atmosphere at Wrigley. It was packed full of a combination of drunken, over-age Frat boys, tourists, and die-hard Cubbies fans.

You’d think being so close to Lake Michigan you’d get a nice lake breeze up in the bleachers, but it was hot as balls. I went practically straight from work and didn’t have time to change into shorts like I had hoped to. Don’t worry, I did rock the New Balances. I really wanted to get a retro-feeling “Fukudome is my Homie” t-shirt, but my cheapness won out. The same applied to my insatiable hunger when it came to getting a chicken sandwich from the concession stand.

But we picked the perfect night to go. It was Whole Food Market night at Wrigley. So, the first so many people through the gates got a savings coupon and a recyclable shopping bag co-branded with “Go Cubbies” and Whole Foods messaging. For those not up on Whole Foods, it’s the world’s largest and most expensive retailer of natural and organic food. I digress. Because everyone else got there so early, we didn’t actually get the Whole Foods bag. I spent a few innings with my eye on the one under the guys’ seats in front of us. So my dad did what any loving parent would do, and he lifted it straight from under their seat as we made our 8th-inning exit.

All in all, my first trip to Wrigley was very enjoyable. I’d highly recommend checking it out, and I’d love to go back. Only maybe a little later in the season when it’s not so hot and humid. I know that it gets a bit chilly in the fall here in Chicago, but if the temperatures dipped that low, I could throw on my North Face jacket. And if that isn’t enough, I can always seek solace in the Starbucks just around the corner.

After a night of pitchers and pitchy performances at karaoke, I had Brent stop at Krogers (sic) in Lawrenceburg so that I could pick up a couple of items. As I peddled past the pharmacy I encountered the following sign much to my eyes’ delight.

I submitted the photo to the Unnecessary Quotations e-mail address, and kept checking my usual few times a week. I was saddened when it never appeared. I chalked it up to being a lousy submission, and began my quest to find another example.

However, when I checked the blog just this morning, I was ecstatic to see that Bethany–one of the bloggers–had included my submission on the blog. Go check it out here!

The move has come and gone. Boxes still litter our cozy (read: small) apartment, but one by one we’re sorting through every single stitch of clothing we own, enough paperwork to occupy thirteen file cabinets and DVDs and CDs that we didn’t even know we owned–Joey Lawrence anyone? “WHOA!”

While we’re approximately 92% moved in, one of the things we’ve yet to accomplish is establishing the Internet connection. We’re going to work on that this weekend.

Tonight, it’s off to Kokomo, Indiana, for my family’s Thanksgiving and Liz’s family will be visiting this weekend!

Happy Thanksgiving.

I’m not sure how publicized our suspected mold infestation was a few weeks back, so I figured that I’d recount the incident here to clear the air once and for all. Liz and I were sure that we had mold in our apartment. Her allergies had been really intense for the last few weeks. More intense than normal. (Jarrod, we’re talking nebulizer).

One day, as I was re-alphabetizing my CDs, I brushed against the exposed brick wall. Much to my surprise, little white flakes sprinkled to the surface of the bamboo flooring. Upon further inspection, I noticed that there seemed to be quite a bit of the fuzzy-textured fungus frolicking on the face of the brick wall. Judge for yourself.

Finally, it all made sense. Liz’s allergies had been acting up since May, which was when we moved into the new apartment. Not to mention that poor Tito had been sneezing his head off. Clearly this was all due to the mold infestation. I turned to a little Internets research to find a local mold expert and called him to have him come take a look. I was unpleasantly surprised to hear from his voicemail greeting that this expert was out of the office for a couple of weeks attending a mold convention. No, really. I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Defeated, I turned to Google and a bit more Internets research. I found pictures and articles discussing brick and mold and was assured that this was what going on in our apartment. I decided that I’d seek scientific confirmation with an at-home Mold Test Kit. Thank God for Ace Hardware!

The kit was a $9 modern marvel of technology. 1 tube of agar, 2 pieces of a petri dish and 3 hours later, we were set with samples from our soiled air. The incubation period was 48 hours. A nerve-wracking 48 hours. We paced. We checked. We slept. We checked. We ate. We checked. Life went on. But we kept checking. And around 60 hours later (12 hours bonus time, I mean just in case it was slow-growing mold) we had our answer.

What! No mold? How could this be? Had my junior-year high school microbiology skills faded away? You talk about a mad scientist. I was pissed! This disproved my hypothesis that our allergies were linked to this fungus from the brick. Apparently what we had growing was brick effloresence–which is also caused from moisture problems with the brick.

The allergies still haven’t gone away completely, and I’m not entirely convinced that the test kit yielded accurate results. Because that would only leave on other option: I was wrong from day one. And we all know better than that.

As Liz mentioned earlier, we caught wind of the fact that just steps from our apartment building, there was a movie shoot going on for “RFK” or “Rory’s First Kiss,” but Holy Pseudonym, Batman! Just a bit of Googling, or walking past the U.S. Post office turned Gotham National Bank, revealed that it is in fact filming for the upcoming Batman movie “The Dark Knight.”

After speaking to some fans that were camping out, we had heard that Heath Ledger, cast as The Joker, was on hand for shooting. We took some photos of the building, crew and equipment, and actually caught a quick peek at my favorite Batman villain of all time, The Joker, in full makeup. More pics are up on Flickr.