Man, what a crazy weekend.
Friday was not quite as fun as I had hoped it would be. Our department at work was rewarded with a day out to celebrate, um, doing well, or something. OK, fine by me! We met up at the Sears Tower and went up to the Skydeck, then caught the train up to Cafe Iberico. The food there was excellent, the service, not so much. We had a surprisingly good time, though. I suspect the sangria helped.
The next stop was supposed to the Shedd Aquarium, but since I had lost part of a filling the day before, I opted out and headed home instead. Takaza was a complete sweetheart and not only looked up what dentists were covered by our insurance, he also called around to see if they could see me on short notice. He found a dentist within a mile of where we live and at 2:30 or so I was in the chair. As you might have surmised from my previous entry, what should have been a small repair wound up being a root canal. I have four more visits with the dentist before the end of the year – wow, won’t that be fun.
On Saturday, I was up well before Takaza, too damn early, in fact – 6:30 AM, but I couldn’t sleep anymore. After showering and coffee, I was on the road! First stop, up to Wauconda to pick up the staff badges. Trust me, they’re purty. People will really like them, I think. From there it was southwards, first with a detour through Palatine to locate Emmett’s Tavern (this will be useful a week from today!), then to the MFF storage unit in Lombard. There, grabbed all of the Registration equipment we’re going to need.
After that I was pretty much done for the day so I wandered over to Windycon to see how things were going. See, the majority of the MFF security crew provides staffing for Operations and “Adult Supervision” at Windycon, and I got a first-hand look at why they view MFF as their “vacation con”. All I’m saying is that people who complain about how outré furry conventions are have never attended a single science fiction convention. Wow. Anyway, I wound up sticking around for quite a while, and just enjoying the fact that I wasn’t responsible for any of it 🙂 I do hope I didn’t annoy those who were working, and I have to say they were doing every bit of the excellent job one would expect of the fine MFF Security team.
On Sunday, I was again up early, this time for a drive up to Libertyville for an MRI test on my knee. That was dispatched reasonably quickly and then I was headed northwards to Antioch and roho and genet‘s place. We were joined by Neowolf2 and headed over for a tasty brunch (mmmm, Las Vegas Restaurant’s Vegas skillet). Afterwards, we walked over to the little games store and were pleasantly surprised to find that the place had a good stock of games and comics, including Furrlough. Roho also picked up a nice addition to the charity auction: a 24″ tall inflatable Brian (from “Family Guy”).
Then it was back to their place for the reason for the trip: pre-printing staff and dealer badges. Roho did a good job wrestling with the database for a while, but we finally got some very helpful advice from rustitobuck that made things flow much more smoothly. It then took a couple of hours to debug the printers and determine that not only were the color cartridges in them bad, so were the brand-new ones that had been purchased last year. One expensive trip to Wal-Mart later, we got that resolved. After all that, printing was a snap, though one of the printers might have some issues with the paper feed mechanism. These have served use well for five years, but I suspect we may be in the market for new printers next year. (And yes, Ramalion, I’ll be sure to look into top-loaders 🙂
So now it’s Monday, the first day of a three-day week for me. In between wrapping up some documents for work, I’ve been mopping up last-minute details and posting information stuff about the convention. There’s still a lot to do, and a lot to be packed up, but I’m pretty confident that we can get to con with a minimum of stress. After that, well, we’ll see…
About time. 😉
Actually got to replace our printers too, we’re down to two functional out of 4. Damn ink jet holes getting plugged up 😛
Thinking of a <dr evil> lazer </dr evil> printer…
Questions about Sears Tower.
I plan to visit it right after I step off the train Fri Morning.
Is it worth it?
Will they give me flak about bringing my overnight bag and backpack?
If so, are there lockers at Union? I’d hate to have to make a second trip but…
Thanks for your directions earlier. I’m weird but I love taking public transit in big cities.
I think it is. The views are fantastic, but keep in mind, if the weather not good it’s a waste. The good news: after you go in, you take an elevator down to the the sub-basement, where you buy tickets, etc. They have a sign as you walk in saying what the visibility is at the top of the building; anything less than 20 miles visibility, I’d suggest turning around and walking out.
Note that the entrance to the Skydeck is not the same as the entrance to the rest of the building. The only entrance to the Skydeck is on the south side of the building, on Jackson. All bags are searched and X-rayed, and you have to go through a metal detector. For what it’s worth, I’d stow your bags at Union Station.
Union Station does indeed have baggage lockers available; expect to pay about $3.00 – $6.00 for a few hours’ storage. Looking at this handy map, it looks like they’re located near tracks 26, 28, and 30.
And I can’t blame you about public transit – I’m the same way. Fortunately, Chicago is a great city for public transit.
Ok, one more q
amtrak called me with the option to upgrade my trip up to chicago to a minisleeper for $50.
Is it worth it?
Ah, now that’s one I can’t help you with. Methinks the Radiowuff from Chambana has more experience with Amtrak overnight trips than I and would be the better person to ask.
Incidentally, I did find another way for you to get out to the hotel if you’re interested:
Metra (light rail) Union Pacific District Northwest Line from the Madison Street Station to the Palatine Station, then you can pick up Pace (suburban bus system) Bus Route #699 southbound down to Woodfield Mall. Metra is without a doubt one of the best light rail systems I’ve been on, and if you’re a train geek and haven’t OD’ed on trains by the time you get to Chicago, it’s a very pleasant ride.
Pedantry and geekery
Actually, Metra is “commuter rail”, which is usually lumped with “heavy rail”, see the discussion at light rail.
Metra is cool in that it uses gallery or bilevel cars. Although an article in Wikipedia seems to suggest that the genre started in 1970 in Canada, the Illinois Railway Museum has C&NW gallery cars built in 1955.
Only if….
1) you don’t like to sleep for hours next to The Mystery Passenger, who may have bathed a couple of days ago…maybe…and gawd knows what he’ll want to talk to you about when he wakes up and stops snoring,
2) you don’t mind the free breakfast in the morning in the diner car, or
3) you’re a big fan of sleeping in a flat bed at night (though I have to warn you, the bed might be a touch on the short side).
Go for it. For Amtrak, that’s cheap! And you never know if it’ll be your last chance to ride a crosscountry train in the US.
I was surprised I didn’t get any calls for help from you guys sooner. I figure either I did a good job of keeping it simple, or Roho’s pretty swift or both. I’m glad you asked the question, and I’ll be around at the con just in case you have more.
I’m not surprised the inkjet cartridges were dried out and the nozzles clogged after a year of non-use. This is one case where I will suggest that you get printers that have the jets on the cartridge, because unless you print something once or twice a week the jets will dry out, and if you can’t replace the jets, you replace the printer. Ouch.
Try cleaning the paper pickup wheels with isopropanol. The printers were stored in an open area and probably got dusty, and the rollers lost their tack.