Category Archives: bingo

Crazy Times in Dogtown

Work work work…yeah, it’s been that kind of week (and weekend).

Most of last week was spent wrapping up the latest Big Project at work – still some stuff to do on that but we’re very close to getting things into production by the end of the week. genet stopped by for dinner on Tuesday, which was a nice break in the routine and her company is always a pleasure.

Friday night we were joined by Genet and linnaeus (roho was stuck with workstuff) for dinner at Jimmy John’s. takaza, Genet, and Linnaeus went off to see Harry Potter and the Giant Wads of Money; I wasn’t really feeling it so I decided to chill out at home. It sounds like I probably made the correct choice 🙂

Saturday was Bingo Day! It was once again Dan’s employer’s Summer Picnic and once again we got drafted to run bingo. It went OK, and we gave out about $900 in gift cards as prizes. When we wrapped up there, we drove over to Trader Joe’s in Lake Zurich and splurged on a few things, then back home. For dinner, we decided to try Smokin’ T’s BBQ in Long Grove, which darkwolph had recommended a while back. The pulled pork was extremely tasty, the short ribs only so-so, and the sauces were a little underwhelming (though the Alabama White BBQ sauce was very tasty). We had a lovely walk through the area and enjoyed the sunset afterwards, then headed home.

Unfortunately, it appears that something Dan ate, either at the picnic or at the restaurant, caused something akin to food poisoning because he was up all night. I woke up on Saturday and saw that Dan was already up, which worried me. I came downstairs to find him in the middle of making me breakfast in bed, which was incredibly sweet of him. He finished making breakfast then headed off to bed himself. I came in to work and spent a few hours finishing up some testing that had to be done during the off-hours of production. I was home by noon, though. Later in the afternoon I went over to Remington Pointe in Volo and signed the papers to start the process of purchasing our new home.

The whole process has been too complicated to get into and to be honest it’s stressing me out a lot, but the upshot of it is that we are on to buy a new townhouse and close the sale on Friday, August 7. Moving day is slated for August 22. The new place is fabulous – a really nice place, backs up to woods, and not in a terribly crowded neighborhood like where we live now. I’ll feel better once we work out the details of the sale, but I definitely like this place better than the one we were originally going to purchase. The only drawback is a kitchen smaller than I would like, but the open floor plan makes up for it. It’s very beige right now, but I suspect we’re going to be applying some paint and changing that up a bit.

As for this week: besides the ongoing home purchasing trials, we’re going on a little trip on Thursday. Many of you already know the details, but shhhh! Don’t tell Linnaeus 😉 I’ll have a lot more to talk about when we get back.

Livin’ the Suite Life

Now that was a truly amazing weekend, and exactly what I needed!

With Anthrocon quickly coming up, I admit I was not the most pleasant company for much of last week. Worries about preparations compounded with concerns about projects that were hitting at work right after the convention had me irritable and sleeping quite poorly. takaza, as always, was a saint and put up with me somehow. Then on Friday, I realized that 95% of what I needed for the convention was done and what wasn’t done could be handled at the con. At the same time, I found out that due to equipment and material delivery issues, my projects were being pushed back to late July. All of this set the tone for me to be very relaxed for the weekend.

We kicked off the weekend by checking into the Westin Chicago North Shore. You see, Dan won a free weekend in the Wheeling Suite there (yes, the suite which will be home to the Con Suite at Midwest FurFest) and he suggested that this would be the ideal weekend for it. So after we got settled in, he had to go have lunch with his cow-orkers. I met up with daveqat, jimcyl, and linnaeus and we had dinner at Wakaba, a Japanese restaurant just up the road from the hotel. It was…underwhelming. Standard suburban strip-mall sushi, at slightly inflated prices. I don’t see us going back there. After dinner we relaxed on the suite balcony (15 floors up) and relaxed. That was a nice end to the evening.

Saturday brought Dan’s company picnic. He was in an organizational role this year (yeah, imagine that) and so I was left to run bingo myself. Fortunately, Paul, roho, and genet volunteered to lend a hand, and we spent an enjoyable afternoon calling bingo to several hundred people and giving away over a thousand dollars in gift cards. It was surprisingly entertaining. Afterwards, we had a quick but refreshing swim in the hotel pool, then it was time for the party.

What’s the fun of having a ritzy suite if you can’t have a party? We welcomes a small group of friends up to the suite, ordered pizza, and mixed up some drinks. The weather was perfect as we chatted out on the balconies, admiring the views and watching fireworks set off in distant towns. We took a break at about 10 PM and everyone went down and swam for an hour until the pool closed, then it was back upstairs to chat and refill our drinks. I had a fantastic time and the party really let me relax and not worry about work or Anthrocon.

On Sunday it was time to check out (after sleeping relatively late). jet_der_hund had spent the night with us, and he kindly assisted us in carrying all of our stuff down. Dan took a nap in the afternoon while I puttered with Anthrocon preparations. Following a reasonably short online MFF staff meeting, we both worked on AC stuff while I introduced Dan to some of Big Blue Fox’s outstanding megamixes.

And now it’s Monday and I’m back at work. I’m going to struggle to maintain focus and get stuff done here, but I leave here at 2 PM tomorrow, pick up Dan from work, and then we head for a brief overnight in Cleveland, then Pittsburgh Wednesday morning. By the way, A note to folks in general: if you e-mail me between now and the coming weekend, don’t expect any response until after Anthrocon at the earliest!

Booze, Bingo, and, um…Man, I Fail At Alliteration

Let’s get up to speed, shall we?

After work on Friday takaza and I stopped by Gurnee Mills to pick up a few things. We were just looking for a new belt for me but wandered into the game store only to find that they were having a buy-one-get-half-off-another sale on games. We walked out with two games that look like they’re going to be a lot of fun at our next party: Malarkey and Wits and Wagers. When we finished shopping we drove up to Antioch to our favorite liquor store to stock up on a few things for Anthrocon (a couple of new Scotches and a bottle of Grey Goose, ’cause I likes me some good sipping vodka). We met up with genet (roho was under the weather) and had a pleasant dinner at Las Vegas Restaurant.

Saturday was craziness, but in a fun way. For the second year in a row we ran the bingo games for Dan’s company picnic. It’s a good thing that Dan thought to bring our bingo set (purchased for use last year, but not used) because we found that the provided bingo set was missing four bingo balls. That would have sucked. We ran two sessions, each 90 minutes long, and gave away a little over $2,000 in gift cards to Target, Wal Mart, and various restaurants. People seemed to enjoy it. Dan had bought a huge chunk for tickets for the charity raffle (to benefit Gilda’s Club) and for the second year in a row he won an iPod, this time a 4 Gb iPod Nano. Which would be nice except that we both have 30 Gb Video iPods. Ah well, we had fun, at least, and the day’s surreal moment was provided by the CEO of Dan’s company inquiring if we’re brothers. I guess it’s true that the longer a couple stays together, the more they start to look alike 🙂

After the picnic we headed into the city, where we met up with datahawk and emrldgrrl to see the GLBT Pride edition of Too Much Light makes the Baby Go Blind (“30 queer plays in 60 straight minutes”). As always, the show was amazing – funny, poignant, and thought-provoking. I admit, it’s the silly stuff that I remember most, including “Two Minute Strip Rock Paper Scissors” and “All The Boys in the Frat House Say Ho(mosexual)!” Because it was a benefit show, even though they ran out of time on play #25 everyone agreed that we should see the last five plays, so we did! After the show, we drove down to linnaeus‘s place and got dinner from our favorite taquiera. It was great ending to a great day.

And on Sunday? We rested. Well, we did a little work on Anthrocon stuff, but mostly we just rested. And it was good.