Category Archives: westin

Soup and Meetings

It was a busy and productive weekend. The busy part came on Friday and Saturday when we sent out impromptu invites for a small dinner at our place. After spending the afternoon doing a bit of cleaning around the house (yeah, we still have bits of Wuffmeet stuff lying around that we needed to clean up anyway), we welcomed roho, genet, and linnaeus, as well as last-minute additions tozier_wah and mirkowuff. We had a lovely evening of chatting while I made a tasty dinner of tomato soup with roasted garlic and herbs and pumpernickel grilled cheese with extra-sharp cheddar, apples, and thyme. Extremely tasty!

Sunday morning was a slow start, then it was over to the first Midwest FurFest staff meeting of the year. We did a bit of a post-mortem for 2008 and looked ahead to plans for this year. I’m excited about some of the stuff we have in the pipeline, and I’m very glad that the convention is blessed by such a capable and creative staff. takaza was feeling under the weather so I opted to pass on the post-meeting dinner and go home with him. We had a quiet night at home, and headed off to bed surprisingly early, by about 8:30 PM.

I should also mention that Dan and I had dinner with several representatives from the Westin Chicago North Shore. Really, not much int he way of business was discussed, but it was more of a “thank you” dinner from them. We had a great meal, and the company was excellent. Clearly, they do like Midwest FurFest and are excited to have us back this year.

Not much going on this week – work is pretty steady, and I have a couple of small projects to work on at home. We’ll be doing some brewing this weekend (the first time in about four years for me!), so I’m looking forward to that.

Livin’ the Suite Life

Now that was a truly amazing weekend, and exactly what I needed!

With Anthrocon quickly coming up, I admit I was not the most pleasant company for much of last week. Worries about preparations compounded with concerns about projects that were hitting at work right after the convention had me irritable and sleeping quite poorly. takaza, as always, was a saint and put up with me somehow. Then on Friday, I realized that 95% of what I needed for the convention was done and what wasn’t done could be handled at the con. At the same time, I found out that due to equipment and material delivery issues, my projects were being pushed back to late July. All of this set the tone for me to be very relaxed for the weekend.

We kicked off the weekend by checking into the Westin Chicago North Shore. You see, Dan won a free weekend in the Wheeling Suite there (yes, the suite which will be home to the Con Suite at Midwest FurFest) and he suggested that this would be the ideal weekend for it. So after we got settled in, he had to go have lunch with his cow-orkers. I met up with daveqat, jimcyl, and linnaeus and we had dinner at Wakaba, a Japanese restaurant just up the road from the hotel. It was…underwhelming. Standard suburban strip-mall sushi, at slightly inflated prices. I don’t see us going back there. After dinner we relaxed on the suite balcony (15 floors up) and relaxed. That was a nice end to the evening.

Saturday brought Dan’s company picnic. He was in an organizational role this year (yeah, imagine that) and so I was left to run bingo myself. Fortunately, Paul, roho, and genet volunteered to lend a hand, and we spent an enjoyable afternoon calling bingo to several hundred people and giving away over a thousand dollars in gift cards. It was surprisingly entertaining. Afterwards, we had a quick but refreshing swim in the hotel pool, then it was time for the party.

What’s the fun of having a ritzy suite if you can’t have a party? We welcomes a small group of friends up to the suite, ordered pizza, and mixed up some drinks. The weather was perfect as we chatted out on the balconies, admiring the views and watching fireworks set off in distant towns. We took a break at about 10 PM and everyone went down and swam for an hour until the pool closed, then it was back upstairs to chat and refill our drinks. I had a fantastic time and the party really let me relax and not worry about work or Anthrocon.

On Sunday it was time to check out (after sleeping relatively late). jet_der_hund had spent the night with us, and he kindly assisted us in carrying all of our stuff down. Dan took a nap in the afternoon while I puttered with Anthrocon preparations. Following a reasonably short online MFF staff meeting, we both worked on AC stuff while I introduced Dan to some of Big Blue Fox’s outstanding megamixes.

And now it’s Monday and I’m back at work. I’m going to struggle to maintain focus and get stuff done here, but I leave here at 2 PM tomorrow, pick up Dan from work, and then we head for a brief overnight in Cleveland, then Pittsburgh Wednesday morning. By the way, A note to folks in general: if you e-mail me between now and the coming weekend, don’t expect any response until after Anthrocon at the earliest!