…And sometimes you roll snake eyes.

I’ve been trying to expand our menu a bit lately, and investigating interesting recipes we find online. We’ve had good luck with a couple of different cuisines and dishes, so I was really hopeful. Tonight’s candidate was Shredded Chicken Red Curry with Rice Noodles. And it was…a bust. I was hoping cooking the onion and garlic down would make it more palatable to Dan, but it wound up driving him upstairs to get away from the strong smell. The deal-killer for me was the relatively large amount of fish sauce – the finished product tasted spicy, slightly onion-garlicky, which devolved into a strange, fishy flavor that came out of nowhere. Maybe 1/2 tablespoon of fish sauce instead to two tablespoons? Ah well. Live and learn…

Beer, Naan, and Easter!

Busy times over the past few days. Last Thursday we met with perro and darkwolph for some MFF stuff, followed by a thoroughly unpleasant dinner at Ram Brewery (stupidly crowded, stupidly loud, and mediocre food). Friday night we joined linnaeus for a delightful dinner at roho and genet‘s featuring chicken tikka masala and homemade naan – yummy! Saturday I worked in the morning, then takaza and I did some shopping, including finally ordering a console for our sectional sofa – hopefully that’ll be here by Memorial Day! And on Sunday, we spent the day with Dan’s family.

Not much going on this week, though. I’m dabbling with possible hotels and restaurants for our trip out to Iowa (in early June, maybe?). On various people’s advice, I’m looking at Iowa City, but we’ll see how that works out. Also, last night we nailed down our travel plans next week for Furry Connection North. After going to see This American Life Live! on Thursday night in Gurnee, we’ll be driving down to scenic Mishawaka, IN, where we’ll arrive way late and spend the night (yay free hotel room!). Then on Friday we’ll hit the road at a reasonable hour and arrive in Ann Arbor just in time to pick up lunch at Zingerman’s Deli. From there we’ll head over to the FCN hotel in Novi.

Dan and I will both be working Security, so we’ll be all over the place during the convention. Depending on our security scheduling, I’m hoping to be able to hit Zingerman’s Roadhouse for dinner on Saturday, perhaps followed by a celebration of libations (look for a more specific posting about that soon).

Then there’s Memorial Day coming up – we’re expecting a house full of people, and we have a lot of projects that we want to get done before then. You know, all those cleaning projects that normal people wouldn’t worry about but I actually fret about (“floss between cracks in banister”) 🙂 Lots of stuff to do!

Wedding Bells Are Ringing…

Wow, what an awesome weekend! And now that the time-consuming testing that has been killing me at work has wrapped up, I even have time to write about it.

First off, the important news: I’m engaged! Again! 🙂

On Friday night, takaza gave me a lovely bunch of roses when he got home. We had invited roho and genet over for a small, quiet dinner. While I was cooking (meatloaf, which came out fabulous!), Dan reached into my pocket and took out my ring, saying he was concerned I’d lose it. I pointed out I take it off at work every day (the joys of working in GMP areas) so he shrugged and put it back in my pocket – or so I thought. When I took a break from the kitchen, I started looking around for my ring – it wasn’t in my pocket! That’s when Dan got down on one knee, pulled out an Altoid tin and opened it, revealing my ring, and asked me to marry him, again! In light of recent news from Iowa, we’ll be driving over there in May or June on a Friday, get married, and spend a nice weekend there. I’m looking forward to it!

Saturday I got an early start on things, dropping a good chunk of the old conbooks that have been in our garage in a local recycling bin and disposed of a futon that we’ve been dragging around for several years but getting relatively little use from. I also stopped by the Grayslake Farmers Market for its opening day, but there wasn’t much of interest there, unfortunately. Afterwards, Dan and I spent the afternoon and evening working on some MFF stuff that, as aureth so obliquely put it, will become apparent in about seven and a half months 🙂

Sunday was a good day to relax, as the weather outside turned to sleet and snow. We tried to install an overhead light in our living room, only to find that the wiring is wonky enough that we’re better off leaving it as it is. The balance of the afternoon was spent watching Dollhouse and catching up on three episodes of Heroes (only five to go!).

As for this week, it looks like we’re going to do dinner with a couple of wuffs at some point, but not too much planned beyond that. Oh, and maybe installing that light in the upstairs bathroom. Good times…

HELP! Need volunteers for Anthrocon!

As many of you know, I am in charge of Artists Alley at Anthrocon. We operate a little differently than most Artists Alleys because of the Pennsylvania tax laws – we perform all sales transactions at a central cashiers table, collecting sales tax on each purchase, then at the end of each day pay all the artists back, less the sales tax. This year promises to be the largest Artists Alley we have ever had at Anthrocon; while we are getting upgraded equipment for cashiers, this means that we are in critical need of more staff (in addition to the excellent folks from previous years who will be returning).

How does it work? Well, I need at least four hours of your time each day (this can be adjusted according to your desired schedule, though). In return, you get:
* Free admission to Anthrocon
* A free Anthrocon 2009 T-shirt
* The right to pick up your badge and registration materials in the peaceful calm of the Operations Office, far from the madding crowd of Registration
* An excellent staff dinner on Sunday night of the convention

What a deal, eh? If you’re interested, you can comment on this post or drop me a line at alley-2009@anthrocon.org. Also, if you know of anyone who might be interested, please point them my way! Thanks.

This has been a glorious weekend

…of doing pretty much nothing. Ain’t it grand? Yesterday we bummed around the house until late afternoon, then drove over to Sunset Foods, a Chicago-area grocery chain that kind of falls between Jewel and Whole Foods Market. They had everything we needed, but had a very interesting selection of stuff. Nice to know that there’s an option when I need something a little more upscale than my usual haunt (Garden Fresh Market) come up short, like when we need crème fraiche. On the bright side, we scored some Passover Pepsi, made with cane sugar – very tasty! While we were out the rain turned to sleet and then snow; I’m glad we wrapped up when we did. We stayed in for the rest of the night, making a simple dinner and watching the latest episode of “Dollhouse”.

Today has been even more relaxed. Dan and I had a nice shower, and he is now making homemade macaroni and cheese with bacon while I enjoy a nice drink (Tanqueray Rangpur Gin + Meyer Lemon Soda – yum!). We’ve got a new episode of “The Amazing Race” tonight, which is always awesome. We’ve been talking about plans for Memorial Day, and clearly we have a couple of weekends that will be spent doing a deep cleaning of the place in order to get it up to snuff according to my various neuroses 🙂 Hope everyone has had an excellent weekend!

Mark your calendars…

The evening of Thursday, April 23. Got plans yet? You should.

Movie tickets are on sale NOW for This American Life—Live!, our stage show that will be beamed via satellite to more than 400 movie screens nationwide on Thursday, April 23rd.

Ira Glass will host an actual episode of the radio program, performed onstage by some of our favorite contributors. Dan Savage, Starlee Kine, and Mike Birbiglia will tell stories. David Rakoff and Dave Hill will conduct a “special investigation.” Plus a new cartoon by Chris Ware, additional visuals by Arthur Jones, and a very special appearance by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer! The performance will last around two hours. We’re going to capture the whole thing with a bunch of HD cameras, and send it live* to movie theatres all over the country.

It’s gonna be a fun night. We hope you’ll come.

One night only. Thursday, April 23rd. In select movie theatres and performing arts centers nationwide.

*8 PM EDT / 7 PM CDT / 6 PM MDT and time delayed to 8PM PDT (also 8 PM in Arizona and 7 PM in Hawaii).

List of theaters where this will be showing, with links for tickets.

We’re definitely going to this, either in Gurnee or Lincolnshire. Tickets are $20 each. Who’s interested in joining us?

A Quick Word…

It’s been a completely insane week at work and I’ve been so exhausted when I got home I haven’t been up to writing anything. Thank heavens for LoudTwitter, eh?

Anyway, I did want to mention one very important thing: Online registration for Furry Connection North ends at midnight tonight! If you haven’t already, you should really go and register now. It’ll give Gir and Nik and all of those fine folks warm fuzzies 🙂 FCN is a great convention! We’ll be there, and you should be too. Hope to see you there!

(Oh yeah, and did I mention something about a party at FCN? One of those might just be happening…)

A-Twittering We Shall Go…

So once upon a time, I signed up for Twitter. I’ve found over time that while I’m still posting here on LiveJournal, the quick, off-the-cuff stuff is going onto Twitter. Because I know I have several non-LiveJournalers who follow my journal (mostly family members), I just implemented LoudTwitter to ship my tweets here. The tweets will show up once per day, posted at midnight Chicago time, they’ll be behind a cut tag (i.e. you’ll need to click to see them), and they’ll have a unique user icon: This will hopefully let folks who aren’t interested quickly skip past the post. I’ll be the first to say that I’m not a huge fan of LoudTwitter, but I think this is a pretty reasonable compromise.

The Fire Still Burns

We’d seen each other at a few Lake Area Furry Friends (LAFF) events and at Duckon, though I don’t think we had ever really talked much.

Then, in December I attended a Christmas cookie exchange party at wyldekyttin and crim_ferret‘s place. We chatted a bit at the party and had an amusing time during a game of “Truth or Dare” (nothing too exciting, you pervs! The clothes stayed on, thankyouverymuch). Interest was expressed by both parties, though not to each other.

Then came the LAFF New Years Eve party. Signals got crossed, unintended messages were sent, and neither of us knew where we stood. Finally, in February, e-mails were exchanged, and we set up a date: dinner and a movie. Dinner was a forgettable sandwich place. The movie was Mel Gibson’s Payback – a heck of a date movie, eh? After the movie, we went back to his place and stayed up very late talking. We talked about our lives, he showed me pictures and videos of himself and his friends. I left his place very late, but elated. What had started with a spark two months earlier became a fire.

February 27, 1999 was my first date with takaza. Ten years to the day, I can say that fire still burns brightly. I love you so much, Dan!

The Only Thing Constant Is Change

Pardon the crappy cellphone pictures.

These are pictures of the new, “improved” lobby of the Hyatt Regency Woodfield in Schaumburg, IL – the former home of Midwest FurFest. As you can see, the koi pond and the comfortable, multilevel seating is completely gone, replaced by an awkward island of chairs and sofas amid a sea of giant…pyramid…things.

Because of the small number of rooms and the lack of sufficient function space, there’s no way we would really ever be able to return the Hyatt, but this is just plain disappointing.

Meanwhile…

So as I mentioned, we got our new sofa last weekend. We had to give it a good workout, so we invited folks over to hang out both Saturday and Sunday, being graced by the presence of roho, genet, linnaeus, and steviemaxwell. We watched some TiVo, took part in the Midwest FurFest online staff meeting, and ordered pizza. It was a good, low-stress weekend.

It looks like we’re going to do a little shopping at Ikea tonight (yes, girtygrin, I agree with pretty much everything you said 🙂 We need to pick up an overhead light for the living room and also see if we can find a narrow-ish (12″ wide) end table, or something that can serve as such. genet will be joining us for dinner tomorrow, and Thursday night we’ll be doing laundry and packing because on Friday evening after work we fly out to Pittsburgh. We’re going to help a little at the Anthrocon storage locker, meet with the DLCC about plans for the coming year, and generally make sure everything is shaping up well as we plan for the coming Anthrocon. We’re flying back Sunday evening.

Not too much else to talk about today, though I did want to mention that I came across a great webcomic called Paradigm Shift, a Chicago-based police/paranormal comic. I’m extremely impressed with the artwork; the artist plainly is local and works from either photographs or by standing right at the locations. I especially enjoy stuff like the last panel on this page – I know that Citgo! It’s at the corner of Addison and Halsted, and I’ve watched the Chicago Pride parade while standing on that corner. And it’s fun to know that the first panel on this page is the view from the Chinatown El station. Now, if only I could figure out where that Ravenswood location is…