More librarians meetings

After Cincinnati last weekend, today I am in Chicago for yet another librarians' meeting - meetings are a favorite librarians' activity - the business owners, particularly the hotels, in the cities where the ALA meets, love the librarians - we stay out of our rooms in meetings all day, so they can clean them, and we eat and drink a lot.

Anyways, the morning meeting today was not too terrible, either food-wise, nor content-wise (it was the afternoon that devolved into horror, a poor facilitator in front of a room full of over 100 people, of which at least half coulda done a better job) - but I will spare you the content details (that, after all, only a librarian could love) and tell you about the food.

Breakfast, supplied by the hotel, was Starbucks coffee, pastries & bagels, and real Dannon fruit on the bottom yogurt, with real metal spoons to eat it with. I got an OJ and snagged a peach yogurt, not my fave, but better than strawberry, and at least it wasn't lite, a.k.a. artificially sweetened and jelled; then at the break got more coffee and a Starbucks muffin (which was disappointing in the way that all Starbucks pastries are - probably the hotel stuff would have been better.)
Rubber chicken lunch, again on the hotel - I snubbed the rubber chicken (some kind of boneless breast) and had coleslaw, salad, and a not very good roll - the chicken had been cooked with steak-house-wedge style potatoes, and those were actually the best thing. And again I chose wrong - I got the cheesecake, which was very ordinary; there was a chocolate cake that everyone raved about. But then again, lover of my own cooking that I am, I might not've been nearly so impressed with the cake.

For dinner, we went to the Weber Grill Restaurant; much better than the hotel, but still not exactly my idea of a great meal. I had barbecued beef brisket, and the piece I had had an annoying fat strip in the middle, but the meat was tender, the sauce was tasty, and the coleslaw was much better than the hotels. The Maker's Mark baked beans were my favorite part of the meal; maybe I'll have to work Maker's Mark into my honey baked beans.

Although probably putting Maker's Mark into beans is what my Dad used to say when my mother took the good bourbon (probably all of 1/4 of a cup, not more than a shot or two) to flavor the hard sauce for fruitcake, "Waste of good bourbon, harumph, grumble grumble".