Ahhhh, that was a nice little vacation weekend.  Unfortunately it left me too beat up and worn out to do anything practical or taxing today, so I will just jot down a few notes and get back to bed.  I have the day off and my horoscope promises a 5-star day so I don’t want to ruin things by trying to spend it wisely.

Our weekend started last Thursday when we flew out to Denver to visit with Ed and Kim.  They both had to work on Friday so we kept it low-key that night, although we did manage to go have an awesome dinner at Benny’s.  I had the chili relleno dinner, which was spectacular as-is, but then I put it over the top (in both taste and fat calories) by going with the bonus topping of carnitas.  Holy smokes it was good.  As far as I know everyone else enjoyed their dinners also, but I wasn’t really listening.

Friday while Ed and Kim worked, we killed the afternoon by driving around sight-seeing and generally enjoying the weather.  We had a good lunch at some random Irish Pub, the name of which escapes me now.  All we really cared about was that they had outdoor seating so we could take in some sun;  The lunch itself was kind of secondary.  After Ed and Kim got home, we took the light-rail down to the Pepsi Center to catch our first ever NLL game.  That, of course, is the National Lacrosse League, just in case you don’t follow the game as closely as we do.  The home team is the Colorado Mammoths, and they seem to have quite a following.  I don’t know if the place was an official sell-out, but it had to be awfully close.  If I had to guess, the main draw is probably the fights, and we were treated to a few doozies;  They made hockey brawls look like powder-puff football.  It was quite an event at any rate, and now we can say we’ve been to a Lacrosse game.  I’m not entirely sure what they were doing over the span of the few hours we were there, but when they were done running around beating each other about the head and shoulders with their sticks, the Mammoth had more points on the board than the Rush, so the Home Team won.  (Insert ringing cowbell sounds and hurl a few loud obscenities here for the full effect.)

Saturday we got up early and drove to Breckenridge Park, for our first try at skiing.  (Technically, I have been once, about a 1/4 century ago, but my skills from that trip have waned a bit.)  We got there around 9:30, and the place was already pretty busy.  Ed and Kim strapped on their snowboards and headed off to do their thing, while we set about renting some equipment, signing up for lessons, and all that good stuff.  Our class started around 10:30, made up of Donette and I and four other first-timers.  The instructor seemed mildly curious as to why you would take skiing classes on the day before the park closed for the season, but he seemed game enough for teaching us anyway.  The morning session brought great promise, and we quickly deemed ourselves skiing prodigies.  By noon, we had positively mastered the skills required to traverse 30 yards of perfectly flat terrain.  We broke for lunch, and then returned to head up the lift for our first run at the hill.  I don’t know if we had short-term memory loss or what, but the afternoon didn’t go quite as well as the morning.  Everything that seemed so easy earlier was all but forgotten as we stared down the 25% grade into the frozen abyss that he took us to.  “Uhhh, dude, are you sure we’re on the right hill?”  It was a rather humbling afternoon, exacerbated by the hundreds of 7-year-olds whizzing by us.  By 3:30 we convinced the instructor that if he could somehow just safely transport us to the bottom of the mountain, we would tip him handsomely, turn in our gear and never again return.  If nothing else, we probably provided him with some good story-telling material for his off season entertainment.  All in all, it was fun though, in a rather painful and humiliating sort of way.  And if you’re going to try skiing, I think we picked an awesome day for it;  It got up to like 60 degrees by the time we were done.  After that torture session, we went into town and hung out at an outdoor concert, which was a little more our speed.  We stayed there for a few hours, people-watching and enjoying the music and perfect weather.  On the downside, Donette enjoyed the weather a bit TOO much…  By the end of the day she was so sunburned that her ears actually swelled up.  I didn’t do a whole lot better either;  I managed to burn my neck pretty bad.  At least she evenly toasted herself, I ended up with one side glowing red and the other side the color of a catfish belly.  Nice.

We spent the night in Breckenridge, then got up Sunday and hit the road back to Denver.  After a huge breakfast to start the day, we embarked on a very circuitous route home, in an ultimately unsuccessful quest to see a moose.  I guess it was too hot out for the wildlife, we didn’t see much outside of a few cows, several foxes and bunch of road-kill deer.  It WAS a nice scenic drive though, as far as drives go.  We took a few breaks, including a short hike in one of the parks, a stop in Idaho Springs for a late lunch, and a detour to Buffalo Bill’s grave site.  The trip took up the whole day, and by the time we got back to the house we had to head to the airport.  We got back to KC around midnight, picked up the dog, and headed home to rest up.  I’m glad I burned the extra day of vacation, as I am pretty worn out today.

Edit:  I added a few pictures to my photo gallery.

Man this weather SUCKS!!  I am getting truly bent out of shape over it all.  I had to scrape frost off my car to drive in this morning, CRAP!  Of course I should be on my scooter toughing it out, but since we went back to two cars I tend to take the path of comfort and convenience.

That was a “down” weekend, mostly due to a combination of the weather and being oncall.  We snuck in a little fun here and there though.  Friday started the weekend with several hours of nothing.  I like to ease into the whole oncall routine you know.  Donette made a good dinner of kielbasa and kraut, and then I retired upstairs to watch the Royals get shut out.  That quickly bored me to sleep, and so ended Friday.

Saturday brought a little fun, in the form of the Royals game.  We met up with the Martins out at the stadium around 2:00 and enjoyed a nice tailgate with a bunch of their friends.  They brought in a bunch of Wabash BBQ, which I’d never tried.  (Thumbs up.)  The game, if you watched it, was somewhat less than entertaining.  The weather was just about as bad as the game too;  More like football weather.  We stuck around for a while though;  Our seats were good and we’re always up for some people-watching, so that kept us occupied.  After the game, well, we went back home and did more nothing.  I had to work into the wee hours so I had to save my strength.

Sunday wasn’t exactly a big wrap-up to the lame weekend, but we stayed busy.  I started the day off by fixing my website.  Since it wasn’t broken in the first place, I’m not sure what got me off on that tangent, but at any rate it’s broken now.  No more message board for pkenagy.com, at least for the time being.  I am totally baffled.  The OLD one doesn’t even work any more.  Very mysterious.  Having thusly wasted my morning, I moved on to installing a new XM radio in my car.  I’d say I’m pretty much addicted to the XM thing…  This is our fourth radio.  (Heaven forbid I take the 30 seconds to move the one in the living room back and forth to the car like most people.)  Granted, I’m only in my car about 20 minutes a day, but that’s more than enough time for the FM stations around here to put me in a foul mood.  That took quite a while, as this time around I actually spent a little time routing the wires right so it would look halfway decent.  And, being probably the cheapest available receiver on the market, it presented a few additional installation challenges that baffled me for a good bit of time.  So, now we’ve got 24×7 tunes in both cars, the house, and one receiver that just sits in the closet and collects dust.  (Oh, we’ve got plans for it though.)  That project got me through the afternoon, then we went to our routine Sunday evening dinner at Jalapenos to wrap things up.  As it happened, I never got called from work over the weekend.  As soon as I’d have gone and tried to have fun I would’ve though… What can ya’ do.

Finally, in a rare bit of “bummer” news from pkenagy.com, I hate to announce that the Kenagy’s are back to a one dog family.  I’d just as soon leave it on the down-low, but I’ll mention it in the hopes of keeping somebody from making any ill-advised references or standard issue pitbull jokes;  They wouldn’t go over too well.  After a year and a half of working with Belle, we finally decided she just wasn’t cut out for our house.  Despite some very prominent flaws that led to this decision, I’d still take her company over a good portion of the people that I deal with day to day, so the whole thing pretty much sucks.  And that’s all I got to say about that.

FINALLY some good barbecue weather.  Now if it can just hold out for a few weeks, I’ll buy into the calendar theory that Spring is actually here.

Things kicked off strong on Friday with a “work” happy hour.  We headed up to our new hangout of choice;  The bowling alley in Raytown.  There’s just something appealing about sitting around a bowling alley…  Perhaps the sheer un-appealing aspect of it?  At any rate, it was a nice little wind-down after the week.  When I got home, one of the neighbor girls was visiting with Donette, so we blabbed with her a while about the Jayhawks and their big tourney run.  (Nutty KU people.)  After a few hours of THAT, we headed off to a benefit auction at Donette’s school for a late dinner and some face-time with her colleagues.  That was fun, although remarkably I couldn’t find anything I was even remotely interested in bidding on.  It was catered by BB’s Lawnside BBQ though, and I’m always up for sampling some ‘que.  As far as that part of it goes, I’d say they should stick to the live music part of their business, ’cause the food isn’t going to keep them in business.  It was “OK” I guess…  The sausage was actually pretty good, but the pork and brisket were rather marginal.  After dinner we went back home, where we ran into the neighbor girl again.  We still had a little “go” left in us, so we came up with the brilliant idea to…  Go out to dinner!  Nothing like a little gluttony to start the weekend.  We headed down to Jalapenos and ordered a few dinners, which we then boxed up and took home.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Saturday morning brought my one practical use of time for the weekend;  The continuation of the failed brake replacement project from last weekend.  I drove out to Zim’s house this time, because he actually has real tools and a garage and other useful stuff like that.  The drive out there probably took longer than the work itself;  He had all four wheels done in like 45 minutes, and even threw in a tire rotation free of charge!  So, I can now reliably stop my car, which is a good thing.  By the time I made the drive back home it was around noon, so I headed over to Brice’s house to enjoy the weather.  His mantra for this ‘Que season is “Practice makes ribbons,” so he had his smoker fired up and loaded down with ribs and pork butt.  It turned into quite the event…  Several people dropped by during the afternoon to sample some food, and we played a few thousand rounds of washers to pass the time between the “courses.”  After that I headed home to watch the KU game, but it turned out to be such a blow-out that I didn’t even watch too much of it.

Sunday was a nice quiet afternoon.  Since the weather was so nice out again, I decided to fire up my own smoker.  (Practice makes ribbons, you know.)  In a rather interesting departure from standard grill-fare though, I threw on a corned beef brisket that I had left over from the St. Patty’s sales.  That pretty much ate up my entire afternoon.  Other than a trip up to Tanner’s to watch the Royals and eat some lunch, I spent the whole day sitting on the back deck listening to my iPod and tending the fire.  Unfortunately, between these two days of sun and fun, I managed to get quite a nasty sunburn on my head.  Happens every Spring, dang it…  I must be a slow learner.  And as for the corned beef?  Pretty darn good.  I shredded it up and made a sandwich with some spicy mustard and a slice of cheddar;  I’d put it on the “repeat” list.

Wow, the weekly poll hit a new high; 42 total votes.  I had to spend the majority of my evenings last week freeing up extra memory on my server to keep up with the vast amount of traffic.  Now, whether or not the results are actually valid is another question.  I happen to have it on good authority that Carl was seen at his daughter’s school several days last week, telling all the kids that the Easter Bunny was going to come take back their candy if they didn’t run home and vote for him.  Something shifty was going on, that’s for sure.

Friday doesn’t really bear recounting… I didn’t do much.  Donette was on the road returning from her Houston trip, so I just headed home to babysit the dogs, as I did every night last week.  Those little monsters really cut into my already mediocre social life.  I’ll be glad if it ever warms up and I can put the dog-door back in, so they can let themselves out.  I can’t even recall what I did for entertainment all evening. Something tells me it probably involved laying on the couch channel-surfing, if I was going to make a guess.

Saturday brought a little more activity, if not really any more accomplishment.  I had gotten it into my head on Friday that the brakes on the Accord were making a grinding noise, so I set about using my mechanical expertise to remedy the situation.   Coincidentally, there were already new brake pads in the trunk all ready to install, which Donette had thought to purchase roughly a year ago when we were told the brakes needed replaced.  Let’s not bring my tendency to procrastinate into the picture though.  I spent the better part of the morning laying out my plan, including trying to decide whether or not I needed new rotors.  I got a little expert advise for you;  If you decide to run your fingers over the rotor to see if it’s gouged up, do NOT do this immediately after driving the car.  By the time the pain registered, I’d lost the finger prints on all four fingers of my right hand.  Man, those fingertips just wiped right off like butter on a hot skillet.  After venting my agony on everything within reach, I continued on with the arduous process of jacking up the car.  Thankfully that went off without a hitch, only to find the wheel was stuck on like it’d been welded there.  I finally hit it with a big enough hammer to jar it loose, with only minor damage to the alloy wheel.  I then proceeded to puzzle over the brake calipers for a few hours;  They really looked like quite an intimidating hodge-podge of bolts and hoses and such.  I took off a few important-looking pieces of metal here and there, but eventually stopped after I started having flash-backs of my old Monte Carlo.  (I took it apart to “fix” something or another in the steering column but never figured out how to put it back together, and eventually had it towed off for junk.)  I ended up making the executive decision that the brakes were just fine, and (hopefully) put everything back together, effectively wasting my entire afternoon.  The aforementioned grinding noise was easily resolved by turning up the radio a little higher;  All good.  Meanwhile, Donette’s nephew Joshua was inside making better use of his time by doing a research paper for school.  The subject matter was “Steroids in MLB”;  Look for it to be published in the next issue of Sports Illustrated!  At least it should be, he spent all dang day on it.  I don’t know when this paper was due (I suspect today…) but he did the entire thing from start to finish over the course of the day.  This worked out well for us;  We left him home with the dogs while we went out and had dinner at Governor Stumpy’s around the corner.  We need to go there more often, it’s not a bad little hang out.  I’d add a link to their website so you could check out the menu, but it is probably the single most embarrassing excuse for a website I’ve ever seen, so I’ll spare you the agony.

Sunday I woke up and started the day with a massive breakfast.  I made a tasty three-egg ham & cheese omelet, hash browns, and a batch of sausage gravy to smother everything with.  It was quite good, and the cat didn’t even run through it this time.  After that feed-a-thon I read the newspaper, and then after much deliberation went to the gym for a few hours.  Then, feeling entirely too healthy, I headed down to eat chicken wings and watch the basketball games at the Brooksider.  I made it through the early game, but then the place was overrun with loudmouth KU fans and I had to bail back to the safety of my couch.  Donette, meanwhile, was out at NFM shopping for a new washer and dryer set.  Our dryer makes some squeaking noise (and has for about the last decade) which apparently necessitated the purchase of an entire new unit.  And, although I was not aware of this fact, the washer has to match the dryer in order to function properly, so you can’t just buy one or the other.  Anyway, she got some fancy LG front-loading super-duper industrial-grade machines, so we should be set for another dozen years.  It seems to me that whenever one of my friends spend that kind of money they get cool stuff;  Shotguns, or big-screen TV’s, or laptops, or what-not.  I get a washer and dryer that sit down in my crumbling leaky basement.  Clean clothes are a good thing though I guess.  She also bought a big bag of accessories for my prized food-saver though, so I did get something out of the deal.  This was obviously an attempt to divert my attention from the bill for the washer and dryer, but that’s OK.

Another Float Trip come and gone;  Except it didn’t really come this year.  The weather was actually looking pretty good considering the date, and we were excited about the water conditions.  Given that the water was 25+ feet above normal, it promised to be a nice challenging float.  There would certainly be no dragging on low spots, and we figured the normally 6 hour long float should take around 45 minutes this year;  All good stuff!  Fortunately, as we made our last-minute schedule tweaks before leaving on Wednesday, Munkirs thought to call down and check on the camping conditions, and was told the entire campground was under water.  DOH!  In short, several phone calls later, we ended up at our friend Bill’s lake house down at the Ozarks.  The accommodations and amenities were certainly top-notch, but it weren’t no Float Trip.  What can ya’ do.  All things considered, it was a nice alternative though;  More comfortable if nothing else.  We stayed there until Saturday morning, then called it a trip and headed back to KC.  Having a little unplanned down time on my hands for the weekend, I even got a few pictures up already.

Saturday, after a nice lunch at Jalapenos and a short nap to recover from the rigors of the pseudo-float,  I got right back on my usual schedule of sitting around watching TV.  Woo Hoo.  We did get a nice little entertainment interlude when the neighbor girls called and said they were down at the Brooksider watching the KU game.  They were probably bluffing and just being nice, but we figured what the heck and went down and joined them for a while.  Aside from the decidedly rough nature of the KU crowd, we had a good time, and even stayed out well past our usual curfew.

Sunday we did the standard Easter celebration;  At least “standard” as far as my definition.  We drove out to Mom’s and had a delicious ham dinner, with corn, asparagus, potatoes, and all that good stuff.  After dinner I drove back home to start my bachelor week;  Donette is headed to Houston with my Mom to take a little Spring Break.  So, it’s just me and the myriad pets this week…  Somebody come entertain me.  That’s all I got.  I’m tired.  I think the pups were a bit out of sorts over Donette’s absence last night;  Crazy mutts paced all night long and kept me up.