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Anthrocon Report, Part 1: Tuesday and Wednesday

I’ll start out by saying that this is going to be a long, multi-part report. The main reason I write these (and so many of my other “went-here, did-this” entries) is because I find that it’s nice to be able to come back months or years later and revisit these entries and be reminded of what went wrong, what went right, who I spent time with, and what exactly happened. I invite everyone to come along for the ride, but if it’s not your thing, I understand completely.

That having been said, let’s start at the beginning, on Tuesday, shall we?

For obvious reasons I’m afraid I didn’t get much accomplished on Tuesday at work, since my mind was very much on the coming trip. I was able to get away from work at 2 PM. This gave me time to stop at Subway and grab some lunch, then go home and eat before piling part of our luggage into the car and heading to the train station for the 3:13 PM Metra train. Takaza had the rest of the luggage and was going to meet me at O’Hare, having gotten a ride from a co-worker. The train ride was uneventful, and the transfer from the train to the bus to the O’Hare ATS was very simple. I met Dan at the United E-Ticketing baggage check-in in Terminal 1 and we cruised through the security checkpoint.

The flight out was unremarkable, save that on what appeared to be a very full flight, an unoccupied row was available so Dan grabbed the window seat and I grabbed the aisle, thus freeing us both of the packed three-person rows we were in before. We got to Pittsburgh International Airport at about 10:30 PM and after a bit of an extended wait for our luggage, went out to meet the shuttle that Dan had called while we waited. The shuttle (with the World’s Most Surly Driver, who didn’t even make a move to help load our bags into the van) took us over to the La Quinta Pittsburgh Airport. It was…adequate. Definitely a mid-to-lower range La Quinta, but it was only $15 with Dan’s LQ points. We watched a bit of TV then went to sleep at around midnight.

Wednesday

I woke up with a coughing fit (something that was to become standard for the week) at about 6 AM and after about a half-hour of trying to get back to sleep, I got up and showered, then went down to get some breakfast and read the paper. I thought something was a bit odd with the free newspaper the hotel supplied (the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review), but it wasn’t until I read the uncritical quote from a Washington Times reporter and saw Mallard Fillmore on the editorial page that I decided I needed to get a real newspaper and walked next door to the Bob Evans and bought a copy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I knew I was going into a news black hole (I don’t have time to read a newspaper during a con!) so I figured I’d enjoy it while I could.

I returned to the room to find Dan already up and showered. We packed everything up and took it down to the lobby where Dan had some breakfast while we waited for the shuttle back to the airport at 9:30 AM. Once we got back to the airport (courtesy of our MUCH friendlier and helpful driver), we walked all of 100 feet down the curb to wait for the 28X bus to take us downtown. As we waited we were joined by Mach, which made the ride much more pleasant and a really nice start to our con experience. The bus let us off about three blocks from the Westin, and we had no problems finding it. We were able to check in immediately, which was a very nice surprise. We took our luggage up to the room and I got the clothes put away and shirts and pants hung up while we had the chance.

Once we were fully settled in, it was time to dive into the convention! We stopped by Operations, but except for various staff members filtering in, there wasn’t a lot going on, especially since they hadn’t dispatched the truck to the storage unit yet. We hung out there for a while, and then decided to get some lunch. Unfortunately, we found that downtown Pittsburgh on a holiday (July 4th, in this case) was a ghost town. Nothing was open, and we wound up walking about eight blocks down to Gateway Center before coming on a McDonalds that was open. Any port in a storm, I guess. We had a quick lunch, and then returned to the hotel to find that the troops had been marshaled and dispatched to the storage unit in our absence.

Dan, kellicjtigerKellic, and I worked to get the radios set up, identifying the faulty ones and verifying the programming on all of them. I think we wound up with a couple of duds (like last year) but overall everything seemed OK. I had an excellent discussion with Bigtig about the Anthrocon Registration system, and what he’s done to improve it over the years. I continue to be impressed with the work that he’s done, and I think he has every right to be very proud of the improvements he has made to the system. The proof is how smoothly things went this year as he and his staff registered 2,849 people. Well done!

We took a break from Ops and I went outside and hung out with Datahawk, Emrldgrrl, Artemisfur, Dancingninny, and the rest of the Dekalb crew. We had a lot of fun chatting, watching the crowds coming in, and making snarky comments. After a time, I went back into find that the hordes had come and gone and emptied the truck very quickly into the Operations office. I helped Dan get his office’s equipment sorted out, and then we started to talk about dinner.

We wound up taking orders from most of the Dorsai on site as well as a couple of others and ordering from Ephesus Pizza. Dan and I ordered a chicken alfredo pizza (with bacon!) that was delicious, if a bit salty for my taste. We hung out in Ops for a few hours, helping out here and there and sharing some of our pizza. The fireworks were quite pretty, what little we could see in the gap between the office buildings. Afterwards, we trundled up to bed and watched a bit of TV before sleep claimed us at around midnight.

Back from Anthrocon

We’re home safe. Apparently we just dodged the thunderstorms that delayed flights into O’Hare for up to three hours, and caught the northbound Metra train with seconds to spare. I’m almost done catching up on 300+ LJ posts. takaza went to bed at about 6:30, and I don’t see myself staying up too late tonight, either

In summary: It was completely exhausting. It was fun. We’ll be back.

P.S. – I’d like copies of any pictures taken at the Fine Potables party, please 🙂

Now Is Not The Time To Be Sick

Still fighting this summer cold. The good news is, all indications are that no infection is present so it’s just your garden-variety Upper Respiratory Ick; hopefully it’ll pass within the next day or so.

Saturday was a crazy day. We met up with datahawk then met justincheetah at the MFF storage locker and unearthed the cable protectors and power distribution panel he needed for Anthrocon. A very pleasant lunch at Chipotle followed (mmm, burritos). We don’t get to see enough of that kitty, something we’ll need to work on after Anthrocon. From there we headed into Chicago to drop off a few things with linnaeus which he will be graciously ferrying to Anthrocon for us. Then we fought our way through downtown traffic to Merrillville, Indiana where we saw Weird Al Yankovic in concert. It was a fun show (and eventually I’ll download the pictures off my cell phone, including a close-up of Al crooning to Data :-), though I admit that it hit my pet peeve of concerts, where the show sounds exactly like the songs on the albums. Sure, something is added in the performance (and Al is nothing if not expressive!). That was a minor complaint, though; overall the concert was a blast. The drive home was long, and we didn’t get to bed until 2 AM.

Sunday morning I woke up at 6 AM, of course, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Bless his heart, takaza put up with my barely-functioning, grumpy self. A midday nap helped a good bit, but the migration of the sinus stuffiness to my chest with some mild coughing didn’t help much. We did accomplish a good bit of the laundry and packing the we needed to do, though in the course we figured out that Dan needs a new dress shirt and I need a new pair of khaki pants. We closed out the evening with some Flip This House and Dirty Jobs, then stumbled off to bed.

And here we are today. I’m feeling a good bit better. My sinuses still hate me, but at least the headache I woke up has receded. I’ve got the cough-syrup-with-codeine in my bag if I need it, but hopefully I won’t. I’m off to Gurnee Mills after work to pick up the pants I need, then we’ll put the finishing touches on the packing tonight. I’ll be taking off from work tomorrow at 2:30 PM, then parking at the Grayslake train station and catching the train down to O’Hare, where I’ll meet up with Dan. Our flight out is at 7:05 PM. I’ve hit the long downhill slide before the con where I just want it to start – months of planning has gone into this, so now it’s time to see how well those plans work.

It’s Been a Quiet Week In, um, Hainesville…

I know I’ve been quiet here this week, but I have excuses! You see, much of our week has been consumed with preparations for Anthrocon; even when we weren’t actively working on convention planning, we were thinking about it and that kind of wears on you. Add to that the fact that I’m fighting off a mild summer cold. Yuck.

In general update terms, though, things have been going well. If I didn’t mention it earlier, I haven’t been hired on full-time at my employer yet since they were still working out which positions were open and which they were going to fill with whom. I have been assured, multiple times, that it is a matter of “when” and not “if” I get hired, though. My contract was extended to the end of July, and that’s OK by me. While that means my three days off for Anthrocon will be unpaid, the good news is that I still come out ahead in net salary. I had a good talk with my boss this week and he is satisfied with my performance and seems willing to put a bit more on my plate, which makes me happy.

Work for takaza continues to be stressful; I worry about him and I know that all of this stress takes its toll on his health. Things got a little more difficult this week (I won’t go into it here, but my heart does go out to those involved), but he’s been assured that it won’t affect his vacation time. He is justifiably skeptical and unfortunately probably will have to log in from Pittsburgh to do some work for some part of the time that we’re there.

We did find time to relax a bit last night. We had a pleasant dinner with roho and genet at a frozen custard place in Antioch (good sandwiches, not so good frozen custard), then we caught the late showing of Ratatouille at the Antioch Theater. GO SEE THIS MOVIE! It was so much fun! Great character design, a nifty score, and a really great expression of the love of food and cooking. I adored it, and wouldn’t mind seeing it again. As an aside, I also love the Antioch Theater – $4 admission, popcorn for a couple of bucks (and free refills on popcorn and sodas, provided by roving ushers), a trivia quiz by a real live employee before the show. When we went to see Waitress a few weeks ago we went to the Regal theater in Round Lake; tickets, plus popcorn and soda came to over $30 (and that’s at matinee prices!). That’s just plain offensive.

Ahem. Movie theater ranting aside, it looks like the next few days are going to be pretty nuts for us. I can’t even guarantee that I’ll be posting between now and Anthrocon, so here’s a quick rundown:

Today, once datahawk gets up here, we’ll all head down to Arlington Heights to meet justincheetah at the MFF storage locker to get a power distribution panel for him (I hope it’s not buried too far under everything!). Then it’s over to linnaeus‘s place in the city to drop off some stuff that he is kindly carrying to Anthrocon for us. After that, it’s down to Merrillville, Indiana where we have tickets to see “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert!

Tomorrow will be con packing and (more) planning, and staging everything as best we can. Oh, and relaxing somewhat, since that’ll be our last chance before the con. Monday will be work as usual.

Tuesday, we fly out from O’Hare at 7:05 PM, arriving in Pittsburgh at 9:32 PM (supposedly). Give that it’s an evening flight in the summer out of O’Hare, I figure if we get to PIT before 11:30 PM we’ll be doing good. We’ll spend the night at the La Quinta Pittsburgh Airport, then on Wednesday morning catch the 28X bus downtown to the Westin Pittsburgh Convention Center. We hope to be at the Westin by 11 AM or 12 noon.

And after that? Madness and chaos. With any luck I’ll be able to document some of that…at some point.

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.

Grillin’, Poker, and a Meme!

Oh dear, a meme. I’ll get that out of the way first, and I blame skorzy and atara for it:

Ask me to take a picture of any aspect of my life that you’re interested in/curious about – it can be anything from the house I live in to my favorite shoes. Leave your choice here as a comment, and I will reciprocate by taking the pictures and posting them as an LJ entry. That way you get to know a little bit about my life!

Please note that it may take a few days to get to all of the requests (if there are any), but I’ll do my darnedest to accommodate them all. Now, I reserves the right to interpret any and all requests however I like, though 😉

Now that that’s out of the way…Yesterday was rather busy. I slipped out from work a little early (considering I get into work each day 20-30 minutes early, this is no big deal) and ran up to Lovin’ Oven Cakery to pick up some tasty stuff for a certain panda’s birthday. On the way, I got a call the my new glasses were ready, so I stopped by the opticians in Grayslake (navigating through the weekly Farmer’s Market) to get them, then raced home and did some last-minute cleaning. Dan got home a little late (he’d had to drive in due to a little problem that Metra had), and were then joined by steviemaxwell, magicpaw, midwestcougar, nymphara and her new squeeze, Nick, and roho and genet. While the crowd played a couple of rounds of poker, I busied myself grilling up a multitude of brats and hot dogs and hamburgers. Everyone had a good bit of fun, and Dan had fun making appletinis. Genet and I elected to chat while everyone else played games, and that was fine – I wasn’t much in a poker mood. For dessert we had a couple of monstrous éclairs that we cut up for serving, as well a couple different kinds of strudel. Yummy! We didn’t get to bed until after 11 PM, though, and both Dan and I are dragging a bit today as a result.

Not much going on today, though I do have my annual checkup with my doctor right after work today. Tomorrow we’ll be heading up to Antioch to stock up on some important items for Anthrocon, and I may see about taking Dan’s car in for emissions testing as well.

The Summer Doldrums

The doldrums in television viewing, that is. There’s not a lot new going onto our Tivo these days. We had an odd hiccup with our DirecTivo last week where a couple of shows that were on our season pass list didn’t get recorded. One of these was Pirate Master, which I’d been really wavering about. We decided that since we missed the episode and really didn’t care, that was a good indication that we could delete the season pass. I read through the episode recap and even the recap was boring, so I think was made the right decision. Creature Comforts is, I suppose, every bit as good as the original UK version, but given that that had limited appeal to me (it’s a cute novelty, but wears thin after that), I’ve pretty much lost interest. Deadliest Catch is ending its season this week, and the After the Catch specials, while occasionally interesting, have gotten a bit meandering. I think a single two-hour special would have been better than four one-hour episodes. And heck, takaza even took Rescue Me off the season pass list when he got partway into the season premiere and found he didn’t really care what went on.

So what’s left? Well, we still are whittling our way (slowly) through Season 2 Doctor Who. We seems to be accumulating a surprising number of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations as well. Coming up soon, we have Eureka premiering on July 10 (Dan enjoyed the first season, and I suppose I can check out the second season, assuming they can keep Matt Frewer from chewing the scenery), Burn Notice on June 28 (interesting premise AND Bruce Campbell – that’s enough for me to check it out), the third season of Doctor starts July 6 on Sci-Fi, and of course the last three episodes of Drive are getting burned off on July 4th.

All in all, this seems a good time to read some books 🙂

Oh, and finally: a cool random SFW link: They’re Made Out of Meat, a short film based on a short story by Terry Bisson. For cable geeks out there, it’s notable because it stars Ben Bailey, host of Cash Cab.

Games, Family, and Cons

Hmm, I’m getting slack about updating again. That’s not so good.

Last week we had to get both of our Honda Elements serviced, mine to have the upholstery repaired before the warranty expired and takaza‘s for its 60,000 mile service. Rosen Honda in Gurnee proved a mixed bag in terms of getting this accomplished. Just setting up the service was difficult, as it took no less than four calls just to get through to the service department, including getting hung up on twice. I dropped my car off on Wednesday night, and got a call on Thursday that they had completely disassembled the driver’s seat and opened the box with the new seat cover only to find that it was the wrong color. We therefore had to leave the care there Thursday night as well. I picked it up on Friday afternoon after work, dropping off Dan’s car in the process with the request that the service be completed by noon on Saturday.

I stopped to get gas before heading down to pick up Dan and it’s a good thing I did, because while filling up I saw that in the process of putting the car through the car wash just before giving it back to me, they had torn off the rear windshield wiper and it was hanging by a wire. I high-tailed it back to the dealership and arrived just as the parts department closed. The service guy was very apologetic and fixed things up enough that the car wouldn’t be damaged until I could bring it back the next day to get the wiper assembly replaced.

From there I headed south to meet Dan at the Buffalo Grove Metra station (gods, I hate Lake-Cook Road on Friday afternoons). We killed some time playing minigolf at my favorite place in the area, Par King, then met up with daveqat and synicism for dinner at Osteria di Tramonto. Dinner was fabulous, as always; I had the cavatelli with roasted escarole and chicken; Dan had chicken Parmesan, Dave went with the hanger steak, and Jim had rack of lamb. All were excellent, and my chocolate torte after dinner was superb.

On Saturday, Dan and I went to pick up his car. $520 later – ouch! – the car is in excellent shape, though I’m told the front brake pads need replacing soon. Somehow I’m certain that I can get it done cheaper than the $289 they’re offering; heck, from what I understand, if I had the service manual and a couple more tools I could do it myself. It’s something to consider after Anthrocon, perhaps; in the meantime, since he’s putting all of maybe four miles a day on the car going to and from the train station, it’s not hugely urgent.

We stopped by Lovin’ Over Cakery for some tasty dessert stuff, then headed over to Dan’s mom’s place for an afternoon of games and lots and lots of food. She had roasted a 20+ pound turkey (!) and had made all of the trappings. This just for me, Dan, Dan’s brother and sister, and her. We had a great time playing Scene It! Squabble (truly annoying, with offensive gender stereotypes for all!), Apples to Apples, and Balderdash. I enjoyed Balderdash the most, though I’m thinking that we need to pick up a copy of Malarky, which encourages a little more elaborate tale-spinning. We capped off the evening with a family portrait, which Dan posted in his journal.

On Sunday, Dan and I worked on various Anthrocon and Midwest FurFest tasks, taking a break to hit the grocery store. Dan made a tasty turkey and rice dish with kielbasa using the huge amount of leftover turkey his mom gave us before we left the night before. We “attended” the MFF online staff meeting, then I edited the log and sent the notes out shortly afterwards. The rest of the evening, we watched a bit of TiVo and the Robot Chicken Star Wars Special, then headed off to bed.

So, this week: Poker Night on Wednesday, and I need to run various errands after work on Wednesday and Thursday. Next weekend is Dan’s employer’s company picnic, and we’re going to be running the bingo games again this year. Should be…um, fun. Yeah, that’s it. Fun. 🙂

Just The Usual Pre-Con Panic, and Fun With Cars

So I was working today and I realized, “Wow, three weeks from today I’ll be in Pittsburgh.” Gaaah!

The good news is that, once the programming schedule is up (which sounds imminent), I can start making a schedule for the Artists Alley and Con Store. I should have the Con Store price list and bar codes in hand from Unclekage tonight (barring unforeseen issues, such as zombie attacks), then it’s just a matter of assembling what little equipment we need and figuring out how to get it to Pittsburgh. Hmmm, I foresee a trip to Antioch Liquors in the near future…

So since my car (2005 Honda Element) has 35,850 miles on the odometer (i.e. within a hair of going out of warranty), it’s going to the Gurnee Honda dealership tonight to get a tear in the seat upholstery repaired while it’s still free. I’ll have some time to kill before takaza‘s train gets in, so I’m going to swing by the Grayslake Farmers Market which opens its season today and see what good stuff I can find there. Dan’s car (2003 Honda Element) is due for emissions inspection, which is thankfully just down the street from where I work; unfortunately, its “Check Engine” light is coming on, warning of the impending 60,000 mile service. Since they won’t do the emissions testing if any warning lights are present, we need to get Dan’s car serviced, so we’ll be dropping it off at Gurnee Honda on Friday night. Also on Friday night we’re meeting daveqat and jimcyl for dinner at the always-yummy Osteria di Tramonto; I’ve heard rumors of miniature golf with some of Dan’s cow-orkers to take place before that, but we’ll see if that comes to pass.

Wow. Looking at my calendar, it looks like every weekend is going to be busy into late July, at least. Ah, the joys of summer socializing…

Indian Food, Parties, and Movies!

You know, as exhausted as I felt at work on Friday, I was astonished at how much energy I had when I got home. It turned out that the power had actually come back on at 8:30 AM, which meant that while the freezer was pretty much OK, some serious culling needed to be done in the refrigerator. Fortunately, it wasn’t too bad – mostly party leftovers and anything with dairy in it (including, sadly, the Keke Key Lime Pie liqueur). Once takaza got home, we talked a bit about dinner and decided that we both wanted something more than a hot dog. We decided that Indian food sounded good, so we met up with roho and genet for dinner at Bombay City. The food was, as always, delicious and the company was excellent as well. It was fortunate that we weren’t far from home, because once the food coma set in, I was very quickly ready to fall asleep.

Saturday found Dan and over at his mother’s house with some family to play some games. I have to admit I had some trepidation going in, but I was readily accepted and we had a whole lot of fun. We played Scene It, Apples to Apples, and Taboo, and it was a blast. It was even better since we moved the table out to the deck and we got to enjoy a perfectly beautiful day outside. At about 7:30, it was time to head south to wyldekyttin‘s birthday party. Because it was such a beautiful evening, we wound up taking back roads through Crystal Lake down to Randall Road, all the way down to Aurora. It was a very pleasant drive along the western edge of the densest Chicago suburbs. When we got to the Holiday Inn Select Naperville (her party was held in conjunction with Duckon), we hung out for a little while, but as is always so typical, between being tired and having a long drive ahead of us, we had to leave before the party really got going well. It was a pleasure to see so many of our friends, albeit briefly. One nifty thing: On the way out through the parking lot we passed by the Tesla coil demonstration. I thought to grab our camera out of the car and grabbed a quick 30-second video of the powerful electrical arcs, which were set to music:

On Sunday, we met up with Roho and Genet to see Waitress. It was a lovely movie, and I really enjoyed it. Not too deep or profound, but enjoyable nonetheless. Keri Russell was fantastic in her role, Nathan Fillion was adorable as always, and the late director was also very good in her supporting role; it’s a crying shame that she passed away before the move was released. After the movie we retired back to our place for a marathon of home improvement shows, including Hometime, The Real Estate Pros, and Flip This House (as well as some Good Eats and Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares). We ordered some pizza somewhere in there, and mainly just relaxed and hung out. Quite a nice, low-stress day. Right before bed, though, I was contacted with an interesting bit of news that left me a bit gobsmacked and made getting to sleep difficult. Nothing bad, just surprising.

And so we have this week. Looks like I may have to work some off hours this week (and maybe the next few weeks) to support a project here, which is fine. If anything, it’s unusual that I haven’t been asked to do this before, and it’s not as if it’s mandatory (the boss is cool like that). We’ll work something out.

Power Update

I checked on the outage status with ComEd and they were all, “Outage? We don’t know anything about no outage.”

I’ll take that as confirmation that the power is back on at our house. We’re still going to have to throw out most of fridge contents, though. At least the A/C will have been running for a while before I get home.

Grump

Ugh. Strong storms last night. The power went out at around 11:45 PM. We didn’t get to sleep until sometimes after 12:30 AM.

At 2:20 AM, the weather radio shrieked an alarm, scaring the bejesus out of takaza and me. I was halfway to getting dressed to head to the basement before they announced that it was a flash flood warning, not much concern for us as we’re on a hill. It took me a good half-hour to get back to sleep.

Even with the power off, our clock radio does its darndest to have the alarm go off. Unfortunately, the backup battery doesn’t do so well at keeping time, so the 6 AM alarm went off at 5:07 AM. I never got back to sleep after that.

When I left the house at 6:50 AM, the power was still off. At this point I have to assume that everything in the fridge is pretty much a loss. Hmm, checking the ComEd automated system, the estimated time of repair is 6 PM tonight. Well, so much for everything in the freezer. Bah.

As we left the house, I noticed a couple of news helicopters just a ways off to the west. Poking around the news websites a bit, it looks like they were looking at the lumber store in downtown Round Lake (Cedar Lake Rd. & Route 134) whose roof was peeled off and tossed across the Metra tracks. Thank heavens it was nothing worse than that.

So now we get to play “How Can Duncan Make It Through The Day On Four Hours Of Sleep?” My preliminary answer is “not well”, but we’ll see how things go.

It’s Wednesday Already?

My, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun. Which leaves me no explanation for this week, but that’s OK. Not that it’s been a bad week, mind you, just…eh.

Monday found takaza and I having fun making dinner. While Dan experimented with slicing and frying techniques to make home fries, I fired up the grill and cooked up a couple of steaks, as well as some fresh pineapple. I learned a couple of things: 1.) Three chunks of hickory is too much. The steaks tasted a little too much of smoke. 2.) When grilling pineapple, add the cinnamon sugar after grilling, otherwise the cinnamon gets bitter. Ah well. It was a learning exercise all around, and in the end we still had steaks and yummy home fries. Yay!

Last night we were feeling minimally motivated. I sautéed up some peppers and onions, then Dan cooked some chicken and diced it up and we had tacos. We both love the whole wheat flour tortillas we’ve found, and the chihuahua cheese is delicious. A little salsa and some crema…yum. It was a quiet evening, as Dan was working on Anthrocon cash sheets and I engaged in a bit of transit geekery (see below). Afterwards we watched the latest episode of Deadliest Catch.

Click for boring transit geek stuff

That Was a Weekend?

Sometimes a weekend is so low-key you hardly know it’s there until Monday whacks you upside the head with a two-by-four.

We had a nice, relaxing “cat weekend”, something that I promised takaza we’d try to have at least once a month. I’m a go-go-go social butterfly kind of guy, but he needs a weekend to recharge his batteries every so often (and I suppose it doesn’t do me any harm either). Dan got to sleep in late both Saturday and Sunday, and we even stayed up far too late on Saturday night (yes, I can stay up later than midnight! So there!).

On Friday we relaxed a bit after work then thought about going out for dinner. We started to leave but looking at the radar and the approaching storm front elected to delay our departure by a half-hour. It’s a good thing, too, because a fast-moving storm blew through with torrential rain and 40 mph+ wind gusts. The sky was amazing right after the front went through; Dan took a couple of pictures and e-mailed them off to the local CBS affiliate, who posted both of them to their website! For dinner, Dan wanted to try the Popeye’s Restaurant, just because it was something he hadn’t had before. One underwhelming meal later, we knew why he hadn’t had it before. We won’t be returning. After dinner, we decided to stop by the Round Lake Streets of Summer Festival. The rainstorm had taken its toll, and the actual festival attendees were outnumbered by the festival staff and security. It was really pretty sad. We walked through the festival grounds and listened to the increasingly-awful band playing (more volume does not mean better music!) and decided to leave.

On Saturday we had to take my car in to the dealership to have some upholstery checked for a possible warranty repair. That’s a whole other rant, though. Afterwards we got a tasty late lunch/early dinner at Scott Dogs. We bummed around the house for a bit, then snuggled up on the sofa and watched Spellbound. I had meant to see this years ago, and I am pleased to report it is every bit as engaging and entertaining as I had heard. What a great movie! Afterwards, we stayed up far too late watching Flip This House.

Sunday we pretty much just bummed around the house before heading out to the week’s grocery shopping. Dan made a big pot of a very tasty chicken/rice/chorizo stew which we had for dinner and we’ll both be having for lunch for the next few days, then we watched some TiVo before going to bed.

Excitement city, eh? But it was a very enjoyable weekend nonetheless. Oh, and obviously we never did get out to see Waitress. Hopefully it’ll still be around next weekend.

We’ve Got Movie Sign!

takaza and I have been wanting to see Waitress since it was in limited release a few weeks ago. Here’s the trailer. It’s a light romantic comedy, and it co-stars Nathan Fillion. And even better, it can’t be cancelled by the Fox Network in mid-run!

We want to see the movie on Saturday at the Regal Cinemas 18 in Round Lake Beach. We’ve got two options:
1. See it at 2:25 PM, then go by Garden Fresh Market afterwards and pick up fixings for grilling up a tasty dinner, or
2. See it at 5:00 PM, and go out for dinner someplace afterwards.

So, who’s interested, and what time works for you?

Memorial Day Weekend, Part the Second

…and we pick up our program on Saturday night, already in progress.

Saturday night a good number of folks headed home, but Rusty, Simba, and Sirius (along with my mom) crashed at our place, and Linnaeus, Jaycee, Nyuni, and Erin crashed over at Roho and Genet’s place. The lot of us met up for brunch at our old standby, Las Vegas Restaurant in Antioch. After a pleasant meal, I took Mom back down to O’Hare so she could catch her flight home, then returned to our place, where everyone else had gone after brunch.

The afternoon and evening were full of games and fun. We played Cranium (which, as usual, was about 30 minutes too long), then some TransAmerica, as well as some Lupus in Tabula. Throw in noshing on leftovers and an occasional break to watch “Ace of Cakes” and you’ve got a lovely day with friends. I went to bed at about 11:30 PM, leaving Rusty, Linnaeus, and Dan to play a few more games of TransAmerica; Dan came to bed around 2 AM.

Monday we had set aside to do absolutely nothing. Paul had gone home after the game wrapped up, so Rusty was our only guest, which was fine – he’s family, so he qualifies as a low-maintenance houseguest 🙂 The day was spent pretty much just lazing around in the living room. Dan got up at about 1:30 PM, and we munched a bit on still more leftovers. I got curious and after asking a few questions, I downloaded the client and now, heaven help us, both Dan and I are on Second Life.

Here is Dunc McMillan. Theoretically, he’s an anthropomorphic Siberian husky. I may need to work on a better avatar.

And here is Dunc sitting with his partner, Takaza Guffey. Isn’t Takaza just the cutest thing?

I don’t see getting too involved in Second Life much more than I am involved on FurryMuck, which is to say as a glorified IRC client. But hey, it’s there and maybe I’ll have fun with it. We closed out the wonderfully relaxing day with our new Monday habit, since Heroes has gone away for the summer: Doctor Who. We’ve had all of the second season sitting on our Tivo for quite some time, so we’ve started watching those, beginning with last night’s “Christmas Invasion”. Hmm. David Tennant is no Christopher Eccleston, but he’s definitely growing on me…

So that’s our Memorial Day weekend. Now we can start worrying about other fun stuff, like Anthrocon, and FRAC, and MFF, and all the usual stuff! 🙂

Memorial Day Weekend, Part the First

Yep, it was a weekend so big it’s going to need two posts!

Going into this weekend, both takaza and I were somewhat disappointed. For the past two years we have hosted Wuffmeet on Memorial Day weekend, a gathering of 30-or-so friends at a local hotel for a weekend of hanging out, good food, and lots of fun. This year, between conflicting schedules, lack of money, and general lack of interest (perhaps it was too soon after New Year’s?), Wuffmeet just didn’t come together. So we went to Plan B: Hanging out at Duncan and Takaza’s. We spent a good bit of last week cleaning the house, shopping, and making plans. I’m very pleased with the way things turned out, and I think Dan is too.

On Friday, after a few last-minute cleaning tasks in the kitchen, I joined roho, genet, midwestcougar, and nyuni over at The Firkin for dinner. It was a pleasure to see Nyuni again (who apparently I had met at MFF a few years back, but it was during one of the “Chairman’s Receptions”, so I was a little hazy on that 🙂 He’s a fellow homebrewer and has a fine appreciation for beer, and The Firkin is the perfect place for that! Dinner was tasty and the beers were plentiful. It was quite enjoyable. Once I got home, I put the pork butts in to brine and put a nice, spicy rub on the beef brisket and put them all into the fridge.

On Saturday morning, I woke up unconscionably early. This gave me time to make coffee, catch up on e-mail and LJ, and generally enjoy a quiet hour, before going to work on the smoking. We had two eight-pound pork butts and a nearly-nine-pound beef brisket that needed to be smoked. After getting the charcoal lit and well-stoked in the firebox, I added chunks of hickory and apple wood. After a few hours, it looked like this:

As you can see, it was a bit rainy, but fortunately I had positioned the grill under our balcony and covered the balcony with a tarp, so the grill stayed nice and dry. I put the meat on to smoke at 8 AM and was able to follow the temperature of both the meat and the smoking chamber using a handy gadget I quick-ordered from Amazon on Thursday (bless you, Amazon Prime – I {heart} $2 next-day delivery). At 1:30 PM, I pulled everything off the smoker and wrapped each one in foil and put them into an over at 300 degrees F to finish off the cooking. After re-rigging the grill a bit, I started up a couple of charcoal chimneys in the main grill portion and then used those coals to grill 30 hamburgers and 16 bratwursts.

As expected, most of our guests showed up after the projected 2 PM lunch time, but over the next few hours we were joined by (big breath here) roho, genet, midwestcougar, nyuni, serinthia, todd_riverden, linnaeus, siriuswolfstar, simbalion, wyldekyttin, uncle_vlad, datahawk, foxish, steviemaxwell, magicpaw, rcking, nymphara, rustitobuck, Dan’s mom, luckytheevildog, and quasiskunk (I think that’s everyone).

In an additional bizarre and random occurrence, I got a call from my sister that my mom, who was flying from Portland, Oregon to Greenville, South Carolina via O’Hare, was going to miss her flight and probably be stranded in Chicago for the night. Right after we had finished slicing the brisket and pulling all the pork and we were about to start setting the food out, I got the call from Mom that she was at O’Hare. I jumped into the car and about the 90-minute round trip to the airport and Mom got to hang out with some of the folks who were at the party (she mainly stayed in the garage “smoking lounge”). So it was a weird twist, but it was a real pleasure to see her again.

The rest of the evening was filled with Apples to Apples, consumption of Beverages, and general merriment. Thanks to all the folks who brought side dishes (Robert’s orzo salad was tasty!), desserts (Jaycee’s ever-full boxes of cupcakes!) and drinks. That many people in our little townhouse gets a bit crazy, but we have so much fun hosting these parties and I hope everyone had as great a time as we did.

Next post: Sunday and Monday – Las Vegas, games, werewolves, and new addictions!

Aww Yeah…

As of 8 AM, there is an 8-pound beef brisket and two 8-pound pork butts on the smoker, with a combination of hickory and apple wood providing the smoke. This is gonna be good.

BTW, if anyone in the Chicago area wants some apple wood, have we got a source for you!

Go Go Gadget Airfares!

Woo! We just bought plane tickets to Anthrocon! Depart from O’Hare on Tuesday night at 7:05 PM, return from Pittsburgh at 2:35 PM on Monday afternoon. The total cost? $93 each, including taxes and fees. Sweet! We need to figure out the logistics of getting to and from the airport, but for that price it was worth it to lock in the tickets now.

Other than that, it’s a last-minute push to finish off the cleaning today, then there’s the party tomorrow. Happy fun time!

Midweek Already? I’m Not Ready!

It’s been a bit crazy this week as takaza and I make preparations for the weekend. Mainly just getting things cleaned up, etc. but also running errands. yesterday I stopped by our favorite local butcher to order some meat to smoke this weekend. We’re going to have rather a lot of meat, since I wound up ordering two pork butts (yes, that’s a pork shoulder, and no I don’t understand the vagaries of butcher-ese) plus a beef brisket. Each butt is going to be 7-9 pounds and the brisket will be 8-10 pounds (with fat attached; probably more like 6-8 pounds of meat once cooked). If we see the 50% yield on the pork that I did the first time I smoked (this will be better quality, so I expect more like 75% yield) we’re looking at putting between 13 to 17 pounds of cooked meat on the table. Hope everyone is hungry! 🙂

The other big news on my mind is Anthrocon. Besides some slight changes to my staff (and welcome to woodychitwn as my second-in-command in Artists Alley/Con Store), I was taking a hard look at our travel plans. We typically leave the Tuesday evening before the convention, spend the night somewhere in Ohio, the roll into the con at around noon on Wednesday. First off, leaving Tuesday night after work means trying to leave town on the evening of July 3. I expect it’ll take at least double the usual time if not more just to clear Chicago and surrounds. Which leaves us driving way too far too late at night, or having to drive further than we’d like on Wednesday morning. Plus, there’s the expense of the gas (assuming $4-ish per gallon), the hotel Tuesday night, the tolls, the food along the way, and the parking at the Westin.

Then, the thought occurred to me: just how much is airfare? If we fly out from O’Hare Tuesday night after work, we can stay at the La Quinta near Pittsburgh International very cheaply due to Dan’s points there, then catch the express bus downtown Wednesday morning. Monday morning, it’s as simple as catching the bus back to the airport. And after totaling all this up, it’s actually cheaper to fly than to drive. Couple that with the kind offer from linnaeus to carry a few other items in his car for us (i.e. booze) and flying suddenly becomes a very attractive possibility. Dan and I will talk this over tonight and probably have a decision in the next day or two.

So, to do tonight: install the new shower head (which, according to Amazon, is currently sitting on our front porch), clean both showers (we have a stall and a tub/shower in the master bath), then start in on dinner. Busy busy busy!

Mercy Me, What a Weekend!

What a fantastic weekend! And yes, sumatrae, this is another post all about food 🙂

On Friday, we met up with roho, genet, linnaeus, feren, lady_curmudgeon, and a host of other folks from R&G’s gaming group for dinner at Bombay City Indian Restaurant in Gurnee. takaza was pushing his boundaries a bit, but I was really happy that 1.) he was willing to try it, and 2.) he really liked it! The restaurant manager(?) approached our group of 14 and suggested we try ordering family style, and since there were a number of neophytes he suggested a set of entrees, including chicken tikka masala, rogan josh (lamb in a tomato and onion sauce), lamb badam pasanda (lamb cooked in cream and nuts), chicken biryani, and saag paneer and mutter paneer (cubes of cheese cooked with spinach and peas, respectively). The nan (bread) was yummy, and I loved my mango lassi. It was a fantastic meal, and both Dan and I look forward to visiting Bombay City again soon. To answer your question from Friday, posicat, I definitely recommend this place! Apparently it’s only been there for about a year.

The weather on Saturday was perfect. I had to fire up our new grill to season the inside of it. I figured that once we had it hot we might as well use it, so we invited Roho and Genet out to help us inaugurate the grill. They were kind enough to stop by Antioch Packing House and pick up some amazing 1.5″ thick strip steaks. I picked up some yellow and red bell peppers, onions, and corn, all of which got grilled up with the steaks. I still need to work on my charcoal grilling technique (I’m sure the hair on the back of my hand will grow back eventually), but the nice thing is that the grill has enough surface area that if I keep the coals to one side, I can position the food at various distances from them to control the cooking. The steaks came out perfectly, and the entire dinner was delicious! Dan and Roho baked up some tasty puff pastry/peanut butter/chocolate thingies for dessert to cap off a great evening.

Sunday was the very-lightly-attended Midwest FurFest staff meeting. Before the meeting, though, we had to indulge in a bit of home shopping. You see, our pantry is nice, but I hated the way that our “liquor cabinet” looked – it was really just a collection of bottles that sat precariously on the wire rack. The bottles were prone to tip over, and it was difficult to see and access what we had. We also wanted to free up the space in the pantry, so we decided to go to Ikea to find a proper liquor cabinet. I’m pleased to say that we found the perfect thing. Dan did the assembly work and I helped secure it in place, and here’s the finished product:

Here’s the new cabinet. I wanted doors because I thought having all the bottles in plain view might suggest that we’re complete lushes. I love all the shelf space on the bottom.

And here it is open, showing all the boozy goodness! And hey, it’s not even completely full 🙂

I like it because it is shallower than the cart we had there before and it provides a lot more storage space – I now can have all my cookbooks in the kitchen!

So now we’re back to the work-week. We’re in a frenzy of listmaking in preparations for our Memorial Day weekend gathering (post on that to follow). That should be a blast too!

TGIF-ness

And the week has thus wound down. Hooray! It’s looking like we’ve got a lovely weekend coming up (well, Saturday, anyway – Sunday’s supposed to be colder and stormy). I’m up in the air about going to LAFF Softball on Saturday; both cars need a thorough washing inside and out, and I still need to fire up the new grill and “season” the interior before we do any grilling or smoking. So, we’ll see how things go.

Sunday will be the May Midwest FurFest staff meeting. Things are perking along there, and I feel better now that I’ve gotten the first of the confirmation postcards out. I need to sit down with neowolf2 and work out who’s going to do what this year as well. Maybe we’ll get some food afterwards, or not – we’re playing it by ear.

I’m looking forward to dinner tonight. We’re going to an Indian restaurant in Gurnee. It’s been ages since I’ve been to a good restaurant, and roho and genet tell us that this is a really tasty place. I can’t wait!

That’s it for now. It’s ice cream time!

Heavy cream, Chicken broth, 4-6 large lemons…

That’s from my shopping list, of course. Since I flaked yesterday and forgot a bunch of things when I went to the store, my penance is that I have to go back today. takaza‘s mom is coming over for dinner tomorrow so I need to get more pork chops, and I think I’m going to make a nice lemon sorbet for dessert.

Last night wasn’t so good. My back was killing me, even after a round of naproxen and some time on the heating pad. After waking up several times, I finally took some Tylenol 3 at about 2:30 AM to get some sound sleep and that did the trick. On the upside, last night’s episode of Heroes was quite excellent. You know it’s good when you have to pause the Tivo in the middle of the show and just stare and say, “Wow!”. One more episode to go, and it’s going to be a doozy.

Dan and I have talked a bit about FRAC (Furries Race Across Chicago) and it sounds like we’ve got some plans in place. It’s going to be on Saturday, October 13, and we’re going all-out this time. We’ll have a website for it, and we plan to have some players out at Anthrocon as well. Dan is going to set up a hotel room block for out-of-towners. For those veterans who are interested in working behind the scenes this time, we’re going to have some fun opportunities to help out, as well. We only have a very general idea of places we want to send people this time around, but we’re happy to take suggestions and also ideas for fun puzzles (privately, of course).

That’s it for now! Back to wrestling this protocol into shape…

Hiking and New Toys, Yay!

Neither Dan nor I felt up to cooking on Friday so we decided to seek dinner out. We stopped by Gurnee Mills to check out the tripods at Micomp that stormdog had mentioned (alas, they only had the floor model left, and that was rather beat up), then got some dinner at the taquiera at one of the food courts (they make delicious quesadillas!). After dinner, and as the mall was closing, we headed across the street and bought our first new toy of the weekend

Just a quick entry

Just a couple of things before we sit down to rot our brains with Survivor…

ovrclokd started my day off with a gigglefit as I read the link she posted: I Has a Sweet Potato. No, it’s not a picture of an animal with cute, poorly-structured statements on it, it’s something that’s far funnier than that. Just click. Trust me.

Looks like we’re going up to Kettle Moraine State Park in Wisconsin. It’s still up in the air whether we’re going to the Southern Unit or the Northern Unit, but either way it should be a pleasant hike with some good company. I’m really looking forward to it.

A minor annoyance: when I was buying stamps yesterday I wanted to buy postcard stamps that I could use after the rate increase that goes into effect on Monday. They’d happily sell me several 100-stamp rolls of 24-cent postcard stamps…which won’t do me much good when the rate goes up to 26 cents. When I asked if they had any of the new 26-cent stamps, I was informed that they didn’t have any of those in stock. Gah! I understand that postcard stamps are in less demand, but it’s less than a week before the rate hike, and they don’t have the stamps in? Since when did the post office become a JIT operation?

There. I feel better 🙂

Hump Day (My Lovely, um, Weekly Hump?)

The Midwest FurFest confirmation postcards arrived yesterday from Vistaprint. In the past, I printed up all the postcards myself, front and back, then cut them up, the put labels and stamps on them, then mailed them. That was fine when it was just a couple hundred. Last year, I mailed out close to 800 postcards. It was very clear that it was time to choose a different route. takaza did a fantastic job sourcing a vendor for who would pre-print the postcards, then he worked with film2edit to come up with a beautiful design for the postcard front. When I got a look at the finished product yesterday, I was thrilled! It’s a quality print job, and the cost was a quarter of the quotes that we got locally, and they sent the cards to us four days earlier than we expected them. I’d really recommend Vistaprint!

So, my task tonight is to stop by the post office and buy a whole bunch of (new, improved, more expensive) postcard stamps to stock up for the year, finish stamping the hundred-odd cards I have in hand, and drop those into the mail (I’ve got one in the for you, Chilly, so you can see the finished product!). I need to stop a couple of other places as well, but that’s fine – the weather should be nice, and it’ll be good to cruise a bit with the windows down and some good music playing. Once I get home, it’ll eithe rbe pork chops of pierogis for dinner, depending on how motivated we are (and what the sell-by date on the pork chops is!).

Speaking of music, thanks to everyone for their music recommendations yesterday! I hope to sit down tonight and sample a little of each artist. I promise I’ll let you know what I think (and if anyone else has suggestions, feel free to add them). Now that I have our MP3 library in order, I’m steadily adding to it. We’ve also found a neat new way to use it: Orb. This is a nifty utility that lets you stream your MP3 library to the web painlessly – no IP spoofing, no client software needed. You load up their Flash-based site and it handles everything for you. The biggest downside for us: one connection per username, so if Dan’s listening and I log in, I knock him offline. The site offers some sharing functionality that I need to investigate further, though.

Aaaaand back to work!

Tuesday Links and Stuff

Good news! Sort of. Fox has announced when they’re going to burn off the last two episodes of Drive: the least-watched night of television of the year, July 4. Thank goodness for Tivo!

Here’s a huge shocker: Amazing Race All-Stars winners Eric and Danielle are no longer dating (video link). Fortunately, they each have $500,000 to soothe the pain. {grumble, grumble}

And finally, a bit of comment-whoring: I’m interested in finding some new music, and I’m seeking recommendations. My tastes run to contemporary folk and folk-rock, Celtic, and guitar-based rock. I’m fascinated with combinations of genres, like Celtic rock, or Klezmer jazz (cf. David Grisman). And vocal harmonies are always welcome. So…what do you suggest?

I Spent The Weekend Cooking

(Yeah, yeah, I know. Big surprise, huh?)

This past weekend was most excellent. Very low stress, and I got to try some new and cool things.

We started out on Friday evening by meeting partran for dinner at Osteria di Tramonto in Wheeling (I note that there are plans to open another Osteria di Tramonto in Rosemont at the new Le Meridien hotel there). The meal was excellent, as always. We took the opportunity to sit at the counter into the kitchen and were rewarded with some entertaining banter with the chefs, as well as a complimentary plate of steamed mussels! I’m normally not much of a fan of mussels, but these were just delicious. I had the veal saltimbocca, while Dan had a seared (monstrous) pork chop. The meal was great, as was the company. We had a great time. Good luck, Partran, as you head out west in a few weeks!

On Saturday I was up and about early for my project of the weekend: smoked pork butt (or pork shoulder – same thing). It was a very educational project, and I learned a lot about smoking. I went to Home Depot bright and early and picked up a small bag of charcoal (Kingsford Briquettes – none of that match-lighting stuff!), a chimney charcoal starter and a five-pound bag of hickory wood chunks. Once I got home, I made up a dry rub for the pork (a mixture of a couple different dried chiles, onion and garlic powders, Turbinado sugar, thyme, marjoram, bay leaf, allspice, ginger, cumin, cinnamon, and pepper), applied it, then went down to fire things up. The smoker worked reasonably well, but I learned something: the higher-end smokers (i.e. $150.00 or so) are a lot more adjustable, with vents on the top and bottom to help control the temperature. Ours is…not a high-end smoker. Alas, it has no vents. This meant that instead of maintaining the ideal smoking temperature of 225-250 degrees F for 10-12 hours as I was hoping, instead it ran closer to 275-325 F for about 7 hours before I ran out of charcoal and the fire died. I improvised by wrapping the pork butt up in foil and put it in the oven for another three hours at 275 F until it came to 180 F internal temperature. Perfect! We let it cool a bit and then pulled all the meat off, shredding it, and throwing away the bones and fat and chewy bits.

How was it? Oh. My. Goodness. It was utterly delicious. Unfortunately, I also learned that a 6.3-pound pork butt reduces down to three pounds even of pulled meat once you’re done. I think in the future, I’ll probably go for things which take less smoking time, like poultry or smaller cuts of beef or pork. The temperature thing may be sorted out by more carefully metering in the charcoal, but overall the experiment was a success. I need to remember: “Don’t let the great be the enemy of the good.” Just because you can’t get everything exactly perfect, doesn’t mean that you can’t get a damn fine result out of what you’ve got.

On Sunday I made up a batch of Miss Piggy Barbecue Sauce and the finished sauce was just wonderful – sweet, spicy, mustardy. Yum! To compliment the BBQ, I decided to make Alton Brown’s Asian Slaw. Once dinner time arrived, roho and genet brought potato salad to add to the menu, and steviemaxwell brought his usual charming self (and sodas as well 🙂 takaza made Texas toast for the BBQ and I’m pleased to say that we went through half of the Miss Piggy sauce – I think Stevie had a small serving of the Bulls Eye sauce I had on the table, but everyone preferred the yummy mustard sauce. The slaw, unfortunately, was a disappointment. There’s a whole lot of interesting flavors in there, but they don’t come together in a cohesive whole. For the amount of preparation that goes into it, I wasn’t happy with the final product. No one cared, though because, dude: BBQ. So, so good.

The meal was capped off with a yummy yellow cake with chocolate whipped cream frosting that Dan made and decorated festively for the occasion of the finale of The Amazing Race. We watched the show, and most of us were disappointed in the results. But Stevie’s weird anyway, so we’ll discount that. We followed this with some Simpsons and Family Guy as we struggled through our digestive torpor, then saw everyone off for the evening. Hmm – we need a new excuse to get folks over for dinner on a weekly basis 🙂

Interesting Survey Results

The University of California, Davis Department of Psychology has released results of a survey of the furry fandom. The online survey was intended to identify the types and motivations of people within the fandom, and included both general demographic questions and sets designed to measure perceptions of furries towards themselves and their view of the perceptions of others towards furries. Over 600 furs participated through 22-26 February.
More background and results below the cut.

2006 Ursa Major Award Winners Announced!

The winners of the sixth annual Ursa Major Awards (formally the Annual Anthropomorphic Literature & Arts Awards), for the best in anthropomorphic/”funny animal” literature and art first published during the calendar year 2006, were announced at a presentation ceremony on Friday, May 4, 2007 at CaliFur III, held at the the Costa Mesa Holiday Inn, Costa Mesa, CA on May 4-6, 2007.

Read all about it!

How to Make a Cassoulet

Cassoulet is a French slow-cooked bean stew, typically made with a variety of meats. In this case, I used pork and duck. My parents learned how to make this when they lived in France about twenty years ago, and I’ve always wanted to make it again. Being that I’m blessed with living in Chicago and therefore have access to some of the more exotic ingredients the dish calls for, I figured it was high time to give it a shot.

Recipe, with copious pictures, below the cut

Thursday linky-links!

Not too much going on this week; I’m still slogging through our MP3 library, culling out the duplicates. I’m through the J’s now, and probably have another 1,500 files or so to go. I went ahead and popped for the $20 license for MediaMonkey because the library synchronization features are quite useful, though I just wish it had a free plug-in to play over Airtunes. I may look into something like Airfoil for that, though, since it’d be nice to have something that works on all applications.

That aside, I’ve come across some interesting links to pass along. On a side note, I’ve started using del.icio.us to mark stuff that interests me. Feel free to add me to your network!

The Webby Awards have been announced, which is always a neat way to find new and interesting sites.

The above list led me to Truthdig (“Digging beneath the headlines”), which led to an utterly fascinating article that provides a thumbnail history of the Shias, the Sunnis, and the Wahhabis, which provides context for the present-day struggle for Iraq. The article is written by Scott Ritter, formerly a U. N. weapons inspector in Iraq.

We’ve recently started watching Deadliest Catch. The show has really impressed me, not so much because Alaskan crab fishing is so fascinating, but because the producers have done an amazing job in constructing a compelling narrative. I was pretty bummed to see that Captain Sig Hansen was actually in this area for an appearance (right near the MFF hotel, actually!) and we missed it. (Though I have to admit my favorite captain is Phil Harris of the Cornelia Marie. He strikes me as the kind of guy it would be a hoot to go out drinking with.)

We’re looking to finally put the smoker that Dan got last year to use this weekend. In poking around on the web, I found The Virtual Weber Bullet, a great site with good information on grilling and smoking (the Weber Bullet is a nickname for a popular smoker/grill). We’re thinking about smoking some pork this weekend, and they have an extremely useful article on pork selection, preparation, cooking, and serving.

Funny, now I’m hungry…

My MP3 Cup Overfloweth

How unique – a LiveJournal entry that isn’t a meticulous chronicle of my daily life 🙂

We’re in the middle of attempting to combine and sort through our MP3 library on a single server in takaza‘s office. Happily, it’s hooked into the network so it’s accessible from anywhere in the house. As we’ve combined stuff down, a nasty by-product is the discovery of duplicate files – mostly stuff that was on different computers. In some, but not all, the more recent files have been fed through MusicBrainz and properly tagged. Were that the case universally, it would be much earier to sort through the 2,500+ duplicates (out of around 17,000 tracks). It’s looking like I’m going to have to sort through manually and remove either mis-tagged or, in some cases, lower bitrate files (how the heck did that happen?). Fortunately, MediaMonkey is excellent for identifying duplicates, and the interface seems to be good for comparing the files and deciding what to keep. I expect that once we ahev everything in place I’ll set up a local library and a network library in iTunes so I can keep stuff locally on my laptop to sync with my iPod, and also have tunes on hand when I’m mobile.

It’ll be interesting to see if we have the network throughput to play MP3’s from the remote server and pipe it to the Airport Express once everything is up and running. Speaking of which, some of you may recall we were getting a nasty ground loop hum from the conection beteen the Airport Express and our stereo. After doing some research it turns out this is not a unique problem, but the solution was simple: go digital! I got an inexpensive TOSlink cable from Amazon ($4.95 with free two-day shipping!) and now everything seems to be running flawlessly there.

Dan is looking at possibly building a new desktop for use as a server, since the one we have now is a P3 500 MHz oldster he picked up from work. After skimming through the listings on Newegg I can officially say my technical know-how of desktops and motherboards and such is so far out of date it’s not funny – circa 2000 or so. This is what happens when you switch to 100% laptops, I guess. Anyway, it looks like he can build something reasonably cheaply, and it should be an interesting project.

Spring Stampede 2007

Last Saturday, linnaeus, mirkowuff, takaza, and I took part in Spring Stampede 2007, sponsored by the Round Lake Area Park District. This was a race/treasure hunt throughout Lake County. It was a bit pricey at $25 per team member, but it was also a benefit for the MS Society.

As many of you know, Dan and I have some experience with treasure hunts, so we had a special interest in taking part in this – if nothing else, to crib ideas for future events! Our team name for this event: Hungarian Soup Orchestra, in reference to a certain infamous challenge on The Amazing Race. For our team: I was driving, Dan was navigating (and taking pictures), and Mirko and Paul provided clue support and puzzle-solving skills.

The Rules of the Game

A Whirlwind Weekend!

Whoa, that was a crazy weekend. A whole lot of fun, though.

On Friday, takaza was stuck at work until late. When he got home, we elected to grab dinner at Charcoal Delight, finishing up just as we got a call from mirkowuff the he had arrived at our place. We stopped by to pick him up then went up to Garden Fresh to do a bit of shopping for the following morning. The rest of the evening was a whole bunch of laptop geekery and the very amusing season finale of Ace of Cakes (with a bizarre furry reference in the opening minutes).

Saturday morning we were joined by Linnaeus. Following a quick but tasty breakfast of pancakes, we headed up to the Sports Center in Round Lake Beach for the Spring Stampede. That’s a big enough deal that it’s going to get its own entry following this one (with very silly pictures!), but suffice to say that we had a lot of fun. After that wrapped up we met up with roho and genet at Antioch Liquors (of course). After some shopping there, we stopped by Lovin’ Oven Cakery (om nom nom) on the way home, and enjoyed hanging out for a bit and sampling some of the pastries we picked up there. After some chatting, we decided on Dog and Suds for dinner, since the weather was so nice out. The atmosphere was great, the place wasn’t too crowded and the food…well, the food was only mediocre, unfortunately. It’s a shame because it’s a nifty drive-in, but I don’t see us going back any time soon. After dinner we went back to our place and spent the rest of the evening trying out some of our purchases from Antioch Liquors, including Roho’s kek Ke Ke Beach key lime liquor. It tastes just like key lime pie…including the graham cracker crust. To my taste, it was actually more graham than lime. It was deemed to be Not Right and pretty much undrinkable (well by most of us. I think Genet liked it in small quantities!). Sadly, because we’re all old and boring we wrapped things up by 11:30 and Paul, Roho, and Genet headed home.

Sunday morning, Mirko, Roho, Genet, and Dan and I made the requisite pilgrimage to Las Vegas for brunch, which was delicious and remarkably filling, as usual. Mirko had to head out afterwards, so Dan and I went home and napped a bit. That evening, Paul, Roho, Genet, steviemaxwell and magicpaw came over to watch The Amazing Race. It was an OK episode, though the ending was disappointing, leaving us with none of our favorites to cheer for during next week’s season finale. On the bright side, we ordered some delicious pizza, and had French silk pie from Lovin’ Oven for dessert. Everyone had a great time, and I look forward to seeing folks again next week for the finale. I think I’ll have some fun making dinner 🙂

Following a lousy night’s sleep (it was too hot – need to reset the thermostat’s programming!), here I am back at work. Not too much going on this week, except for dinner with partran on Friday night. After such a busy weekend, it’ll be good to relax! Oh and hey – Heroes tonight. Yay!

Linky Linky

Not a lot going on, so here…have some links!

Roger Ebert rocks! I wish I could be at the Overlooked Film Festival this week, but it’s really good to hear that Mr. Ebert will be there.

Coming June 17: Robot Chicken Star Wars Special featuring the voices of George Lucas, Mark Hamill, Conan O’Brien, Seth MacFarlane, Robert Smigel, Malcolm McDowell, Hulk Hogan, James Van Der Beek, Donald Faison, Abraham Benrubi, Breckin Meyer and Joey Fatone.

If you’re a fan of Heroes and aren’t reading the online graphic novels…you really should!

And of course, I Can Has Cheezburger?