Category Archives: chicago

The Stanley Cup Comes to Chicago Pride!

This is a very cool bit of news. Thanks to the work of invncble, his hockey team, and the Chicago Gay Hockey Association, the Stanley Cup will be a part of the Chicago Pride Parade this weekend! Michael Sneed reports this in the today’s edition of the Chicago Sun Times.

The Stanley Cup . . .
Is the ultimate game of testosterone going to dispatch a Blackhawk with the Stanley Cup in tow to the Gay Pride Parade this weekend?
You betcha!

Sneed has learned Blackhawks President John McDonough is rerouting the Stanley Cup from the NHL draft in L.A. to the parade Sunday . . . and Blackhawk defenseman Brent Sopel has volunteered to represent the team.

“I am honored to do it,” said Sopel, who will be accompanied by wife, Kelly, and his four kids, Jacob, 12, Lyla, 8, Jayla, 6, and Paul, 20, whom they adopted three years ago after Paul’s parents died within six months of each other.
The rest of the article is here…

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

Oh wow, it’s been a while since a proper post here, hasn’t it? OK, here’s a quick recap of the last few weeks…

The weekend of October 10th: This was the big Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind weekend. On that Saturday I took the train into the city and wandered around a bit. I stopped by Julius Meinl Coffee House, which was delightfully civilized (and had great coffee)! After that I walked around the Lincoln Square neighborhood and stopped by The Bad Apple. While I didn’t get any of their tasty-looking food, I did have a New Holland Charkoota Rye Smoked Doppelbock which was…challenging, but interesting. You have to love a bar where you can strike up a conversation with two strangers about the relative merits of the beers your drinking. I really need to get back to this place!

From The Bad Apple it was across the street to the Half Acre Beer retail store. Alas, their offerings were a bit thin still (they had just started retail sales) but I did pick up a couple of good beers to take to dinner. I bussed it over to Andersonville and arrived at Ranalli’s Pizza in plenty of time for the LAFF get-together. I have to say that the folks at Ranalli’s were awesome to work with for our little shindig! We had about 28 people show up, and they were extremely accommodating. The pizzas just kept coming out, and the company and food was excellent. I hope that maybe we can do another LAFF event there again sometime soon.

After dinner the whole crowd trooped down to the Neo-Futurarium, where a line was just starting to form. I’m really glad we got there when we did! It was a cold night, but not too bad and the time passed quickly. We were treated to an extremely entertaining show, and I was reminded once again why it’s going to be so damn great to have the Neo-Futurists at Midwest FurFest this year.

The next day was the Midwest FurFest staff meeting, and things went really well. We nailed down some lingering details and I hope that everyone left with as good a feeling about the convention as I did.

On the weekend of October 17th, we aimed to keep things a little lower-key. takaza and I both slept in and had a lazy day around the house, slipping out late in the afternoon to stop by a restaurant supply place not too far away, then stopped by the local butcher and liquor store (where Dan had an amusing exchange with the Twitter-rep of our favorite rum). On Sunday, we welcomed roho, genet, and linnaeus over for a very tasty dinner of braised short ribs, ratatouille, and roasted potatoes with garlic vinaigrette. Very tasty dinner, supplemented by some really nice wines.

And here we are in the throes of another week. We’re going to be doing cleaning in preparation for a get-together this weekend, not that the place is all that dirty. If nothing else this gives us the impetus to put away the last few items left over from the move. Oh, and the penultimate Midwest FurFest staff meeting is this weekend! Believe it or not, plans for next year are already in high gear as well – nothing I can talk about, but I can say that folks should try to get to Closing Ceremonies at MFF, because we have a lot of cool information to share!

“Medium Pimping” With Out-of-Town Friends

Work work work, busy busy busy. It’s a crazy week for me, but it’s time to take a break a write a bit about the past weekend.

On Saturday, takaza and I took the train into Chicago and met up with fordshepherd and his “Bestest Friend” Julie (tsk, kai_darkwolf – you’re just going to have to try harder improve your friend status). We met up at Union Station and then jumped in a cab to visit the West Loop location of Wishbone Restaurant. We had a light lunch and a thoroughly enjoyable conversation about random things.

Afterwards we walked a block west and admired Oprah’s Harpo Studios, then across the street and into the Oprah Store, mainly for Julie’s benefit. Ford tried extremely hard to get us thrown out of the store for not showing the utmost reverence for the Great and Powerful “O”; it was vastly amusing to watch the oh-so gay male salespeople giving us the stink-eye as it became more and more clear that we really didn’t belong there.

Once we escaped there, we started what seemed like a short walk but wound up being about two and a half miles through The Loop. Following a quick stop by Intelligentsia Coffee (which we had to pass on, since the place was jam-packed), we walked up to Moonstruck Chocolate. We relaxed for a bit there with some conversation and hot chocolate, then proceeded up Michigan Avenue for our next stop, Vosges Chocolate (at Ford’s insistence). This turned out to be a good call – I tried the Bianca Cocoa, an astonishing mix of vanilla, lemon myrtle, lavender, and white chocolate. It was truly delicious. I also picked up a “Rooster” truffle, made of Taleggio cheese, walnuts, vanilla, and bittersweet chocolate. Delicious!

Our next stop was Galt Toys, since Julie wanted to peruse stuffed animals. Alas, their selection was limited, but Ford did find a plush cheetah that he decided needed to come home with him. Finally, we went to the Disney Store and I learned that RĂ©my is apparently an extremely popular character – so popular they can’t keep any merchandise with him on it in stock. Ah well. Dan did pre-order the 101 Dalmatians DVD, so at least it was a worthwhile trip.

It was time to go back to Ford and Julie’s hotel, some flophouse called The Drake Hotel. Ford wanted to take a cab, but I pointed out that it was a short bus ride. I was informed that one does not simply “take the bus” to The Drake. This would qualify as “medium pimping”, and was simply not to be considered. So we took a cab 🙂 Following a brief tour of Ford and Julie’s room (luxuriously appointed, and an ingenuous use of a relatively small space) and their dropping off their purchases, it was back downstairs and into a cab for dinner.

We chose the restaurant for dinner, so of course we had to pick our favorite restaurant: Heaven on Seven. The meal was divine, as usual, and I went with the “Feed Me Jimmy Junior”. This time around that included: crawfish cake in remoulade, small samplers of gumbo and turtle soup (the latter the highlight of the meal for Ford, I think), a Voodoo chicken enchilada, and strip steak over mashed potatoes. For dessert, I can never turn down their chocolate pecan pie. It was a stellar meal, and the company was excellent. We parted ways after dinner, as Dan and I headed back to Union Station and the long train ride home. It was a fantastic day out with good friends, and I had a really good time. Somewhere in the course of the day Ford extracted a promise from Dan and I that we would be visiting Columbus sometime soon, so I suppose we’re bound to that. Oh darn!

We got a late start on Sunday (gosh, I wonder why?), but Dan and I had to part ways – he to help his mother get her DVR running properly and get her tax information to help her file them, and I to the Midwest FurFest storage locker. I met up with linnaeus there and we dug around a bit, looking for some Art Show equipment and checking out what Registration equipment Paul would have to work with. For lunch we went over to Pierogi Place (yum!) and had a nice like chat over lunch. That evening, there was the online MFF staff meeting, which went OK but not as well as I would have liked – I forgot to call on a few people, and I completely forgot to follow up on action items from the previous meeting. I’ll need to take better notes before the meeting next time to remind myself of these things.

This week is, as I said, quite busy. Between some projects finally getting off the ground and lots of meetings, it’s going to be hectic. But things are going well, and I’m enjoying what I’m doing. That counts for a lot, I guess!