I am rather less that inspired to type this up.  My four-day weekend is coming to an end and I’m rather disappointed that I have, for all intents and purposes, wasted it.  Bummer.  Friday, as a matter of fact, I didn’t do anything at all.  Later in the evening we did meet up with the Martins and Browns down at the P&L to celebrate the Martin’s anniversary.  We went to McFadden’s;  First time I’ve been there as far as I can remember.  Aside from being ridiculously loud, we had a fine time.

Saturday Donette took off for St. Louis with Susan, and that’s when the trouble set in.  Left to entertain myself, I will more often than not just sit on the couch.  Luckily a co-worker called later in the day and invited me to a party out in Blue Springs.  Not sure about the wisdom of a work-related function on my long weekend, but it was a good time.  Musta been anyway, I stayed much longer than I planned.  Took care of my whole day, as a matter of fact.

Sunday I very slowly got around, thrown off by the time change as always.  It took me a while to catch on, but I finally figured out I’d gotten up at 4:30 in the morning.  Rats.  By the time the football games rolled around, I felt like I’d already been up a full day.  I wandered down to the Brooksider to see what was up, and what do you know, they had the football games on all 25 TV’s.  I pulled up a chair and commenced to wasting the day;  And waste it I did.

And today?  Looks to be a repeat of the rest of the weekend.  I’ve sorted out all my audio books, played with my webserver a bit, and watched ESPN for countless hours.  Whippy.

Another month down.  Still riding the scooter, although I have to think that will be coming to an end pretty quickly now.  About time to start the three-month banishment to the Metro.

That wasn’t an all bad weekend, considering I was oncall.  Given that qualifier, I’d go so far as to call it a good weekend.  Friday was something of a bust I guess.  I headed straight home and hit the couch to sort of get in the “oncall” mode.  Watched a few Halloween movies on Netflix, and called it a day.  The first selection, Rumplestiltskin, was predictably horrible.  I watched the whole miserable thing though.  After that was Day of the Dead, which was marginally entertaining.  (Can’t go wrong with the zombie genre.)

Saturday we got up (relatively) early and headed to the gym.  That’s a solid start to a day;  Kind of gets you in the mood for some productivity.  Case in point, on the way back home we stopped by Sutherlands and bought some lawn bags and electric hedge shears for some long overdue shrubbery maintenance.  It took a few hours to knock down all the bushes in the front yard and get it all cleaned up, and then it was on to the back yard to tackle the Shrub From Hell.  We’ve only got one lonely “bush” in the back yard, but it’s a doozy.  I’d guess it is more in the weed family than an actual shrub.  I have no idea what it is, but it’s quite resilient.  We’ve cut it to the ground at least twice, but it just comes back even bigger and uglier than before.  I gave it a good hacking this summer, but it had already bounced back and was a good nine feet high.  So, I drug out the ladder, some loppers, and the new electric shears, and went after it.  I beat it down to a manageable level I suppose.  Donette gave the work a thumbs up, but Kane was none too pleased with the effort.  That was his hunting blind, where he liked to stalk chipmunks from.  At his age and fitness level he’s never going to catch one anyway, but he does like to try.  Oh well, it’ll grow back I’m sure.  After I got that mess cleaned up, the Missouri game was well underway.  I figured I’d earned a break, so I rode my bike down to the Brooksider and hung out on the deck watching the rest of the game.  Bah, disappointing outcome.  I hung out there for a while enjoying the nice weather anyway, then headed home for a delicious spaghetti dinner Donette cooked up.  After dinner I tried to watch Dolls;  I think I might have made it through the first ten minutes before falling asleep.

Sunday we kicked off the day with a good breakfast down at Sharp’s.  It ain’t no Eggtc, but I didn’t feel like driving all the way down there.  (It’s at LEAST another mile, possibly even two.)  I knocked off a plate of biscuits and gravy, then headed back to work in the yard again.  The project that day was leaf clean-up.  I only made it through the front yard, but that was quite an accomplishment.  Whew, lot of leaves.  I missed the first half of the Chief’s game due to that chore, but caught the second half.  After that nail-biter, I watched the late game and monitored my Fantasy Football teams.  My season is shaping up nicely;  I’ve only lost one week to the wife so far, and won most match-ups in a most convincing fashion.  I would expect this is largely due to my superior male sports-genes, as well as my grasp of the game in general.  I’ve been instructed not to gloat though, so I won’t mention it.  Anyway, later in the evening, we actually turned on our porch-light for a short bit and handed out some candy.  We probably had a dozen or so kids come by in a few groups.  We didn’t stick around long though;  We turned out the light and headed over a block to our friends Tom & Nancy’s for their annual Halloween party.  Their street must be something of a Halloween destination.  There were tons of cars and kids roaming around, and lots of driveway parties going on.  We hung out for a while, then headed back to our boring block to watch the baseball game.

As anticipated, my big day off was a total waste.  Oh well, it was to be expected.  I did get some PC-related issues cleared up between all the worthless television episodes though.  One involved replacing my “storage” drive on the main PC.  It has been pushing the “too full” condition for quite a while now, so I upgraded from a 320 gig to a fancy new terabyte drive.  I gave consideration to leaving the 320 in there and running all three drives, but decided I didn’t need to burn the extra electricity.  I give it about 3 weeks before I invariably decide, “well there’s no sense just leaving it in the closet, I’m putting it back in.”  I can backup my backups to it or something ridiculous.  I also finally switched my laptop over to Ubuntu Linux.  That one has been a long time coming, I’ve had that thing for well over a year.  I gave an honest effort to liking Windows Vista, but finally conceded it is junk.  I like Windows 7 well enough, which I use on my PC, but I couldn’t see buying a $150 operating system for a $300 laptop.  The Linux does just fine;  I’d recommend it for anybody.  Matter of fact, it does several things quite a bit better than Windows;  Notably, it manages my super-duper firewall, and even more importantly it has built-in Sudoku.

I have a day off, and as usual I’m not inclined to spend it typing this.  Add to that the fact that I really didn’t do much this weekend, and there you have a recipe for an even weaker update than usual.  Friday was a total loss;  Donette went out to make a few bucks babysitting, I stayed home on the couch and watched movies.  Hey, I don’t get the “big TV” very often, I have to seize the opportunity when it arises.  Netflix now streams to both the Wii & PS-3 without using the silly disk, so that’s kind of nice.

Saturday, oddly enough, I got caught up in the college football games.  I just don’t normally follow them except in the paper.  There were some good games on though;  Or maybe I just needed an excuse to stay on the couch.  I went over to our friend Ron’s house for the big MU game, which was a good time.  Actually stayed all the way until the end.  We had several slabs of ribs, brisket, and turkey to keep us full while we cheered.

Sunday I rode my bike down to the Brooksider to watch the Chiefs game.  Aside from a rather harsh glare on the TV’s I enjoyed it.  Rumor is they are putting up the tent this week, so that was probably my last day on the patio for a few months.  The day was pretty nice, so I stayed for some of the afternoon games too;  At least, that is, until the hoodlums from the Chiefs game started over-running the place.  Man it got crowded quick;  I bailed.  We had a nice sirloin steak for dinner and then it was back to the couch for the evening game.

It IS Friday right?  Please?  Well I guess if it’s not, it will be some time.  That weekend went by entire too fast, it could still be last Friday for all I know.  Things started out rather unremarkably;  Spent Friday evening down at the Brooksider of all places.  Hey, this weather ain’t gonna be around for ever, I feel I need to take advantage of it while it’s here.  Nothing of note from down there;  The same guys, sitting at the same table, talking about the same things.  A routine I am quite comfortable with, I might add.

Saturday brought another fine day outside.  We spent our morning running errands, which took a lot longer than normal with the big marathon going on.  I think we drove about 15 miles on the 5 mile trip to Costco.  We got everything done though, just took a bit longer.  Later in the afternoon we headed over to our friend Ron’s house, AKA “Brooksider North,” for a gathering.  (He insists on referring to these events as “gatherings,” as the term “party” would somehow require too much responsibility.)  Officially dubbed the Annual Fish Fry, it’s morphed into a more diverse buffet over the last few years, presumably because nobody wants to go catch and clean a bunch of fish.  (I know I don’t.)  We did fry up some obligatory fillets, but there was also fried chicken, ribs, and two kinds of smoked pork.  For our part, we brought the fryer for the fish and threw some hush puppies in the grease too.  The pups came out well this year;  I just bought a few boxes of mix and then stirred in a few “extras.”  Much better than the home-made route, and easier to boot.

Sunday we got out of our routine a bit.  Niece Dee was having some kind of BBQ at her dormitory in Columbia and needed a cooker, so she’d called a few weeks back to see what we could come up with.  Details were a bit…  “sketchy” around the event, but we borrowed our friend Troy’s cooker and headed up there early Sunday morning.  It was a good time;  Our responsibility pretty much consisted of starting the fire and then sitting in lawn chairs enjoying the weather.  Never did really figure out what the party was for but that’s OK;  Something to do with Homecoming I think.  They set up a bunch of games and decorations and food, all of which was judged around 4:00.  (I’m not even sure what the judging criteria was, but they seemed pleased with the event so that’s good…)  The grill served admirably;  Dee and a few friends churned out some serious burgers and dogs on it.  I was rather surprised (shocked?  scared?  disturbed?) at the amount of food they went through.  Final damage was 160 hamburgers, and at least that many hot dogs.  And there were only like 35 people there.  (OK maybe a few more than that.)  You definitely wanted to pull your fingers back quickly when setting down a pan of food, or they would end up on a bun with relish and mustard.  We spent the whole afternoon down there;  By the time we got the cooker cooled down enough to pull it was around 6:00.  A few hours driving back to KC, then add another hour for me to finally get it backed in the driveway when we got home, (180th time is a charm) and it was bedtime.