Meeting 3 went well. Despite missing Lost (thank god for DVR's) we nailed down a schedule of events, vendor info, sponsorship info, and some of the contests we plan to do. The schedule of events and vendor pages have been updated. Check them out if you haven't already.

Registration has been open for 11 days and we are all amazed at how well it's going this year as opposed to last year. We have had some problems with web browsers not allowing the pop up window for the Paypal payment page, so new instructions have been added to the top of the site. If you know someone who has been having that problem, please help them out. :)

Thanks to the great work from myself (shameless pat on the back) and our VP Ken for putting together an incredible admin area for the registration area. It's working pretty flawlessly and provides great input to the rest of the team working the event. 95% of the registrants so far have stated they plan to arrive Thursday! We are close to topping the amount of Thursday bears as we had last year. Good times are a coming!

Thanks to all of the guys who are helping spread the word about the event. If you know someone who wasn't here last year, tell them about it and invite them down/across/up/over. That's all for now... more to come.

The excitement is in the air! People are talking and the buzz is aplenty about this years event. As of February 1st registration is now open. Thanks to everyone that submitted issues to us about the registration process. Seems we were having some problems with people inputting phone numbers and the website saying NO. We smacked it around some and it's happy now. :) Big thanks to Ken for all his hard work.

If anyone comes across any problems, please use the contact us page to let us know so we can jump on it asap!

Meeting 3 is this coming Thursday. I have already started design work on the scavenger hunt and the run booklet. I'm thinking like a bbq dinner menu. You know the whole red checkerboard cloth look. Have some bbq sauce splattered on the pages. Meh. It's almost 6am and I must hit the bed. Keep checking in on the blog and feel free to comment.

Woofs!

Ok last meeting was a basically a throwout. Got the full group together and looked at what was happening in the bear scene. We are determined to not have an event the same weekend as another group (last year we unknowingly booked the same weekend as the Music City Bears event - sorry guys!!). So move the date we did. August 21st -24th is the final date. Two weeks before us is Bear Invasion (D.C.) and one week behind us is Bear Jam.

Theme. Last year we had pitched the idea around about having a country theme/borderline redneck. All we kept thinking about was (lucky) Ned Beatty bent over that log in the movie Deliverance, and the now famous lines of "Squeal like a pig!". Every time we brought it up we laughed. We scrapped it for fears of advertising etc. This year.. it's on! Mountain Bear Madness : Squeel like a pig is our theme. What better way to go with a pig theme than to serve it, so one of the catered dinners will be a full on BBQ meal with all the fixins' etc. Still working on what night.. but count on some finger licking bbq. The full meal menu's are still being worked on.

Contests. Last year the Bear/Cub/Daddy contest was good, but too long. This year we want to have more contests that don't require you to strut your stuff but to have fun. More on this to come...

Is anyone reading these? Comment if you'd like just be nice when you do.

After a few months of recuperation from MBM 2007, we all head back to the meeting den to go through what we did right and what we did wrong. Seeing as it was our first bear event, we were all very proud of accomplishing 90% of what we had originally set out to do for the event.

Meeting was short and sweet. Several members were not in attendance (out partying). We tentatively set a date for labor day weekend. See our problem with setting up an event date is compounded by this little school up the road and their football team. If VT has a home football game... we can't get exclusivity of the hotel and the room rates go up. So... labor day is the iffy date. We'll pass it around and ask the other clubs their dates etc so we don't conflict.

Talks of themes etc went so so. I wanted a big toga party, lube wrestling etc, others thought of an Olympic event, Greek, and there was even talks of a big top tent and a circus theme. More on this later...