Went on a ride with Munkirs and Martin last night.  As usual, (well, “usual” for Munkirs & I anyways) we selected the KCBC ride that leaves out of Brookside.  It’s a good ride, although I may be starting to tire of the route a bit.  Better than sitting at the Brooksider watching TV I guess.  “Better” in the health sense anyway;  I’m not sure it’s any more entertaining.  This week we decided to kick things up a notch and ride with the self-labeled “Fast Group” for the first time.  Actually I’d say ride with them was a stretch;  We did manage to sort of doggedly hang on to the back of the group though.  Certainly a more briskly-paced ride than we are used to.  I decided I liked it better though, at least as an experiment.  After getting our 17 miles in, we drug our tattered carcasses over to the Brooksider and replenished with some cheeseburgers.  We all survived in relatively good condition;  It remains to be seen which group we pick next Thursday.

My perfect streak of attending lousy Royals games is intact.  We braved the storms last night to head out to the ballpark, along with about 60 other people.  Honestly it really wasn’t that bad of an evening, the actual ball game aside.  As a matter of fact, we stayed later than any game I’ve been to this season.  As the game was rather “lightly attended,” we had our pick of seats, so we chose some nice lower-level ones just under the overhang.  That kept us nice and dry, and there was even plenty of empty seats by us when a bunch of our friends showed up.  Had quite a party of it as a matter of fact.  There was plenty of offense to keep me entertained (none of it by the Royals unfortunately) and all our friends’ kids were rather funny to watch too.  I noticed almost every sentence kids say starts with “Dad, can I have a…” or “Mom, I want a…”  Geez, just keep those wallets out.

Bad time to depend on a scooter for everyday transportation.  I even get sweaty on the way in to work at 6:30 in the morning.  It’s tempting to go back to riding the bus every day, as they manage to keep it at a constant 42 degrees on there, but then there is the walk to the bus stop to consider.  Oh well;  July in KC, deal with it I guess.

That was a pretty fine weekend, especially considering it was my oncall weekend.  I never expect too much of those, so if I squeak in any fun at all it’s a bonus.  Friday some friends were in from out of town, so that occupied our day.  (Well, that and work.)  One of my “Old Army Buddies” Scott & his wife Trish were visiting from the fine town of Wolbach, NE.  They were on a semi-business, semi-fun trip, so we tried to help out with the fun part.  Donette showed them around all day, I can’t remember where all they went.  I did get to meet them for lunch at Arthur Bryant’s, which was definitely a solid pick on the wife’s part.  That’s one of the bonus’ of seeing people from out of town;  We tend to take them to places we know are good but for whatever reason we never go to.  I hadn’t been to Bryant’s forever.  Had an awesome brisket sandwich, made for a bit of a long afternoon though.  I swear it had a full pound of beef on it, if not more.  I met up with them again at the Peanut (Main Street location) after work.  From there it was off to the Brooksider to relax for a while.  Smart money would have called it an evening at that point, but I had other ideas.  I decided to drag everybody down to Grinders to see what was going on.  They had some music out in the open area, and we ended up staying much too late.  The Zeros and a band called “Sellout” were playing.  The Zeros I’ve heard of plenty;  I generally associate them with ruining my evening at the Brooksider.  Not to say they’re bad or anything,  I just don’t go there to listen to music.  Get those crazy kids in there listening to their loud music and I can’t even hear the televisions.  Bah.  I wasn’t familiar with Sellout at all though, and they were pretty entertaining, especially outside on a relatively decent evening.

Saturday we slept in, a rather remarkable event in itself.  Well, for one of us anyway.  If not for the fact that we were supposed to meet Scott & Trish for lunch I may well have slept until noon.  But, we had plans, so I rather reluctantly drug myself out of bed and headed out.  We decided on the Power & Light district for lunch, then further narrowed it down to the Flying Saucer.  We all decided on hamburgers;  Bad decision.  I will go on record as labeling this the worst hamburger in KC.  Our guests claimed to like them, but I have to think they were just being nice.  Maybe it was just a bad day in the kitchen…  I’ll never know because I will never risk ordering another one.  Note to self:  “Stick to the soft pretzels at the Saucer.”  We killed the rest of the afternoon in random fashion, then for dinner headed up to Donette’s parents.  After that burger I needed some good food, and this trip filled the bill.  Fried chicken & Smokehouse BBQ, yum.  And, for a bonus, a homemade coconut creme pie that may well have been the best I’ve ever had.  (If maybe not the best for my ever-expanding gut.)

Sunday started off strong.  Got up and went on a 35-mile bike ride with Munkirs.  We seem to be stuck at the 35-mile mark for whatever reason;  Gonna have to man up and bump the mileage at some point.  I think we’re up for a longer ride, as far as our “conditioning” goes.  (I put that in quotes because I’m not sure “conditioned” would describe my current health status.)  But, it takes around two hours to go 35 miles and I think that’s about the limit of my attention span.  Not sure what to do about that;  Maybe hire a traveling circus to ride alongside and entertain me or something.  After our ride I headed down to the Brooksider with intentions of having some lunch and watching the Royals game.  Alas, the game was blacked out.  What is up with that?  Literally threw my whole day out of whack.  I did have a tasty sandwich, which took care of the lunch part of my plan, but didn’t want to sit there watching bowling all day so I went back home and listened to the game on mlb.com.  After that I pretty much wasted the rest of the day.  Luckily Donette brought me four new PS-3 games home from her shopping trip, that effectively killed the rest of my evening.  I spent a few hours puzzling over Madden NFL.  Wow, that game is a far cry from the last electronic football game I played.  (Being the hand-held with the little red dots flashing on it;  Amazing technology at the time.)  There’s almost too much going on for my old mind to process, and definitely too many buttons to keep track of.  It’s very entertaining though, as long as I keep things on the “beginner” setting.

I made it all the way to Friday.  Unfortunately this holds no significance at all this week, just means I am going oncall.  Time to sit on the couch and watch TV all weekend, and wait for the phone to ring.  We went out last night to celebrate Thursday though, so hopefully that gets me through the entire next week.  Didn’t do much;  Went down to the Brooksider and watched TV and enjoyed their A/C for a while.

Hmmm…Doni trying to help Phil out by uploading a picture but I am not smart enough (or don’t care) to get it to work.  Phil can figure it out later.  🙂

I (being Phil at this point) shall now try my hand at this.  Yeah I don’t really “get” how to put pictures on here either.  The purpose of the post was to recap our “date night” yesterday.  While it is true that we go out more nights than not, last night we ventured out of the Brookside/Waldo area, qualifying the evening as a “date.”  Our entertainment of choice was a beer tasting/dinner at Grinders.  The event was sponsored by Magic Hat Brewing.  We met their local rep at the Brew Ha Ha last weekend and talked for quite a while, so when we saw this event pop up we decided to show up.  She actually remembered us too, we must have talked longer than I thought.  It was a fun event at any rate.  Much different than the dinners we’ve been to at 75th Street.  Decidedly more casual themed for one thing.  I wouldn’t call that good or bad, just “different.”  We’ll probably check a few more of them out (second Tuesday of every month) and see if they are all that good.

OK that’s not really what I had in mind for the picture but it’s on there.  I’ll mess with it later.