Category Archives: tmlmtbgb

They Like Us! They Really Like Us!

I just came across this profile of The Neo-Futurists in Gozamos (“A Spotlight on Chicago Community and Culture”). As you may or may not remember, The Neo-Futurists produce the long-running play “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind”, which appeared at Midwest FurFest last year. There’s a great quote from Kurt Chiang, who was part of the ensemble for that performance:
What has been your favorite Neo-Futurist moment? I really enjoyed performing TML at the 10th annual Midwestern Furfest last summer. Those people were so kind and welcoming to us in their very specialized culture/geekdom (and I use “geek” in the a complimentary sense). They also dug the choatic dynamic of the show right away, which is rare for people who see the show for the first time.

(Summer, winter…whichever. At least they had a good time!)

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!

Updata

Whoa, what a crazy week. Work has had me slammed all week, and it will probably be more of the same into next week. Still, it’s manageable, just doesn’t leave a lot of time for things like LiveJournal updates.

Waaay back on Friday we met up with daveqat, linnaeus, perro and darkwolph to see the Pride Edition of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. It was a fun show, though not one of their best overall. We still had a good time. Afterward we walked over to Big Jones for what turned out to be a really enjoyable dinner. We worked our way through their cocktails menu, and my shrimp and grits was fabulous (if this sounds weird, imagine the grits being served more like polenta). Dan’s country fried steak was tasty as well, up to Heaven on Seven standards.

Saturday was pretty low-key. I went in to work in the morning, then that afternoon we had Paul, roho and genet over for dinner. We grilled up some steaks, chatted a good bit, sampled some mighty fine beers, and played the new Boom Blox game. And Sunday? On Sunday we didn’t do anything – just stayed in and relaxed. That was nice.

This week has been busy on the housing front. The home inspection for the new place was on Tuesday, and everything looked pretty good. There are a couple of exterior GFCI outlets that need to be replaced, but we’ll have the seller take care of that prior to closing. I’ll be meeting with our mortgage broker today at lunch to sign off on paperwork and hopefully secure as good a rate as possible.

Last night we got the letter we’d been expecting, a Notice of Motion to the Court of Lake County setting a trial date for the foreclosure of the townhouse we’re living in. The good news is that this is just another step in a long process, and the bank won’t take over the property for at least another four or five months – we’ll be long gone by then. The other good news is that in lieu of refunding our security deposit, our landlord told us we don’t have to pay rent in August. This is awesome!

In the meantime, planning is still going ahead full steam for the Midwest FurFest Summer Picnic, which right now has about 100 RSVP’s. Yikes! We’ll definitely have free strip steak for everyone (and some chicken breasts for non-beef-eaters); I’m working with a local caterer to figure out what the sides and desserts will be. I’ll be posting the menu next week as soon as we get it locked down.

And finally, there’s Anthrocon looming large on the near horizon. I need to deal with some items on my to-do list for that this weekend, and make sure that everything is ready to go. One advantage to having done this for so many years is that I’ve got lots of notes about things that need to be done before the convention. That will definitely save my sanity (what little I have left). OK, back to the grind!

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.