Moog, that jelly picture is awesome! The faint blurriness plus light and color really makes it cool...I might try to set that up as my desktop wallpaper.
Enjoy Chicago while you can, it's a neat town, really. Wish I could think of a lot of cool places to send you, but I always blank out when I try to think of them. They're there, trust me!
Actually...did I interpret this to mean you're in Chicago 'till August? If so, one thing I would highly recommend is that you make every effort to attend the Taste of Chicago, which will be ramping up here in a few weeks. A very large street festival, wherein prominent local restaurants provide a wide variety of their fares in relatively small portions. Thus, you can flit from stand to stand and "taste" the restaurants of Chicago. Big, crowded, almost always hot, but fun.
For years, my family has camped out on the lakefront on the third of July, picnic-style. One of us retrieves food, and we eat at a leisurely pace, drink cool drinks from our cooler, and wait for dark, when the City's massive fireworks display starts, fired off from barges in the lake. On the side of the Shedd Aquarium is a fine sloping grass lawn that's the perfect place to view the show. For some reason it's never as crowded as many of the other places in the lakefront park are, despite being an ideal location.
If you have the time, I highly recommend trying to make the taste and/or fireworks. And yes...for some reason, the City holds them on the 3rd, not the 4th as is traditional. I'm not sure why...perhaps it was to respect the parades and fireworks shows of the many neighboring communities, which would otherwise lose attendees to Chicago's huge display.
rusty