Got in a short bike ride last night with Munkirs.  We’ve been on the Thursday night Brookside ride several weeks in a row now, and kept up the tradition this week.  We probably need to pick up the mileage a bit, but I guess seventeen miles is better than nothing.  After the ride we tried to hit the Brooksider for a cheap burger & fries;  Alas, no parking spots to be had.  Dang Thursday night tourists.

My winless streak of Royals games continues.  We went out to the ball park last night with Donette’s parents to catch the game.  Of course, due to my attendance, they lost.  Haven’t won a game I’ve been to yet this season, which has been quite a few actually.  Oh well.  It was a nice night for a game and we had fun, and they didn’t get absolutely crushed like the other times I’ve gone.

In a quite unrelated topic shift, I really need to start riding my bicycle to work.  I had big plans for bike commuting but so far I’ve only actually ridden in once.  I really should have biked today;  I don’t know how many 65-degree days are left but I’m guessing not many.  Next week…  NEXT week I’ll start.

Ahhh, another 3-day weekend.  I just don’t think I’m really cut out for a 5-day work week.  Four is more than enough.  I had Friday off courtesy of my oncall week.  It was earned too, geez.  Oncall is a young man’s game, I tell you.  Once again, I’m having a little trouble recalling exactly what we did that far back.  Maybe I need to start taking notes or something.  I took the motorcycle up the street to get re-inspected.  My tags are expired, as Officer Friendly reminded me on the way home a few weeks ago.  He also reminded me that there is a speed limit on Main Street, and it is not mach II, a fact I was previously unaware of.  After that we went and hung out at the pool for several hours until the heat drove us out.  Wow, it was hot.  Still June and the pool water is hot already.  Dang global warming.  After that details are kind of sketchy.  Donette went to the baseball game with our friend Katie.  As for me, well I did something remarkably fun and exciting, I just can’t remember what.  I think I sat on the couch and watched TV.

Saturday didn’t develop quite as planned.  I had intended to waste my day on the back porch smoking a brisket.  I goofed around all morning and finally threw it on around 10:30.  About that time, Donette reminded me we had a wedding to go to at 4:30.  Dang it!  This left me in brisket limbo;  Too late to take it off and save it for another time, and not enough time to get it cooked.  I ended up cooking it for 6 hours and then foiling it up and leaving it on the smoker.  Don’t know if it got done or not, haven’t even sliced it yet.  It was a failed experiment at any rate;  My goal was to cook it without using any foil but that didn’t work out.  What can ya’ do.  The wedding was fun though, as weddings go.  Man it was hot though, whew.  One of the groomsmen fell out, providing a little excitement.  Actually he didn’t go all the way down, he sort of crumpled then made a nice recovery and ducked out stage left.  We stuck around for a few hours of the reception and then bailed out to tend to the smoker.

Sunday I was supposed to go cycling with Munkirs but called rain-out.  We may have been able to ride anyway, but it looked pretty dicey out.  I ended up opting for the gym instead.  I wasted a few hours there, then made a PC house-call, then it was off to the ‘Sider to watch the ball game.  Donette got to go to the game again, but I had to make do with the TV.  They had the sound on for once too, bonus.  I watched the whole game down there, then Donette & Kelly showed up and we went to get some dinner at Jalepenos.  Ate a tasty relleno, then we all headed back to the house for some Rock Band;  Fine way to round out the weekend.

That was a pretty crazy weekend, at least as weekends go for me.  Friday I can’t even really remember what we did.  I am relatively certain we were at the Brooksider early in the evening.  I don’t remember anything in particular that verifies that, I’m just going with the odds.  At some point we decided we didn’t want to go back to our house.  Again, the decision process that led up to this is fuzzy;  I just can’t really remember that far back.  At any rate, we ended up staying in a room down on the Plaza.  Sort of a little mini-vacation if you will.  Very mini, considering it’s only four miles from our house.  Seemed like the thing to do at the time I guess.

Saturday we started the day off with breakfast at Eggct, my latest favorite place.  Donette’s parents met us there for an early Father’s Day celebration.  Great idea, but it didn’t work out for me;  I got paged before I could even order my omelet.  So, I hopped in the car and headed back to our room, and everybody else ate some tasty breakfast.  I’ve been cheated.  (Actually they got me a plate to go and it was solid.)  After breakfast we decided to take a stroll around the Plaza.  It actually is kind of like a pseudo-vacation spot because we don’t really go down there very often.  Things went bad while I was in Diebels though.  I was wandering around in their huge humidor for like 20 minutes, and when I came back out there was a monsoon developing outside.  We almost had to hunker down there, but we decided to make a dash and (barely) made it to the Falloon.  I thought that would be an ideal place to ride out the storm, but as soon as it hit the TV’s and music went out, leaving the place rather…  “quiet.”  Oh well.  We enjoyed a light lunch, and by that time the rain had passed.  Still not quite ready to go home, we went downtown for a while.  Eventually we wound our way back to Brookside.  Grilled some chicken kebabs for dinner and listened to the Royals game on the back porch;  Entertainment enough for me.

Sunday I went on a rather nice bike ride with Martin & Munkirs.  We had kicked around the idea of going on the City of Fountains Tour all week, and finally decided to just make it a last-minute call.  As it turned out, all three of us showed up.  The route options were a bit confusing.  That seemed to be the case for everybody, not just us.  We ended up stringing together a few routes and got in 30 miles.  (By “we” I mean James, Chris & I;  We rode by ourselves the majority of the trip.)  It was a good ride, although we had to spend a considerable amount of time waiting on Chris.  We weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere so that was OK.  No man left behind, just like when he waited for me on our Katy Trail ride several years ago.  After the ride I spent the rest of the day trying to amuse myself between intermittent pages from work.  I still maintain I am flat too old to be oncall, but I’m not getting a lot of support on that theory.  I watched a good part of the Royals game down at the Brooksider over a tasty tuna salad sandwich, then a little more work, then grilled up some burgers for dinner.  After dinner we were gonna watch a movie but decided I’d just fall asleep anyway, so I played Wii instead and then called it a weekend.

I’m afraid it looks like a stretch of 5 day work-weeks in my immediate future.  Oh the agony.  Honestly I don’t know how I’m going to pull through.  Time will tell.

I took off Friday because we had company in town.  Actually, we didn’t have company in town, per se;  A friend of ours was getting married, which led to the presence of several mutual friends.  Anyway, our friends David & Jill were the first to arrive, late Thursday afternoon.  Donette hung out with them while I went on a quick bike ride with Munkirs, then I met up with them at Cantina del Ray up the street for a late dinner.  After a while our friend Steve showed up, in from California.  He managed to find the restaurant despite getting some rather erroneous directions from us.  After ten years you might assume we know what street we live on.  Not so much I guess.

Friday we had intentions of hitting our “Tour de KC” in full force.  Well, it didn’t quite work out that way in the end, but we made a decent run at it.  Our first stop was the Boulevard Brewery tour;  One of our favorite options when we can remember to get reservations early enough.  It’s definitely worth going on if you haven’t been, even if you live in KC.  I had to remind them (again) to throw in a little Ripple Glass info though;  I don’t know why they leave that out.  It’s a pretty cool program, they ought to pimp it a little more.  After the tour, we debated a short bit about heading downtown to the P&L area.  Ended up cutting that part out though, mostly because it was a “work day” (for everybody else) and we didn’t want to deal with the parking, traffic, etc.  Instead we headed straight to Westport, for a quick lunch at McCoy’s.  Checked that box off the list and then walked across the street to Kelly’s.  We hadn’t seen the new upstairs deck at Kelly’s so there was a new feature for us to check out too.  Despite the furnace-like temperature, it was actually a pretty sweet deck and we ended up hanging out there for quite a while.  After Kelly’s, well, the whole tour kind of broke down.  We ended up fast-forwarding clear to the end of our list, and headed to Waldo to meet up with Steve’s wife & daughter at 75th Street.  It was a fine day for the tour, but David & Jill’s fun-hating daughter Casey called and shamed the whole lot of them into going to the rehearsal dinner.  Me, I have no shame, so I went home and watched TV.  (Of course I paid for it, it sounded like they had a good time.)

Saturday we got up, waded out into the monsoon, and met up with the Aushermans at Eggtc for some breakfast.  I think that place just may have surpassed Sharp’s as my breakfast of choice.  I don’t know, it’s still a close race.  It could be because I haven’t made it all the way through the menu at Eggtc, where-as I’ve lapped the one at Sharp’s several times over.  Anyway, after enjoying a particularly tasty (albeit unhealthy) selection, we headed down to the P&L to watch the big soccer game.  Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know there was a “big soccer game.”  I didn’t either, or maybe just didn’t care.  I appeared to be in the definite minority on that though, the place was packed.  Outside at the big-screen was a little too rowdy, as a matter of fact, so we elected to watch it at the Flying Saucer.  We ended up watching the entire match, a decision that would cost us a 30 minute wait getting out of the parking garage.  I found it remarkably entertaining though, it was a good time.  After that we all went and put on our goin’-to-town clothes, and headed out to Independence for our friends Kirk & TJ’s wedding.  It was…  You know, a wedding.  You’ve been to ’em.

Sunday, as the happy couple was heading off to Jamaica, we headed out for breakfast at Sharp’s.  Solid breakfast, and they actually had room for all eight of us, which was a bonus.  Unfortunately I felt the need to knock out an entire order of biscuits & gravy, effectively ruining the rest of my afternoon.  Carb overload I guess.  I laid on the couch and watched the Royals game, and the next thing I knew my whole day had been wasted.  We did go out and meet up with everybody for one last outing at 75th Street.  Just what I needed;  MORE food.  Hey, it was good, and I can always cut back a little this week.