The exterior walls of the main floor are all up, and a lot of the interior has been completed. I'm starting to finally get excited that our long-awaited dream of owning a new house is coming true -- as you can see, things are actually starting to look like a house! 

This view is taken from about where the guest bathroom door will be, looking into the great room and dining area. As you can see, there will be LOTS of windows. And luckily, we have a nice view out the back. 

We are making progress on the house! The framers started this week and they are moving fast! The basement is already walled up, the first floor is in, and they've started a little on the garage -- which you can see from this picture of the front of the house.  

Here is the southeast corner of the house -- in the back behind where the extra bedrooms will someday go. The other side, where the theatre will go, is not very interesting because there are no windows. 

Well time to show the result of Justin's "mistake".  
We had both hoped to be able to put the incident behind us and enjoy the rest of our trip, but fortune just would not smile on us. I found out that there is a Medieval Times restaurant in the Chicago area, however all the shows were sold out for the time that we were there. One of our primary plans for this trip was to visit Fermi Lab. However, we discovered when we got there that their website does not accurately describe how tours are handled and we missed our only chance for the month of June. Furthermore, we were outrunning bad weather on the way out, and left early to get ahead of more thunderstorms on the way back. All in all, we didn't really accomplish much. On the bright side, we did spend a day in downtown Chicago (more pictures below) and saw the Art Institute and the Adler planetarium. We played a couple of nice rounds of disc golf, did some fun geocaches, and ate at some nice restaurants. (Of course, those stories have their own details of mosquitos and free meals -- ask me about it in person someday.) The best part, of course, was that we were together away from home and having fun. I'd do it again if given the choice. ;)

This is a shot looking up the at the top of the Sears tower from the sidewalk right next to it. We didn't feel like paying the $12 to go up, especially since we've both been in tall buildings before. This picture doesn't quite capture the "looming" feeling you get -- but you can see that there are lots of other buildings around in the reflection. Kinda cool. 

Here is a nice picture of the Chicago skyline taken as we are walking to the Adler Planetarium. Even got some "artistic" birds in the shot. At least I can say it was a beautiful day -- lots of sunshine, not overly hot with a nice breeze.