As I have noted in the past, insomnia sucks, and insomnia on a Sunday night when you’re trying to readjust to a work-week schedule and went to bed late…Ugh. Needless to say, I’m dragging a good bit this morning. I have a whole lot to write about the weekend, though!

On Saturday I met neowolf2 and linnaeus at the Midwest FurFest storage locker to pick up a few things and get a feel for the state of the locker. It could use some organization, but it’s not an utter disaster. I wonder if it would be worth it to steal an idea from Ohana House and assign each department a color (Registration=red, Operations=green, etc.), with every item that department puts into the storage locker labeled with a piece of tape of that color. I’m not sure how helpful that would be, but I imagine it would make sorting what goes where when we bring stuff to the hotel a lot easier. Just thinking out loud here…

After Neowolf got the Registration server from the storage locker, the three of us had lunch at Chowpatti, a vegetarian restaurant in Arlington Heights, not too far away from the storage locker (or the MFF hotel!). The menu – all 26 pages of it – is quite overwhelming; it’s sort of a vegetarian Cheesecake Factory. I opted for the Pav Bhaji Uttapam (an thick pancake made using a batter of rice and lentil topped with seasoned potatoes, green peas, cauliflower, tomatoes, garlic, onions and cilantro, covered with cheese). It came out looking quite like a pizza 🙂 It tasted excellent, though, and the fact that it was vegetarian was completely obscured by the riot of flavors and textures. Delicious! My only complaint was that the service was a bit slow, but I would be very happy to go there again.

Afterwards, I started my reconnaissance for this year’s Restaurant Guide. I had forgotten how slow the process can be; in an hour I had only covered Algonquin Road from Arlington Heights Road to the Alumni Club, just past the Motorola campus, as well as McConnor Parkway and a small part of Meacham Road. In that stretch there’s been a couple of closings (Sal e Carvao, notably) and several new additions (including a Jewish deli, a Malaysian restaurant, and a fast-food pierogi place). I’m hoping that this weekend takaza and I can do a bit more information gather either before or after the MFF staff meeting on Sunday. After an hour of driving, the food coma from lunch was catching up to me and I just wanted to relax a bit, so I headed home. Dan and I did a bit of grocery shopping, and he grilled up some tasty steaks later in the evening.

On Sunday, perro came up to hammer out MFF programming room assignments with Dan, then steviemaxwell and magicpaw joined us not long after. A delicious meal ensued which I will detail in a later post, because it was all about testing out recipes and preparation techniques for this coming weekend’s LAFF Softball Steak Dinner. The recipes were a success, and we wound up chatting until late about con related stuff. It was an extremely productive evening, and I went to bed with my brain buzzing about plans (which probably explains the insomnia).

More anon…