Boy it looks like a beautiful week to go camping, am I ever excited!!  I hope the basketball tourney is on satellite radio, because we’ll need something to pass the time while we sit in the car watching the rain/snow mixture come down.  Geez, we’ll probably have to send a look-out canoe ahead of the main group to call out icebergs.  Oh well, so far it looks like it is going to be just a bit warmer than last year, and we survived that one.  Last Easter it dipped into the teens at night, forcing Munkirs and I to snuggle in one sleeping bag just to survive.  (Nah, we’d have frozen to death before that happened.  It was cold, but we stayed well on our respective sides of the 6-man tent.)

Remarkably, we actually left the house a few times this weekend.  Friday was a non-event however, so I’ll substitute Thursday’s outing for the sake of some material.  That evening, I went up to the bowling alley in Raytown and hung out with some co-workers, as if I hadn’t seen enough of them during the afternoon.  That’s the second Thursday in a row I’ve been to a bowling alley…  Suspicious.  They’ve got two-fer-a-buck tacos though, can’t go wrong there.  I hung out there for a while, and then headed back home.  Mid-drive, however, I was notified that the neighbor girls were watching the Big 12 tourney on TV down at the Brooksider.   Donette was up North having dinner with her family, so I figured “What the heck” and stopped by for a while.  We watched MU get thrashed by the mighty Nebraska team, then I headed home, since it was well past 7:00!!  The neighbor girls, meanwhile, decided it would be a good idea to go hit Westport for the evening.  Ahhhh, to be young.

Saturday got off to a rough start, but rebounded later.  I woke up early, and decided to start the day with a solid breakfast.  A quick inventory of the ‘fridge turned up all the stuff for a ham and cheese omelet, which sounded like just the thing.  I must say, it turned out masterfully;  Sharp’s ain’t got anything on that omelet.  I enjoyed a few bites of it, then decided I needed a glass of milk to accompany my meal.  As soon as I turned my back to go into the kitchen, Gabe and Kane got into one of their all-too-common disagreements.  You would think Gabe would be the instigator of these events, but Kane has been observed more than once taking an unprovoked swat at his nose, so I’m not really sure who started this one.  (He might not be the smartest kitty in KC, but I’ll wager you he’s one of the fastest.)  Anyway, I got everybody all settled down, then returned to the table to find that Kane’s path of escape had been right through the middle of my beautiful omelet, as well as my full cup of coffee, which got dumped all over my unread paper.  I think I blacked out for a few seconds, but when I came around I was still screaming at those dumb animals.  I’m not sure they cared though;  Heck I think Kane was rather pleased at the delicious coating of mexican-blend cheese on his paws.  I can’t really blame him anyway;  I suppose if I had a snarling 75-lb. pitbull snapping at my heels I wouldn’t really care whose breakfast I ruined getting away either.

So, after a delicious meal of cold cereal, Donette got out of bed and we took the bus downtown to check out the Big 12 scene.  (Wow, a two-paragraph day!!)  I had a pair of tickets to the games, so we went down a few hours early to walk around the new Power & Light district.  I’ll give it high marks so far;  Pretty cool spot, especially for around here.  We bummed around a while, then went over to check out the new arena and watch a little basketball.  Unfortunately, our seats were so high up that the game was kind of hard to follow, so we only made it until half-time of the KU game.  It was still early, so we headed back across the street and had a remarkably good lunch at Gordon Biersch.  I say “remarkably” because they seemed to be struggling a bit with the crowd, so I wasn’t expecting much.  It came out very good though, if a bit slow.  After the basketball game was over, the place got just ridiculously crowded, so we bailed back to the bus stop for the ride home.  Of note regarding the ride home, I actually initiated a conversation with a complete stranger!  And after all the grief I give Donette about talking to strangers, sheesh.  I noticed the guy was wearing a Pellet Envy jacket though, and it piqued my curiosity.  Turns out that he and his wife (who was with him) are indeed the Pellet Envy team, and we had just a fine chat about competition BBQ’ing on the way back to Brookside.  (Remarkably, he was not familiar with the Triple Fat Back moniker.)  It also turns out he is entered in the Memphis In May competition for the first time this year, so he invited us to stop by his booth while we’re there and check things out;  Score!  Weary from all this interaction, I spent the rest of the day on the couch watching TV.  I watched Hostel II and some other horror flick that was so bad I can’t even remember the name of it.  Whew, busy day though.  I even took some pictures of the tourney and a few of the dogs playing in the back yard;  They are posted in the photo gallery.

Sunday I was still tired from the previous day’s events, but I managed to rally and get down to the gym for a while.  After a grueling 10 minute workout, I headed back to the Brooksider and joined Martin to watch the championship game on TV.  It wasn’t even that crowded down there;  I guess everybody was downtown watching it maybe?  We hung out there most of the afternoon;  I even had a cigar and then we sampled a few of the Boulevard Smokestack beers.  They were quite interesting brews, if maybe a bit on the expensive side.  Unfortunately I forgot my wallet and Martin had to pick them up, so money was no object.  After the game Donette came down and visited for a while, then we went and had dinner at Tanners to wrap up the weekend.  Oddly, we ran into our new bestest friends from Pellet Envy there again…  I think they are stalking us.

Not a bad weekend, all in all.  A bit on the quiet side for a person of my high entertainment requirements perhaps.  Friday night was a total “down” night actually…  I don’t think we did anything at all.  All I can remember is watching movies;  I watched “The Hills Have Eyes II”  (crappy) and “Next” (crappy also) and Donette watched whatever the heck she watched downstairs.

Saturday, Mom came out in the morning and took us out to Sharps for breakfast;  Score!  Mom and Donette had omelettes, I had good ol’ biscuits and gravy.  Aside from being an obscenely large portion, they were delicious.  (Must not have been that much I guess… I ate it all.)  After breakfast, being good and carb loaded, I headed off to the gym for a while.  I hung out there for a few hours, mostly just killing time while I waited for it to warm up outside a bit.  When it finally got up to a tolerable temp, we drove out to Mom’s to try starting the motorcycle again.  It fired up with a little cranking, so I got to ride it home finally!  I tell you what, that free neck gaiter thing that I picked up last week is SWEET.  It definitely rounds out my cold weather riding ensemble.  It was somewhere in the mid-30’s, and it was just fine riding.  Maybe a little chilly on the highway, but tolerable.  I rode it straight home, and then once I regained feeling in my fingers I grabbed a spoon and commenced to whoopin’ up a big pot of roux.  Zim was coming over Sunday to help make a pot of gumbo for Float Trip, and I wanted to get that part out of the way.  Good thing, because it took three friggin’ hours before it was the good dark color I like.  Of moderate interest on this topic, I tried baking the roux this time instead of cooking it on the stovetop, and was quite pleased with the results.  I picked that up while watching Alton Brown last week;  Can’t go wrong with Alton I figure.  That about covers Saturday;  The only other event of note was taking Gabe to the vet.  (And that always does qualify as an “event.”)  Donette took him by herself, and it sounds like all went well.  He got his rabies shot and various other vaccinations, so I guess he’s caught up for the year.  (Don’t want any rabid Pitbulls running around, you know.)  They gave him a gold star because it only took four people to hold him down while getting his nails trimmed;  It usually takes at least six people and a mild sedative.

Sunday, after spending my morning adjusting our myriad clocks for Daylight Savings, I tried to get the kitchen in some kind of order for some gumbo’n.   Zim arrived promptly at noon, and we got to work.  (Well, actually he showed up at one of the neighbor’s houses at noon…  And weren’t they pleasantly surprised.)  That took up the better part of the afternoon;  Chopping up all those vegetables and around 10 lbs. of meat is no small undertaking.  Once it finally came up to a boil we headed down to the Brooksider and loitered a while, then came back to check on it a few hours later.  I was quite pleased with the results;  I’m proclaiming it one of the better pots of gumbo to come out of the Kenagy kitchen.  Hopefully the hungry Float Trip patrons will agree with that assessment…  I figure the fact that it’s gonna be 25 degrees out should help my case.   After that bout of cooking, I was pretty well spent.  I sat in the back yard and let the dogs run for a good while, enjoying the weather.  Speaking of the doggies, they went to dog daycare for a 1/2 day on Sunday, and did “OK”.   They described Belle as “excitable,” whatever that means.  Overall they seemed to enjoy it though, we might try again soon.

Man I like my new coffee maker.  I didn’t realize how bad of coffee our old one was making until I tasted a cup from the new one.  I’d have cashed in the Braun a long time ago.  Plus, the new one has the “schedule” feature, so when you get out of bed you’ve got a nice hot carafe of coffee brewed up and ready.  (Actually the old one had that too, we just didn’t use it for whatever reason.)  The only downside is that the bean grinder sounds like a jet airplane taking off, but I’m getting used to that;  Just another alarm clock.  We picked up a Roomba too, and that’s working out very nicely.  My biggest fear when we bought it was that the dogs would attack it, but they don’t even seem to pay attention to it.  We schedule it to run while we’re sleeping, so when we wake up in the morning we’ve got a fresh pot of coffee and a clean floor.  Ahhhh, wonderful times.

Friday afternoon I went out to some gun range in Independence with a few guys from work for some shootin’.  Fun stuff there.  It was an indoor range though;  All-in-all I’d rather be outside, at least if the weather is decent.  After that episode of manliness, I met the wife down at the Brooksider for a “date night.”  (I spare no expense on these events, obviously.)  We socialized there for a few hours, then walked down the street a few doors for dinner at Jalapenos.  (This is remarkably similar to every other Friday night;  We just decided to call this one “date night.)  Usually you have a long wait for dinner on a Friday night, but since they went non-smoking we just sit at the bar if there’s a line for a table, which was the case on this night.  Being the last Friday of the month, they were serving my favorite too;  The chicken verde burrito.  SCORE.  After dinner we went home to watch a movie.  The evening selection was 3:10 to Yuma, one of the 8 movies in existence we both agreed sounded interesting.  I found it so exciting I fell asleep about 10 minutes into it, effectively ending date night.

Saturday I had planned to go out to Mom’s and pick up my motorcycle, which I was pretty fired up for.  I wasn’t entirely certain where to put it once I got it home, since Donette parks her new bus in the garage, but I decided to just worry about that part later.  So, we waited for it to warm up a bit, then made the arduous journey to Peculiar.  We had a typically fine lunch at “The Best Burrito” to start things off.  I had the chile relleno and enchilada combo plate.  Their rellenos are quite good, and I find them easy on my braces too, so that’s been one of my common orders lately.  After lunch we went back to the house and I tried to fire up the Yamaha;  Alas, no joy.  Drawing on my extensive military mechanic skills, I was able to diagnose the problem as a dead battery.  In reality, the issue could be anything from a dead battery, to bad fuel, to a faulty fetzer valve.  But, a battery is the only thing I know how to fix so that’s what I diagnose everything as.  If that doesn’t fix it, well, time to figure out how to get it to the shop.  So, I hooked up a charger and we drove back home bike-less.  For dinner, given the exceptional weather, we fired up the grill and cooked some pork chops.  We did some green beans on the grill too, and that worked out surprisingly well.  After dinner I retired to the computer chair to work on installing a new bulletin board on my web server.  The time has come to ditch the old reliable cgi script I’ve used for years.  It attracts spam like a friggin’ magnet;  I get like 75 to 100 crappy posts every day on that stupid thing.  Of those, at least a few make it through and actually get posted, and I’m tired of cleaning them up.  So, I decided it would be easiest to instead go with the most popular “forum based” one, phpBB.  Having a somewhat quirky web server though, nothing is ever too easy, and I gave up after a few hours.

Sunday morning started off very early, when I had an early-morning revelation what was wrong with my server.  Naturally this precluded going back to sleep, so I got up and started working on that again.  It took a few hours, but it’s up and working now, at least at some level.  Get to figuring it out if you want to use it, ’cause as soon as I waste some time getting it to look a little better I’m getting rid of the old one.  It was still rather early when I got done with that project, but I decided to just get on with the day instead of going back to bed.  Incidentally Mom called and said the indicator light on the battery charger had turned green, so hopefully that means my motorcycle will start now.  Given the gale force winds and the threat of rain I decided not to go try it out though.  After reading the paper and watching a few hours of news on TV, I headed off to loiter at the gym for a while.  I like going up there on Sundays because I have time to enjoy some of the “amenities,” like the sauna and the pool.  Nobody seemed to appreciate me practicing my cannonball technique in the lap pool, but they’ll get over it.  Pools are supposed to be fun.  After that moderately healthy activity, I met up with Martin at the Brooksider to have a stogie and watch some TV.  Alas, for some reason or another the place was full of college kids, whoopin’ and hollerin’ and making a generally unacceptable racket.  I don’t know what the deal was;  It’s not Spring Break yet is it?  Oh well, we stayed for a while and then went to the Westport Flea Market and met the wives for dinner.  I had a blue cheese burger with extra onions and fries.  Aside from having to sandblast the film off my braces when we got home, it was delicious.

The long winter is finally over.  You heard it here first people.  I’ll be riding the scooter every day by next week.  And Float Trip is gonna be sunny and 70.  Ol’ Katie Horner ain’t got nuthin’ on me.

We had a bit of fun this weekend, interspersed with long stretches of downtime.  Friday started things off with a standard-issue happy hour at the Brooksider.  Not much to say about that.  We put in our requisite one hour of face time, then went and picked up a little take-out from Kin Lin, down by UMKC.  And that sorta did it for Friday.  We ate our dinner and took our places in front of our respective televisions to watch worthless TV.

Saturday I actually got up and went to the gym.  I’ve been slacking on my weekend gym trips something fierce;  Maybe I’m getting back in sync.  I hung out there for a while, then we took a short road-trip out to Gail’s Harley Davidson in Grandview.  They were giving away free neck gaitors, which I just so happen to need.  What a deal!!  I personally don’t have much use for Harley’s, but I’m all about free stuff.  We loitered around the store for a short while (pretty cool place actually) and then headed over to Bruce and Liz’s for their annual bowling party.  We made it for all of the pre-party at the house, the highlight of which was Bruce, Carl, and Martin’s take on “dualing guitars.”  They have all taken up the guitar for some unknown reason, and we were treated to a (thankfully) short recital.  After that auditory assault, everybody headed off to the bowling alley to test their skills.  We refrained from actual bowling participation though, preferring to just make fun of everyone else.

Sunday got off to a rough, rough start.  We woke up to find our 12 year old coffee pot had up and quit working.  What a piece of crap.  Donette raced down to Costco to get a replacement, but alas, the damage was done.  I was so thrown off my routine by that time that I just laid on the couch all afternoon.  (Actually that pretty much is my routine on Sundays anyway.)  We did have a little dinner party though.  The neighbor girls came over and joined us for some stacked enchiladas.  After dinner the girls huddled up to cackle and watch the Oscars;  I went and parked myself in front of the upstairs TV and watched Rob Zombie’s Halloween.  (Good movie, probably the best I’ve seen in my recent spate of movie-watching.)

Please pardon my tardiness.  I have the day off and this wasn’t extremely high on my list of priorities.  Looking down my list of accomplishments for the day, it’s apparent that nothing else was either.

As a matter of fact, I had Friday off too.  Donette and I had lunch at Lew’s, then I met up with Martin and K.B. at some point in the afternoon and we hung out at the Brooksider talking BBQ and such.  After a while the girls met up with us and we went across the street to Carmen’s for a little evening repast.  We hadn’t been there in quite a while, and honestly it hasn’t changed much, which I’ll take as good thing.  We started off with the stuffed artichoke, which is always solid, then split a plate of my favorite entree;  Fettuccini al Diablo.  I ended up with squid tentacles all tangled up in my grill work, but it was worth it.  What the heck, I don’t have to look at it.  (Stupid braces.)

Saturday was downright event-filled.   We started off the day by laying down a solid base of feed at Sharp’s.  Perhaps of note, if not really of interest, I voted on branching out and going to Georgie Porgies.  We went there quite a while ago and it was “OK,” so I thought maybe we should give it another chance, as opposed to the same ol’ Sharp’s.  Plus, if I’m going to get car-jacked I like to get it out of the way early so I have the rest of day to recover.  Anyway, I got voted down, as in all other walks.  Naturally Sharp’s was just as good as ever though.  After breakfast I met up with my buddy Mark, one of my Brooksider partners in crime.  We drove out near Lone Jack (in “my” fine purple Civic I might add, which he is now the proud owner of) and met up with one of his co-workers who owns some land out there.  We spent the entire afternoon shooting targets of various composition;  everything from balloons, to golf balls, to assorted fruits and vegetables, to traditional paper targets.  Naturally the sound of even small-caliber gunfire brings out everyone in earshot, and after a while a pretty good little crowd gathered to plink around.  One guy even brought a cannon he made.  It looked pretty cool and got lots of oohs and ahhs when he shot it off;  I crawled under the truck when he lit it and missed the whole thing.  It was just a fine time, and I managed to shoot up my entire 550 round box of .22’s I took out there.  Oh well, that’s the beauty of .22’s;  That whole afternoon of entertainment ran me about $12.  About 5:00 it started raining pretty hard, so we packed up and scurried back to KC.  Donette had been running around the city with Susan W. all day, so her husband John and I met up with them at Jalapeno’s for some dinner.  We had a nice long meal, after which it struck me that I was totally exhausted.  We had a few games of cards in the works, but it was apparent that I only had about 30 minutes of steam left in me, so we just went home and called it a night.

Sunday, well…  We tend to not do much on Sunday.  I think I used that nasty wet crappy snow as an excuse to just hunker down all day.  That’s pretty much all I did too.  I watched, in this order:  True Grit, The China Syndrome, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and  The Sons of Katie Elder.  Wow.  After all those were over there wasn’t anything else on so I sat and clicked through the channels all night.  I got so bored at one point I actually got dressed to go to the gym, but then I looked outside and saw my car was buried under snow, so I plopped right back on the couch.  Crap, I was too lazy to even eat… Now that I think about it my intake for the day was a bowl of cereal and some coffee.  Oh well, I don’t think I’m gonna waste away to nothing any day soon.