Category Archives: amazing race

The Downward Spiral

And so we enter the last few weeks before Midwest FurFest. Saturday was spent doing a good bit of preparation for Midwest FurFest 2008, the fruits of which I hope will be evident at this year’s Closing Ceremonies. After takaza and I met mirkowuff for lunch, Dan headed home to work on Publications stuff (yes, still). Mirko and I worked on The Super Secret Project, then drove into Chicago. We had some time to kill so we tried a couple of nicer restaurants around Lincoln Square, but either their menus were unexciting or they were completely booked for the evening. Man, I hate trying to eat out on Saturday nights. We wound up settling for a small taqueria at Lincoln and Montrose that was actually amazingly good, and cost about a fifth of what dinner at any of the other places would have run. Great horchata, too! Afterwards, we headed over to an impromptu party that woodychitwn was hosting. I’m sure descriptions of who was there and that accompanying embarrassing pictures will show up in his journal soon, but suffice to say that I had a good time and it was fun to meet his other friends. Alas, Mirko and I had to head home on the early side (i.e. before midnight), so we missed the various eating-of-cake-off-body-parts, etc. Ah well.

Sunday brought he final planning meeting for Midwest FurFest 2007. It was pretty much the shortest meeting we’ve had all year (36 minutes!) because really, if you don’t have your act together this late in the game, you’re pretty much screwed anyway. Fortunately, every appears to be on their game and we’re in for an excellent convention, I think. For my part, pretty much everything that needs to ordered is in, with the exception of badge blanks and at the door registration forms, which will hopefully be sent to dexcat tonight. Our numbers are looking good, with not only our total attendance following past normal growth patterns, but our sponsorship numbers are matching last year’s as well. The latter is a nice confirmation that we’re doing something right.

After the meeting broke up, roho, genet, and linnaeus joined us back at our place, and we were shortly joined by steviemaxwell and magicpaw. Pizza was ordered, tasty cheese and crackers (and wine) was enjoyed, and we had a good time watching the season premiere of The Amazing Race 12. I was quite pleased with the outcome of the first leg, and I see several teams in there that I will really be cheering for this time around.

The rest of this week will be helping Dan with the last bits of Publications, including a really nice innovation he came up with last week: a small pamphlet for staffers that has all of the information they’ll need, from telephone extensions to emergency procedures to quick schedules, and a lot more. With luck, that will be wrapped up tonight or tomorrow and we’ll get a night or two to relax. On Friday we’re going to Windycon in Rosemont, where we will be working on Operations staff and in our spare time maybe helping out the Dorsai. It should be a fun weekend, and it’s a nice change of pace since neither of us is actually in charge or anything 🙂

It’s That Time of Year

Crunch time is upon us for Midwest FurFest. This past weekend was spent preparing several different orders for sponsor and Registration items, gathering information, etc. I won’t bore you with the details, but that pretty much ate up most of my Sunday. Saturday was a lot more fun, though! While takaza slaved away on the Con Book and hotel issues, I made a savory sweet potato casserole which was simply divine. I figure anything that’s made with half a pound of bacon and three-quarters of a pound of cheddar cheese can’t be bad! I’m not a huge fan of sweet potatoes, but this was just delicious! I was fascinated by the way the sweet potatoes added a complex, almost curry-like flavor to the dish. The dish was my contribution to unclevlad‘s birthday party; once it was done I packed it into a cooler with layers of towels to keep it warm and drove on down. The casserole was a hit (yay!) and the party was a blast. I was able to chat with perro, darkwolph, and linnaeus about con stuff (sorry if the smoffage put everyone else off!) and had a great time chatting with all of the other folks there.

On top of all of this we have the preparations for Midwest FurFest 2008. I was vastly relieved to get confirmation of our second (of three) guests of honor yesterday. The third slot will probably remain open until early next year. A theme has also been chosen, so we can go ahead and add those to the promotional materials for next year. (What’s the theme and who are the Guests of Honor? Come to Closing Ceremonies and find out!) This is a nice weight off my mind, though.

Unfortunately, Dan’s health issues continue, with good days and bad days. I worry about him a lot, and it’s frustrating that there’s really not a lot I can do to help. We’ll muddle through this somehow, but I do hope it passes sooner than later.

In happier news, a couple of nice things from yesterday: 1. My Aeropress came in the mail. I may make my first cup of coffee with it tonight (early in the evening, though!). 2. With CBS canceling the apparently-execrable “Viva Laughlin”, the gap in the schedule opens the door for the premiere of the new season of The Amazing Race on Sunday, November 4 at 7 PM CT. Yaaaaay! Anyone interested in making a social event of the premiere?

I Spent The Weekend Cooking

(Yeah, yeah, I know. Big surprise, huh?)

This past weekend was most excellent. Very low stress, and I got to try some new and cool things.

We started out on Friday evening by meeting partran for dinner at Osteria di Tramonto in Wheeling (I note that there are plans to open another Osteria di Tramonto in Rosemont at the new Le Meridien hotel there). The meal was excellent, as always. We took the opportunity to sit at the counter into the kitchen and were rewarded with some entertaining banter with the chefs, as well as a complimentary plate of steamed mussels! I’m normally not much of a fan of mussels, but these were just delicious. I had the veal saltimbocca, while Dan had a seared (monstrous) pork chop. The meal was great, as was the company. We had a great time. Good luck, Partran, as you head out west in a few weeks!

On Saturday I was up and about early for my project of the weekend: smoked pork butt (or pork shoulder – same thing). It was a very educational project, and I learned a lot about smoking. I went to Home Depot bright and early and picked up a small bag of charcoal (Kingsford Briquettes – none of that match-lighting stuff!), a chimney charcoal starter and a five-pound bag of hickory wood chunks. Once I got home, I made up a dry rub for the pork (a mixture of a couple different dried chiles, onion and garlic powders, Turbinado sugar, thyme, marjoram, bay leaf, allspice, ginger, cumin, cinnamon, and pepper), applied it, then went down to fire things up. The smoker worked reasonably well, but I learned something: the higher-end smokers (i.e. $150.00 or so) are a lot more adjustable, with vents on the top and bottom to help control the temperature. Ours is…not a high-end smoker. Alas, it has no vents. This meant that instead of maintaining the ideal smoking temperature of 225-250 degrees F for 10-12 hours as I was hoping, instead it ran closer to 275-325 F for about 7 hours before I ran out of charcoal and the fire died. I improvised by wrapping the pork butt up in foil and put it in the oven for another three hours at 275 F until it came to 180 F internal temperature. Perfect! We let it cool a bit and then pulled all the meat off, shredding it, and throwing away the bones and fat and chewy bits.

How was it? Oh. My. Goodness. It was utterly delicious. Unfortunately, I also learned that a 6.3-pound pork butt reduces down to three pounds even of pulled meat once you’re done. I think in the future, I’ll probably go for things which take less smoking time, like poultry or smaller cuts of beef or pork. The temperature thing may be sorted out by more carefully metering in the charcoal, but overall the experiment was a success. I need to remember: “Don’t let the great be the enemy of the good.” Just because you can’t get everything exactly perfect, doesn’t mean that you can’t get a damn fine result out of what you’ve got.

On Sunday I made up a batch of Miss Piggy Barbecue Sauce and the finished sauce was just wonderful – sweet, spicy, mustardy. Yum! To compliment the BBQ, I decided to make Alton Brown’s Asian Slaw. Once dinner time arrived, roho and genet brought potato salad to add to the menu, and steviemaxwell brought his usual charming self (and sodas as well 🙂 takaza made Texas toast for the BBQ and I’m pleased to say that we went through half of the Miss Piggy sauce – I think Stevie had a small serving of the Bulls Eye sauce I had on the table, but everyone preferred the yummy mustard sauce. The slaw, unfortunately, was a disappointment. There’s a whole lot of interesting flavors in there, but they don’t come together in a cohesive whole. For the amount of preparation that goes into it, I wasn’t happy with the final product. No one cared, though because, dude: BBQ. So, so good.

The meal was capped off with a yummy yellow cake with chocolate whipped cream frosting that Dan made and decorated festively for the occasion of the finale of The Amazing Race. We watched the show, and most of us were disappointed in the results. But Stevie’s weird anyway, so we’ll discount that. We followed this with some Simpsons and Family Guy as we struggled through our digestive torpor, then saw everyone off for the evening. Hmm – we need a new excuse to get folks over for dinner on a weekly basis 🙂

Things Don’t Always Go As Planned

Well, takaza and I were supposed to go away last weekend for a relaxing mini-vacation together, but after evaluating our finances we decided that it would be better to postpone that trip until April. So what did we do instead?

I got a last-minute call for help from wyldekyttin on Friday afternoon to lend a hand with moving on Saturday morning. I got up far too early and headed down to the Chicago to help out. I learned how to remove the seats from the Element (man, that’s easy!) and I was impressed just how much extra space that buys you. Because of the huge turnout of folks, I didn’t have to do too much heavy lifting (many hands, light work, etc.) , so it wasn’t an unpleasant experience at all. After dropping everything off, I headed back home and spent some quality time with my wonderful husband. Sorry, woodychitwn – I wish we could have made it to the party, but it sounds like you had more than enough fun without us. mirkowuff wound up crashing at our place for the night after he left Woody’s party.

Sunday was all about Midwest FurFest – first the Board meeting, then the staff meting immediately after. Both meetings went quickly, and there’s lots of good stuff on tap for 2007 and 2008 (yeah, we plan that far ahead!). We had a pleasant late lunch/early dinner with friends afterwards, then headed home. Dan napped a bit while I played some Okami (I’m just starting the final part of the game – maybe someday soon I’ll break this addiction!). We were mildly annoyed when the basketball games pushed the start of The Amazing Race back by 40 minutes, causing us to miss about 15 minutes in the middle of the show. Fortunately, we didn’t miss too much, it seems (mainly everyone attempting to get out of Johannesburg Airport), and I was more than satisfied with the results. I note that next week’s episode is two hours long. Yay!

I’m working long hours this week, coming in each day at 7 AM so I’ll be able to leave at 11:30 AM on Friday. We’ll be heading over to Ann Arbor, MI for the Dorsai Thing, which should be a new and different experience. Other than that, though, it should be a boring week.

Domestic Bliss

That was a lovely weekend that just passed. What did we do? Well, not a whole lot. Hooray!

On Friday, takaza was going to take a half-day because they were finally coming to fix the window in his office. The glass company said they’d be there between 7:30 AM and noon; they actually showed up at 7:35 AM. Wow. They fixed the window in a matter of minutes and were gone by 8:00 AM. Dan elected to call off the rest of the day and spent the day trying to bring some sense to the jumble of boxes down there. Because the room is below grade and has only one vent that is probably not properly balanced, the room stays close to 55 degrees when the rest of the house is at 68. That’s fine for Dan, but I’d freeze; come summertime it should be nice, though.

Dan informed me that we were going to celebrate the window installation by going out to dinner, meaning that neither of us were particularly motivated to cook. We opted to try one of the many Mexican places down the road from us, Rancho Nuevo in Round Lake. Downtown Round Lake (all one block of it) is rather amusing – it’s a toss-up whether there are more signs in English or Spanish. Not surprisingly, between that and Round Lake Park (the short commercial section on IL 134 that’s right around the corner from us) there’s approximately a half-dozen Mexican restaurants. Rancho Nuevo had a reasonably authentic air, though the decor tries a bit too hard, and the “Learning Spanish Is Fun!” placemats are just over the top. We split an order of asada quesadillas and each had the carne asada, mine with a cheese enchilada. The food was delicious, but unfortunately, the service was terrible. There was a decided language barrier with our waitress (though when does “beer” sound like “horchata”?) and the long periods of unrefilled drinks (a bit of a problem when eating moderately spicy food) might keep us from going back. Maybe if we don’t sit sequestered in a corner, outside of the view of the servers…

On Saturday we ran all kinds of errands. We’ve been trying to stop, as I put it, spending like drunken sailors as we continue to set up the new house. Fortunately, we have a little extra unaccounted-for income that we can put towards expenses like that, but at some point we need to stop. It wasn’t too bad for the most part, but it wasn’t until we stopped by the framing place to have three pieces properly matted and framed (to the tune of $300) that I started humming “What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor” under my breath. Still, it’ll be worth it – one of the pieces is Kenket’s original artwork for the 2005 Midwest FurFest con book cover. That is going to look spectacular in our living room, I think.

We stopped by Lovin’ Oven Cakery, the place that supplied the truly deadly chocolate cake for my surprise party. They had king cake! Woo! It was wonderfully moist and tasty, too, but just too darn big for us to get one. We picked up a couple of tasty pastries to sustain us, and I am quite impressed with the range and quality of their products.

On Sunday Dan continued to putter in his office while I did some general housecleaning and cooking. I made a couple of loaves of challah that turned out quite nicely, as well as a wonderful garlic-potato soup from the new issue of Cook’s Illustrated. roho, genet, and linnaeus joined us for the season premiere of The Amazing Race: All Stars. The show was good – better than I expected, even – and the outcome was pretty good too. Numerous comments were made that Joyce looks a lot like chebutykin. By the way, this season they have a series of web episodes called “Elimination Station” the will follow the eliminated racers as they get to “Elimination Villa”, a mansion in Acuapulco where they will be sequestered while the rest of the race goes on. That looks like it could get entertaining.

Yesterday was spent relaxing, and I got to indulge in my latest video game obsession, Okami. It’s a very enjoyable, very pretty game. Not too challenging, but hey – that’s not what I look for in a game. This is something I do to relax, and I like the visuals and the music.

So, this afternoon I have to tend to a bit of house repair (the soap dispenser fell off the wall of the shower) and a few other things around the house. I expect tonight will be another early bedtime, since neither Dan nor I have slept too well for the last few nights.

Cat Weekends Are Good For Dogs

Yesterday was pretty tough. Work was OK, but I tuned in to watch takaza‘s cousin’s funeral (for those who missed it, Jared was a police officer in Colorado Springs who was killed in the line of duty). Dan went home early to watch it, which is a good thing because it was an extremely emotional and draining service. We spent a good part of the afternoon when I got home watching the funeral procession wind through Colorado Springs (thanks to a webcast by KKTV). I skipped going to the gym because, well, it was better I stay there with Dan. Afterwards, Dan cooked a nice dinner and we watched the final episodes of Monster House.

The weekend was much better. March looks like it’s going to be a busy month, so we decided to make last weekend a “cat weekend” – the kind of days where you say to yourself, “Hey, it’s five o’clock. I should really take a shower.” On Sunday we ventured far enough outside to walk around the neighborhood a little. We checked out the Middle Eastern butcher shop near us (good prices, though I need to find a recipe that uses baby lamb shanks, because they looked delicious!). We also stopped by the coffee shop down by the (former) Kedzie El stop. Man, they weren’t kidding around about station renovation; it only took a week for them to completely level the station. There’s nothing there right now except a bunch of construction equipment between the tracks.

As for the coming week, we have the premiere of the new season of The Amazing Race tonight. Yay! (I love their ads: “It’s a new season! It won’t suck as bad as last season! We promise!”) unclevlad, renniefrog, datahawk, and posicat will be joining us, with dinner provided by the taquiera around the corner from our place. Then tomorrow night right after Dan gets home from work we’ll be going to the Gay Games Chicago volunteer orientation meeting. Yes, we looked at the lineup of events and decided that this would be something that would be a lot of fun to be involved in. And hey, with Anthrocon moved back to June for a year, that opens up a nice hole in our schedule for mid July, so this works quite nicely! I’m excited to see what might be in store, but I’m also realistic. Sure, we have experience running Midwest FurFest, but that’s small potatoes to this (they’ve got 8,000 athletes registered already, with a goal of 12,000 by July). You always need people to take tickets and fill water coolers, and if that’s what they need us to do, it’s all good. I’m looking forward to just being a part of the event.

Not a lot planned for this weekend, but I hope to remedy that. We still need to see Eight Below (and Brokeback Mountain!), and it would be fun to hang out with friends some. But for now, it’s back to work!