I find Mondays to be an increasingly tedious part of my weekly routine.  This is a quite frustrating situation, given that there’s not much I can do about it.  I guess I should look at the bright side;  Monday night television now consists of Monday Night Raw AND Monday Night Football.  Gosh, so many entertainment options.

I supposed our Thursday night is worth a mention before I jump into the sparse weekend coverage.  We don’t usually go out on school nights, together anyway, so just the fact that we left the house was news in itself.  (Somebody usually has to stay home and babysit the dogs, but they are slowly getting a little better at being left alone.)  Our destination was the Peanut downtown, where our friend Anne works every Thursday.  The ‘Nut ranks as one of my favorite dinner destinations in the city, particularly when Anne is cooking.  It might not be the most heart-friendly meal, and strays a bit from our recent attempt at a healthier diet, but you have to shock the metabolism every now and then I think.  She started us off with her world-famous appetizer;  Lays potato chips served with a cup of blue cheese dressing.  Let the artery thickening begin.  We followed that up with a bakers dozen of their enormous hot wings, then rounded the meal out with a triple BLT and fries.  (The sandwich was loaded down with about a pound of bacon, and of course the fries came with another cup of blue cheese for dipping.)  Whew.  Now that’s eatin’, people.

Not a bad weekend all-in-all;  A little bit of partying intermingled with some thrilling culinary adventures.  OK, maybe “thrilling” is a stretch, but we did actually cook at home a few times.  Friday was shaping up into a non-event, so we decided to hunker down and cook some dinner.  After taking a quick inventory of the freezer and the cabinets, we decided on grilled fish with a white wine and rosemary reduction sauce.  It came out fair.  Sounds better than it actually was.  For the most part I just like saying “white wine reduction sauce,” the rest is secondary.  That was essentially our Friday;  The rest of the night consisted of bad television intermingled with a few riveting games of sudoku on the computer.

Saturday afternoon wasn’t much to speak of, for me anyway.  I walked the dogs quite a ways, while Donette hit the Plaza Art Fair with her friends Susan, Anne, Lucy & Katie.  Luckily (miraculously) she didn’t buy anything.  After that, we met up with a crowd down at the New Point Grill to celebrate Carol Brown’s 40th birthday.  We had a good time but couldn’t stay long, because I had to work later that night.  But, I never miss a chance to party on Kevin’ s dime so we stayed as long as we could.

Sunday we spent our afternoon cooking and watching football.  I was volunteered to smoke some turkey and brisket for our neighborhood block party that night, so that ate up most of the day.  I used the Red Buffalo’s award-winning turkey recipe, and was quite pleased with the results.  For the most part it consisted of brining the bird all night, then smoking it at around 225 with a generous amount of butter and fresh herbs.  Meanwhile, while the smoker was running, Donette took a shot at a new chicken recipe.  She smoked up a bunch of chicken thighs, and I must admit they came out more-than-passable.  Too bad girls are strictly prohibited from competing on the TFB team, we could use the help.  But, rules are rules.  Since food is the general topic of the moment, I suppose our lunch bears mention too.  I made my first-ever frittata, and it came out very nicely.  If, like myself, you’ve never heard of a frittata, I would liken it to some kind of cross between an omelet and a quiche.  Here’s the recipe I used, if you feel adventurous:  Italian Frittata.  Our Sunday evening was spent at the aforementioned block party.  It was as much fun as standing around trying to talk to a bunch of people you don’t know can be, I guess.  It was mercifully short at any rate, and broken up with frequent trips back to the house to “check on the dogs.”  I won a door prize though;  That made it worthwhile right there.  A gift certificate to a nearby restaurant…  More food!!

Sorry to all, but the technical content of the weekend was rather limited;  I have no material relating to any network upgrades, PC tweaks, or even random firewall policy changes.  Maybe next week.  My time was spent in the hellish wilds of Kearney MO, land of cow patties, trucker hats, and single-ply toilet paper.  I was there participating in TFB’s second BBQ competition of the season.  And, to tell you the truth, I am still feeling a little bit out-of-sorts from the whole thing.  Somehow I managed to burn, cut, or bruise a great portion of my already battered body, including a nasty slice right on the tip of my index finger.  I didn’t notice it so much until I started typing this morning…  Could end up being a career-threatening injury.

But, being a trooper, I will play through the pain and recap the events, if maybe in a slightly abbreviated fashion.  Martin and I got there mid-Friday, followed closely by Zim and the all-important camper.  We got settled in and the rest of the crew dragged in throughout the evening.  We actually had a nice little party, although the sub-40 degree temperature made things just a little chilly.  Of course, no TFB event would be complete without some type of humorous turn of events.  In St. Joseph this Spring, Chad provided the amusing story line. (That’s all I’ve got to say about that.)  For the Kearney event, the shocking turn came about when our arch-enemies, the Red Glove BBQ team, set up right across the street from our camp.  They were truly sneaky about the whole thing, even going to the length of signing up under the pseudo-moniker of “Bone Deep BBQ.”  (Just in case we were perusing the entry sheet daily watching for them, I guess.)  It was a good laugh though, and added a new level of drama to the entire competition.

We got our smoker fired up around midnight Friday, and the first flesh hit the fire at roughly 1:00.  (I apologize for being vague, but I just can’t be sure who might be reading this in an attempt at stealing trade secrets.)  Things progressed smoothly throughout the wee hours;  Not sure how much text I could possibly squeeze out of that.  Turn, baste, stoke, turn, baste, stoke…  You get the idea.  We passed the time with occasional forays over to the Red Glove (a.k.a. Bone Deep) camp, and my co-worker Rick’s team who was up the street a bit.

Everything got wrapped up around 2:30 Saturday afternoon, as far as the “work” was concerned.  The results were announced promptly at 4:00, and you could have cut the tension in the air with a 12″ slicing blade.  (Much like my finger.)  They asked if we needed any additional security called to stand between us and the Red Gloves, but we assured them we were professionals and would act as such.  Red Gloves scored the first punch early and big, staggering us hard with a first-place finish in chicken.  They followed that up with another body-shot in the form of a fourth-place rib entry.  The TFB team was reeling, but then came back strong when Falhstrom and Bryse’s pork entry placed third.  That was it for the ribbons;  We had to go to the scorecards for the final results.  Team TFB ended up taking the honors, by a scant but decisive four spots.  (Eighteenth to twenty-second.) I don’t think our resounding victory really surprised anyone, given our clear history of defeating them, but I will admit the dual ribbons had us a bit shaken.  As for my brisket, it came in a somewhat disappointing 20th.  Not bad, I guess, but I must admit I was hoping for a little better.  (It placed top 50% and beat the Red Glove entry, which are my main areas of focus.)  I was somewhat comforted by a string of perfect scores in the “tenderness” category, so it’s something to build on.

Sunday was a wash.  I spent the day up at Martin’s watching football and trying to recover.  Of course, we also spent a considerable amount of time discussing what we could have done different, should have done, didn’t do, blah blah blah.  The American Royal competition is right around the corner people!!

Not much to go on from that weekend.  That marked the third weekend in my recent spate of oncalls, so I hunkered down in the dark and waited for the inevitable pages.  And they came, so I wasn’t disappointed.  Most of my time was spent on various dorky tasks about the house, so about all I can do is re-tell my computer-related exploits.  It’s a pretty safe bet most of you couldn’t care less about those, so if you want to just quit reading now and go back to sleep, that’s OK.

Don’t believe me?  Well, here goes.  And who knows, maybe somebody will find some interesting tidbit in here.  (Doubtful.)  Friday evening I stayed up way-too-late working on my wireless network.  I bought a used wireless router from a guy at work last week, with the original plan of just having a spare in case I messed mine up.  (Again.)  But, unable to stand the thought of having something sitting in the closet gathering dust, I instead embarked on an exciting mission to implement WDS between my two routers.  The first struggle in this project was to pick an alternate firmware for the routers, one that would support the WDS feature as well as my rather unique firewall setup.  After a perilous and ultimately unsuccessful struggle with Tomato and HyperWRT, I finally found network nirvana with DD-WRT.  When I finally called it a night, I had achieved my goal of having an “excellent” wireless signal anywhere in the house, and most likely half-way up the block.  On the downside our wireless doorbell and light switches no longer work, and there is a slight tingling sensation from all the waves in the air, but you gotta have priorities I suppose.

Saturday, still flushed with the excitement of the evening before, I started on a project to install Linux on our laptop.  This was my first attempt at using a machine solely with a Linux O/S, no dual-boot or virtual machine crap.  I decided on the relatively user-friendly Ubuntu distribution, brewed a pot of coffee, and went to work.  Ultimately this was a relatively easy undertaking;  With the exception of having to install a new wireless card I would honestly say it’s an easier process than installing Windows.  So far I’m quite pleased with the results;  It’s fast, easy, and most importantly comes pre-installed with a fancy Sudoku game.  What more could you ask for?  After that, Donette’s parents came over and dropped off their laptop, which had fallen into an unfortunate condition not unlike the one ours was in.  I doubt they would have liked the Linux look though, so I went about installing good ol’ Windows back on theirs.  First though, I wanted to try and salvage some of their data, so I hopped on the scooter and took off for the geek-mecca of the west, Microcenter.  I searched out the skinniest sales guy, with the thickest glasses, told him what I was trying to do, and he recommended a 2.5″ drive case.  The price was right, so I picked it up and scootered back home.  It got the job done, but it turned out to be pretty much a piece of crap.  The directions were almost as bad as the build quality too.  These were the instructions:

Q1:  I could see the icon at the right down comer on the screen, but I still couldn’t find my external HDD.
A1:  Please make sure your HDD has been installed correctly.

Q2:  Why I couldn’t find my enclosure at all?
A2:  This situation somethings happens to some notebook models.  This problem mostly couldn’t solve the problem, please buy a AC power adaptor to offer sufficient power for enclosure.

Wow.  Those aren’t typo’s either, that’s actually what it said.  “This problem mostly couldn’t solve the problem”??!!  Long as it worked, I guess.

Sunday, since I was sorta tethered to my laptop with the whole work thing, the Martins came over to do a little barbecuing.  We decided to practice a few chicken recipes, since our team poultry-guy has forsaken us.  I went with a simple marinade and dry-rub method, while Martin opted for a much more elaborate basting scheme.  At the end of the day, everyone agreed the basted bird was to be our “official” entry at Kearney next weekend.  The only downside was his somewhat aggressive basting technique, but I won’t complain about it.  Somehow, in addition to a liberal application on the chicken, he also basted my patio furniture, the smoker, the deck, the sliding glass door, and one of the dogs.  I’m not complaining though.  The chicken was good.

Ahhhh, four-day weekends are GOOD.  Our long weekend started developing last Wednesday, at the Brooksider of all places.  We happened to be down there having some dinner, and griping about a problem we’ve been having with our car.  For the last several years (yes, YEARS) the Accord has been bedeviled with this problem where, when the weather gets hot, it won’t start.  It will run like the finely engineered foreign auto that it is, and then BAM, you come out from work and can’t get home.  It might start five minutes later, it might not start for two days.  We’d taken it to our regular mechanic a few times for this, and mentioned it to the dealer, but they could never replicate the problem while it was there.  So, we’re sitting around the table bemoaning the fact that we basically have no four-wheeled transportation when it gets over 80 degrees, and one of the guys at the table says “Oh, I know exactly what that is, that happened to my Honda.”  OK, yeah right, somebody named “Flop” knows the answer to the mystery of our non-starting car, which our $100-an-hour mechanic has assured us is absolutely the oddest problem ever to beset a vehicle.  And not to discount ol’ Flop’s word or anything, but just out of interest I go home and Google “honda doesn’t start when it’s hot.”  What do you know, my mechanic and myself are the only people in the free world who don’t know what the problem is.  The moral of the story?  1.)  Always Google any problem you’re having, somebody else is having the same problem.  2.)  Flop knows everything.  (Incidentally, buoyed by this success, I searched on a problem I was having with my Palm Pilot and fixed that too!  Wonderful times, people.)

Anyway, first thing Thursday morning, Donette took the car up to our (NEW) mechanic and he fixed it right up.  We were so excited by our new-found mobility that we decided to take a road trip;  All we needed was a destination.  We did a little quick research to find the best available entertainment in the nation over the Labor Day weekend, and found that Night Ranger was playing in Denver!  Wow, what luck!  We got there late Friday afternoon and hooked up with Ed and Kim, who kindly put us up for the weekend.  The big show was Saturday night, and lived up to our every expectation, easily overshadowing the DMB show we went to last Tuesday.  Those guys truly put the “power” in “power ballad.”  Our only regret was that Donette cut off her hair just a few weeks too early, so she wasn’t able to get her 80’s bangs on.

OK, so they were just as over-the-top cheesy as they were last time I saw them, circa 1987 or so;  I can’t really remember that far back.  The most noticeable difference between the shows was that last time they were at sold-out Kemper Arena; this time around they were doing a free show at the Taste of Colorado festival.  Other than that they were pretty much identical.  And our weekend didn’t really center around the concert.  We visited Golden for an afternoon, ate lots of good food, (including some fresh Hatch green chiles,) played some cards, and generally relaxed.  As a bonus, our car reliably transported us both ways, SWEET.

Man every year I dread stupid fantasy football, and every year I get stuck doing it again.  I basically drop $100 to go show a bunch of people how comically little I know about football.  What a treat.  Some years I get it back though, and a few years actually come out ahead, but those are few and far between.  This year I doubled my misery by going down to the Brooksider Saturday afternoon and drafting Munkir’s team for him.  My motivation here was two-fold;  First, I wanted to help out a buddy in need, and second I wanted to get some good tips for my own draft which was later that night.  Those two items are not necessarily listed in order of importance, mind you.  I can say I was pretty happy with the way his team came out though;  It was better than my own anyway, mostly because he was third in line to pick and I was ninth.  I did have to sneak in the “Oh he’ll hate this pick” jab around the fourth or fifth round though, giving him Randy Moss, whom I’m sure he has already traded or dropped outright.  As for my brilliant idea to spend four hours of my afternoon picking up hot tips for my own draft?  Well, I laboriously typed all 150 picks into an Excel spreadsheet with any notes I thought pertinent, so I felt it was time very well spent.  When I got to my draft that evening, my stupid laptop wouldn’t start.  So, I ended up wasting my afternoon (except the moderate joy of the Randy Moss pick) and going into my own draft just as clueless as ever.

Sunday was spent cooking my fourth “practice” brisket.  Nothing new to report, which is good in that I think they are coming out a bit more consistent.  I went to a nice store to get this one though, where as the last three have come from good ol’ Costco.  I haven’t decided if it was worth the extra buck per pound yet, but I’m leaning towards “yes.”  Costco’s are fine, but it seems you can’t count on them having exactly what you want each time.  Kind of hit-and-miss on the size especially, which adds guess work to the cook time.  Martin kindly came over and judged it for me, although he didn’t reveal the actual numbers he gave me.  He takes that “Judges Code of Conduct” stuff a little too seriously if you ask me.  Something tells me that all this time spent practicing is going to end up much like my fantasy football “practice”;  A lot of time spent for more mediocre to low results.  That could just be my natural optimism shining through again though.

I ran into another moderately interesting item last week, which I had never seen before.  Now I must warn you, this part of the weekly update is mildly bawdy for my usual content, but I feel it is worthy of inclusion, mostly based on the sheer oddity of it.  I’m not quite sure how to broach the subject even.  You know those plastic round things that sit in the bottom of urinals?  I believe they are commonly referred to as “breath mints” or something.  Anyway, I’m not sure of their exact function, and to tell you the truth I’ve never put a lot of thought into the matter, but I have always assumed they have something to do with freshening the place up a bit.  Well, when I was down at the Brooksider last week I found that they “upgraded” these things to talking models.  No lie, they talk.  I don’t know what triggers them (it’s a little disturbing to think about) but I can say with all certainty that it is very unnerving when they start babbling.  You are just standing there minding your own business and the urinal starts lecturing you on the dangers of drinking and driving.  I even got into a rather animated argument with it Thursday;  “Hey buddy, I’m just here for a 1/2 price burger and a water, I don’t need any lip,” but it turns out they can’t be reasoned with.  They won’t shut up either, it just keeps going on.  Kind of breaks your concentration, if you know what I mean.  Just goes to show you the horrible ways that technology can be exploited these days.