Category Archives: memorial day

Memorial Day 2010-palooza!

I need a vacation from my vacation!

It all started so long ago…Friday, I think it was. That night, what was going to be a small pre-party get-together swelled to 11 people getting together for “tapas” (as in “we only serve a bunch of appetizers, so let’s call it tapas”) at Rugan’s in Antioch. The company was excellent, the beer tasty, the food OK, the service disastrous, and the sound level inexcusable. We had a good time anyway.

On Saturday things got rolling early as folks started to arrive for our big Memorial Day Party. The cast of characters from the previous night, plus, um, a lot of other people – I think we had 25 people in our place at dinner time. I smoked a bunch of chickens in the smoker, Dan grilled up some bacon cheeseburgers, and everyone had a great time. Little-known fact: “Mai Tai” is Polynesian for “express train to drunkville” 🙂 Everyone brought an amazing array of food and drinks and we had a fantastic dinner.

On Sunday morning we made the requisite pilgrimage to Las Vegas Restaurant for their tasty brunch, then retired back to our place for chatting, relaxing, and gaming. As the day wore on we broke out the leftovers (of which there were copious quantities) and Dan got to try out a couple more drink recipes. Drunken Malarkey was played, where we learned that Bill Hep may or may not have been a hep cat, toothpaste magically regenerates itself, and popping movie theater popcorn has been outsourced to China.

Monday brought breakfast fail, as I somehow failed to comprehend that bagels, lox, and cream cheese requires bagels and cream cheese. Um, whoops. Thanks to Mirko, at least, for importing salmon from Seattle! We recovered, though, and headed out en masse to take over Whirlyball in Vernon Hills! We had 23 people in all there, including 11 fursuiters. The Whirlyball marketing guys loved us, taking pictures and video of the fursuit Whirlyball sessions (our picture gallery is here). We played for two hours, and I think everyone had a pretty darned good time!

Afterward, we adjourned back to our place for lunch with a few folks, then saw our last guests off at 4 PM. Dan went to bed not long after that, and I took a nap myself, then enjoyed a quiet evening, just me and Buddy.

As always, this was a terrific weekend, and I want to thank all of the great folks who were able to join us at some time over the course of the weekend: Aerofox, Aiden Dingo, Aureth, Bacon, Baja, Basil, Croc, Delmir, Drake, Eddi, Ford, Genet, Gir, GrayWolf, Hartree, Hegdish, Jenne, Linnaeus, Mirko, Nik, Perro, Quasi, RB, Rex, Roho, Rusty, Stevie, Street, Ted, Theome, Tozier, Vish, and Woody (I think I may have missed a few – if so, I apologize!). As tired as we were at the end of it, I know I felt it was all worth it, and we’re already thinking ahead to New Year’s Eve and other fun events in the future!

This Dog Is Dragging

Oh man, am I tired. takaza wasn’t feeling well this morning and got up at about 3:30 AM. I woke up and while waiting for him to come back to bed I got to thinking and stressing and…well, so much for getting back to sleep. Mind you, it’s not his fault – a normal person would have gone right back to sleep. Me, I’m just neurotic that way. I don’t function well on five hours of sleep, unfortunately. (Dan did come back to bed and get a bit more sleep, which made me feel better.)

We’re getting ready for company this weekend, and a fun party and some other cool stuff. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone, but as usual I’ve succeeded in working myself up into a ball of stress in the process of getting everything ready. I’ll be fine tomorrow, I’m sure, but I have a list of stuff I need to get done tonight that’s really bugging me.

In non-holiday-weekend news, Buddy is still wearing The Cone of Shame for most of the day, though we do take it off in the evenings when we’re around to keep an eye on him. He gets his stitches out on Saturday morning, which is good. He didn’t try to lick the healing area last night, so I’m taking that as a very good sign. The vet let us know that the lump that was removed was “most likely” benign and his prognosis is excellent. We’ve got just a couple more antibiotic pills to give him, then hopefully his digestive tract will get back to normal, too. He’ll be a happy and friendly pup come this weekend, I’m sure!

Anthrocon is just a few weeks away and I am sure that if I took a close look at what remains to be done for that I’d be terrified. I am putting all that way until after Memorial Day weekend, though. In the meantime, soon it will be time to party!

End of the Week Wrapup Before the Week Ends!

Right. Friday. Where did the week go?

We’ve got a busy weekend ahead, but before that happens I wanted to post about the past week. On Saturday, we were joined for dinner by linnaeus, hegdish, drakeduck, and baconcoyote. We grilled up some very tasty bacon cheeseburgers and had a lovely evening of chatting and catching up. We don’t get to see the Milwaukee folks too often so it was a lot of fun to hang out with them!

On Sunday we did some work around the house, though takaza was feeling a bit iffy. I wound up going up to roho and genet‘s for dinner and The Amazing Race by myself. Unfortunately, Dan’s illness carried over into the next day, when his boss sent him home because he was running a mild fever and had a slight cough (OMG SWINE FLU!). Even after he saw a doctor (who diagnosed it as your basic virus-caused upper respiratory ick), he didn’t go back to work until Wednesday.

My week at work has been pretty busy, wrapping up a final report and starting in on my next project. It has kept me hopping (and extremely stressed on Monday), but it hasn’t be too bad.

Last night was a fun change to the usual routine; we met up with aureth, jenwolf, and moryssa for dinner in McHenry at the decidedly pedestrian Bambino’s (so-so pizza and $5 bottles of Guinness? Seriously?) before walking down to see Star Trek. On a scale of 0 to 100, I’d give it about an 85. Entertaining, pretty to look at (though as Dan and I said on Twitter, you can make a drinking game out of counting the lens flares, and be very drunk by the end of the movie), though ultimately lacking in…something. It was amusing to see them follow the “Star Trek checklist”, though: Bones says “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a *”, Scotty says he’s “giving her all he’s got”, etc. I absolutely got my six dollars’ worth, so I have no complaints.

As for this weekend, we’re going to stop by Anime Central briefly tomorrow, then either go for some tasty BBQ or a wine tasting for a great cause, the German Shepherd Search and Rescue Dog Association. As for Sunday, I have a list with a lot of tasks to complete before we open up our house for Memorial Day, mostly stuff that no one would notice if we didn’t do them, like cleaning the windows in the stairwell and such, but I’ll feel better once they’re done. Hmm, Sunday is also the finale for The Amazing Race. We (or someone) should do something for that. We’ll have to work on that 🙂

The Calm Before The Storm

Before the craziness of this week’s preparations for the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, we had a very nice weekend. On Friday we met up with linnaeus, roho, and genet for dinner in Antioch. We had originally planned to try out a BBQ joint I had read about, except we found that it was not only closed, the space was vacant and available for rent. Well. Instead, we walked down to the little Italian place a few doors down, Petrucci’s. As we were standing outside debating, one of the employees came out to cajole us into coming in. After she went inside, Linnaeus took a deep whiff and said, “Smell that? That’s Calvin Kline’s Desperation.” We shrugged and went inside.

After being seated, the waitress asked what we wanted to drink. I asked what beers they had on tap, and she…didn’t know. The manager came over and told us the beers they had: Michelob, Heineken, and Moretti (sure, they had a Peroni neon sign out front but they didn’t actually, you know, carry it). Evidently the three-beer beer list was too much to remember. Drinks arrived, and many giggles were had as we admired the Dunkin Donuts straws we were given. That was when I started pushing for just getting appetizers (a selection of fine frozen, fried cheese sticks, onion rings, etc.) and getting dinner elsewhere. I got outvoted, but we ordered the simplest possible thing we could: one sausage pizza, and one pepperoni pizza. To their credit, the pizza sauce wasn’t bad, and the toppings were OK. The crust, though, was terrible. It reminded me for all the world of cheap frozen pizza. Needless to say, we won’t be going back.

Saturday saw me at work in the morning while Dan slept in. He was awake and showered when I got home, and we headed out to run some errands. We happened upon a local coffee house now in its third incarnation since we’ve been in the area, and had a very tasty lunch there (they carry Intelligentsia Coffee! Yay!). Then it was up to Antioch Packing House to gather information on buying a side or quarter of a cow to fill up our freezer. We also picked up some excellent bacon and a couple of fantastic steaks. Once we got home we were joined by tozier_wah for the evening, and introduced him into how we have a small dinner for company: grilled NY strip steaks, baked potatoes with Monterey Jack and Parmesan, and grilled asparagus with rosemary and goat cheese, all accompanied with an excellent Australian shiraz blend. The evening ended with me nodding off on the sofa while Dan and Toz played Mario Kart Wii.

Sunday was the Midwest FurFest staff meeting. It was lightly-attended, as expected, but we got some good stuff done. perro has done a great job of fitting all the major events into the allotted space; now he can start thinking about the smaller panels. Afterwards we went over to Cafe Mistiko, a curious “European sports bar” that I really wanted to like more than I did. They made killer smoothies, and the saganaki was quite tasty. My crepe, “The Zembekiko” (Loukaniko [Greek sausage], tomatoes, peppers, and feta cheese) was only so-so, though. I’d be willing to go back and try something else on the menu, though. And lest you think of crepes as dainty little things, these suckers were huge, taking up three-quarters of the plate. I did also pick up a copy of the menu for the Japanese sushi joint next door and it looks like that may be next on the list of places in the area to try.

This week, we’re cleaning and shopping in preparation for the coming weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing some of our out-of-town friends, and hopefully repeating the fantastic time we had last year. Never a dull moment!