Those darn meteorologists sure know their stuff. They had yesterday’s forecast exactly right.

It was 31 degrees at U.S. Cellular Field, the wind chill was in the teens, and snow flurries swirled throughout the game. In other words, a typical day for spring baseball in Chicago — and we took advantage of every minute of it, from the time the gates opened to the final heartbreaking out some five hours later.

Overlooking the questionable Chicago pitching, the game was an exciting one. It was, to use that favorite term of sportswriters, a “slugfest,” a seesaw battle that the White Sox only lost because of the Indians’ Jason Michaels, whose heroic catch at the warning track prevented Joe Crede’s two-out, two-on, bottom-of-the-ninth drive from knocking in the winning runs. Final score: Cleveland 8, Chicago 7.

Today it’s off to warmer pursuits: the Adler Planetarium this morning and a jaunt to the Western Suburbs to visit Medieval Times tonight. The famous “dinner and tournament” attraction was one of my daughters’ favorite places when they were in kindergarten, and rather surprisingly, it was near the top of their must-do lists for this vacation. Will it hold up for them, now that they’re 18?

The final score was disappointing, but the Sox did fire up the famous old Comiskey Park exploding scoreboard with a couple of homeruns.

We weren’t the only baseball fools who braved yesterday’s weather. The official attendance at the game was 26,337, though the end of every inning brought many departures. I’d estimate that fewer than 10,000 fans were left by the end.

No, not that. At least not at the moment. But I did have some time to kill this morning, so I tackled a long-delayed project: adding tagging capability to the blog.

Using tags will allow a deeper, more complete, more intuitive level of search and navigation than the simple categorization of posts. And they’re fun, since they can include keywords that are sensible and straightforward or lighthearted and odd.

I’ve not yet had time to go back and add tags to all the existing posts, but I’ve finished some of them, which should give you a good feel for how it will work. Eventually, at the end of every post you’ll find a list of tags. If you want to find other posts with the same keywords, just click, and off you’ll go.

Even better, you can use this entertaining tag cloud to find your way around the archives.

On another note, it looks as if the White Sox and Indians will play this afternoon, despite the bone-chilling temperatures (almost 40 degrees colder than yesterday) and some wind damage that occurred overnight at U.S. Cellular Field. We’re practicing our shivering and teeth-chattering now, so we should be all set.

Today was reserved for visiting a classic, the Museum of Science and Industry. Much had changed since I was there last close to 20 years ago, but some exhibits were the same. Actually, a few hadn’t been updated much since I’d visited as a kid, nearly 20 years before that. Some cool old stuff, some cool new stuff, an unsettling number of interactive exhibits out of order or down for maintenance, and an amazing Body Worlds 2 exhibition.

Oh, and they had a nifty display of vintage robot toys from the fifties and sixties, a few I even remember owning myself. When we were done there, we used a plastic injection-molding thingy to make our very own super cool family of “Space Robots.” Perfect little green souvenirs, which have now lined up on the hotel desk to send their greetings to you.

Other than trying to get over the strange, alternate-universey feeling of being a tourist in a place you used to live, our vacation in Chicago is turning out to be everything I’d hoped it would be.

As long as I’m accepting my fate, playing my new role of small-town gawker to the hilt, I thought I’d post a couple of pretty pictures now, before our weather takes a turn for the worse, as it’s supposed to do tomorrow (though nothing like the 5-8 inches of snow they’re supposed to get back home).

Speaking of the forecast here, the outlook for the next few days is so bleak that I fear our chances of seeing the White Sox play the Indians on Wednesday are in serious jeopardy. Fortunately, we’re also going to catch the Cubs playing in Milwaukee on the way home Saturday. You’ve got to love a retractable roof on a ballpark at this time of year!

I’ll try to get some more shots posted later this week. In the meantime, you can click on any of these images for a larger view.

The view from Navy Pier looking west and a little bit north toward the John Hancock Building and the Gold Coast.

Probably my favorite building in Chicago, the magnificent Tribune Tower, beautiful outside and in, with its lobby full of engraved quotes about freedom of the press. The Tribune was the focus of much attention when I took this, as the sale of the newspaper company (and the Chicago Cubs) had just been announced a few hours earlier.

To me, the Chicago River winding through the heart of downtown and the resulting “City of Bridges” is one of the things that always sets this place apart from other cities.

It’s a busy, busy time here.

After just finishing up this week’s newspaper, I now have two work days to write a substantial portion of next week’s edition. Everything that can get done in advance — everything that’s not, you know, news — has to be done by tomorrow afternoon.

Why the scramble? We’re leaving Saturday for vacation. A full week in Chicago. Our first real getaway since a trip to New York City in the summer of 2005.

I should be doing some things at home to get ready. Packing would be a good start. But I’ll have to settle for making mental lists of things to take and save the part where you actually find the items and put them into a suitcase for later — most likely Saturday morning, about an hour before we leave.

See you from the road. I’ll try to post a nice picture or two!

It seems like forever since my daughters, Ingrid and Amanda, started the college application process.

After quickly being accepted at four perfectly fine “second choices,” they waited and waited and waited, and waited and waited, and waited some more, and waited a little bit longer, and waited another little bit after that to hear from their top choice, the school they’ve always wanted to attend.

Yesterday, they got the word.

They’re official members of the Class of 2011 at the University of Michigan.

Congratulations, girls!

P.S. You can breathe again now.