When last we left our intrepid heroes, they were prepping for a big weekend. Well, sort of. Takaza wasn’t feeling well when he got home on Friday night, so we had a quiet night in. On Saturday I was up bright and early, ready to enjoy a beautiful day. Dan was feeling better, so we headed down to the Cadillac Room at Soldier Field for the event of the day, Night of 100 Champions, a fundraiser for Gay Games Chicago. Considering that there were over 80 tables, with ten seats each, and seats were $75 each, this was going to be quite a fundraiser. Over the course of the weeks leading up to it, we had been told that we would have a variety of jobs, but ultimately they all collapsed down to “Setup”. We started at about 11:30 AM and worked pretty much continuously until the event started at 5:30 PM. We did a quick change into more dressy clothes and assumed our roles as facilitators for the silent auction – checking that bids were following the proper increments, answering any questions anyone might have, that sort of thing. the auction was pretty impressive, too – stuff like flights anywhere in the US, cruises, extravagant dinner and theater packages, artwork, and even a signed, framed tennis racket from Billie Jean King. The auction was supposed to end at 8 PM, then it got pushed back to 8:15, then 8:30, then finally 10 PM. This wasn’t too big of a deal – the object was to raise the most money possible, of course, but communications were poor at best, and there was a lot of confusion.

I should say that the volunteers and almost all of the organizers that we worked with were great, and we had a lot of fun with them; the only downer, and it was a BIG downer, was one of the organizers who was completely and obviously incompetent. She had a tendency to rush in and micromanage, pull you away from the tasks that you were working on to do stuff that was important to her, change her mind on how things should be done and snap at you when you didn’t read her mind, and generally being completely annoying and difficult. When she changed the (previously arranged, sensible and organized) plans for assembling the winning bids and accepting payment for winning items for the auction right as we were trying to close the auction – that was when Dan and I decided we’d had enough. We packed up our stuff and went home.

Initially, I think we were both pretty pissed off and really doubting what our participation with Gay Games might be for the next few months, I’ve come to realize that we were having problems with one person and one person only (though someone should have seen the problems and told her to knock it off). We also learned that if you’re competent, you’ll find yourself in a leadership role pretty darned quickly.

I was tired and sore Sunday morning and Dan was even worse off, suffering a dual curse of respiratory nastiness and a flare-up of the pinched nerve problems from earlier. He elected to stay home and I attended the MFF meeting. I was still in a pretty grumpy mood from the night before so I probably wasn’t the most pleasant to be around, but the meeting passed quickly. We spent Sunday night hanging out and being laptop geeks, as usual 🙂

Last night Dan was facing a recurrence of the god-awful all-nighter from last week. faced with dinner alone, I opted to walk up to Tom Yum, the sushi/Thai place around the corner from us, and had a tasty and inexpensive sushi dinner. The walk back was pleasant and perfect after a good meal. Dan didn’t leave work until after 11 PM, and didn’t come to bed until after 1 AM. We talked a little about the silliness that had kept him so late, and that got me more and more irritated until i couldn’t get back to sleep. I finally got to sleep again at about 3 AM, so you understand why I’m dragging a good bit today. Bleah. I’ll still hit the gym today, though, and we have a nice dinner of fettuccine carbonara lined up for dinner. Pasta makes everything better 🙂

Time to head home!