OK, I will make an effort to get back to Monday updates.  There’s usually too much going on Monday morning to be typing on this thing, but today looks pretty mellow.

All-in-all, I’m going to label that a “good weekend”.  I am not sure what the exact qualifiers are for one of those, but it met them whatever they are.  Friday night I left work a bit early and went to the Brooksider.  That turned out to be a good move; I think it was the last of the cool weather we are going to see.  Not too much else to say there… sat on the deck until it was time to go home.

Saturday morning, I woke up bright and early to go help Mark start building a fence around “Smith Farms” in Lathrop.  You’ve probably heard of the place; it is a large cattle ranch in Lathrop that raises Black Angus.  I was kind of excited to see the cattle… I’m thinking about buying one of the calves so I got to see them and take a few pictures.  Anyway, four of us were on hand for the hole-digging party.  I think it served as a very suitable reminder to us all that our Mon-Fri jobs ain’t all that bad.  Manual labor is very, very over-rated.  Mark had rented a big two-man auger, which was pretty much a 5 hp motor stuck on top of a 10″ wide, 3′ tall corkscrew.  Sort of a medieval torture device with handles.  At the end of the day though, we had completed our mission; 50 holes in one day.  Whew.  After I poured myself back home, Doni and I went out to dinner at Strouds.  For some reason fried chicken and mashed potatoes just sounded good after a day on the farm.  And, as a matter of fact, it was.

Sunday we did the “regular stuff”.  Went to the gym for a while, sat out at the pool for a while, and then went over to Susan’s to watch a few old episodes of The Sopranos.  Susan sold her house so those events are coming to a close pretty quickly, gotta enjoy it while it lasts.  I worked on my picture section a little bit too.  Posted a few pictures of the fence building event and of the nieces and nephews.

On the plate for this week: The preparations for the big Katy Trail ride are kicking up.  Remarkably, I have yet to actually ride my bike, which is probably not a good thing since the ride is only a month and a half away.  But, I am taking spinning classes twice a week so I’m counting on that to help me survive.  I definitely need to get some real ride time in though.  Our first “training ride” was scheduled last Thursday but I ended up working late and missing it.  Bummer.  I’m also working on reloading my mp3 player… the current songs are getting a little old.  Haven’t decided on a general “genre” yet.  You got your “spinning music” and your “workout music“, both of which are about equally annoying.  (Right-click those and choose “save target as” if you really want to hear them.  Don’t play them around your kiddies though; I have no idea what they are saying but I’d bet it isn’t good.)

Well, the good news is my site is fixed.  Stupid firewalls are overrated.  The bad news is I didn’t get to go biking this evening.  So I am bitter.  Bitterer, whatever.

This is just kind of a test post.  If it’s out here on the site, then my problems are over.  All is well.

Training has begun for the big “Katy Trail” ride.  Four fit fellas will attempt to traverse the wilds of Missouri, from Sedalia to St. Charles, in a mere 3 days.  Training rides are on Thursday if anyone would like to join in the fun.  We’ll be riding the Corporate Woods trail most of the time, and riding mountain bikes.  Fat tires only welcome, don’t be showing up with your 8 lb. road bike with the 4 cm. tires, we have no need for you.

Not much to relate this week… I would have posted yesterday but the site experienced an unscheduled outage all day due to a failure at KCPL.  Apparently my UPS downstairs doesn’t have much run-time to it.

As far as weekend activities, I’d say Saturday was the “busiest” of days.  I started off the day with a nice 45 minute spinning session at the “racquet club” at 9:30.  Then we went to the ball game at noon with the Martins; the Royals lost as usual but it was still a great time.  Any time you get an afternoon game that’s in the low 80’s in the middle of July, you gotta love it.  Plus, it was free tee-shirt day, woo hoo!!!  After the game we hooked up with the Scottens, Browns, Munkirs, and of course Todd, and went to The Thai Place for dinner.  That’s a pretty big group for dinner, so we were plagued with the dreaded screwed-up-order and screwed-up-bill issues, but minorly so.  Sure couldn’t complain about the grub, that place is awesome.  After dinner we went to Harpo’s and hung out on the deck, where we actually lasted until past the midnight hour; quite remarkable considering we don’t exactly go out of our way to frequent Westport establishments.  I will grudgingly admit that their deck is considerably nicer than the Brooksider’s… But, the extra 4 miles makes it totally unacceptable for a regular hang-out.

Sunday we did “Kenagy Family Day” all afternoon.  After surviving the arduous trek to Peculiar, we were rewarded with a feast of ribs, dogs, and burgers, complimented by a bevy of sides.  We met the latest little ‘un in the bunch, young Faith Finley visiting from the wilds of northern Nebraska.  I took a grand total of 129 pictures, which are queued up to be posted after the other gazillion I’ve taken since my PC crashed.  (I am still in the process of loading software… Don’t have my “photo album” stuff loaded yet.)

Slackin’ on the updates again.  Actually I kind of took last week off.  Off from web site updates, off from the diet, off from the gym… just “off”.  I should have rounded things out by taking off from work, but I didn’t want to get too carried away.  Not that the site has been truly idle; I upgraded the webserver to 256 Meg of RAM, and have been giving a rather half-hearted effort at installing PHP.  The RAM works great… the PHP… not so great.  Not really sure what I’d do with it anyway.

Well, as briefly alluded to on the message board, about the most interesting thing we’ve done in the last few weeks was a camping trip to Smithville over the holiday weekend.  Not much of a “trip”, sure, but camping all the same.  We pulled into the campground on July 4th, got a good spot, and pitched the tent.  The tent, see, was kind of pivotal to the whole trip; Doni was getting a bit upset that we’ve had this super-duper tent for three years now and she’s never even seen it.  It’s primary function is Float Trip, it’s not meant for such banal trips as 45 minutes north of the house.  Given that, and the fact that it is the middle of summer, I wasn’t really too concerned when Doni INSISTED on not putting on the rainfly.  “It will make it cooler inside” she says.  Being something of a veteran outdoorsman, I gave her the “always be prepared” speech, and a short lecture on the unpredictability of nature.  But oh, no, she was adamant.  “At least let me put a few stakes in the ground,” I pleaded, but she would not be swayed.  So, with grave misgivings, I left it in it’s half-complete state and we headed out for a day of sun and fun on the S.S. Schmartin.  (The popular moniker for the fine vessel co-owned by Schmidt and Martin.)  It was a great day on the lake, and after watching a rather spectacular fireworks display over the dam, the Martins took us back and dropped us at the camp.  It was rather early morning hours at this point, but still I took a moment to plead with the Martins and Doni; “C’mon, help me put on this rain fly and put out some of the guy lines.  It’ll only take a second and I’d feel a lot safer.”  But ohhhhh no, nobody would listen to ol’ Phil.  At exactly 3:00 a.m. I was awakened by a few gentle sprays of very cold water on my face.  “Rats,” I thought, “Left the windows down.  Well, no problem, the Alaskan Guide can easily withstand this little sprinkle.”  By this time the water had awoken Doni too.  We were zipping up the windows, and I took a moment to point out “See, I told you we shoulda put on the…”  WHAM!!!!  We get hit from nowhere with a wall of water that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie.  Then the deafening thunder kicked in, and the wind kicked up like nothing I’d ever been in.  The tent instantly was completely flattened on the west side, and we were taking water like a swamped boat.  Doni toughed it out for about 8 seconds, then bailed for the Civic.  I could hear her screaming from the car, “C’MON, LET’S GET OUT OF HERE!!!”  Through the freezing cold rain, blinding lightning, gale-force winds and deafening thunder, (and quite possibly hail… it sure hurt but it might have just been big raindrops) I managed to gasp out “No… you go… I gotta… save… the tent.”  The last I saw her, she was driving off through the wreckage of flat tents and tumbling lawn chairs, heading off to bunk at the Martin’s house while I hunkered down in an ever-deepening pool of water.  Well, to sum it up, the tent didn’t fare too well.  While it survived better than any other tent in the immediate vicinity, it was in less-than-ideal condition to say the least.  Several of the poles came apart, and the shape of it was quite sad.  And the water… ohhhhhh, the water.  I don’t know how it all got in the tent, but it wasn’t coming back out so easily.  All-in-all though, there was no permanent damage.  Nothing a few hours in the sun couldn’t fix.  Doni came back to get my battered carcass in the morning, and the rest was history.  Moral of the story?  Always, always, always, put on the rain fly, and at least a few obligitory stakes and guy lines.

**DISCLAIMER:  The author of the above may have taken liberty with a few details of the story in order to 1) protect his or her already-shaky reputation as a camper and 2) make for more interesting literature.  It is up to the discretion of the reader to determine which parts may or may not have been contrived.