The musings of Don Reese

What a month! I just got back from Chicago, my first trip in the Active Directory migration project. This was the training trip for Brian, Matthew and myself, the new members of the team. We had a good part of the work complete before hitting the ground, thanks in no small part to Artie, Tony and Nick, the on-site IT crew. Because of this, we had probably 80% of the job done on the first day, leaving us with plenty of time, not to mention plenty of reason, to hit Rush Street in earnest. So much has changed since the last time I was in the Windy City, eighteen years ago or so, but so much for the better! We started out at Hugo’s Frog Bar, where I tried frog legs for the first time. Tastes like chicken…chicken scampi. I also had this huge porterhouse delivered from Gibson’s Steakhouse, next door. We visited The Terrace at the Conrad, had an excellent meal at Tavern on Rush, ate the Bucket of Boat Trash at Bubba Gump’s Shrimp Co. at the Navy Pier; oh, and we went to Hooter’s (yaaaaawwwnnn…). Brian and I also sampled many a fine pint of Guinness, notably at some of the aforementioned eateries, and also at Charlies Ale House on the Pier. Monday evening we stopped by Sluggers Sports Bar prior to visiting famed Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs get trounced by the Brewers. Afterwards we took in Bar Louie to sympathetically drown our sorrows. If it seems like we partied the whole time while we were in Chicago, well, we did actually put in some hours to get the job done, but describing it really wouldn’t be all that interesting.

In other news, as the commercial goes, I’m now officially in debt up to my eyeballs – I bought a house! I guess I’ll be sticking around the Phoenix metro for a while. More on that later. The two or three of you out there in cyberspace that read my useless drivel on occassion will also notice that I finally upgraded my menu system to the left. Much spiffier, but you’ll definitely need to enable javascript in order to navigate the site from now on.