Posted 8:54 PM by MEATHEAD

Did anybody else attend this years boomsday? I did and I have to say it was the worst one ever. I absolutely love this event but they completely screwed the pooch this year. In some sort of deal with the city and ESPN the vols first home game was moved from saturday the 4 to sunday the 5th so they could present boomsday on saturday instead of the tradtional Labor Day Monday to I guess draw more people. They expected over 500,000 people to attend Boomsday and according to the paper about 300,000 showed up. I thought there were more. Anyway.... how many food tent do you think there should be at a huge event like this? and where should the be located? I may be mistaken but I only saw about 5 food tents, 2 near the beginning and the rest all the way at the other end. With LONG ass lines in each one. One was papa johns selling their little pan pizza for $5. They ran out on more than one occasion and since they weren't actually cooking them there they had to wait for them to be delivered..... kinda ironic there don't you think. Selection.... This event for years has been touted as a barbeque extravaganza. Last year you had Buddy's, Sonny's, Famous Dave's and Smokey's. How many this year??? ZERO!!! ZERROO! I was fucking pissed. They pretty much had billy bob from down the street with his modded trailer into to food cart. I think it was the same people that did Saturday night on the Town which I wasn't impressed with the food selection this year either. Next, Port-O-Johns. How about spreading them out???? They had them all bunched in the middle with none on either end of the road. The fireworks were good as usuall but unfortunately there wasn't any sort of breeze so all the smoke/sulfur just hung over the bridge and much was missed. And, I don't think played the national anthem this year? They are supposed to do that. What made it at least bearable this year was I invited a friend from work and his family who just moved here and this was their first time. I had fun with their kids watching one play in the volunteer landing fountaion(there are fountains and a nice little walk way there if you didn't know, which I didn't) and trying to get the other one to join in. We got there early and were able to get a spot on the top of the Thompson bowling Parking garage and as we missed getting a good spot on the ground we decided to watch the fireworks from their SUV. First time from that vantage point and I thought it was spectacular. Hopefully the city and sponsors will figure out how to put the event back to it's normal performance.

Oh well, Autumn in the square starts tomorrow. Not sure if I'll attend the first one or not. The Velcro Pygmies are also in town tomorrow at Liquid Knoxville, not sure if I'll attend that one either. We have our huge ass e-mail migration this weekend and I need some rest as I have a feeling it will be torture, at the same time my ass is going to be busy as shit for the next couple weeks so I guess I should get in as much evening activities as I can?? We'll see.

Ok, now for my quick chicago trip. We were able to tout it as an offsite meeting as we were visiting CDW and Eisenberg two companies we deal with. It didn't start out that well as I missed my 7am flight but was able get on at 10:30 and met up with co-worker that was arriving at the same time and headed to the hotel where we met the rest of our group and of course I took some ribbing and shit for missing my flight. I deserved it. We then headed to CDW to attend a meeting and toured their facilities. Damn! It's huge! 800,000 square foot distribution center and then additional sales office's close by and downtown. The warehouse was just incredible and Yes... we saw the worm hole! Pretty intricate process of handling orders and processesing them. And a heck of of conveyer belt system. There are a lot of little things that they do to make sure the correct item goes in the correct box and to the correct destination. That pretty much took the entire afternoon and then it was on to dinner... Mmm Free food! :) The next day we had breakfast(more free food) and then headed on to Eisenberg. You may know them better as Kelly Eisenberg who produces corned beef and hot dog products. They make the corned beef brisket in the chicago plant. The first thing that hits you smack in the face is the smell.... phew. They don't slaughter there but the brisket blood and juices... Daamn. Incredible process from start to finish. They use every part of the brisket in some way. They guys trimming are some serious knife artists... I would NOT piss them off for anything cause they could slice and dice you without blinking an eye. They sell off the pure fat trimmings to be used as soap and the other trimmings are sold locally for gyro meat. After that the best part of the day.... A cubs game! Eisenberg was our host as they have their out club box(FREE FOOD AND BEER!!!) We got to go down on Wrigley field and the cubs dugout baby!! Allbeit for about five minutes but it was a fabulous five minutes! We had to leave about the 8th inning to catch our flight back to knoxville and the cubbies lost but it's always a good time at the ballpark. They had a new scanning device at O'Hare that I hadn't seen yet. A little foot stool where you put your shoe and if it beeps that means you need to go ahead and take your shoes off as well and put them through the scanner. I thought that was a nice new feature cause every damn airport has been different so I've been by default taking my shoes off. Anyway... there were some bad storms and instead of delaying our flight while it was still in the terminal they decided instead to let us get on the plane and sit on the runway for almost 2 hours.... not fun. They had close all southern departures cause of a bad storm. I have no problem delaying for safety but geez... they knew the storm was there before we got on the plane. The only good thing was that we were second in line when they opened the southern departures back up and looking back there was a long line of planes waiting.

Good grief. Another long blog :)