My goodness, it’s been an eventful seven or eight days. Not that you’d know from reading my journal. So hey, let’s bring you up to speed, shall we?

Last Wednesday, as mentioned earlier, we hit the road at a godawful early hour to drive to Chicago. The drive was relatively uneventful, though unfortunately Takaza was only able to drive at most about an hour and a half or two hours at a time. Gee, you’d think he was recovering from surgery or something. This wasn’t a problem, though – I picked up most of the driving and we arrived at Rustitobuck‘s at around 8:30 PM. Linnaeus stopped by on his way home from work and we ordered up a tasty pizza. We stayed up far too late chatting, but it was nice to be back with our friends in Chicago.

Thursday was a designated “family day”. We drove up to Takaza’s mother’s place near McHenry and surprised her by showing up on her doorstep unannounced. We spent some time chatting and got a tasty lunch at Culver’s, then stopped by to say hi to Dan’s brother and sister-in-law. They’re nice folks, and always fun to visit. We said our goodbyes after that and made the short drive over to Posicat and Datahawk‘s place. After being joined by steviemaxwell, moryssa, roho, genet, grabstein_69, silverwind, and Rowan, Roho and I went out and picked up Chinese food while everyone else played some Chez Geek. We then got in a few highly amusing rounds of Catchphrase before calling it a night.

On Friday we met up with awfulhorrid and chouette (neither of whom have posted in far too long, poke poke) for a delightful lunch. Much smoffage took place and a lot of really useful conversation. After lunch we retired to the bar and played a couple of rounds of darts. A lovely, relaxed afternoon. We adjourned back to Rusty’s place, where we were joined by Stevie, Datahawk, and Linnaeus. The original plan was to hit Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, but bad weather convinced us to skip it. Instead, we grilled up some burgers and spent the night hanging out, chatting, and enjoying the company late into the night. Stevie and Datahawk spent the night, while Linnaeus elected to drive home and sleep in his own comfy bed. Cheater!

Saturday we were predictably slow to get started, but we got a jump-start when Linnaeus showed up with quasiskunk and rcfoot joining us shortly thereafter. Linnaeus and Datahawk cooked up some tasty French toast, and a LAFF Hot Death Uno game broke out. Quite entertaining. Quasi and RC joined us on a trip to Penzeys to restock our spice cabinet (note to Data: you were right about that taco seasoning! Wish we’d bought more). Quasi and RC departed to head over to the LAFF bowling event and Partran joined me, Dan, Linnaeus, and Datahawk for dinner. Initially we met at Maggiano’s in Oak Brook, but they couldn’t seat us for 2.5 hours. We checked a few other places in the area and as a hedge booked a reservation at Buca di Beppo’s. Jackpot! We lucked out and got the chef’s table (i.e. table right in the kitchen). It was so much fun to watch the food being made, talk with the servers, and enjoy some really fabulous food! We stuffed ourselves silly (Partran, you were just evil to order that tiramisu!) and loved every minute of it. Afterwards, we stopped by the bowling event and socialized a bit before heading home.

What a surprise, we slept late Sunday too. We finally got motivated and headed over to Samo’s, a nice little diner around the corner from Rusty’s, for breakfast. From there it was on to the Midwest FurFest staff meeting. A really good meeting, not too long, and a lot got accomplished. We also noted that there was free, unencrypted wifi available, which allowed several of us at the meeting to quietly pass comments back and forth on Furrymuck 🙂 I’m not sure if this is the much-vaunted hotel-wide wifi that had been promised, but if it is there’s going to be a lot of happy geeks at MFF next year. After the meeting a small group of us went over to Outback and enjoyed a meat-heavy dinner. Yum!

On Monday we hung around at Rusty’s most of the day and worked on the MFF website. Some headway was made, and I’m hoping that the whole site will be live very soon. We’ve got a lot of work to do to clear out the old and bring in the new stuff. That evening we met up with LAFF folk at Portillos for a Western Suburbs Dinner. Much talking, much socializing, and much fun was had. Yay!

We stopped by Schweppe’s, a fabulous restaurant supply store, on Tuesday, meeting justincheetah there. We spent a lot of time drooling over kitchen goodies and got a lot of good ideas (hey Quasi and Jason – y’all REALLY should go by this place if only to pick up some ideas for con suite). From there we stopped by wyldekyttin‘s office and watched her hard at work. No, really. I mean it. Then it was over to Trader Joe’s where we stocked up on lots of yummy items, including a bottle of the fabulous maple syrup that Linnaeus had brought over on Saturday. In our continuing tour of the western suburbs, we visited Cheetah’s place and got to see some of the footage from the Anthrocon masquerade. Very nice! We rounded out the evening with a visit to Z’Ha’Dum, aka the new home of feren. Roho and Genet joined us for dinner at Chili’s (with a nice stop by Oberweis afterwards). A great dinner and lots of good conversation, plus a tour of the Feren lovely new home – we really had a good time.

We just weren’t feeling up to driving the whole way home in one day again, so on Wednesday we elected to drive halfway. I got a great deal on a room at the La Quinta in Lexington, KY (via hotels.com – thanks to camstone for recommendation!), so that’s where we spent the night. Dan unfortunately got very little sleep that night and I woke up early, so we were able to hit the road quite early on Thursday and got home at around 3:30 PM.

And here we are!