The Friday Five, 5/17/24: 5 things I've been up to this week

We are headed to Chicago today for wedding #2, which involves an entire weekend (dinner tonight at a hotel, wedding tomorrow, brunch Sunday), but unfortunately our flight is delayed about 50 minutes—as of this writing, as least, because it's changed from being delayed 1h40m to now only 50 minutes.

Fried green tomatoes at LouVina, Indy
Fried green tomatoes at LouVina, Indy

What I've been up to this week:
  1. Going to a wedding in Cincinnati. This has been an extremely busy week (felt like two weeks, actually), and it kicked off last Friday, when we drove about five hours to Cincinnati for wedding #1 of 3 this month, a friend of my fiance's. We've actually been to Cincy a few times to visit them, too. Since he was a groomsman in the wedding, on Friday we went to rehearsal and rehearsal dinner, near the venue, and on Saturday was the wedding. On Sunday, they also had a casual Mother's Day/post-wedding brunch, and then we stopped by Jungle Jim's (the best! I say it's like Costco meets EPCOT) and then headed back to Detroit. 
  2. Traveling to Indianapolis for Sweets & Snacks Expo. Even though Indy is only a 1.5-hour drive from Cincy, we drove back to Detroit on Sunday night, and then I worked like 9am-3pm the next day and then took Uber to DTW, where I flew to Indy. I think next time I will drive (it's the same location next year too), because my flight was a little delayed, so I only got in about 30 mins. before when I would have, if I had driven. This was my 2nd year at the Expo and it's always a lot of fun—all of the big confectionery and snack companies are there, as well as some startups and others, and there are a ton of samples; I definitely came home with a lot of candy and snacks to sample. For the past 10 years, with one exception, the Expo had been in Chicago; it was in Indy in 2021 for a smaller expo, during the pandemic, so this was technically it's 2nd time at the Indiana Convention Center (and mine, too; I went there in 2018 for Comic Con). 
  3. Dining out/getting takeout. On Friday, we stopped at Culver's on the way to Cincy—and ended up being only a few minutes ahead of another of the groomsmen and his wife and daughter, so we dined together—and for rehearsal dinner, we went to deSha's American Tavern for a tasty buffet meal. The next day, I was on my own for the day since I wasn't in the wedding party, and I hung out with a few other wedding attendees; we went to Barrel House Kitchen & Bar, near the hotels we were staying at, and also got ice cream at Graeters; my first time there, and it was delicious. On Monday night, I got Doordash from Chai & Kathi Roll Express, in Indy, which was also great, albeit a little too spicy for me; on Tuesday, my future sister-in-law and I (she lives 30 minutes away from Indy) stopped at LouVino, which was also very good; and last night, my fiance and I got takeout from Taco Bros, a new place in Farmington Hills I had been wanting to try. 
  4. Watching TV. Another of my favorite guilty pleasure shows, Bridgerton, is back on TV—part one, at least (four episode out now, and another four next month ... why, Netflix, why?!). I also continued watching Under the Bridge, Loot, The Good Doctor, Acapulco (AppleTV), and I also started Dark Matter (AppleTV), which is great—it's based on the book, by Blake Crouch, so I knew it would be, as I've read other books by him and they were all really good. 
  5. Finding a new library. I had a Clawson library book due yesterday, and unfortunately didn't have time to return it. Someone in a Clawson FB group gave me a good tip: Novi, Northville, Franklin, and Livonia libraries have a reciprocal program with them, so I headed to the Franklin library (about a 10-min. drive from my fiance's house) to return the book. I went inside to verify that I could return it there, and the library is SUPER cute: I believe it was an old house that got donated to them in 1929. I was also able to check out a few books with my Clawson card, and I can return them there, at the Clawson library, or really at any of those reciprocal libraries. 
Very cool Skittles machine at Sweets & Snacks, they had an M&M's one too
Very cool Skittles machine at the Mars booth at Sweets & Snacks, they had an M&M's one too

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