Something is wrong with my webserver…  It was locked up when I got home from vacation & then this morning it threw some mysterious database error.  Oh well.  I shall ignore it for the time being.

So, odd computer behavior aside, we had quite the long weekend.  We flew out to Albuquerque on Thursday morning for our friend Grant’s wedding.  The wedding wasn’t until Saturday, but we like hanging out with the Ausherman family so we decided to get there early and put some fun time in.  Not that the wedding itself wasn’t fun, you know, but other kinds of fun.  So, anyway, we got into town on Thursday, picked up a rental car, and headed out to Chen’s for some lunch.  Why ever on earth you would go to a Chinese restaurant when you are in NM I cannot even begin to explain.  Something to do with the last time Donette was there with the girls they went and it was really good and blah blah blah.  Whatever;  I just drove there with nary a complaint and enjoyed my pork chow mein.  (It wasn’t too bad either, in all fairness.)  After lunch we headed to the Hyatt downtown and got all checked in.  Thanks to my highly gregarious nature, I struck up a friendly conversation with the guy at the front desk and found out that he also was from KC, and was familiar with several of our favorite haunts.  This somewhat extended conversation wouldn’t really bear mention except for the fact that he comp’d our parking for the entire weekend and hooked us up with a room that had an awesome view of the nearby mountains.  This, while nice, wouldn’t really be worth mentioning either, other than I got no end of entertainment when I found out that David & Jill, (parents of the groom,) who spent money untold at the hotel for rooms, the reception hall, etc, got dinged $12 a night for parking and had a less-than-favorable view of the hotel’s HVAC equipment out their window.  SWEET.  After reveling in this score for a while, we all headed out to Sadie’s for a little dinner.  I had the carne adovada enchiladas myself;  Oh my goodness.  After dinner all the “kids” went out to take care of business, in the form of their respective bachelor/bachelorette parties.  Not being quite up for that action, Donette & I joined David & Jill for a bit “tamer” entertainment before heading back to the hotel to turn in for a relatively early evening.

Friday morning we got up late and sorta hung out at the hotel for a while.  Jill had gone off to do “wedding stuff” (booooo) and David had to run up to the airport to pick up his friend Steve.  Later in the afternoon Donette joined Jill for still more “wedding stuff” (boooo) and David wanted me to meet up with him & his friend to pass some time.  I was a bit apprehensive about this turn of events, not being particularly fond of either meeting strangers or passing an entire afternoon with them.  However, when his friend pulled out a hand-written list of local breweries & brewpubs that he had researched and wanted to visit, I knew everything was gonna be OK.  So while the girls wasted their time on whatever silliness they were up to, we dove into some research of the local brew scene at Kelly’s.  We didn’t stay too long, and then headed back to the hotel pool to discuss what we had learned from our experience.  Our little meeting didn’t last long though before the girls started calling, bothering us with some nonsense about a so-called “rehearsal” and this and that, so we had to cut our pool time short.  We made it through the rehearsal, and then travelled to the mecca of New Mexican Cooking, El Pinto, for the rehearsal dinner.  (Neither Steve or Donette & I were actually in the wedding party, but were quite honored to get invited to the rehearsal & dinner.)  Anyway, El Pinto just may be my favorite restaurant ever.  Bold statement, but quite possibly true.  Man I love that stuff.  They had a buffet set up, and it was as if they had somehow picked all my personal favorite items off the menu for it.  I really don’t remember most of the evening, I think I may have blacked out for a while.  I sort of remember being introduced to a bunch of people and mumbling some kind of gutteral response with my mouth full, and I’m afraid I may have yelled at some lady who I felt was taking too long at the rib tray.  Ohhhh, the red-chile ribs, oh my.  I think I may have been personally responsible for the demise of at least 2 slabs.  Unfortunately I was quite unable to go out with everyone after dinner, as I had to get back to the hotel and suffer through a bad case of the meat sweats, which kept me up most of the night.

Saturday I got up quite early and drove David & Steve to a nearby golf course.  Our obligation for the afternoon was to meet up with several other guys to discuss & finalize the details of the upcoming ceremony over a few holes of golf.  There were twelve of us in all, which would have made for a nice round three foursomes, but I elected not to actually swing any clubs myself.  This was, believe it or not, the first time I had set foot on a golf course in my 43 years, and it was far too much pressure to actually participate.  So, I just drove the cart around with David, Steve, & Grant, fetched errant shots, watched the game, and tried to learn a few things.  (By the second hole I was wishing I had rented some clubs;  It looked fun.  Oh well, live & learn.)  We were on the course for the full 18 holes, then rushed back to the hotel just in time to get dressed and head to the wedding.  The ceremony was at a nearby winery, outside in the scorching Albuquerque sun.  Wow, was it hot, and the dark suit was not helping.  The good news is the actual ceremony only lasted ten minutes;  The bad news was it started forty minutes late.  (You can ask Donette about that part of the story, she likes telling it.)  It was brutally hot.  We survived though, and I probably needed to sweat off a few pounds of those ribs anyway.  After that we headed back to the hotel for the reception;  Good times.  Nice dinner, few hours of dancing;  General wedding reception activities.  (No, I personally did not engage in any dancing, thank you very much.)

Sunday we slept in, then met up with David, Jill & Steve at the pool to wind down and rehash the good, bad & ugly of the day before.  Very relaxing actually.  We got a late checkout from the hotel and just loitered down there all day.  We finally took off around 5 o’clock to head to the airport, stopping by Frontiers on the way for one last green chile fix.  This was a good thing in that it was truly delicious;  A bad thing in that we were so miserably full I was afraid we were gonna blow on the flight home.  We made it though, albeit very late in the evening & still very full.  We picked up Gabe from Aunt Ronda’s house, struggled home, and went straight to bed.  Whew.  Good weekend.  I’ll get back to the gym and take care of the overeating tomorrow.  Or Wednesday.  Thursday at the latest.

Currently experiencing site difficulties…

Ahhh, a nice three day weekend.  This week is short too, which I’m looking forward to.  Last week I decided to take Friday off because we were going to a concert Thursday night, and I thought I might require additional recovery time.  We scored some tickets to the Crossroads to see Seven Mary Three (with Marcy Playground,) both of whom I rather enjoy.  And for free I downright like them, plus it was an absolutely perfect evening for an outdoor concert.  So, we headed down there with our friends Brooke, Fritz & Holly, and proceeded to generally enjoy the show.  Fritz had VIP passes for us all, which just meant we got to stand right down front.  I kid you not, if I had any hair, it would have been blowing in the breeze the speakers were generating.  It was LOUD.  There is a relatively good chance I sustained some level of hearing impairment.  Then again, I am about 1/2 deef anyway so no big loss.  We actually stayed until the very end of the show.  As if that wasn’t late enough for us, we rounded the evening out with a little Rock Band back at the house.  Hmmm, lay off the energy drinks Phil, no good can come of them.  ** Late addition:  I forgot to mention the delicious dinner we had.  The pizza from Grinders was very good, but Donette hit the home run with the “Frito Pie.”  They take a bag of Chili Cheese Fritos, and just open the bag and dump in beef, cheese, sour cream, etc.  In addition to being a nutritionally balanced snack, it got very high presentation marks.

Friday…  Well, we didn’t do too much.  One of our old neighbors, Molly, (Brooke’s roommate) came into town so we joined her down at Jalapenos for lunch.  After that we went to the pool with them for a bit, and then we went back home and hit the couch.  We were supposed to go to a party with them, but we had to own up that we just weren’t quite up to two nights out in a row.  Old age gets the better of us once again.

Saturday we got up rested and in much better shape than the day before.  After walking the dog, we headed down to the pool with Susan for some lounging.  We actually stayed there for several hours, much longer than I can usually tolerate it.  This came at the expense of a rather nasty sunburn though…  Drat.  After we had duly lounged, we headed to the Brooksider to enjoy the weather a bit more on the back deck.  Good times.  For evening entertainment, we went to my big twenty-fifth high school reunion.  Wow…  Twenty five years, I am indeed old.  It was down at the Cashew, well within our geographic comfort zone, so I figured what the heck.  Well…  As probably anybody but myself would have likely predicted, it may have been within my geographic comfort zone but perhaps not so much in my social comfort zone.  Maybe “excruciating” is an overstatement, but there are probably ways I would have rather spent the evening.  Usually I can count on Donette to bail me out in such dicey scenarios, but I think she took a “Hey, this was your bright idea” tact this time.  While I certainly did get to see some old friends, I think I spent the majority of the time sitting at a table trying to recall exactly what I was thinking when I RSVP’d.  Oh, and I came up with my first million-dollar idea:  The reunion tee-shirt.  Everybody gets a tee-shirt with their essentials listed on the front and back:  “Hi, my name is ___, I’m here with my ___ whose name is ___.  We have ___ children, live in ___ & work at ___.”  You get the idea.  Hand out a sharpie to fill in the blanks and boom, you’ve just shaved ten minutes off the front of every single conversation.  Let’s say you talk to ten people that night, you’ve just saved yourself over an hour and a half of excess chit-chat.

Sunday was a pretty low-key day too.  My sunburn had gotten progressively worse, to the point it was really rather uncomfortable.  I did manage to take Gabe on another long walk, which he sort of enjoys.  I say “sort of” because the boy has the lowest heat tolerance of any animal I’ve ever seen.  For being a generally athletic breed, he does not last long at all in any kind of heat.  Around the two-mile mark, he started dragging me over to every bit of shade in sight and would just plop down.  I thought I was going to have to call the sag wagon for a while, but he finally toughed it out.  For dinner, we had John & Susan over for some blue cheese burgers.  We’ve been making those quite a bit lately;  take a 1/2 lb. burger, mix it up with a bunch of fresh herbs and seasoning, stuff it with blue cheese, and grill it up.  Pretty solid.  We added bacon this time too, which topped it off quite nicely.  After dinner we played a round of Yahtzee, which I managed to win despite not having any idea what I was doing.

Funny comment Donette made in passing this morning while I was slathering on another gallon of aloe:  “Hey, didn’t that antibiotic you’re taking say something about avoiding direct sunlight because it makes you sensitive to sunburn?”  Ya’ know, now that you mention it… DOH!!!!

Sort of a moderately lame weekend.  Friday we made a somewhat unplanned appearance at Happy Hour down at the Brooksider.  Cheap entertainment I suppose.  We hung out on the back deck for quite a while, enjoying the somewhat temperate weather and the beginning of the weekend in general.  When we tired of our loitering, we moved up the street for a little dinner at Cantina del Rey.  Man, I like that place.  It’s been a little over-crowded as of late, but Friday night we walked right in and got a table.  I went with my favorite, the carne asada.  Probably about time to branch out a bit before I get tired of it, but don’t want to get too risky.

Saturday we spent the afternoon doing a whole lot of nothing.  I got wrapped up in a stupid time-killer computer game, and Donette stared at the TV in a similarly time-wasting fashion.  I guess we were saving our strength;  We had signed up to work at the second annual Wine & Beer Brew Ha Ha down at the American Royal building.  We worked at it last year and had fun, so we figured what the heck, try it again.  We headed down there around 3:00, and indeed it turned out to be a great time again.  We actually did work pretty hard though;  I think harder than last year.  We sorta hung out behind the scenes and kept all the vendors fixed up with ice and fresh water, cleaned up messes, and that sorta stuff.  Most people like to stand out front and pour, but that’s wayyyy too much interaction.  The event ended at 9:00, and after that we hung out with the other hard-working volunteers for a while…  Kinda a “post-party.”  I got the feeling the event overall was a big success for the Royal;  Maybe they’ll lower our freaking booth price for the BBQ.  (Yeah right.)

Sunday we were a bit slow getting around.  I had planned to go out to the shooting range, but since it was storming pretty bad I figured that was off.  I checked in with my partner in crime for the “alternate entertainment options” around noon though, and he said all was dry out that way, so we were a go for shootin’.  That killed three hours or so.  I ran through a bunch of ammo;  Guess it’s time to start loitering at the Walmarts again.  After fine-tuning our quick-draw technique for a bit, we ended up back at the Brooksider to meet up with the girls.  Didn’t stay long though, ’cause I was hungry.  Luckily I scored my first homegrown tomatoes of the season while I was at the ‘Sider, so I sliced those up for a fancy tomato-cheese-herb-oil salad.  Yum.

Hopefully everyone still has all their fingers intact after the Fourth.  I can’t decide if the weather was a boon or bust at this point.  I could have done without all the rain, but at least it was reasonably cool.  I had Friday off work, and, ahem, Donette did too, so we started our weekend Thursday evening.  I started things off by “fixing” my webserver for a few hours.  There wasn’t anything wrong with it in the first place, but by the time I finished there certainly was.  I gave up after a while;  I’ll figure it out later, or start over, or something.  Luckily, I keep a spare for just such an emergency, so I moved everything over to the super-duper backup and went about more entertaining ways to kill time.  For the first evening of the long weekend, we picked up Brooke and went down to the newly opened Vox Theatre, where they were having an open house of sorts.  It was definitely worth the time;  They had a nice table of feed out with some good pulled pork and trimmings.  There was also Shatto ice cream, which I’ve always wanted to try but am too cheap to buy.  (It’s probably worth the extra coin after trying it.)  We also got to test out the new Tank 7 from Boulevard, which I think will be a hit.  We hung out there for a few hours and then it started getting a little crowded so I freaked out and left.  Fun gathering though.

Friday we got up and headed to Smithville Lake for some psuedo-camping, which would take up the rest of our weekend.  Donette’s folks have a big motorhome, which they let us borrow, so we pretty much just threw a few changes of clothes in a sack and headed up there.  Since all our northland friends were so rude as to sell their boats we really didn’t have any water-related entertainment, so we just kinda hung out.  And hung out, and hung out, and…  Hey it was “relaxing.”  We met our camping neighbors and spent a considerable amount of time talking with them.  Yep that’s us, making new friends, building bridges.  They were nice people though, and it passed the time.  The guy was pretty funny too;  By the end of the weekend I noticed that every time the dozen or so kids in their camp started getting extra wound up, he would wander over to our camp.  Hmmm, coincidence?  That was about the whole of the weekend.  We enjoyed the fireworks, at least the ones that didn’t get lost in the clouds.  There were several rainstorms, but that is relatively insignificant when you’re in a motorhome.  During those wet interludes and the 14 hours a day Donette was sleeping, Gabe & I watched movies.  Our cinematic entertainment included:  The Happening, The Strangers, & Max Payne.  The Happening was one of the worst flicks I’ve ever endured, but I didn’t have anything else to do so I sat through it anyway.  The Strangers was…  OK.  It might have been better if I didn’t watch the first 20 minutes without hearing any of the dialogue.  I could hear the music fine, but no voices, which I figured was supposed to be some sort of artsy-fartsy suspense builder.  It started getting ridiculous after a while though, and then I figured out I didn’t have my headphones pushed in all the way.  It wasn’t worth starting over though, so I just let it run from there.  I liked Max Payne better than the other two;  It was good enough to restore my faith in Marky Mark as the top-notch actor that he is, after watching “The Happening” disaster.

Sunday we broke camp and headed back  home around noon.  I was feeling mysteriously beat up for no more than I actually did all weekend.  I watched the Royals game, took a short bike ride down to the Plaza and back, and well, that was about it.  Our old neighbor Rick was in town again, so we went to dinner at Waldo Pizza with him and called it a night.  If I would have taken any pictures at the lake I would post them…  But I didn’t.  Sort of forgot I had the camera I guess.  There wasn’t much to photograph anyway though;  I guess I could have done a 48 hour time-lapse of Gabe sleeping on the picnic table.