Man, what a crazy weekend.
Friday was not quite as fun as I had hoped it would be. Our department at work was rewarded with a day out to celebrate, um, doing well, or something. OK, fine by me! We met up at the Sears Tower and went up to the Skydeck, then caught the train up to Cafe Iberico. The food there was excellent, the service, not so much. We had a surprisingly good time, though. I suspect the sangria helped.
The next stop was supposed to the Shedd Aquarium, but since I had lost part of a filling the day before, I opted out and headed home instead. Takaza was a complete sweetheart and not only looked up what dentists were covered by our insurance, he also called around to see if they could see me on short notice. He found a dentist within a mile of where we live and at 2:30 or so I was in the chair. As you might have surmised from my previous entry, what should have been a small repair wound up being a root canal. I have four more visits with the dentist before the end of the year – wow, won’t that be fun.
On Saturday, I was up well before Takaza, too damn early, in fact – 6:30 AM, but I couldn’t sleep anymore. After showering and coffee, I was on the road! First stop, up to Wauconda to pick up the staff badges. Trust me, they’re purty. People will really like them, I think. From there it was southwards, first with a detour through Palatine to locate Emmett’s Tavern (this will be useful a week from today!), then to the MFF storage unit in Lombard. There, grabbed all of the Registration equipment we’re going to need.
After that I was pretty much done for the day so I wandered over to Windycon to see how things were going. See, the majority of the MFF security crew provides staffing for Operations and “Adult Supervision” at Windycon, and I got a first-hand look at why they view MFF as their “vacation con”. All I’m saying is that people who complain about how outré furry conventions are have never attended a single science fiction convention. Wow. Anyway, I wound up sticking around for quite a while, and just enjoying the fact that I wasn’t responsible for any of it 🙂 I do hope I didn’t annoy those who were working, and I have to say they were doing every bit of the excellent job one would expect of the fine MFF Security team.
On Sunday, I was again up early, this time for a drive up to Libertyville for an MRI test on my knee. That was dispatched reasonably quickly and then I was headed northwards to Antioch and roho and genet‘s place. We were joined by Neowolf2 and headed over for a tasty brunch (mmmm, Las Vegas Restaurant’s Vegas skillet). Afterwards, we walked over to the little games store and were pleasantly surprised to find that the place had a good stock of games and comics, including Furrlough. Roho also picked up a nice addition to the charity auction: a 24″ tall inflatable Brian (from “Family Guy”).
Then it was back to their place for the reason for the trip: pre-printing staff and dealer badges. Roho did a good job wrestling with the database for a while, but we finally got some very helpful advice from rustitobuck that made things flow much more smoothly. It then took a couple of hours to debug the printers and determine that not only were the color cartridges in them bad, so were the brand-new ones that had been purchased last year. One expensive trip to Wal-Mart later, we got that resolved. After all that, printing was a snap, though one of the printers might have some issues with the paper feed mechanism. These have served use well for five years, but I suspect we may be in the market for new printers next year. (And yes, Ramalion, I’ll be sure to look into top-loaders 🙂
So now it’s Monday, the first day of a three-day week for me. In between wrapping up some documents for work, I’ve been mopping up last-minute details and posting information stuff about the convention. There’s still a lot to do, and a lot to be packed up, but I’m pretty confident that we can get to con with a minimum of stress. After that, well, we’ll see…