Category Archives: dining

Weekendness and stuff

Now that was a fun weekend. As planned, we had lunch on Saturday at The Firkin in Libertyville with roho, genet, feren, and lady_curmudgeon. I need to remember that while their beer is divine (mmm, bocks) and their appetizers are tasty (the duck quesadillas were to die for!), their entrees aren’t quiet always up to snuff; the steak sandwich I had tasted like a whole lot of horseradish and not enough of steak. Still, I’d go back, even if I only ordered a couple of appetizers. Afterward we wandered town around a bit, including a stop by Rocky Mountain Spotted Chocolate Factory, where we introduced everyone to the yumminess that is “Apple Pie Apple”, an apple rolled in white chocolate, caramel, and cinnamon sugar. Yum! Afterwards we stopped back by our place to pick up nymphara and headed up to Antioch for an evening of hanging out, pizza, boozahol, and Apples to Apples. We had a wonderful time!

On Sunday I finally got my taxes taken care of (yay federal refund! boo state taxes due!) and we cleaned up a bit, and did some grocery shopping. Roho and Genet came over for dinner and we enjoyed some yummy burritos and watched The Amazing Race. A nice, low-key day.

So, other random stuff going on: We have tickets to see Weird Al Yankovic in June! He’s playing at the Star Plaza Theatre in Merrillville, IN. takaza saw him on his last tour, and apparently it’s a great show. I’m really looking forward to it. Hey – anyone else want to go? Get your tickets now, ’cause they’re going fast!

Maybe more later – gotta run!

A Trip To The Mitten

Y’know, before this weekend, my sole experience of visiting Michigan was back around 2002 or so, going north about a mile on I-69 from the Indiana Toll Road, turning around, and continuing my trip on the Indiana Toll Road. Hey, at least I could say I’d been to Michigan, and therefore every state east of the Mississippi.

This weekend I got to see a bit more of Michigan than that. I left work at 11 AM on Friday and picked up takaza from his employer an hour after that. After carefully checking the traffic reports, we were able to slip through downtown Chicago and out the Chicago Skyway with minimal delays. The trip across Michigan on I-94 was uneventful; I wound up doing most of the driving, since Dan was sleepy. We arrived at the Best Western Executive Plaza in Ann Arbor at close to 6 PM EDT.

We were there for the Dorsai Thing, an annual private relaxacon that the Dorsai hold annually. It was a bit awkward, since we didn’t really know many people there, though giza and petercat from Anthrocon were in attendance, and indeed we spent a good bit of time hanging around and chatting with them. Although they had several tasty dishes available in the con suite, Dan and I opted to go out and grab dinner at Zingerman’s Deli, part of the Zingerman’s conglomerate in Ann Arbor. I had done a bit of googling before we left, and the deli was described as the one place in Ann Arbor (or “A2”, as the local hipsters refer to it) that should not be missed. I have to say, I was extremely impressed with the place. They are clearly set up that funnel massive amounts of people through their store quickly and efficiently, though fortunately there weren’t that many people there that night (I think it was Spring Break at the University of Michigan, so that helped). Dan had a turkey sandwich which he found close to transcendent, and my beef brisket sandwich was pretty darned tasty (great BBQ sauce, but it needed more smokiness in the meat). We drove around downtown Ann Arbor a bit and it struck me as a rather pleasant college town, albeit one that supports a freakin’ huge college. After dinner we went back to the hotel and I crashed early, while Dan stayed up too late making a video blog.

Saturday was pretty laid back. I stepped out from the hotel early to hunt down a tasty cappuccino and had a chance to read the local paper; this only reinforced my opinion that Ann Arbor is definitely a small town in big-city clothing. That has a certain quaintness to it, though. that afternoon there were a few pseudo-panels (more like discussions) on how to be a duty officer (i.e. how to head up and deploy the Dorsai contingent at a convention) and how to negotiate contracts with conventions. These were quite interesting from an outsider’s point of view, and it’s worthy of note that the Dorsai think that Anthrocon is a whole lot of fun, and have nothing but nice things to say about the convention. From the discussions, it sounds like they’ll be working at another furry convention this year, too (not MFF). Following the panels, there was The Spanish Inquisition. This was an entertaining contest where each team had to take ten minutes and do…something. The judge (Sergeant Steve, scs_11) would only tell them if they were doing something wrong, or not wrong. Oh, and the judge could lie at any time. Between your team’s activities and observations made of the other team’s activities, the goal was to deduce what the rules were. It was very silly, and people had a lot of fun with it. We worked with Giza and Peter and we were, of course, “Team Furry”. Of the four teams, we somehow won, for which we got a nifty action figure!

After that, we gave Peter and Giza a lift to the local Kroger where we purchased supplies for the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster contest. The goal was to create a drink that best embodied the description of a drink that was “like being hit over the head by a gold brick wrapped in a slice of lemon.” Peter and Dan’s entries were quite tasty, though Giza’s was…well, I’ll have to track down some pictures of the reception that Giza’s drink received. I think the best comment his drink received was, “A bit harsh for marinating pork or chicken, but maybe not bad with beef.” Dan won a nice set of martini glasses for his drink!

Sunday morning we stopped by the breakfast buffet briefly, but decided to go ahead and hit the road to beat the weekend traffic back through Chicago. Sorry to everyone we didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to! The drive was uneventful, but difficult due to nasty crosswinds most of the trip. We arrived home and pretty much collapsed on the sofa, enjoying the two hours of The Amazing Race that aired last night. Then it was off to bed.

Many thanks to Steve and all of the other good Dorsai Irregulars we met this weekend! We had a lot of fun and I definitely look forward to seeing many familiar faces when Anthrocon rolls around.

Long Days, Video Games, and Peanuts on the Floor

It’s Thursday, and as this day begins…

Oh wait, it began a while ago, didn’t it? Anyway. It hasn’t been a very exciting week, but things are picking up. I’ve been coming in an hour early each day (7 AM – 4:30 PM) so that I can leave at 11 AM on Friday. Why? More on that below.

Earlier in the week I finally finished Okami. How sad is it that I fired it up again for a bit yesterday just to see what happens when you start it again (oooh, you have lots of cash and stuff, that’s what!). I don’t foresee playing the whole game through again, but it’s remarkable that the playability holds up even after finishing it. And even though it’s the most expensive game we’ve ever bought, at 40+ hours of gameplay, it was very much worth it!

Yesterday when takaza got home I started to make dinner – farfalle in a tomato-sausage sauce. Except when I unwrapped the Italian sausage from the fridge something wasn’t…quite…right. Rather than speculate on just how spoiled the sausage might be (hey everyone it’s food poisoning roulette!) we elected to seek dinner out. We wound up trying Pat’s Pizza on 83 in Grayslake. Wow, what a throwback that place is. Peanut shells on the floor, tables decorated with pages from the 1967 Grayslake High School yearbook…yeah. As much as I wanted to like the place, though, the pizza was unremarkable, as was the garlic bread. It might be a fun place to go with friends, though, just not on a weekend night – that place gets seriously crowded then!

After dinner we made a short drive up to Antioch to visit our favorite booze supplier, Antioch Liquors (nee Armanetti’s, and now apparently part of the Cardinal Liquors chain, though they haven’t changed their sign in over a year). We got a six pack of the Winter’s Bourbon Cask Ale that I had at the bowling alley a few weeks ago; as I feared (and the stupidly low price was the tipoff) it’s an Anheuser-Busch product. The stuff from the tap was reasonably good, though, and at three bucks for the six pack, if it’s nasty at least I didn’t gamble much. We also got a bottle of Van Gogh Dutch Chocolate Vodka (giza is so doomed!) and a bottle of Aberlour a’bunadh (I’m so doomed!). I toyed with getting a bottle of the extremely tasty Stolichnya Elite, but we were already damaging our wallets enough, so we stopped there. From there it was back home for a boringly early bedtime.

Today has been somewhat busy but I’m really looking forward to tomorrow. After I leave work at 11, I’ll be picking up Dan at work then we’ll be hitting the road for Ann Arbor, Michigan and the Dorsai Thing, a nice little relaxacon. I have no idea what to expect, but I’m sure it’s going to be entertaining one way or another. I’m really looking forward to this because it’s been a while since we did any kind of a road trip (since last July, I think?) and I’ve been antsy to get out on the road again, even if it’s just a short jaunt over to Michigan. For those going to Congenial this weekend, I’m bummed that we won’t be able to make it and I hope that you all have a blast!

The Flashing Lights Are The Policeman’s Way Of Saying Hello

It’s Monday and man am I dragging. A nasty bout of insomnia last night had be up between 12:30 and 1:45, and when I did get to sleep it was pretty shallow and I kept waking up. I’m looking forward to 4:30 when I can head home and collapse.

I haven’t really done a substantial update in a week, so I guess I should look back over the last seven days.
Tuesday at the Meat Faucet!

Our House Is Now Fully Warmed!

Wow, what a weekend!

After a week of preparations and a morning of frantic cleaning, by 3 PM or so on Saturday we finally had the house ready for our Housewarming Party. I decided to commemorate that fact by taking the camera out and creating a virtual tour of our new home.

siriuswolfstar and simbalion showed up early, followed shortly after by roho, genet, and steviemaxwell (welcome back, Stevie!). Shortly thereafter followed a slew of other folks, and lots and lots of food, booze, sodas, and more food. For the entree, I made up about ten pounds of stuffed pork roast (see the following entry for this). We started things at about 5 PM and eventually kicked the last few folks out at 2 AM. We had a lot of fun, played games of Fluxx, Apples to Apples, and Lupus in Tabula, packed entirely too many people into our tiny living room, and everyone ate really, really well. Thanks to everyone who attended!

On Sunday, I woke up far too early at 7:30 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. Unfortunately, the drapes in the master bedroom aren’t nearly as light-blocking as we had hoped, so we’re going to supplement them with some inexpensive blinds from Home Depot or someplace similar, the theory being that since the drapes will usually be closed, it doesn’t much matter what the blinds look like, so long as they block as much light as possible. Anyway, eventually we got everyone up and moving by noon and made the (short) pilgrimage up to Antioch to indulge in breakfast at my favorite diner in the area, Las Vegas. After an excellent meal, we dropped Sirius and Simba off at the train station and spent the remainder of the afternoon and into the evening hanging out at our place and watching TV with Roho and Genet. We caught up on a few episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”, “Dinner Impossible”, and the first episode of the BBC’s new Robin Hood series (great casting, great sets, crappy modern editing. At least they kept it to only one “You’ve got to be kidding me!” moment). Then, since they were there anyway, R&G stayed and watched the latest episode of “The Amazing Race” as well. It was a deliciously lazy and unproductive afternoon.

And now we have a new week. We have dinner engagements on Tuesday and Friday of this week, at a Brazilian steakhouse (note to self: don’t eat breakfast or lunch tomorrow) and at a new steakhouse in Wheeling. It’s gonna be a carnivorous kind of week!

I’m thinking that napping at my desk would be bad, but man I sure wish I could!

Beer, Lasagna, and Laziness

Well, this was the weekend of “Gonna do it…but didn’t.” But in the end, that’s OK, I reckon.

The weather forecast for Saturday was dismal, but as the day approached the arrival of the sleet/snow/icy death was pushed further back, finally to late afternoon. We’d been intending to stay in all weekend, but an enticing invitation from roho and genet found me joining them for lunch in Libertyville (takaza had actually believed me when I said we’d be staying in all weekend, and very reasonably opted to sleep in instead). We met up at The Firkin. I really liked this place! Imagine someplace like The Hopleaf only without quite the insane number of beers and a bigger menu (and not insanely packed!). They have a good 25 beers on draft though (as well as Sprecher’s root beer, cream soda, and ginger ale!), and appear to change them regularly. I was in a bock mood, so I started out with an Anchor Bock, which was delicious, then moved to the always-reliable Spaten Optimator. Since they were running Creole/Cajun specials for Mardi Gras, I opted for the smoked alligator sausage and blackened chicken fettuccine, which was…well, it was capable, and the sausage was good. I’d probably stick to their regular menu, which is supposed to be much better.

After lunch we walked around a bit until I was safe to drive to enjoy the shops of downtown Libertyville. We found a fun little kitchen shop that offers cooking classes, then got ice cream from a little shop that also hosted children’s parties on Saturdays. Gah. Anyway, I took my leave of R&G and headed back home.

As for the rest of the weekend? Wow. Not much to say. Saturday night Dan made a fabulous lasagna-esque thing with chicken, tomato sauce, bacon, and lots of cheese. I played a whole lot of Okami (yeah, I’m an addict). And we watched the snow come down from Saturday afternoon through Sunday night; I think we finished off with about six inches of snow and sleet, all told. I also made a very tasty chocolate bread pudding on Sunday night, though the recipe could have been slightly sweeter.

So here we are this week. We have a housewarming party coming up and a good bit of stuff to get done before then. Tonight my main goal is to get the drapes in the master bedroom up, and put a few finishing touches on the guest bedroom as well. That’s pretty much all the structural stuff – after that it’s just cleaning and cooking.

Oh, and last night? Yeah, we watched Heroes. And were suitably blown away by all the wonderful plot tidbits that were leaked out. I very much agree with those who have said that that episode alone qualifies Jack Coleman (“Mr. Bennett”) for an Emmy. For those counting along, that was episode 17 of 23 for the first season, so the finale is coming soon!

Domestic Bliss

That was a lovely weekend that just passed. What did we do? Well, not a whole lot. Hooray!

On Friday, takaza was going to take a half-day because they were finally coming to fix the window in his office. The glass company said they’d be there between 7:30 AM and noon; they actually showed up at 7:35 AM. Wow. They fixed the window in a matter of minutes and were gone by 8:00 AM. Dan elected to call off the rest of the day and spent the day trying to bring some sense to the jumble of boxes down there. Because the room is below grade and has only one vent that is probably not properly balanced, the room stays close to 55 degrees when the rest of the house is at 68. That’s fine for Dan, but I’d freeze; come summertime it should be nice, though.

Dan informed me that we were going to celebrate the window installation by going out to dinner, meaning that neither of us were particularly motivated to cook. We opted to try one of the many Mexican places down the road from us, Rancho Nuevo in Round Lake. Downtown Round Lake (all one block of it) is rather amusing – it’s a toss-up whether there are more signs in English or Spanish. Not surprisingly, between that and Round Lake Park (the short commercial section on IL 134 that’s right around the corner from us) there’s approximately a half-dozen Mexican restaurants. Rancho Nuevo had a reasonably authentic air, though the decor tries a bit too hard, and the “Learning Spanish Is Fun!” placemats are just over the top. We split an order of asada quesadillas and each had the carne asada, mine with a cheese enchilada. The food was delicious, but unfortunately, the service was terrible. There was a decided language barrier with our waitress (though when does “beer” sound like “horchata”?) and the long periods of unrefilled drinks (a bit of a problem when eating moderately spicy food) might keep us from going back. Maybe if we don’t sit sequestered in a corner, outside of the view of the servers…

On Saturday we ran all kinds of errands. We’ve been trying to stop, as I put it, spending like drunken sailors as we continue to set up the new house. Fortunately, we have a little extra unaccounted-for income that we can put towards expenses like that, but at some point we need to stop. It wasn’t too bad for the most part, but it wasn’t until we stopped by the framing place to have three pieces properly matted and framed (to the tune of $300) that I started humming “What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor” under my breath. Still, it’ll be worth it – one of the pieces is Kenket’s original artwork for the 2005 Midwest FurFest con book cover. That is going to look spectacular in our living room, I think.

We stopped by Lovin’ Oven Cakery, the place that supplied the truly deadly chocolate cake for my surprise party. They had king cake! Woo! It was wonderfully moist and tasty, too, but just too darn big for us to get one. We picked up a couple of tasty pastries to sustain us, and I am quite impressed with the range and quality of their products.

On Sunday Dan continued to putter in his office while I did some general housecleaning and cooking. I made a couple of loaves of challah that turned out quite nicely, as well as a wonderful garlic-potato soup from the new issue of Cook’s Illustrated. roho, genet, and linnaeus joined us for the season premiere of The Amazing Race: All Stars. The show was good – better than I expected, even – and the outcome was pretty good too. Numerous comments were made that Joyce looks a lot like chebutykin. By the way, this season they have a series of web episodes called “Elimination Station” the will follow the eliminated racers as they get to “Elimination Villa”, a mansion in Acuapulco where they will be sequestered while the rest of the race goes on. That looks like it could get entertaining.

Yesterday was spent relaxing, and I got to indulge in my latest video game obsession, Okami. It’s a very enjoyable, very pretty game. Not too challenging, but hey – that’s not what I look for in a game. This is something I do to relax, and I like the visuals and the music.

So, this afternoon I have to tend to a bit of house repair (the soap dispenser fell off the wall of the shower) and a few other things around the house. I expect tonight will be another early bedtime, since neither Dan nor I have slept too well for the last few nights.

In Other News…

So, other stuff going on…

I neglected to mention that last Friday we met roho and genet for dinner at Scott Dogs, a tasty find on Grand Ave. in Lake Villa. I had a couple of homemade empanadas and the (gulp!) deep fried dog. It was excellent, but the cheese sauce was over-the-top. Afterwards we went down to Wine Knows in Grayslake to check out their Friday evening tasting and Roho picked up a bottle of a tasty Spanish cava. We capped off the evening by going next door to Something’s Brewing for some dessert; takaza got a hot chocolate, and I got to demonstrate the lost art of pouring hot beverages down the front of your shirt. No harm done, except to my dignity.

On Saturday evening, we met Roho and Genet again for a coffee tasting at Grinders in downtown Grayslake. It was definitely an introductory session, but they covered some interesting aspects of regional coffee variations, and we had a lot of fun. I’ve never really drank that much black coffee, and I found out why when all that acid returned with a vengeance later that night. Ugh.

This week we’ve been relaxing a bit, which is nice. Erin (nymphara) hitched a ride home with Dan on Monday night rather than deal with her commute in from the South Suburbs on Tuesday – good call. We had a pleasant evening watching some good episodes of Heroes and The Dresden Files. Then last night we went to work on shipping out the leftover sponsor items from MFF. We actually sold seventeen sponsorships after we ran out of pint glasses, and in the chaos of the holidays then moving this was the first chance we’ve had to get these out. Dan kindly packed everything up; I had to print up the letters to go inside the boxes and the shipping labels today. I’ll seal them all up and put them in my car tonight and take them to the post office tomorrow. After that, my focus tonight is going to be on making a tasty batch of chicken and dumplings. Yum!

Finally, PICTURES! Erin posted the pictures that she (and Dan) took at my surprise birthday party on Sunday. Lost of great (and embarrassing) shots there 🙂

The Great Holiday Summary

So, it’s been quiet here lately, and I hope to post a bit more than I have over the last few months.

Things are going OK at work, though the project I’m on is the kind of thing that seems easy at first but then grows in complexity and volume. I swear, someone at $employer must have a military background, because in order to get anything done you must first fill out form DR-CQ-271, followed by DR-CQ-272, but in order to that you need to fill our form DR-CQ-877, 878, 879, and 890 (all of which require the signatures of at least three separate people). I find it truly astonishing that anything gets done here – it’s like work gets done in spite of the paperwork. That having been said, though, it’s not a bad gig overall. Still no idea when (or if) I’ll be hired on full time, but in the meantime, the pay is good.

When I get paid, that is. There was a bit of a screwaround a few weeks back when we found out that my contracting service sent my paycheck to the wrong address. That was followed by them having to FedEx my next two paychecks to me, plus my direct deposit was delayed by someone in their office mis-transcribing my checking account number. Theoretically, my next paycheck will be deposited tomorrow, if it isn’t delayed by the fact that I had to bug my manager this morning to approve my timesheet from two weeks ago. And this will be only half a paycheck, since I didn’t work last week due to the annual winter shutdown. Even with all that, though, our cash flow is good and bills will be paid on time.

Before I go any further I wanted to mention Christmas. Normally we would have been with my parents and my sister’s family down in South Carolina for the holiday. Unfortunately, since I was uncertain of my time off until right before Christmas (they may have called me in over shutdown) and Dan didn’t have any vacation to spare, we had to pass on the trip south this year. Instead, we spent Christmas Eve with

[info]takaza

‘s mom, and Christmas Day with 

[info]roho

and

[info]genet

.

The Christmas Eve dinner is especially worthy of note. We took Dan’s mom to Le Vichyssoise, a noted French restaurant just outside of McHenry. She had worked at Le Vichysoisse for twenty years as a bartender before quitting six years ago to focus on nursing full-time. Fortunately, the parting was amicable, which afforded us the opportunity for an outstanding meal. Dan’s mom and I each had a couple of glasses of wine, an appetizer (my roasted-tomato-and-onion tart was excellent), and soup (my vichyssoise was also quite tasty). Following a tasty Poire William sorbet, compliments of the chef, they brought our entrees: steak au poivre for Dan, beef tourenados for me, and a scallops dish for Dan’s mom. We capped the meal with a collection of sumptuous desserts, including the “Floating Island”, a meringue floating in a vanilla crème Anglais drizzled with caramel, and I had a cappuccino.

I knew going in that this was not going to be a cheap meal; this is a highly-rated restaurant, the prices reflect that. Then they brought the bill: $365.00. I probably blanched a bit, but to my credit Dan said he didn’t notice anything was wrong. I just calmly put my debit card back into my wallet and pulled out the credit card. When the receipt was brought, I swallowed hard and added a 15% tip (alas, the service waned a bit towards the end of the meal), bringing the total to $415. I was somewhat shell-shocked as we drove to Dan’s brother’s house to visit, and I’m sure the quiet hand signals between Dan and I as Dan found out how much the meal cost were probably quite amusing to see.

As we chatted with Dan’s brother’s family, Dan got a phone call (he was the one who had made the reservation). Apparently, they had double-charged us for the meal, and the final bill was only $183. Whew. That was more like I was expecting. I was chided by Dan’s mom for not speaking up, but hey – that’s not how I am. (“Oh my GOD! Look how expensive this meal is! This can’t be right!” Yeah, that’s real smooth). And yeah, pride probably played into it a bit too. Either way, though, I’m just glad that that things worked out. We left Dan’s brother’s late and headed up to Antioch, where we found Roho and Genet, remarkably, still awake. We chatted a bit then all headed off to bed.

Christmas Day was wonderfully lazy. We had a tasty breakfast, then watched some TV, chatted, and poked at our computers a bit. Genet and Roho had started a turkey brining the night before (yay for Alton Brown!) and I was able to help provide a few tips on cooking it. Genet did most of the cooking, but all of us helped out a little bit. The finished dinner was absolutely delicious, and it was really nice to spend the time with friends.

The following week was spent putting together the New Year’s Eve party, which I already mentioned. That pretty much brings me up to date, except to mention what’s going on right now. Dan and I are hot on the trail of a new place to live, with the goal of moving by the end of the month. We have a couple of places lined up to look at on Saturday, in Wauconda, Hainesville (Grayslake), and Antioch, and will probably be looking at more places on Sunday. The idea is that Dan could take the train in to work from Hainesville or Antioch, or have about a 40-minute drive from Wauconda. I feel kind of bad, because all of these put me at most 20 minutes from my work (and about 5 minutes in the case of Hainesville). That’s the reality of what we can afford, though – things in our price range further south are either apartments (not what we want) or…unacceptable. Our hope is that we can find a place to live for a year and then, once we have a little more savings and better financial security, buy a place next year.

Oh, and a note to locals: yeah, expect that call for help moving something in the next few weeks 🙂 We’ll give as much notice as we possibly can. And now, back to work!

‘Tis the Busy Season!

Right. Wow, long time since my last decent update, huh? Anyway, last week found us at Gameworks on Thursday night for my contracting agency’s holiday party. It was exactly what I look for in a holiday party: bring a guest, free food, free booze, fun stuff to do, and no onus to socialize with cow-orkers (who I don’t know, having just been hired a few weeks ago, and they all work at other companies anyway). We had a lot of fun, even both takaza and I injured ourselves playing Hyperbowling (imagine a giant bowling ball going down a crowded city street. “Yay! I flattened a car!”).

On Friday we went over to perro and darkwolph lovely house to celebrate Andrew’s birthday and to help, um, warm their house. Or something like that. We got to meet Chaos, their German shepherd, who has the sweetest disposition of any dog I’ve met recently. The libations flowed freely, and Dan had a heck of a lot of fun playing bartender at their fabulous basement bar (that you can barely see over for all the bottles of booze perched atop it). Good times, great company, and we stayed out later than I have for a while. It probably helped that I didn’t drink much, since I had to drive home.

On Saturday we were going to get up early and go get Dan’s new driver’s license, then take a bunch of stuff up to our storage locker in Lake Villa, then go to Dan’s employer’s holiday party. Well, the first two were scotched by the 2:30 AM bedtime the night before, and Dan had some nasty workplace drama that left him not particularly interested in the evening’s festivities. Instead, we made some short-notice dinner plans and met daveqat and jimcyl for dinner at Cafe’ Bernard. It was a very tasty meal, and I got to try their cassoulet which was…well, not as good as mine, quite frankly (which reminds me – I have a monster post about making cassoulet that’s been waiting in the wings for weeks). The meal was excellent, though, and we had a great time.

Sunday we were just plain lazy, but we did finally roust ourselves out in the late afternoon to stop by Bobtail and pick up some coffee beans for me. While were in the area, we decided to grab a quick dinner at Potbelly Sandwiches, which really hit the spot. After buying provisions for the next few days’ dinners at Whole Food$ (for $6.99/lb., those had better be some pretty damned amazing chicken breasts), we came home and watched some Tivo and did laundry, then spent some time celebrating the birthday of one of linnaeus‘ friends.

And here we are at Monday. Woo. There’s plenty at work to keep me busy, but I’m still learning procedures, and the sequence of projects and spending an inordinate amount of time waiting for assistance from others. Hopefully this awkward period will pass soon and I can start going ahead full speed.

The Con Is Mother, The Con Is Father

As one might have guessed from my last update, Midwest FurFest is weighing heavily on my mind.

Friday I took takaza into work and took advantage of the glorious weather to take some nice pictures in and around McHenry County (well, except for the first one; that’s on Milwaukee Ave. in Niles). You’ll be seeing some of those pictures again come the convention. After driving for several hours I made a big loop and stopped back by Schaumburg and found a good place for MFF to store our stuff for the next year right near the hotel. I’ll be stopping by there later this week to nail down a contract with them. Afterwards I went to Dan’s employer and read the paper and killed some time until he was ready to leave, only about two hours after quitting time. steviemaxwell was over visiting so we had a pleasant evening of dinner from the taquiera and good conversation.

On Saturday I took off early and headed up to roho and genet‘s place where we were joined by neowolf2 and attempted to assemble all of the parts of the Registration server. Things didn’t go quite as well as we’d hoped. Computer geekery ensued, and Unix-y troubleshooting

A Random Weekend of Stuff

Well, I’ve been productive enough today, so I guess that means I have time to look back over the last few days and see what’s been going on.

After a small series of scheduling snafus, I picked up lisagems on Friday and we met up with foxish to ostensibly start the moving process early in the afternoon. Well, that didn’t happen, but we did get two loads of stuff moved over to the new place by evening. emrldgirrl was nice enough to pick up gyros for everyone and a very entertaining dinner at the new house was had. Still a lot of work to go on that, but they’re getting there.

On Saturday takaza slept in until quite late, but he had had a rough week and was certainly due the extra rest! He and I ventured out into the burbs and ran some errands, in particular picking up a PCI wireless card for the spare desktop we keep in the bedroom for extra storage and emergencies – emergencies like Dan’s laptop dying. Just because he was using it to make the MFF conbook, that’s no cause for alarm, right? Ack! Fortunately, the card worked great and he is now on his way to getting stuff together for the book.

Sunday, I joined Linnaeus, siriuswolfstar and simbalion for lunch at the Lucky Platter in Evanston. I had the “Omelet #1” (artichoke hearts, goat cheese, avocado, and roasted tomato sauce), and it was just amazing! I loved the food there, and I’d love to go back! Afterwards, I gave Sirius and Simba a life to Beast Buy where we wandered among the slack-jawed and they picks up some needed items. On the way back to their place we stopped by Evil Squirrel Comics to say hi to woodychitwn, then had an interesting conversation about who can and cannot be considered a “hack” furry artist. The rest of the afternoon was spent lazing around the house and getting in some quality snuggle time with my sweetie 🙂

Yesterday…not a whole lot to say. The usual job applications, grocery store runs, etc. Dinner was excellent, and I’ll be posting that recipe shortly since I want to make it again. I did call in Dan’s laptop to Circuit City’s warranty program, since we paid for it after all, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the problems seem to be covered and they’ll be sending a box to ship the laptop back to them for repair.

Today has been quite productive. Laundry has been running all day, and I have put in the orders for our sponsor gifts, Registration bags, and cloisonné pins. In a little while I’ll hit the road out to the burbs to help out with the moving once again; I figure if I can’t be useful here I might as well be useful somewhere. There’s some other MFF-related stuff I need to do later this week. I’ll probably talk about that more later.

Do the Friday Dance!

Don’t know what the Friday Dance is? Just jump up and dance around because the next two days won’t be spent stuck at a desk all day. YAY!

Last night was lots of fun. After pulling an all-nighter, Takaza was told that a sizeable bonus is in the pipeline for him. This, coupled with the nice chunk of change I’m getting back on my federal and state taxes will help to pay down some of our debt that much faster, which makes us very happy. To celebrate, Dan informed me (as I was relaxing, exhausted from the gym) that we were going out to celebrate! We stopped first at Martin’s Big and Tall, a nice little shop in Lincoln Square. I had thought that they were a bit expensive in the past, but since Dan and I both needed shirts, we stopped by to see what they had. It turns out that they had some great shirts at reasonable prices (MUCH better than Casual Male’s shoddy crap), so we bought several, including the spiffy shirt I have on today.

From there we decided to explore Lincoln Park a bit (and hang out with trixies and chads) and took the Brown Line down to Armitage. Dan was in the mood for steak and while we were looking around we stumbled onto Select Cut Steak House at the corner of Armitage and Halsted. The steaks were good. We both got combos; Dan had a strip steak and chicken breasts (“it’d be good on a chicken sandwich, not so much by itself”), I had the strip steak and ribs. It’s telling that as I dipped my fries, Dan pointed out that it was probably barbecue sauce I was dipping into and not ketchup. It took me a couple of fries to tell the difference. We also felt a bit rushed by the waitron, which was silly since the place wasn’t busy at all. All in all, it was an OK meal but I don’t see us going back. We finished off the night by stopping by my new favorite place for desserts, Bobtail, just off the Southport El stop. I {heart} the Brown Line!

So tomorrow is Night of 100 Champions. We’re supposed to be showing up at around 11 AM at Soldier Field and help set up the raffle and silent auction, then (tentatively) will be helping to sell tickets and pimp the auction items. Theoretically, we’re also supposed to be helping out with the brunch at the same location on Sunday, but that’s even more loosely-organized. I think I’ve been spoiled by the conventions I’ve worked on, because volunteer organization for this event is a bit lackluster and disorganized; I’ve always followed the guidelines that volunteers want to know what they’re going to do, where they’re going to do it, and when they are going to be there. There’s a few gaps in these facts for this event. This is a shame because there’s plenty of people willing to help, but I fear that by the end of the night it’s going to be a valiant few who have stuck around through the chaos who have to clean up. I hope I’m wrong.

I had a few other items to touch on, but work calls. More stuff to come!

Just ’cause

Here, have a rambling entry, just because. I’m feeling better today, even though I forgot to take the heavy-hitting cough syrup (mmm, codeine-licious!) this morning. I’ll stick with the OTC stuff to carry me through the day, I guess.

I’m vastly amused that an innovation from our old stomping grounds in North Carolina has been picked up on a lot of the tech blogs: Taco Bell/KFC Tries Out Touchscreens For Orders. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was one of Takaza‘s occasional lunch stops.

I’m still having fun at WikiFur. If you haven’t created an entry for yourself, well, why not? I’ll be happy to help with the editing and wikification, if needed.

We still need to try out some of the excellent restaurants in our area. Last weekend’s trip to Tre Kronor was a good start, but there’s so much more to try. Hey hartree – you need to come up and help us figure out the Korean BBQ place around the corner from us. It’s gotten rave reviews, but the prospect of navigating all the dishes and condiments is…daunting. I think I need to make a list to work from.

Speaking of restaurants, we’re looking at the possibility of hitting my favorite French restaurant in Highwood this weekend. Anyone care to join us? Plans aren’t set in stone, but if there’s enough interest, we’ll see what we can do. Fair warning: while it’s an excellent value for what you get, it is certainly not cheap! The Gourmet Menu ($32) and Chef’s Creation of the Day ($36) are a steal for a prix fixe meal.

Microsoft Word is the bane of my existence. I’ve successfully managed to crash it eight times in the last two days – either our templates are retarded (quite possibly) or my MS Office installation is borked (also quite possible). I’ll muddle through somehow, though.

Oh, and hi nymphara! Your comments about “the little Nazi” cracked me up, I must say 🙂 I hardly know the guy but my impressions of him have been, um, less than favorable.

OK, I’m off to immerse myself in my iPod and beat on Word some more.

Bring on the Food Porn!

Courtesy of the Chicago blog Gaper’s Block, here are two photo tours detailing excursions into what can only be described as Food Pornography, dining experiences in which all five senses are used in a nontraditional approach to dining.

An evening at Alinea (and an overview of past menus)
Dinner at Moto

These are two of the hottest restaurants in Chicago right now, and with that hotness comes the attendant sticker shock: $160 at Moto and $175 at Alinea. But…damn. Were we a bit more financially flush, I would seriously consider it.