Man, long holiday weekends mess with my head. Thank heavens my employer is closed today (even if I’m not getting paid or it).
I need to think up a good excuse not to go down to see the fireworks tonight. I seem to be failing in my search, which means I might have interesting times ahead…
…which explains why this list tickles me so: The Top Five Movies Filmed on the El (as in Elevated Trains, part of the Chicago public transit system). This makes me want to go and rent a couple of these (oh, and I still wouldn’t mind seeing The Lake House, in spite of my firm and abiding loathing of Keanu Reeves, if only because the whole bloody thing is all about Chicago).
I imagine this will be all over LJ by the end of the day, but hey – here ya go. Pittsburgh City Paper did a front-page article on furries and Anthrocon that hits the stands today, and it is surprisingly even-handed. The reader is left with the impression that furries are a bunch of people who are slightly weird and very geeky, but certainly not the sex fiends that the media has made them out to be. They even got most of the facts right! The web version leaves out many of the pictures that ran with the article, so scans of the article are below the cut (thanks to artemisfur for the scans).
I made this at a recent potluck and it got rave reviews. Here’s my recipe for Asian Chicken Salad.
In case anyone missed it, tugrik has his amazing pictures from Anthrocon up and ready for viewing.
This is my favorite picture because it shows both the beauty of the venue we were in (David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, right on the Allegheny River) and the sheer number of fursuits gathered – almost 200!
(Click picture for a ginormous 6610 x 2149 version showing an amazing amount of detail)
Oh, and here’s how they got that shot (that’s PNC Park in the background).
Yeah, we’re weird, but it’s a good kind of weird 🙂
Well, after Anthrocon and a very trying week at work, racing against deadlines, we came to the weekend. What would one want to do to recover? Hey, how about relaxing at home? Or maybe going to the Chicago Pride Parade? Or catching the Pride edition of Too Much Light?
No, we called bingo games, drove to Wisconsin, and went to meetings. Logic? What’s that?
On Saturday, takaza and I drove up to Vernon Hills for his company’s summer picnic. Man, it’s nice that he works for one of the few companies that isn’t cutting costs to the bone these days. The picnic was open to all employees and their families, though this was the first year that they didn’t offer free beer and wine (and attendance suffered somewhat, but not terribly). We were in charge of calling bingo games for two sessions, from 12:30 – 2 PM, then from 2:30 – 4PM. The organizers gave us a huge box of $25 gift cards to give away for everything from Jewel and Toys R Us to Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants and Wal Mart – probably close to $1,000 worth of cards total. Dan did some excellent pre-planning and made some signs that were a huge help, and although I’ll admit I was a bit unsure about things at first eventually I did have a very fun time. We alternated, first calling two games, then walking among the audience, answering questions, and checking cards. I think we called about 30-40 games total, and had crowds that pushed 100 or so by the end of the day.
That was pretty fun, but it gets better. First, Dan won a door prize: a $25 Lettuce Entertain You gift card (mmm, that’s two large, home-made apple strudels). They were holding a charity raffle to benefit Ronald McDonald House in which, among other things, they were giving away six Blackberrys. Dan took some of his leftover cash from Anthrocon and bought sixteen $5 tickets. As we were finishing up the last session of bingo, one of the organizers came over and told him he had won and gave him his prize…a 1 Gb iPod Nano. Which is all well and good, except that we both already have 30 Gb iPods. Dan ran into a cow-orker who mentioned that he had won $100 in gift cards to Best Buy; after some talking, they agreed to swap prizes, since the gift cards would be much more useful to us and the cow-orker’s son really wanted an iPod. As we were driving away from the picnic, Dan opened the envelope and pulled out one $50 card, then another $50 card, then another, unmarked card! One call to Best Buy’s automated number later, and we find that we actually have $150 in gift cards. Woo! To cap all of this off, after we helped last year we each got $40 in gift cards, so I’m assuming we’ll be seeing something similar this year. It turns out that it was a very lucrative afternoon, plus I had a surprisingly good time.
After the picnic, we headed up to Milwaukee to have a going-away party for Straif (colliedoc). It was a lovely, low-key affair. The company was excellent, the food was good, and the wine very tasty 🙂 (Steele Carneros Pinot Noir, of course – you can’t go wrong with that!) unfortunately, we were both feeling the effects of the long day outside and had to take our leave early – I slept a good bit on the drive home, and poor Dan was feeling pretty sleepy too, but we made it home OK.
Sunday featured the Midwest FurFest staff meeting. Not much to say about that, though do check out our spiffy new website, courtesy of hooktail. Really nice work! We lazed around at home a bit in the evening, and continued slooowly going through the first season of the new Doctor Who by watching “Daleks” – yet another strong episode.
Today has been a pleasant day at work, a lot less stressful than last week! It sounds like Dan will be heading down to the St. Louis for his employer tomorrow for a few days, but with the possibility of late nights there the prospects of socializing seem regrettably small. In the meantime…Anyone want to go out for sushi tomorrow or Wednesday night?
So I was commenting back and forth with rooth and he mentioned that people needed more to do on Sunday night of Anthrocon, and maybe something like a scavenger hunt would be a good thing to keep them occupied. Well, I have some experience with treasure hunts, and hmmm…
And right about there is where Takaza bopped me with a rolled-up newspaper. Because yeah – what am I really good for by Sunday night? Sleep, and that’s pretty much about it.
Now Thursday night, on the other hand…
🙂
The short version: Everything went exactly as it should, though a few of our pre-opening proceses can use some improvement. I also seriously need a second-in-command to keep me from getting completely stressed out.
Whoa nelly, what a con. I’m not sure if I can write this up without boring everyone to death, but here’s what I can recall, anyway…
Home from Anthrocon safely.
Exhausted.
More tomorrow.
Just because I haven’t said much, don’t assume there’s not a lot going on 🙂 The last few days have been spent in pre-convention stress mode before Anthrocon. I’ve printed up all the forms, handouts, and MFF flyers we’re going to need and we’ve been working on a packing list for everything that we’re going to cram into Dan’s Element. Naturally, work hit me with a big deadline so the last few days here have been unpleasantly stressful, but that’s past and even though I’m still here, my brain has already left for vacation.
The biggest problem I have right now is insomnia – the past two nights I’ve woken up at 3:30 AM; Monday morning I was able to get back to sleep, but this morning I finally said t’heck with it and got up at 4 AM to check e-mail and such. I’m sure I’ll be paying for it later tonight, but at least I got some stuff taken care of before coming into work at 6 AM. I just chugged down a Monster, so I expect jitters to start soon.
As for tonight, I need to pick up some boxes for sorting receipts in Artists Alley and then make a stop by the grocery store for last-minute supplies. Then it’s back home to start packing and run a last load of laundry. We’ll be up at 5 AM tomorrow morning (if not before) to hit the road to Pittsburgh. It should be an easy drive out of town, and we should arrive there before rush hour. Then it’s a couple of meetings, and hopefully a chance to grab some dinner in between.
Hope to see many of you in Pittsburgh at some point this weekend!
God is a DJ (8-minute YouTube video)
Very clever. A really nifty idea, well-executed. Four paws up!
I’ve seen a couple of people post stuff like this, and I figured, what the heck…
Duncan Goes to Anthrocon, or The Care and Feeding of a Frazzled Husky
Yes, we do indeed have a personal life too, and I’m sure y’all are tired of reading about FRAC, so enough about that for now.
On Friday, even though takaza had driven in to work we decided that it would be better if I picked him up and we left his car at his employer’s over the weekend. I really enjoy meeting him after work on Fridays because I usually get there 30-40 minutes before he’s ready to go so I have time to read or nap or just relax, and the weather on Friday was ideal – 70’s and breezy. I parked under a tree for some shade and read the paper, and dozed a bit too. Once he was done for the day, we drove deep into the darkest wilds of Evanston, to explore the mysteries of the Central Street shopping district. Although my initial target was The Spice House, we also found Foodstuffs, which is an evil, evil place, and checked out a couple of interesting restaurants (Jacky’s Bistro was tempting, but a bit too spendy for us that night). We wound up opting to drive down to the Davis Street business district, which wasn’t nearly as interesting even if it is bigger (too many national chains represented there). We tried to drop in on siriuswolfstar at work, only to find that he had traded shifts and was well on the fast track to inebriation elsewhere. We wound up at Trattoria Demi, a “red-sauce Italian place” that I found to be…eh. Nothing exciting, but at least it wasn’t too expensive.
Saturday found me poking around on the net in the morning to try to find something to bring to wyldekyttin‘s birthday party that evening. I utterly failed at matching the theme (“something that can be deconstructed”), but I did come up with an extremely tasty Asian chicken salad. I sauteed up some chicken breasts using The Spice House’s delicious Argyle Street Asian Blend. I stole the dressing and fried rice noodles from this recipe, only I used a nice spring blend for greens, and added snow peas, scallions, and baby bok choy. Once the chicken breasts were cooled, I tore them apart by hand. The nice thing about this was that I could I put the noodles in one bag, the greens in another, the prepared veggies in another, the chicken in another, and the dressing in a plastic container; when it was time to serve I just dumped them all into a bowl and tossed. Quite tasty, too.
The party was great fun, and crim_ferret did a sterling job on grill duty (mmm, Asiago cheeseburgers!). Alas, the fact that I had woken up at 6:30 AM caught up with me and we left the party at an unconscionably early hour because I was close to falling asleep.
Sunday was spent working on Anthrocon stuff – Dan on signage, me on Artists Alley and Con Store prep. I’ve almost gotten the work schedule in place, I just need to give it a once-over before sending it out to my staff. Thank heavens I was able to recruit enough folks this year so that I don’t have to schedule myself, since I get pulled in four different directions at once during the con and I need to be able to deal with stuff when necessary. We took a break in the afternoon to grab some food, do a bit of shopping, and finally pick up our rings from the jeweler. This ordeal has taken over two months, but we finally have both rings back and I’m once more wearing my wedding band – no more cruising the bars for me! {snicker} Once home we watched some Good Eats and worked on more Anthrocon stuff (this will be our refrain for the next week).
Incidentally, for those that care: we’ve made a slight alteration in our Anthrocon travel plans. We will be driving, leaving Chicago sometime between 5:30 AM and 6:00 AM (when we normally leave for work anyway) on Wednesday, June 14, aiming to arrive in Pittsburgh by 3 PM EDT; we’ll be departing Pittsburgh before noon on Monday the 19th. We were originally going to put in half-days at work and leave Chicago at noonish, but we realized that the loss of hours for me is more than made up for by the decrease in stress in not getting in late to the hotel and not scrambling to get stuff done Wednesday night. Heck, we might even be able to take a swim before the con starts!
We don’t have a lot of plans for this week, since we’re trying to save a small bit before the con. Mostly finalizing Anthrocon stuff, and clearing up the huge backlog we have on the Tivo (NINE episodes of Doctor Who? I need to get watching!)
The weekend is done and we are pleased to report that Wuffmeet 3 was a success! Thanks so much to the wonderful folks who showed up to make the weekend so much fun: artemisfur, crim_ferret, werellama, datahawk, daveqat, dancingninny, genet, foxish, linnaeus, lisagems, Max, mirkowuff, mistletoe, wooisme, mstegosaurus, neowolf2, posicat, roho, simbalion, siriuswolfstar, steviemaxwell, stormdog, jimcyl, tincrash, tremaine, unclevlad, vidarwolf, and wyldekyttin. Many beverages were consumed, much food was eaten, and I laughed more than I have in quite a while!
Things kicked off Friday with some tasty food for dinner: beef stew, chicken white chili, and kielbasa, kraut, and potatoes. Judging from the alacrity with which the food disappeared, I gather it was of acceptable quality (or everyone was really hungry). As requested, I’ll post the recipe for the white chili here in the next few days. Saturday was FRAC (Furries Race Across Chicago), followed by a pizza feast and socializing into the wee hours. Sunday was a late start for some reason (gee, where’s all those empty bottles come from?) 🙂 We took a sizable crowd over to Emmett’s Tavern, where we had a delicious lunch and enjoyed a sampling of their beers. Later, we sent out for various cuisines for dinner, which were all distinguished by being pretty much awful. And this morning, once we got everyone rousted up and checked out of their rooms, we grabbed a late brunch at Apple Villa, which turned out to be an excellent alternative to the dreadful IHOP which was next to the hotel. From there, everyone scattered to the winds, to head home and crash.
Planning this event was a world of fun, and it was everything I’d hoped it would be. I was pretty stressed on Friday hoping that everything would work out right and that takaza and I had budgeted properly, but I should have trusted my wonderful wolf – everything worked well, with the exception that we came up a few cans short of diet sodas on Sunday. Dan and I came up with a good approach this year: I took the early shift and he took the late shift. That meant that I was up early to make sure that everyone had their coffee, kringles, and oatmeal, and Dan stayed up late to clean up and lock up when everyone went to bed. The downside of this is that he got to bed at 5:30 AM this morning; needless to say, he’s taking a nap as I write this. We hope that everyone enjoyed themselves, and we look forward to the next Wuffmeet!
And what about FRAC, you say? How did it go, and who won this time? You’ll have to wait for that! I’ll be putting up some lengthy posts tomorrow detailing the clues, the hints, the answers, and the winners (with pictures!). But for now…time to collapse and relax.
At 10:46 AM, the first team left FRAC HQ to start FRAC 2: Electric Boogaloo. It’s noon now, and all seven teams are in the field. Let’s see whose navigation will reign supreme…
“Sure, the white chili is spicy,” I said to myself. “But what harm could half a bowl do, even though it’s half an hour before bedtime?”
Ugh. Pass the Pepto.
I can be an annoying ball of stress sometimes, and over the least important stuff. I’m trying to get better, but in a lot of ways that’s just how I am, and about the only way that’d ever change is through medication – but that’s a bit more extreme than is necessary, I think. This is why as things approach that I enjoy doing (Wuffmeet, Anthrocon, MFF), I become more and more irritable and worried. The good news is that once things get going, I’m fine, everyone has a good time, and I’m able to enjoy myself. But the few days leading up to the event…yeah. Which is a long way of saying, if I seem snappish to anyone over the next few weeks, I apologize in advance.
My FRAC stuff is done; takaza has a few more things to take care of and we can start assembling everything. In the meantime I can worry about the food I’m cooking for Friday; I’ve got a white chili recipe that I’ve synthesized out of a number of recipes I’ve found on the net (I can post the recipe if people are interested); I’ll be making that tomorrow night. I’ll also be making a nice big pot of Kielbasa and sauerkraut with boiled potatoes – it’s easy and tasty. I will admit that it never occurred to me to rinse the sauerkraut before using it, but it’s probably a good thing to do to cut the acidity a bit. Tonight, though, after a quick visit to The Spice House on the way home, Dan and I are off to see the White Sox play Oakland in some kind of baseball thingy.
Oh yeah, woodychitwn, tagged with a meme. You bastard! I’m supposed to name 6 weird facts/things/habits about myself.
Now I’m supposed to tag some people to do this meme. I tag perro‘s mom 😉 (oh, and anyone else who just feels like doing it)
That was a very satisfying weekend. On Friday I took takaza to work (it means I don’t get in until 7 AM, when I usually get here at 6:45 – no loss). This meant that when I got out from work, I was able to spend a lovely half-hour alternately reading and dozing in the sun while waiting for him to finish work. We walked around to Randhurst Mall (which is very, very sad) before meeting up with linnaeus and Dan’s cow-orker nymphara to see Over the Hedge. The verdict from me: Not great, but it had some very funny moments. Bruce Willis played Bruce Willis, which bores me. Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara as the porcupines cracked me the hell up and really made the movie (OK, Steve Carrell’s Sammy was good too).
On Saturday I was up and motivated on the early side, so I walked the two miles or so over to where wooisme was participating in a garage sale. I had a pleasant time chatting, and Paul joined us not long after. Paul and I ducked out at around 11:30 and in the interest of time caught a bus back to our place. Dan was feeling under the weather, so he opted to stay in while I picked up mirkowuff from O’Hare and we headed out to LAFF softball. Thanks so much to woodychitwn for providing the comfy viewing arrangements! That was perfect way to chat with friends, enjoy the beautiful weather, and be completely and utterly lazy 🙂 After the game we had ambitious plans to go out to dinner at a nice place in Andersonville and see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Unfortunately, we were all tired and that devolved into dinner from the taquiera around the corner, some family Guy from the TiVo and an early bedtime.
I woke up at 6:30 AM on Sunday and couldn’t get back to sleep. Curse being a morning person! On the bright side, this allowed me to go out and enjoy the crisp, breezy morning. I drove over to the Broadway location of Intelligentsia and picked up a couple of pounds of beans for this week and Wuffmeet, then took my (free!) cup of coffee over to the lakeshore at Foster Beach and spent some time watching the lake and admiring the skyline. Truly, a wonderful way to start the day! We had a nice morning of coffee, newspaper, and a bit of video games before Mirko, Paul, and I headed out to the MFF staff meeting (Dan was still feeling pretty oogy, unfortunately. He’s doing much better now!). The meeting was quite useful, and we accomplished quite a bit. Afterwards, the dinner at Portillo’s was enjoyable as well. I picked up some dinner for Dan on the way home and we had a quiet evening in, though we stayed up a bit later than I would have liked nailing down more FRAC stuff.
And so this week: it’s going to be pretty crazy. We have a lot of prep for Wuffmeet to do, I need to run a good number of errands, and on top of that I’ll be going with Dan, Woody, and perro to see a White Sox game tomorrow night. Oh, and I need to cook two full meals for Friday night, too. Whee!
So, as predicted, we did spend a delightful evening at roho and genet‘s in the company of ottr and riecka. Charcoal Grill in Kenosha provided tasty burgers and so-so drinks (note to self: next time stick to the mai tais – the Long Islands there suck), then back to R&G’s where Diesel proceeded to clean our clocks at Texas hold ’em. It was a lot of fun, and many thanks to R&G for putting us up for the night!
Tuesday was going to be a quiet evening at home, but a call from a friend who had locked their keys in their car prompted a pre-emption of dinner plans and a trip out to the burbs. Dinner became Potbelly Sandwiches, which I must admit I’m starting to like. Unfortunately, I was reminded of the perils of raw onions too soon before bedtime as I had one of the worst attacks of reflux that I’ve had in quite a while that night, after midnight. I stayed up for almost an hour waiting for things to settle down, and still have a nasty “scorched” throat to show for it. We really need to make an attempt to eat earlier, I think, and I need to watch what I eat a bit more closely.
Last night I was feeling terrible when I got home from work – a pounding headache just this side of a migraine. I forewent the gym and instead lay down for an hour or so, though even with ibuprofen the headache wouldn’t go away. Dan came home and, after seeing the state I was in, grabbed some massage oil and administered a heavenly neck and shoulder massage that drove the headache away. I’m so fortunate to have a husband as wonderful as him! Not long after, we were graced by the presence of datahawk, who crashed with us for the night so we could watch the finale of The Amazing Race. The hippies won, yay! It was a great ending to a so-so season; I’m just glad that they renewed it for next year, though I’m not sure how I feel about a Sunday time slot for the show. On the other hand, it’ll be right after 60 Minutes, which is a hell of a lead-in. We stayed up a bit too late hammering out some details on FRAC, and I’m pleased to say we now have a good two-thirds of the clues done and ready to go. And just so I can get my reality double-doe, I see that the Top Chef finale (Part 1) recorded last night. That’ll be some good Tivo fodder for tonight.
And so today I need to make a quick stop by the grocery store on the way home, then it’ll be back to the gym after too many days away.
Hmm…we need to make some plans for the weekend. Stay tuned for a post about that…
Wuffmeet and FRAC are fast approaching! Today, we need to talk about FRAC. Right now, we have the following participants signed up for FRAC:
DaveQat
Linnaeus
Lisa
Mirko
Moira
Simba
Sirius
Stormdog
Synicism
Posicat
Osiris
That’s great! Except for one slight problem: eleven is an odd number. We need one more person! (or three more people – what the heck 🙂 If you are reading this and are thinking about participating, or know someone who would make a good addition to Wuffmeet, we need to know immediately! It’s only $12.50 to participate, and we guarantee a fun and exciting afternoon.
As for teams, right now I know that DaveQat and Syn, and Sirius and Simba are teaming up – the rest of you, I’m not sure. Talk amongst yourselves, and figure out who’s one whose team, then tell us your team name. We need teams and team names NO LATER THAN SUNDAY!
And now, the rules. These are only slightly changed from FRAC 1, but it’s worth re-reading them:
Click here for FRAC Rules
Weekend. Right. Yeah, we had one of those, I think.
On Friday, I picked takaza up at work and we braved the insane Friday traffic to drive down to visit a friend who was in the hospital (good news, though – he was discharged the following day). We were pretty tired afterwards, so we grabbed dinner from Charcoal Delight and I crashed on the early side.
Saturday found me up and awake at 8 AM, as per usual, but that left me time to read the paper and have my coffee. I woke Dan up and we headed out the door to spend the day nailing down a route for FRAC. I’m happy to say that after a few false starts and some disagreements on where to go when, I think we’ve got a good course for the race in hand. We still need to work out several elements, but hey, we’ve got twelve days to go, right? After all that traipsing around, we met siriuswolfstar and simbalion for dinner at The Grafton, a place I had visited before with Linnaeus. I regret to report that the place has not improved on my initial dismal opinion of it, and we won’t be returning. The food was uninspiring at best, and the service was quite poor. Ah we.. We capped the night off with a nice chat back at our place, then I stumbled off to bed, though Dan stayed up quite a bit later.
On Mother’s Day we drove up to Dan’s mom’s place in McHenry County. On the way there we stopped by our storage unit to visit our stuff (“Hi! Did you miss us?”) and we dug out our 32″ television. After our last visit to his mom’s I had noticed that her TV was in terrible shape, and ours has just been sitting in storage for the last year and a half. Plus, I suspect that when we do get our own place we’ll be in the market for something a bit bigger and shinier (curse you, feren! Curse you and your 52″ flat-panel HDTV!). After we dropped off the TV, We headed over to Woodstock to the Tip Top Bistro for their Mother’s Day brunch. It’s a pleasant little place, and the staff there were friendly and helpful (which must have been tough on a crazy day like Mother’s Day!). They had a nice brunch buffet with a tasty Waldorf salad, seafood paella, fettuccine puttanesca, leg of lamb, eggs benedict, and bananas French toast. The complimentary champagne (well, prosecco, technically) with free refills was nice too 🙂 After brunch we returned to Dan’s mom’s house where Dan spent the next hour rearranging her A/V equipment, making sure the VCR(s), Tivo, and TVs all were connected properly. I…well, I fell asleep on the sofa 🙂 Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon, I think. We headed home and made a stop by the corner taquiera for a light dinner. We stayed up too late to catch the Survivor finale (Bleah. I’m skipping next season, and this time I mean it!) and then I went off to bed, though again Dan stayed up too late (silly wolf!).
So tonight we’re going to be hanging out in Antioch, spending time with roho and genet and the visiting ottr and his wife, riecka. I foresee a wee bit of alcohol, some tasty food, and me getting the bejesus beaten out of me at poker…
Well, I’ve got some good news to report on the wedding band front. I took takaza‘s ring by the store after work yesterday and we agreed that, yes, it was indeed different from the ring that they had sent. Amanda (who, by the way has been fabulously helpful) checked against their catalog and we found the problem: someone had fumble-fingered the model number when typing in the order. She called the manufacturer and they said they had the correct ring in my size in stock, so they’re priority shipping it; it should be at the store by Wednesday, and Amanda wills end it out the same day for engraving. With luck, it’ll be in my hands by Thursday or Friday at the latest. Yay!
Oh, and in reference to my last entry, my mom asked what’s so great about a Thermapen? Well, it’s a very nice, very accurate instant-read thermometer with a nice big digital readout. What I like is that the hinge gives you a good angle to stick the thermocouple into roasts, chicken, etc. Theoretically, it’s very durable as well, but obviously they need a bit of work there. I’m pretty confident they can resolve the issue quickly, though.
Hmm. Need to make a grocery list and plan out the menu for the week. We’ve been eating out a lot, which gets a bit pricey sometimes…
Well, not all woe: there’s some good, and some bad.
Let’s start with the good: Back in March, I mentioned that my coffee pot had died. Special thanks to kwikdog for pointing out that the warranty was still applicable! I sent it off and, after about a month, I got it back, with a new pot (which contains a lot of the electronics). Total cost: shipping to the repair shop. That’s it. Yay!
Not long after that, I noticed that my wedding ring was cracked. Now, it just so happens that the place where we bought our rings only has one location in all of Illinois – and it’s on the way home from work for me. Perfect! I dropped off my ring and received a slip and a promise that it would be repaired and back to me in 8-10 days. Well, it’s been over a month now, and the ring came back from the manufacturer last week. The local store had to have the engraving done themselves, so it wasn’t ready until Saturday. yesterday Dan and I went to pick it up and…it’s not the same ring. Yes, it’s a ring of yellow gold with a white gold band around it, but it’s a different design, a much heavier weight, the difference between the white and yellow golds is barely discernable, and honestly it’s not a design that we would have chosen. So now we need to figure out with the store what we’re going to do; the object was to have two rings that matched – that’s kind of the point of the rings. I’m going to meet with the store manager this afternoon and see what’s to be done, but I am not happy. To her credit, she’s been very helpful and pleasant up until now, and the whole transaction has been free. We’ll see how it goes today.
Oh, and a new tale to add to the stack: My Thermapen has died, after only five months of use. Yeah, that ain’t gonna work. I bought a new battery to see if that was all that was necessary, but that isn’t it. I’ll be contacting the manufacturer this week.
I was feeling a bit blah after work on Friday – nothing serious, just a series of reminders of why life sucks when you’re a contractor. I found that a good workout at the gym helped – yay for endorphins! It didn’t hurt that it was a lovely day out so the walk back was quite pleasant. Takaza saw that I was restless and we went out to do a little shopping, with a stop by EBGames (fruitless, but for some reason the store at Lincoln Village always sucks) and Target. We grabbed dinner at Hub’s on Dempster in Skokie, which was pronounced to be undistinguished.
I got an early start on Saturday and went down to the EBGames on Elston, where I found what I was looking for: Psychonauts, allegedly the best platform game from 2005, and a very fun and playable game. It happened that that was right near the Edward Don Outlet (a restaurant supply store) that I had heard was closing. I stopped by and was impressed by two things: first, all the cool merchandise marked down by 70%, and second, the HUGE line waiting to check out – like a good 20-30 minute wait. I looked all through the store but I didn’t see anything that I HAD to have; I saw some nice stuff at great prices, but the kitchen is crammed full now, and I couldn’t see anything that would merit the major project of making space for it. More’s the pity. Quasiskunk, I did think of the stuff you might need for Con Suite this year, but I knew you were off in the boonies for the weekend, so…oh well. I passed the afternoon playing Psychonauts (it’s one of those games where you sit down to play and suddenly it’s three hours later!) then it was time to go.
A friend of our had given us complimentary tickets to the final home game of the season for the Chicago Rush arena football team. We took the CTA out to the Allstate Arena and got in just before the game started. It was a good game, once I got used to the arena football rules, and Chicago kicked the butt of the Utah Blaze. The highlight of the game was actually halftime, when they had a game of “mascot football” – yes, sixteen mascots from all around the Chicago area turned out, including Staley the Bear (who gets points for being the most willing to take a hard fall), Benny the Bull (definitely the most personality), Skates (the home-arena favorite), Tommy Hawk (from the Blackhawks), Sparky (from the Chicago Fire), plus mascots from Loyola, Northwestern, and several other schools and companies. The highlights were Benny laying out “celebrity quarterback” Mike Adamle, and a bee mascot putting a shoulder in the gut of the Rush’s mascot Grabowski (yeesh, what a costume). He needed a sec outside the huddle to catch his breath. The “game” was a disorganized wreck, of course, but extremely entertaining from the stands. We took off in the middle of the third quarter with the Rush up something like 76 to 24 and found ourselves with no way back to the CTA. We opted to walk to the ATS at O’Hare and take that in to the CTA station at the airport, getting home at around 11 PM. Datahawk and Linnaeus were watching Rent when we got home, but we were too tired to watch, so we headed off to bed.
On Sunday I puttered around a bit while Data slept through me grinding coffee, the dishwasher running, and the cat meowing. I only wish I could sleep that soundly. Dan and I drove up to check on my wedding band (more about that in my next post) and sat down at a nearby Potbelly Sandwiches to make use of the free wi-fi and try to hammer out the final details of FRAC. Unfortunately, what we determined was that, while we had a set course, neither of us was happy with it. We kicked around ideas on the way home and I think we have some solid plans on how things are going to go, but we’re going to need to do some research this Saturday. We got home and had a quiet evening of video games and laptops.
Not a lot of plans for the week, though we’re going to have dinner with partran tonight. I’m sure stuff will come up, as it always does 🙂
Adblock Plus is very cool. Especially when people are posting really freakin’ stupid memes all over the place.
Good news! I have too much blood in my cholesterol system. Or rather, I don’t have too much cholesterol in my blood system. Well, I do, but it’s not something I need to take meds for – I’m classified as “high borderline” on most counts, but compared to last year the numbers are declining, so all my work at the gym has paid off. My weight hasn’t really changed much, unfortunately; this means that in the diet-exercise balance, I need to work on improving my diet. The even better news is that everything else checked out, and I’m pretty healthy otherwise.
This week has gone by pretty quickly. Tuesday we helped woodychitwn pick up some shelving for his about-to-open comics store (they do mail-order, too!), and had a tasty dinner at Heartland Cafe. Last night siriuswolfstar and simbalion joined us for dinner, and tonight we’re going to have dinner with daveqat and jimcyl. I reckon we’ll have to have dinner with perro and prfanity at some point just to complete the apartment trifecta 🙂 Tonight should be fun, though – we’re going to check out Tweet, which gets good reviews from The Reader.
Planning continues apace for Wuffmeet. To those of you who are attending and have not yet made your hotel reservations: DO IT NOW! We’re being asked to give up some space because it appears (to them) that we don’t have many people in our room block. The sooner you reserve, the more bargaining leverage we’ll have. If you need the info again, just let me know.
Back to work now!
As promised, takaza and I retreated to the Hoffman Estates La Quinta on Friday after work for a weekend of relaxation and planning. Once we had a chance to decompress a bit we took to the car and went in search of dinner. Our wanderings took us to Woodfield Mall, and while we briefly considered trying out the new meat faucet there, we instead opted to cheap it out and resorted to the food court instead. After that it was back to the hotel to relax and sleep, eventually.
We were up relatively early on Saturday. The plan was to research the FRAC route, though we were racing the weather to do it since the forecast predicted incoming steady rain starting that afternoon. We had a couple of funny things happen that I can’t really talk about since people who will be participating in FRAC will be reading this 🙂 Maybe later. Anyway, the rain started to pick up at about 2 PM so we called off the scouting (we got about 75% of the work done, I’d say) and instead went in search of what is alleged to be the best hot chocolate in Chicago. We tried it, and we’d have to agree – extremely tasty!
Since the rest of the day was shot for FRAC research, we gave siriuswolfstar to see what he and simbalion were up to. It turns out they were just a few blocks north of us, so we met up at North Bridge Mall and amused ourselves with a bit of window shopping (and taking some amusing pictures in the process). We wound up grabbing a table and just chatting for a good hour or more, which was a nice break after all the walking we had done all day. After we parted ways, we headed back to the hotel. We weren’t feeling hungry until late, plus we were too lazy to actually drive anywhere, so we ordered pizza and pasta for a local joint. We have a winner for Wuffmeet, I think. The tortellini alfredo that I had was enough for three people, and I think it would nicely supplement any pizza we order.
On Sunday I snuck out early in the driving rain and spent some time at a nearby Panera having breakfast and reading the paper. Around 11:30 I went back to the hotel to find that Dan had just woken up. We got packed up and checked out and talked to the front desk folks to make sure that everything was in order for Wuffmeet. We then went made a Sam’s Club run to check prices for Wuffmeet budgeting, then a stop at American Science and Surplus to see if there were any useful knickknacks that might come in handy at our upcoming conventions. The rest of the evening was spent relaxing at home and catching up on Tivo.
Not too exciting for a weekend away from home, but that’s just fine by me!
You might be surprised by what Nathan Fillion (aka Captain Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly/Serenity) gets off on in this 30-second (safe for work) YouTube clip from the Weekend of Horror Conventiion right here in Chicago last month.
Well, it’s been a real up-and-down week. On Wednesday, I heard from takaza that things weren’t going well at work. I skipped the gym and met him after work and we had a nice walk in a nearby park and talked some of his stress out. After that, we drove around a bit, exploring some of the northern burbs that we hadn’t seen before, and then wound up at Old Orchard Mall where we splurged a bit for some not-bad hot cocoa and some excellent chocolates. I’d like to think that helped Dan a lot and made the rest of his week a little better. We capped off the evening with a nice episode of The Amazing Race, though we’re bummed that the oldsters got bounced. They seemed like genuinely nice people.
Yesterday was relatively unexciting – work, then a cardio workout at the gym. Because of my knees, I’m sort of limited in the cardio I can do, so I vary between the treadmill and the recumbent stationary bike. If I ride the bike, I can definitely get my heart rate up, even though I top out at about twenty minutes and about 130 calories burned. If I use the treadmill I can go twenty-five minutes (and longer – I need to push that a bit) and that theoretically burns 320 calories or so, but my heart rate doesn’t really get into the “cardio” range. I need to figure out how to better balance these. I’m alternating those with one day of shoulder and abdominals exercises and one day of arm and leg exercises; that seems to work pretty well, but I’m having a hard time sticking with the five-times-a-week schedule my doctor has suggested. Well, some is better than none, anyway.
This weekend we’re rewarding Dan a bit for the two weeks from hell that he’s had by spending it at the La Quinta in Hoffman Estates. It isn’t all fun, though – we’re checking out the hotel to make sure they’re ready for Wuffmeet, and on Saturday we’ll be scouting the FRAC course, taking pictures, making notes, and making evil plots 🙂 On Sunday we’ll be hitting Sam’s Club to check prices for food and drinks and play with budgeting a bit more. In between, though, we’ll be doing a lot of relaxing, which I’m looking forward to.
Gotta get some work done, but look out for some links coming up this afternoon!
When last we left our intrepid heroes, they were prepping for a big weekend. Well, sort of. Takaza wasn’t feeling well when he got home on Friday night, so we had a quiet night in. On Saturday I was up bright and early, ready to enjoy a beautiful day. Dan was feeling better, so we headed down to the Cadillac Room at Soldier Field for the event of the day, Night of 100 Champions, a fundraiser for Gay Games Chicago. Considering that there were over 80 tables, with ten seats each, and seats were $75 each, this was going to be quite a fundraiser. Over the course of the weeks leading up to it, we had been told that we would have a variety of jobs, but ultimately they all collapsed down to “Setup”. We started at about 11:30 AM and worked pretty much continuously until the event started at 5:30 PM. We did a quick change into more dressy clothes and assumed our roles as facilitators for the silent auction – checking that bids were following the proper increments, answering any questions anyone might have, that sort of thing. the auction was pretty impressive, too – stuff like flights anywhere in the US, cruises, extravagant dinner and theater packages, artwork, and even a signed, framed tennis racket from Billie Jean King. The auction was supposed to end at 8 PM, then it got pushed back to 8:15, then 8:30, then finally 10 PM. This wasn’t too big of a deal – the object was to raise the most money possible, of course, but communications were poor at best, and there was a lot of confusion.
I should say that the volunteers and almost all of the organizers that we worked with were great, and we had a lot of fun with them; the only downer, and it was a BIG downer, was one of the organizers who was completely and obviously incompetent. She had a tendency to rush in and micromanage, pull you away from the tasks that you were working on to do stuff that was important to her, change her mind on how things should be done and snap at you when you didn’t read her mind, and generally being completely annoying and difficult. When she changed the (previously arranged, sensible and organized) plans for assembling the winning bids and accepting payment for winning items for the auction right as we were trying to close the auction – that was when Dan and I decided we’d had enough. We packed up our stuff and went home.
Initially, I think we were both pretty pissed off and really doubting what our participation with Gay Games might be for the next few months, I’ve come to realize that we were having problems with one person and one person only (though someone should have seen the problems and told her to knock it off). We also learned that if you’re competent, you’ll find yourself in a leadership role pretty darned quickly.
I was tired and sore Sunday morning and Dan was even worse off, suffering a dual curse of respiratory nastiness and a flare-up of the pinched nerve problems from earlier. He elected to stay home and I attended the MFF meeting. I was still in a pretty grumpy mood from the night before so I probably wasn’t the most pleasant to be around, but the meeting passed quickly. We spent Sunday night hanging out and being laptop geeks, as usual 🙂
Last night Dan was facing a recurrence of the god-awful all-nighter from last week. faced with dinner alone, I opted to walk up to Tom Yum, the sushi/Thai place around the corner from us, and had a tasty and inexpensive sushi dinner. The walk back was pleasant and perfect after a good meal. Dan didn’t leave work until after 11 PM, and didn’t come to bed until after 1 AM. We talked a little about the silliness that had kept him so late, and that got me more and more irritated until i couldn’t get back to sleep. I finally got to sleep again at about 3 AM, so you understand why I’m dragging a good bit today. Bleah. I’ll still hit the gym today, though, and we have a nice dinner of fettuccine carbonara lined up for dinner. Pasta makes everything better 🙂
Time to head home!
Don’t know what the Friday Dance is? Just jump up and dance around because the next two days won’t be spent stuck at a desk all day. YAY!
Last night was lots of fun. After pulling an all-nighter, Takaza was told that a sizeable bonus is in the pipeline for him. This, coupled with the nice chunk of change I’m getting back on my federal and state taxes will help to pay down some of our debt that much faster, which makes us very happy. To celebrate, Dan informed me (as I was relaxing, exhausted from the gym) that we were going out to celebrate! We stopped first at Martin’s Big and Tall, a nice little shop in Lincoln Square. I had thought that they were a bit expensive in the past, but since Dan and I both needed shirts, we stopped by to see what they had. It turns out that they had some great shirts at reasonable prices (MUCH better than Casual Male’s shoddy crap), so we bought several, including the spiffy shirt I have on today.
From there we decided to explore Lincoln Park a bit (and hang out with trixies and chads) and took the Brown Line down to Armitage. Dan was in the mood for steak and while we were looking around we stumbled onto Select Cut Steak House at the corner of Armitage and Halsted. The steaks were good. We both got combos; Dan had a strip steak and chicken breasts (“it’d be good on a chicken sandwich, not so much by itself”), I had the strip steak and ribs. It’s telling that as I dipped my fries, Dan pointed out that it was probably barbecue sauce I was dipping into and not ketchup. It took me a couple of fries to tell the difference. We also felt a bit rushed by the waitron, which was silly since the place wasn’t busy at all. All in all, it was an OK meal but I don’t see us going back. We finished off the night by stopping by my new favorite place for desserts, Bobtail, just off the Southport El stop. I {heart} the Brown Line!
So tomorrow is Night of 100 Champions. We’re supposed to be showing up at around 11 AM at Soldier Field and help set up the raffle and silent auction, then (tentatively) will be helping to sell tickets and pimp the auction items. Theoretically, we’re also supposed to be helping out with the brunch at the same location on Sunday, but that’s even more loosely-organized. I think I’ve been spoiled by the conventions I’ve worked on, because volunteer organization for this event is a bit lackluster and disorganized; I’ve always followed the guidelines that volunteers want to know what they’re going to do, where they’re going to do it, and when they are going to be there. There’s a few gaps in these facts for this event. This is a shame because there’s plenty of people willing to help, but I fear that by the end of the night it’s going to be a valiant few who have stuck around through the chaos who have to clean up. I hope I’m wrong.
I had a few other items to touch on, but work calls. More stuff to come!
Poor takaza. He went in to work at 7 AM yesterday and got home just in time for my alarm to go off this morning at 5 AM. Theoretically this is the last of these crazy overtime blitzes, but we’ll see. His boss has dangled the prospect of a spot bonus for him when this is all over (one of those “might be $20, might be $thousands” kind of things). All I’m sayin’ is, it better be on the north end of that range.
Dan’s home sleeping now, thank heavens, and told his boss that he’ll be unavailable before 2 PM, and even then he’ll only be working from home (which I think is generous, but I’m a bastard that way). A nasty side-effect of this is that I kept waking up last night, worrying about him. At 3 AM, I woke up and imagined horrible scenarios of Dan in a car wreck on his way home, so I had to get up and IM him to make sure he was still at work and safe. What can I say? My mind works in weird ways when I’m sleepy.
So now it’s 9:30 AM and I’m yawning up a storm. Even after this morning’s three cups of coffee, the can of Monster on my desk looks awfully inviting, but I’m going to save that until this afternoon, when I’m really gonna need it.
Larry Warner and Former Illinois governor George Ryan were just found guilty on all counts of 22 counts of racketeering conspiracy, mail fraud, tax fraud and lying to FBI agents.
Goodness – one public post in the last week? Honestly, last week just wasn’t that interesting. The weekend, however…
On Friday, I got home and just felt generally tired. I skipped the gym and was even thinking about grabbing a nap when takaza called on his way home and suggested we go out and do a bit of shoe shopping. He needed my help because he has been dealing with a nasty pinched nerve in his back which limited his mobility somewhat (he’s very much on the mend now, fortunately). After some shoe shopping we decided to grab dinner out. We opted to investigate Lincoln Square. We grabbed a good parking spot and had a brief browse through The Chopping Block, a neat kitchenware store, and enjoyed a bit of music from the busker in the square. Our first choice, though it looked quite tasty, didn’t really tickle Dan’s fancy, so we walked a bit further down to La Bocca della Verita’. Dan had a very tasty (though somewhat plain) gnocchi pomodoro, and I opted for the ravioli Anatra, which had a duck breast, sage, and shallot filling. Rather good, I’ll say. Alas, the atmosphere was a bit too bustling and loud, and I doubt we’ll return.
On Saturday, Dan had to go in to work. I spent the morning and part of the afternoon hanging out with datahawk (who had spent the night) and filing my taxes (hey last-minute folks: Taxact will e-file your state and federal taxes for $16!). After some false starts (I fumbled some employer ID numbers on my W-2’s), I submitted my taxes and had notification back within a few hours. The nice refund of $900 will go…well, it’ll all go towards credit cards, which is pretty boring. Yay for debt reduction, though!
At about 4 PM Dan, Data, Linnaeus and I headed out on the El down to River North for a truly wonderful early dinner at Heaven on Seven. We were joined by emrldgirrl, wiktowasichu, siriuswolfstar, simbalion, lisagems, Moryssa, Dan’s cow-orker nymphara, Data’s mom, and Data’s brother R.C. Dan had the extremely tasty country fried steak (again), and I splurged a bit and got the “Jimmy Jr. Feed Me!” a four-course meal of whatever the chef decides to give you (the larger “Jimmy Feed Me!” is seven courses). This was truly amazing. I started off with two demitasses, one with their delicious gumbo and the other with a delicious turtle soup. This was followed by a jalapeno-cheddar corn muffin and Cajun-seasoned halibut that was nothing short of astonishing – flaky, tender, and perfectly-cooked. Not too spicy either! After this was beef tenderloin served on a bed of garlic mashed potatoes. Yum! (By this point I was sharing the dishes all around because there was no way I could finish all of it myself!) They finished things off with my choice of dessert from their dinner menu; I opted for the chocolate pecan pie, which everyone agreed was tasty, but the crust was a bit too tough (Lisa guessed, and I agree, that they probably let the dough get too warm as they were rolling out). Regrettably, we were a bit rushed by the end to make our next appointment, but I would absolutely order this again when I have time to savor things a bit more. It’s a hell of a deal at only $24.
After dinner we stumbled downstairs and stuffed an insane number of people into a cab and headed over to the Cadillac Palace Theater for the evening’s main event: the final Chicago performance (this time) of the musical Rent. Dan and I both went in cold, not having seen the movie or listened to (much) of the soundtrack. The performances were solid (although the actress playing Mimi was rather dreadful and in the first act wandered off-key several times) but the experience was marred by an incompetent sound mix that rendered the vocals into mush. When you have a performance where all of the exposition is sung, this meant that I spent a lot of the time trying to guess what was going on, who was who, and what each character’s motivations were. As a result the play really fell flat for me, because I was unable to connect with the characters or really care what happened to them. The songs were pretty good, though, so the evening wasn’t completely wasted. I hope to watch the movie sometime soon and hopefully will maybe get a bit more out of that. After the play we dispersed (slowly – inertia being what it is), but made a stop by the truly tasty Bobtail Soda Fountain for some ice cream with Lisa, Sirius, Simba, and Data. Then it was on to home and collapsing into bed.
Sunday started out slowly, as might be expected given the late night Saturday. Dan had to tend to a few work items, though he fortunately could do that from home. Later in the afternoon we drove up to McHenry to Dan’s mom’s place to drop off her taxes (which Dan had filled out) and visited with her for a bit. We drove back to the city through the pouring rain and arrived just in time to meet Simba and Sirius for dinner at Calo Ristorante. Much pizza was eaten, and it’s always fun hanging out with friends. We trundled off to bed shortly after we got home.
So then we have this week. We have the final volunteers meeting tonight for Night of 100 Champions. This will pretty much be eating up our time next weekend, both the gala on Saturday and the brunch on Sunday, so we’ll probably miss the MFF staff meeting on Sunday. Other than that, I have a couple of MFF registration projects I’m working on that I would like to finish this week. Right now, though, there’s work here I need to do so I’m off. Hope everyone has a great week!
You know, I’ve always wondered about midget ninjas…
Well, that wasn’t too bad of a weekend. datahawk came over on Friday night and we hung out (mostly her keeping me company while I cooked up a massive amount of chicken broth for chicken and dumplings). takaza didn’t get home from work until after 8 PM, and data was kind enough to run around the corner to the taquiera and pick up some dinner for us. We didn’t eat until late, though, and because of a nasty attack of reflux I wound up staying up until almost 1 AM, long after everyone else had gone to bed.
On Saturday, Dan had to go into work again, so I passed the time relaxing and chatting a bit with data and Linnaeus before doing the final prep work for the chicken and dumplings. When we headed over to siriuswolfstar‘s place at around 4 PM, Dan still wasn’t home. After the requisite circling (only about ten minutes, though) we found a decent parking spot and trudged upstairs. The evening is a bit of a blur and not because I was drinking that much (though that Stolichnaya Elite vodka was very tasty!). Dan and Paul showed up at around 7, and I’m really glad they both made it. People seemed to like the chicken, judging by the locust-like rapidity with which it was consumed, and the rest of the party was quite entertaining. Alas, the previous evening’s late night, combined with Dan being tired from a long day at work led us to bow out early once again. As usual, it sounds like the party got a whole lot more entertaining after we left, but them’s the breaks.
I spent a good bit of Sunday morning quietly reading the paper and drinking coffee. I say quietly because Data didn’t get in until 5 AM and was fast asleep on our couch 🙂 Long about noon, though, we managed to get everyone awake and were joined by mirkowuff and perro for an extremely tasty brunch at Tre Kroner. Amazingly, we only had to wait 15 minutes for a table, and while we waited Dan picked up some adorable hand-carved animals at the Swedish Shop next door, a wolf and a fox. After brunch we found out that Dan wouldn’t have to go in to work after all, which was a little annoying since we hadn’t made any plans for the day because we assumed he would have to go in. Instead, Perro, Mirko, and Data went their separate ways and we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening catching up on our Tivo backlog. That wasn’t a bad alternative, actually.
As for the rest of the week, I’m hoping to be a bit more diligent on my gym attendance, and we’re trying to improve our dinner menus as well. I hope to get the Registration budget for MFF wrapped up as well, and get caught up on Registration confirmation postcards, too. Lots to do!
Just some stuff that struck as amusing today…
Here’s a couple of intriguing products:The Lazy Drinker is a cooler that holds 16 bottles plus ice and automatically meters out any of 5,000 preprogrammed drinks. A steal at only $750!
A bit more attainable is the AeroPress, a device which squeezes foxes…no, that’s not right. Sorry, it’s a one-cup coffee maker that’s purported to make an excellent (as rated by coffee snobs!) cup of coffee in less than a minute. I’m intrigued, but I’m not sure if I’d go through the hassle to make one cup at a time. Good for traveling, though.
ursulav amused me immensely this morning with her post comparing the Bible to Jesus fanfic. I especially liked the speculation that some of the proto-gospels were crappily written
and full of Mary Sue disciples who all had green eyes and Jesus fell madly in love with them and…wait, was that the Last Temptation of Christ?
Via the ever-useful Lifehacker, we have Tab Mix Plus, a fabulous extension for Firefox which is an excellent tab manager, plus is saves your session if Firefox crashes, so you can pick up where you left off, and a couple of other nifty things. I just installed it last night and I like it!
And finally: Happy birthday, siriuswolfstar!
Overheard on this morning’s traffic report:
And on the Kennedy, a dump truck flipped over and spilled a bunch of dirtbags into the roadway. Um, bags of dirt. Topsoil, I mean.
Gotta keep those lowlifes off the freeways 🙂
