Nothing like popping halfway across the country to rejuvenate yourself…

Friday

The flight out on Friday morning wasn’t too bad. I had fretted so much about delays due to more stringent luggage searches and lo and behold everything ran right on time. The hour-long wait to get through Security sucked, but that was the worst of it. Poor Takaza got stuck in the middle seat even though we’d attempted to reserve window-and-aisle; a quick check of our itinerary showed that American Airlines had ignored our request and given us aisle-and-middle. Between that and the departure time snafu, I’m more than a little leery of using American’s website to purchase tickets ever again.

No problem getting through O’Hare (on the way out, I noticed that there were absolutely NO lines at their Security checkpoint), and we proceeded down to the baggage claim are to meet Takaza’s mom. She wasn’t there, so we waited. And waited. And waited a bit more. After an hour and just was we were about to call Datahawk for a ride, she showed up – it turned out she’d gotten completely lost and turned around. No great loss – we weren’t in that much of a hurry.

We stuffed our luggage into her car and drove over to River Forest, where we introduced her to the wonders of Whole Foods (I just love Whole Foods, if only because you can usually snack your way through the store :-). We moseyed through the aisles, sampled some yummy cheeses, and got some (HUGE) sandwiches. We called Jonathan and he met us as we were eating, finally turning over the commitment ceremony pictures. He was there for approximately 30 seconds and had to run. Thank heavens all the pictures turned out well, because if not I don’t think we’d have much recourse (seeing how he never had his act together enough to even get us a contract to sign).

We looked over the pictures (about 145 or so) and everything looked good. We need to stop by Wolf Camera or someplace similar to see if they can scan the medium-format negatives onto a CD for us. We could scan all the pictures, but what a tremendous pain in the butt. Anyway, the ultimate goal is to get all the pictures online and viewable to anyone who wants to see them – I’ll be sure to put a link here when we get that done, but it may take a week or two.

After eating and looking at the pictures, we wandered over to Penzey’s Spices. What a great place! I love going to their store because the people there are always so friendly, and the place always smells so wonderful. We picked up some more garlic salt and Korintje cinnamon to restock our spice cabinet.

From there it was on to Woodfield Mall where we wandered around a bit and waited to meet up with Datahawk, who had kindly volunteered to chauffeur us around Chicago for the weekend. We walked around the mall a bit with her, ate some Cinnabons (yummy!), then headed over to Robert King‘s house for a SMOFfish meeting with Aureth, Stevie, and Robert. Much pizza was eaten, very little of any import was discussed, but a good time was had by all.

Then, it was on to Rusty‘s place. Rusty had graciously volunteered to put us up for the weekend. About two minutes after we passed Oak Brook, Linneaus called to let us know he was leaving work and would meet us at Rusty’s. Once we got there, after much hugs and skritches and chatting, both Takaza and I crashed hard so off to bed we went.

Saturday

Early wakeup call: 7:00 AM.

Rusty was nice enough o get up and make us pancakes before we had to hustle out to make it to NoCoasterCon by 9:00 AM. Well, we were only a little late and we got in right as they were starting, so no problem.

NoCoasterCon, for those of you who may not be familiar with it, is essentially sitting in a hotel meeting room with about 250 other roller coaster enthusiasts for nine or so hours while representatives from various Midwestern theme parks come to talk about what’s new for the coming year. There’s also short video presentations of various roller coasters, as well as a roller-coaster-fan version of Family Feud.

Yes, it’s every bit as geeky as it sounds. I am at peace with this fact.

Now, I like roller coasters – they’re fun, and I’ve been known to drive stupidly far on weekend trips just to ride them, but most of these people were waaay more into this than I was. My feelings about being on the outside of a fandom looking in were crystallized exactly after seeing the presentation by Six Flags Great America: following a rather humdrum rundown of minor improvements, the crowd erupted into cheers and applause when it was announced that they would be running one of the trains on American Eagle backwards for the first time since 1991. Linneaus commented, “It’s like reading fetish fiction about a fetish that you don’t share: you don’t quite understand the attraction, but you can tell where the money shot is.”

The convention was fun, though, and it was easy to tell that fen are fen are fen are fen, be they SCA, furry, or roller coaster enthusiasts. Just to add to the atmosphere, I’m almost sure I got a whiff of fench a couple of times. We can’t complain too much, though – we got free passes to Paramount King’s Island out of the deal, as well as one exit pass each to any ride at Cedar Point (in other words, skip the queue, walk in the exit ramp, and ride immediately). I doubt we’re going to get to Cedar Point this year, but if we do there’s a seat on Millennium Force with my name on it.

After NCC, it was back to Rusty’s. It would have been fun to organize a huge LAFF-thing where we could see all of our friends but this time around we opted to keep it small, just us five, we ordered in from Leona’s. The food was fabulous and we spent the rest of the evening enjoying the company, playing Life and Crazy Taxi on PS2, and talking. It’s been a long time since I laughed that hard or that often – I love these folks, and it was a delight to get to spend that time with them.

Sunday

An early start for me (7:00 AM), but the rest of the household was sound asleep. Ran over to the !White Hen (formerly a White Hen, but they left the franchise, even though everything but the sign outside has remained the same) for a paper and some coffee, and enjoyed a lazy morning, relaxing and reading the paper. Rusty got up at 9 and made waffles with bacon in them (yum!) and we struggled to get motivated.

We headed over to the hotel for the MFF staff meeting and got there in time for the official tour. I found a perfect place for Registration – a coat check on the downstairs hallway, just outside the Mayoral ballrooms. It’s perfect because we can lock it up at night. No more carting computer equipment all over and setting up every morning for me! The meeting went well and was surprisingly brief. Aureth has a good handle on what needs to be done, and I’m looking forward to working with him this year (like I’m going to dis him when I know he’s going to be reading this? Hi Jim! 🙂 Seriously, though, I have great hopes for this year and although I don’t think we’re going to break 600 in attendance, I’m not going to completely rule it out either.

We got some things cleared up after the meeting, which made me very happy. Feren volunteered a Sparcstation that we can use as a new and improved Registration server; It’s even net-connected so Rusty can do the porting to Solaris and pre-con testing long before the con, and we can probably even do all the pre-reg data entry directly into that database. No more MS Access, yay! I’ll work out the details of this with my second, DaveQat, who’s probably surprised to hear about this…

The other great development is that Takaza got the go-ahead to buy an i-Toiletseat, which will make his life much, much easier. We’re going to need to do some research into integrating an Apple unit into our home network (file sharing, in particular). I’m told the laptop has OS 9.2 on it, and I’m not sure if we’re even going to want to deal with OS X. It appears that Quark Xpress doesn’t have an OS X-native version, though Adobe Acrobat does. Hmm – more research is in order.

It was great to see folks at the meeting, and I just wish we could have spent more time there. It seems every time we visit Chicago everyone asks, “When are you moving back up here?” I love North Carolina, but there is really so much more for us in Chicago. Both Takaza and I have great jobs, though, and with a job like mine we don’t have the luxury of dropping everything to move. In addition to that, I can’t afford to have someone look at my resume and see that I did a coupe years at this job, then a couple years at that job – I’ve been on the hiring end and when I saw that the first question that came to my mind is, “Why should I hire this person when, after they are fully trained and acclimated, they’ll up and leave?” So we wait. Besides, I looked in the classifieds on Sunday, and there isn’t shit for chemical engineers in the Chicago area right now, anyway. But it is a matter of when, not if, we return to Chicago, of this I’m sure. It’ll probably be a few years yet, though.

So, after the meeting, we got dinner at Portillo’s (mmm, Italian beef) with some of the good folks on MFF staff then Datahawk took us to the airport. We breezed through Security and spent two hours bumming around the airport. Our flight left on time (amazingly enough) and we even got in early, but it was still 11:30 PM. I think we finally got to bed at around 1:30 AM. Gaaah.

So there you have it – Duncan and Takaza’s Big Chicago Adventure. I wish we could have had more time to spend up there, but there’s never enough time.

Data, Linnaeus, Rusty – thanks for a wonderful weekend. You guys are the best!