The biggest excitement of that weekend was the addition of a new dog to the house.  You might be saying to yourself,  “New dog??!!  I thought you were done with dogs?  I thought Donette was out of town?  I thought you had two ounces of common sense?”  Well, true, all true.  (With the possible exception of the last one.)  Things just sort of fell into place though.  “Went with the moment,” so to speak.  This little ‘un is a refugee from St. Louis.  A friend of Donette’s sister had taken her in as a stray a few weeks ago, but couldn’t keep her.  I just so happened to have a friend driving back from there on Friday, so I figured what the heck.  (Well, at least he was my friend before driving 4 hours with “my” puppy on his leather seats.)  So anyway, the dog journeyed to KC on Friday, and I went and picked her up that afternoon.  So far, so good.  She has been remarkably well behaved;  Almost to the point of arousing suspicion.  We are struggling to come up with a name though.  They called her “Athena” and she does respond well to that.  But, I think it’s good ju-ju to name your own dog so we’re trying to come up with something else.  On the short list so far are Reegan, Teagan, Reeces, Peanut, Theena, and approximately 20 others.  Quite the variation there, huh.  Actually I sort of like “Peanut” if it wasn’t such a goofy name.  That one might make the nickname list.  So here is a picture of her that her rescuers in St. Louis sent me.  She looks quite a bit darker in person than she looks here, but I’ve been too lazy to drag out my own camera so this will do.

** Edit:  We’ve agreed on “Teagan.”  She has been dubbed.

So what else went on this weekend?  Well, for the most part I tried to hang out at the house and get the pup settled in.  Lots of walks, lots of fetch, and lots of watching basketball.  I did make it out to Mom’s Saturday afternoon and got her new computer set up.  MAN that thing is fast, makes me want a new one too.  (This and every other want for the foreseeable future will be responded to with “We don’t have money for that, you wanted a dog instead.”)  This also gave me an opportunity to try kenneling the pup, which went just fabulously.  The only other time I got out of the house was for a nice bike ride Sunday afternoon with Munkirs & Martin.  Well, at least it was a nice ride for Munkirs and I;  Chris suffered a catastrophic failure of his Internet-Bike early in the ride and had to call in support.

I have (almost) successfully killed another week.  Last night I dropped by the Brooksider and found a big bunch of old men hanging out.  Carl, Zim, Chad, Martin, Belanger, Brice, Falstrom, et al;  I think we pretty much had representation from all four corners of the city.  I guess the occasion revolved around the basketball games, but it was so stinking loud in there you couldn’t hear anything.  Eventually this crowd filtered out, and I stuck around a while longer to hang out with a table of 20-somethings.  This was every bit as bad an idea as it sounds.  I am way too old.  Do not look for me down there tonight.

It’s Wednesday.  Four days since I was abandoned to fend for myself, left alone with no food, no entertainment, and no companionship save a half-crazy cat.  Yet I am somehow managing to get by, a testament to my strong will to survive.  Last night, weak from hunger, I barely managed to drag myself down to the Brooksider, where a kind young lady quickly recognized my desperate plight and rushed me a plate of chicken soft tacos.  Rejuvenated by this small amount of nourishment, I made it back home for another lonely night on the couch watching TV with the cat.  We watched The Thaw, which was a thoroughly engaging documentary on global warming.  Or, it may have been a mindless horror film.  It passed the evening, whatever the case.

Last night I headed out to Mom’s house for a service call;  The old PC had been acting up again.  After a tasty dinner I headed down to the basement to take a look and found it…  Working fine.  I think it was an elaborate ruse to drag me out of my Comfort Circle all the way out to Peculiar, ha.  Oh well, with the wife out of town I needed dinner anyway.  And, “working fine” in this particular case means it did actually boot up, and then proceeded to drag along in the usual painfully slow fashion.  Not to mention, from the description of what it has been doing, I think it is about to give up on even doing that much.  So, after doing the usual once-over on it, we headed up to Office Max to see what was on sale.  We ended up picking out a nice HP system.  It will surely be an upgrade from the existing one.  For one thing, it is of course loaded with Windows 7, which I have grown rather fond of.  I think the jump from XP is worth the price right there.  The processor jumps from an 800 Mhz single-core to a 3 Ghz quad-core.  I won’t even try to do the math on how much faster that is…  Suffice to say “A lot.”  Combine that with 8 times more memory, not to mention faster memory at that, and there should be a noticeable speed increase to say the least.  And, of course, it comes with the ridiculously huge hard drive that everything seems to have these days.  The new PC comes in with a whopping 25 times more space than the old one.  Now when you consider that she has used less than half of the space on the old one, that number doesn’t really mean much, but it’s rather impressive all the same.  So, anyway, after checking them all out, debating between a laptop or a desktop system, comparing prices, etc, we finally picked that one out…  And they were out of them.  Naturally.  They were going to check other stores though, and hopefully get one out there today.

Here’s a picture, Donette sent me from her travels;  Isn’t that just the sweetest thing ever?  Everybody now:  “AWWWWWWW”

This snow has knocked the wind out of me.  It’s just too disappointing for words.  I’ll type a little something out of sheer habit but I really ain’t got much in me.

Friday, as I mentioned, I took the day off due to the fatigue of two consecutive late nights.  Good thing too, I guess that was the last of the decent weather.  I headed down to the Brooksider and watched basketball on the patio most of the evening, enjoying the relative warmth.

Saturday morning we moped around the house, then went down and met our friend Brooke at Jalapenos for a little lunch.  She was up visiting from Fort Worth, presumably for the Big 12 tourney;  Guess I forgot to ask the reason for the visit.  After lunch Donette and a few friends headed up to the airport, and flew out for a Spring Break in Newport Beach.  She’s gone all week, so feel free to come entertain me.  I headed over to my friend Ronnie’s house to watch basketball.  It was an “all guys” event, which is something of a rarity.

Yesterday Munkirs & Martin came down and we sat around the Brooksider bemoaning the cold weather.  We were supposed to be bike riding but it was just too c0ld.  Wah.  Tired of it.  And then I wake up this morning to snow on the ground?  I can’t take it.  Doesn’t bode well for the upcoming Float Trip either.