Hopefully everyone had a fine Holiday feast;  We sure did.  We had a full-fledged gorge-a-thon out at Mom’s house this year.  I’m counting sixteen people in my head right now, which made for a few full tables.  I got up bright and early and smoked a turkey breast, and Mom did a big roasted one in the oven, plus all the standard accompaniments;   Mashed ‘taters, cranberries, noodles, gravy, salads, etc.  After dinner I settled in for an evening of football, while Donette braved the lighting ceremony.  I guess I’m done with the Plaza Lights…  If I can’t sit in the warmth and quiet of Todd’s apartment and watch it from across the street then I’ll take a pass on the whole thing.

Friday morning Donette got up and hit the Black Friday sales.  That’s usually my one shopping trip of the year, but I wasn’t up for it this time around.  The only “home run” deal I saw was a decent laptop out at Nebraska Furniture Mart.  But, I figured it would be a mob out there, and then there is the fact that we don’t really need a new laptop.  Indeed, Donette reported she was several hundred people out of the running on the laptop, so her pre-dawn outing in sub-freezing weather netted us a pair of boots and some long underwear from Cabela’s.  Oh well, maybe next year.  For evening entertainment we headed up to the distant Northlands to celebrate Josh’s birthday.  Nightmarish drive aside, we enjoyed still more good feed.

Saturday most of our day centered around the big MU – KU game.  Donette bravely volunteered for “table duty,” so she had to head down to the Brooksider around 3:00 and reserve some chairs.  Her sisters Ronda and Jackie came down with their broods and joined us, so we had a pretty good crowd.  I thoroughly enjoyed the game;  I would almost go so far as labeling it the single best sporting event I have ever witnessed.  While I don’t claim to be a die-hard MU fan, I do maintain a pretty strict anti-KU-fan sentiment.  Naturally, as luck would have it, we ended up next to a big table of “those guys” for the game.  (Not really lucky I guess… What are the odds we would be by the two civil KU fans in the city;  Those two must have been at the game or something.)  You know, the ones who stand on their chairs, rant and rave obscenities about each play, and just make general spectacles of themselves.  During the first few possessions, while KU still had a chance, they were so unbearable I didn’t think I was going to make it through the first quarter.  But, after the tide was going decidedly MU-ish, I got to enjoy the game in relative peace and quiet, with the bonus side-show of watching them sulk in silence, AND revel in the satisfaction of knowing we won’t have to endure any more loud-mouth rednecks in the Brooksider until well into basketball season.  (Well, during sporting events anyway…)

Sunday I got up bright and early and actually went to church.  My niece Rebecca got baptized, and as the official God-Father I was naturally obligated to show up.  Whew, 8:30 is early on a weekend.  Miraculously I survived though.  After church we all went out to a nice breakfast at good ol’ IHOP, which was even tastier when Mom picked up the check.  After that, well, you know the drill.  Horizontal on the couch watching football.  I was so bored by the evening game that I actually thought about taking the dogs for a walk or something.  Unfortunately for me and them, I never made it past the “thinking about it” stage.  Maybe next week.

The Holiday funk has set in.  I see no future for me but constant driving and eating.  Wake me up when January gets here.  I have to admit I am looking forward to Thanksgiving though, although I’m trying to shift to a more negative aspect.  No matter how much of a pain it might be, that menu sure sounds good.

I took off work last Thursday and Friday, so I had a nice little four-day weekend.  I’ve got a few extra days of vacation floating around that I need to burn, so I’m sort of throwing random days on the schedule.  Nothing of note to report on though, really.  Friday I rode my motorcycle out to Mom’s house and put it in her garage for the Winter.  I was sad to see it go, although I really don’t ride it much any more.  All the same, I like to see it there in my garage in the morning;  Gives me something to look forward to next Spring.  But, what can ya’ do;  It’ll be snowing before you know it and we need to fit our car in the garage.  We went to the new Mexican Restaurant for lunch while we were out there, which was quite delicious.  Solid menu, we’ll have to go back and try a few other items.  I finally narrowed my choice down to a chile verde burrito, which was quite delicious but there were several other choices calling my name too.  Friday night we popped “300” in the dvd player for some evening entertainment.  I was a little disappointed I must say, but Donette liked it.  Actually I fell asleep pretty early in the movie, so maybe I should give it a second chance.

Saturday I continued the cinematic bonanza with an early morning showing of the under-rated classic, “Cool As Ice.”  Considered by many to be the final undoing of Vanilla Ice, I none the less find it a veritable show-case of his wide ranging talent.  From rapping to dancing to motorcycle riding, he fits it all in this hour and a half train wreck.  It’s a pretty funny movie, and you find yourself constantly wondering “Did I actually like this guy when he came out?  Nahhhhh, surely not.”  After that, I clicked through the channels and came across “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” on one of the HD channels.  This is one of the several movies that I have most likely seen in their entirety, but in 15 minutes pieces and all out of order.  Kind of hard to follow that way, but I still have a bad habit of watching movies in that manner.  I caught it about 10 minutes into the show this time though, so I went ahead and stayed on the same channel.  Good show; highly quotable and a good soundtrack.  Next in the tv-a-thon was the MU football game.  I made it through most of that, but then we had to leave to go to a birthday party.  Oh, and not just any birthday party, a party for a one year old.  Somehow or another I’ve managed to escape going to the “kid parties” my entire life, but as in every other facet of my life, my luck finally ran out.  Ahhhh, it wasn’t bad.  I was saved in no small part by two factors;  1) It was at KC Masterpiece restaurant so there were brisket sandwiches, and 2)  Martin had to go too.  Plus, it did my heart good to know the little birthday girl will always cherish the time her good friend Phil pulled himself away from a day of college football to come to her first birthday party.  (You remember your first birthday, right?)  After that, Martins came over and we engaged in a lively evening of cards and dominoes.

Sunday, well not much to go on there.  We went to Sharp’s for breakfast and laid down a good base of biscuits and gravy.  As it turned out though, we didn’t really need a good base because we didn’t do anything all day.  My Sundays, it would seem, are getting increasingly non-productive.  Other than watching football and reading the paper, I can’t think of a single useful thing I did all day.

Another weekend “off.”  I’ll report what I can with what I have to work with though.  Friday night Donette was gone by the time I got home from another arduous work week.  Something about needing to have some fun, which automatically excluded me, or something like that.  She had an outing planned with her friend Susan actually… They hit the Plaza, Bobby Bakers, and various other haunts.  Meanwhile, given the peace and quiet of an empty house, (rampaging Pit Bulls aside,) I decided to embark on a mission to finish “rating” all the music in our iTunes collection.  This is a moderately important undertaking, as it affects which songs go on my iPod, and consequently what tunes I will hear all day at work, and so consequently my relative level of sanity.  That project didn’t get too far though;  After about an hour and a half of alternating country-western, 80’s tunes, symphony music, and metal, I was about to go on a bi-state killing spree.  Perhaps I need to do some type of pre-filtering before I wade into the actual ranking process.  After that failed effort, I settled in for a night of movies, starting with “Wild Hogs.”  That was a pretty awful movie.  Just as I was thinking, “Well, at least Travolta isn’t dancing,” he even crossed that line and threw in the obligatory dance scene.  Puke.  I watched the whole thing though, so it must have been entertainment at some level.  I followed up that cinematic debacle with “Texas Chainsaw Massacre:  The Beginning.”  Now THAT was a great film.  Pure, unabashed trash horror, with no pretense of usefulness at all.  No plot, horrible acting, cheesy special effects;  Right up my alley.

Saturday morning, Donette got up at the crack of 9:00 and headed to my Mom’s house for an afternoon of cookie baking.  Now THERE is a homey Saturday afternoon activity.  They had a “girls day” out there, baking up a storm;  Not something achieved very often in our own house.  Meanwhile, I spent my afternoon sitting at the Brooksider with Martin & Brice, continuing on my never-ending quest to become a sports fan.  The place was remarkably uncrowded and relatively quiet, so I made it all the way through the MU game.  After the game I suggested, of my own free will no less, heading up to the Northlands and playing some dominoes at Martin’s house.  In some veiled attempt at steering me elsewhere, he got out his pocket knife and threatened to stab me if I came within 2 miles of his house.  Wow, what’s up with the unsociable attitude, Martin?  Since Mr. Grumpy wasn’t going to entertain me any further, I went home and put down the rest of the sod in the back yard.  For the best, I suppose;  It had to be done sometime.  I ought to take a few more pictures, as it really does look quite nice, at least for the time being.  There is still a solid chance it will just die, or our sprinkle system will freeze and burst, turning the neighborhood into an ice-rink.

Sunday didn’t bring much of note.  We watched the entire, riveting drama that was the Chiefs game, then took the dogs for a nice walk.  (Maybe the “nice” qualifier is a stretch;  There is nothing “nice” about Belle on a leash.)  After our walk I washed the motorcycle and scooter, and as far as I can remember that was pretty much the day.  I watched bits and pieces of the rest of the football games;  It was apparent early on that both of my Fantasy teams were going to receive an unprecedented drubbing, so that kind of knocked out what little value I get out of them in the first place.  Donette fixed us a delectable can of soup for dinner (no, really, it was good) and I retired upstairs to alternate between the Sunday night game and “Two Mules for Sister Sara.”  My last gasp at winning one of my Fantasy games was Peyton Manning, and it was obvious that wasn’t going to work out for me, so a good Clint movie gave me an alternate diversion.

I think Winter is going to be here a bit sooner than I would prefer.  My morning scooter commutes are starting to get just a bit nippy.  But, since we only have one car these days, and Donette is working two whole days a weeks, my alternate transportation methods are somewhat limited.  I try to wait until the sun is out and the temperature is at least 40, but that doesn’t always work out.  So, I wear lots and lots of clothes.  Flannel-lined pants, double jackets, heavy gloves, etc.  I am worried that all those bulky clothes are going to detract from my “coolness” factor though.  That would be pretty hard, because nothing exudes coolness quite like an old fat guy on a scooter, but the thought has entered my mind none the less.  Maybe I should get a big snow suit or something?

We finally had a “down” weekend; Not much going on.  Friday night was a total wash.  I messed around with my PC’s a bit, with half an eye on some television show or another, and next thing I knew it was too late to go anywhere.  (Which is like 7:00 in my book.)  So, we built a cozy little fire in the back yard fire pit, broke out a cigar, (me, not Donette) and called it a quiet night at home.  Not so bad;  Rather relaxing actually.

Saturday was somewhat more eventful, if not as busy as our recent weekends.  The first project of the day was laying some sod in the back yard.  Since the addition of the second dog to the house, the yard has taken an absolute beating.  I think most of the damage is just from their constant game of “chase,” although Belle’s mysterious penchant for digging random holes doesn’t help matters either.  Donette and Ronda tilled everything up last Spring and put down a bunch of seed. It tried to grow, but never really stood a chance against the galloping mooses.  By mid-summer, despite constant watering and fertilizing, our once-green lawn looked like this.  Yeah, the seed project didn’t work out so well.  So, for our second attempt, we decided to try some sod.  Donette ordered a load of 100% fescue from the Grasspad.  That crap is just this side of a noxious weed, but it’s supposed to hold up good under heavy traffic.  (Which we have…)  I recruited a buddy of mine from work to help, and we got started pretty early in the morning.  Unfortunately, a mere hour or two later, we discovered we had grossly underestimated the amount of sod needed.  Dang.  Oh well, the part we got done looks better, for the time being at least.  The entire time we were working, Gabe was sitting in the corner thinking “FOOL, that stuff doesn’t stand a chance.”  We shall see.  Anyway, I was at something of a crossroads at this point in the day.  I’d planned on an entire day of yard work, and here it was noon and I had nothing left to do.  Luckily Zim called right about this time, and wanted to meet up at the Brooksider to watch some football.  Whew, just in the nick of time, saved from an otherwise productive afternoon.  Indeed, that pretty much killed the rest of my day.  We sat down there all afternoon, then I bailed back home to watch the MU game in the safety and relative calm of my own house.  Meanwhile, Donette went out with a bunch of friends for a “girls night out.”  I think they went to La Bodega or something like that.  I’m sure they didn’t have any fun without their men around though.

The first thing we discovered Sunday morning is that dogs do not observe daylight savings time.  We thought we were ahead of the game when we set all our clocks back before we went to bed Saturday night.  It was a flawless plan, and should have resulted in an extra hour of sleep.  Alas, the pups have it in their simple little heads that breakfast is served at 6:00, which was 5:00 on this particular day.  It is a total waste of time to try and convince them to go back to bed for another hour too;  They will not be ignored.  So, we had an unusually early start to our Sunday.  (I’m not really sure how we’re going to get their clocks reset actually;  The same thing happened this morning.)  I had lots of time to kill before football started, so I went to the gym and then stopped by the grocery store and got stuff for a pot of gumbo.  The gumbo came out pretty mediocre.  My roux didn’t get dark enough, and it was downhill from there.  I don’t know what happened, I stirred that stupid stuff for an hour and it still didn’t get dark enough.  I used peanut oil instead of veggie oil;  Is it possible that you can’t make a good roux out of peanut oil?  Very mysterious.  Anyway, the rest of Sunday was spent watching football and eating mediocre gumbo.  All-in-all a rather poor day;  Marginal food and I got beat by a stupid girl in Fantasy Football again.  Dang.

Happy Halloween all.  Hopefully everyone has their costumes ready to go for a big night of trick-or-treating.  Not us though.  We kind of gave up on Halloween;  Too much of a nuisance.  Plus, we’re still on a diet so we can’t have candy around the house, you know.  Maybe we’ll give out carrot sticks or something.  Actually, we are planning to leave the front door open and the porch light on, and then when kids ring the doorbell the dogs can rush the storm door and scare the crap out of them.  We’re going to take some snacks over to the neighbors house and watch out the window and laugh.  Come on over, it’ll be a hoot.

Well we had a pretty busy weekend again.  Friday I started things off by going to Kennedy’s with Brice and Martin, for their “grand re-opening” event.  Personally I’ve never been much on Kennedy’s anyway, and their “temporary” location doesn’t do much for me either.  But, what the heck, gotta keep the local shops open.  Supposedly they are re-building on their old location, so if that ever actually starts the construction should provide a diversion, as it’s right outside the window from their current spot.  (The sorta-historic Kennedy’s burned down last winter, if you don’t remember.)  We hung out there for a while, and then picked up a pizza (so much for the diet) and met up with the girls at home.  I spent the rest of the evening kicking everybody’s butt in dominoes.  Nobody was very sure on the rules, but since I won they must have been right.

Saturday we had some friends in from Nebraska, Army buddies of mine from “The Big One of ’91”.  Tom and Tammy come up every and then, but the last time Dan and Denise visited us was for our wedding, so they haven’t seen KC in a little while.  Since it might be another 15 years before they make it out this way I wanted to do it up right, so I decided to take them to the Brooksider.  Spare no expense, I always say.  We introduced them to everybody down there, had some delicious chicken wings and nachos for lunch, then hung out watching the Huskers get their weekly beat-down.  After that, we hopped a bus down to the Plaza so the girls could take a mercifully short shopping break.  When they were done, we took everybody on a short tour of the Plaza, showing them all my favorite spots.  Since I don’t really like anywhere on the Plaza, this made for an extremely short tour.  My recommended spots consisted of Tomfooleries and the ‘Falloon, both of which went over pretty well with the group.  Actually I had very good tenderloin sandwich at Tomfooleries;  I’d even say it was good enough to merit a trip back some day.

Sunday we spent the better part of the day cooking.  The Nebraska crew came over for breakfast, so I made a big pot of biscuits and gravy and some fried eggs.  (Yeah, the ol’ diet ain’t going so well.)  They had to start their trek home around 11:00, and after they left I went to work boiling a chicken.  It’s been said that I am easily amused, and to that end I would say that boiling chickens is one of my favorite things to do around the house.  There is just a lot of “bang for the buck” out of a boiled bird.  You get a couple of quarts of broth that you can do all sorts of amazing things with, especially with soup-weather right around the corner.  And, you get a bunch of shredded chicken meat that you can use in countless fascinating scenarios.  Case in point, the Martins came over for dinner and voila’,  chicken burritos!!!  Wow, does the fun ever end at our house?  Donette made all kinds of good stuff to go along with the burritos too;  beans, salsa, pico de gallo, etc.  We cheated and had frozen guacamole though.  OK, that’s about all the text I can stretch out of a boiled chicken, I’m done.