We have returned from our weekend at Tablerock with the Martins, slightly worse for the wear.  But more on that later.

Martin and I headed out for Tablerock on Thursday afternoon, with the S.S. Schmartin in tow.  With a full tank of gas in the boat, we averaged roughly 45 MPH all the way to Branson;  Munkirs would have been proud.  We arrived to find the cabin we rented would provide more than adequate accommodations, and settled in to smoke a cigar and wait for the girls.  They arrived shortly thereafter, and that pretty much wrapped up Thursday.  Long drives wear me out.

Friday started out kind of rough.  We weren’t getting a lot of weather cooperation.  It was freaking pouring, so the girls bailed out for the outlet malls.  Martin and I settled in to smoke a cigar and wait for them to return.  Sort of a trend there.  After a while the rain burned off and the chicks ran out of money,  so we hooked up the boat and headed for the lake.  We got in a good two hours of boating;  Kind of checked out the lay of the lake, swam around a bit, and enjoyed the sun.  Around 7:00 Martin had to head back in to take a conference call though;  One of the penalties of being an extremely important resource at his job.  While he feigned responsibility, the girls and I grilled up some fajitas, and then they cooked a few more “practice desserts” in preparaton for the American Royal.  I was “for” the grilled peaches with fancy cheese topping, and “against” the other dish.  I was so offended by it I can’t even really remember what it was.  I do remember it had “cardamom” in it, which I can assure you is the single worst-tasting thing that anyone has ever intentionally put in a recipe.  I almost called 911, as initially I was certain that Donette had finally fed me a rat-poisen cocktail, which is something of an ongoing concern at our house.  I smoked two more cigars and ate the leaves off a nearby tree to get the taste out of my mouth, and went to bed.

Saturday started off strong.  We laid down a base of Martin’s semi-famous breakfast casserole at the crack of 11:00, and then got the boat out on the water to enjoy what turned out to be a fine, sunny day.  Things were good until we tried to throw physical exertion into the mix.  We broke out the tube and drug Kelly and Donette around for a while, which went all well and good.  Then I had the bright idea to take a turn on the devil-donut on our way back to the dock.  It was fun, sure, but inevitably I crashed and felt a solid “pop” in my arm.  It rated an “uncomfortable” on the pain scale initially.  After I got back in the boat and felt the nice smooth slope where my shoulder previously was, the nausea and extreme pain set in.  By the time we got back to the dock, my head was spinning around and I was uttering vulgarities I didn’t even know were in my vocabulary.  Donette summoned a nice Ranger over, but all he did was give me a sling, despite my insistance I needed a quick round through the skull.  Donette ended up having to drive me to the emergency room, where they confirmed a dislocated shoulder.  I was still cursing like a demented sailer, begging for a sharp rap on the head, or a teaspoon of cardamom, or anything to take my mind off the shoulder.  I don’t think the poor doctor knew whether to give me anesthesia or an exorcism.  Eventually he opted for putting me under and snapping everything back in place.

That’s all the tale I am going to relate.  Things are still quite sore and I am deathly afraid of this thing popping out again.  It was pretty much a weekend-stopper at any rate;  What a drag.  If it weren’t for bad luck…

I am sorry to report that, due to a bad wing, I am currently unable to type at my full rated speed of 100 WPM, thus making a timely entry of the weekly update impractical.  I’ll get ‘er in tonight when I’m able to hunt-peck at my leisure.

Not a whole lot happened last weekend, which was just fine by me.  Friday I met up with Todd, Martin, and KB down at the Brooksider to celebrate the double-digit temperature.  It was warm, sure, but not TOO warm.  Tolerable.  I only stayed until 6:00 or so though;  It was my oncall weekend again so I needed my rest.  The remainder of the day, predictably, was spent watching television and playing a little fetch with Gabe.  Oh, and speaking of Gabe, I forgot to mention last week that he passed his Canine Good Citizen class again.  Yeah, he already took (and passed) the test once, but a little tune-up never hurts.  Passing twice qualifies him for the rare and coveted “Canine Super-Duper-Extra-Good Citizen” status.  He celebrated his accomplishment by tearing up Donette’s day-planner and terrorizing Kane (the cat) all week.  They didn’t cover either of those topics in class apparently.

Saturday I got up and took Gabe for his walk, and then made the drive to visit Mom down by the Arkansas border.  Her PC was minorly messed up, so I got it fixed up (I hope) and then ate a tasty lasagne lunch.  Homemade, not even the frozen stuff like we make at our house.  After that, I did a little grocery shopping, and then I’m not entirely sure where the rest of the afternoon went.  We went to a wine tasting around 6:00 down at Cellar & Loft in Brookside.  We didn’t go so much for the wine tasting (that place is a little high fallootin’ for me… more Todd’s style) but to talk to this guy whose dog we are lightly considering taking in.  Donette met him last weekend at the tasting, and then we went and met his pup “Belle” on Monday.  I would describe young Belle as… “energetic.”  Yeah, that’s a nice adjective.  A common phrase beginning with “ram” also comes to mind, but we’ll stick with “energetic.”  At any rate, the guy wasn’t there so no progress on the new dog.  After that social event, we met up with the Martins at Starlight for the production of “Rent.”  You never know when children might be reading this, so I shall eschew the barrage of expletives that come to mind and just say that I didn’t care for the show.  Loud, confusing, pointless, and the girl in front of me kept flipping her hair on my leg.  Not to mention, I thought they were having prime rib for dinner and it turned out to be flank steak.  I don’t even LIKE flank steak, as evidenced by my two enormous helpings.

Sunday I started the day by hitting the gym, for the third time in the week.  That’s almost a routine!!!  Unfortunately since I’ll be out of town next weekend it will be a short-lived routine.  After that I went home and fired up the smoker to cook some spareribs for dinner.  The ribs were a bit of a sore subject;  I picked them up at Price Chopper, against my better judgement, because they were on sale.  I got home and unwrapped them, and they were friggin’ half slabs.  Not only that, but just the large end to boot.  Crap.  Get what you pay for, I guess.  But I couldn’t really just throw them out, so I gave them some dry rub and threw them on.  Todd came over around 2:00 and threw a few chickens on too.  While the flesh was cooking, I got out the food processer and made a basil-arugula pesto recipe I’d been wanting to try; not half bad.  All that cooking pretty much took up the entire afternoon.  Donette, meanwhile, was researching dessert recipes to enter for the ARB contest.  Ed, Kim, Susan and John (Susan’s beau of late) came over for dinner and helped with the taste-testing.  She made like four different styles of bread pudding, all them pretty darn good, most involving grilled or toasted bread soaked in cream, topped with fruit and stuff.  That was pretty much a night-killer for me.  Four plates of rich desserts after a barbecue dinner is a little much, even for a glutton of my magnitude.  We managed to get through the Entourage showing, and that was IT.

I am feeling rather creatively stifled today.  Bear with me please.  Before I forget, let me mention that I fixed a long-running issue with my web server that was preventing large-ish downloads, so now I can share such fascinating content as the JoCo Rap song, and the video of Gabe doing the hurdles.  It was quite a perplexing issue actually; I was quite stymied.  This was actually the first time I just threw up my hands and (GASP!!) went online to talk to strangers.  And, what do you know, they actually fixed it for me.  You can read all the action-packed banter on the lighttpd forum if you are in need of some excitement.  Actually it not FIXED, but they gave me a work-around, which is fine for me.  Ol’ Mr. xummxxu isn’t as pleased, but you can’t make everyone happy.

Well let’s see, what did I do this weekend?  Started off  pretty well on Friday by stopping in at the Brooksider on my way home to see who was there.  Lo’ and behold, Belanger and Lueck were sitting there doing some psuedo-business kind of stuff, so I pulled up a chair with them.  After a while Todd and Downtown Brown stopped in too, and we hung out for a while.  And, of course, all the usual people were there too.  Donette, meanwhile, was out with her band of hooligans somewhere at one of her more posh events.  She’s getting too well-to-do for the ‘Sider I suppose.  Kind of like Todd, although he graces us with a guest appearance now and then.

Saturday night I had to go in to work, so that kind of nixxed the whole day.  I don’t like to do a whole lot before a night of work, just sit around and mope.  I spent the morning working on the Woodlands Trophy site, which took all of about 30 minutes.  The place where it was hosted previously just up and dissappeared one day, so I had to move it to another provider.  Due to my fastidious backup scheme, (or sheer luck) I had a copy of the site at home so it was pretty easy.  Oh, and I made my semi-quarterly trip to the gym too, which is always exciting.  Whew, do I feel a lot healthier.  Ohhhhh yeah.

Sunday I slept in a bit, since I didn’t get home from work until some ridiculous time.  At least I considered it a ridiculous time;  Donette was still out kickin’ it when I got home.  She was at Westport of all places, on some kind of wedding-shower-slash-bachelorette party kind of thing.  I don’t know what time she finally drug in, but she brought the morning paper in with her so it must have been well after I called it a night.  I took this to mean she was going to be asleep for a while, so I snuck on down to the Brooksider to watch the Royals game around noon.  If anyone watched that first inning, it was abundantly clear that the baseball game wasn’t going to provide a real big source of afternoon entertainment for me.  Luckily “The Group” showed up around 1:00, so I sat around with them and watched golf and Nascar.  Neither of those are even remotely interesting to me.  But, neither was the prospect of sitting at home playing computer games so I chose the lesser of two boredoms.  I finally ran into Donette around 6:00 or so, and we sat around watching television for the rest of the day.  We somehow got sucked in to “Remember the Titans” on network TV, and then I had to go online to research how much of it was actually true.  As usual, the weekend wrapped up with the latest episode of Entourage, and that was about it.

Man you can keep this weather.  I am dragging.  It is just inhumanly hot out there.  Even my morning walks with the dog are barely tolerable, and that’s at 5:30 in the morning.  Oh well, that’s what air conditioning is for I guess.

Well that weekend didn’t really go as scripted, but then when does it ever.  We had plans to kick things off Friday night by going and watching the free B-52’s concert out at Legends shopping center, wherever the heck that is.  Donette had some kind of psuedo-work function in the late afternoon though, so we didn’t even leave the house until 7:30 or so.  By the time we made the roughly 100 mile journey to the show, it was over.  Nice.  It wasn’t a wasted trip though;  My buddy Rick of Red Buffalo BBQ was competing in a ‘Que contest at Cabelas, so I just hung out with him all night while Donette, Ed and Kim hooked up with a bunch of people over at Yard House.  I had a good time watching the bbq team work, I wish our merry band of slackers would have got in this contest.  Rick ended up taking second place in ribs, congrats!!

Saturday is a bit of a sore subject, but I guess I’m obligated to summarize it anyway.  After the week I had at work, I had grand visions of just partying the entire weekend to wind down.  I started the day right by whipping up some biscuits and gravy to give me a little energy, and then took my coffee upstairs to read the paper and surf the web a bit.   I don’t know what the heck happened from there.  I vaguely recall Donette saying she was going to the pool, and the next thing I knew she was back home from the pool and telling me it was time to get ready for dinner.  I’d punched some kind of hole in the space-time continuum and ended up sitting in front of the computer in my pj’s for the entire day.  A perfectly good Saturday flushed down the crapper, and I was none too happy about it.  But, there wasn’t much to do about it except complain, which I did in large quantity.  After coming to grips with the fact that my day was gone, I rebounded a bit and we headed out to meet the Munkirs at Bonefish Grill for dinner.  We were joined by the Scottens and Belanger too, so we had a table full.  Despite the treacherous drive out there, and the less-than-ideal location in general, it was a fine meal.  After dinner we went even further south to Munkirs house and hung out for a while.  We rested up and digested for a few hours and then trekked back to midtown, eager to return to the land of sane drivers and paved streets.  Kudos to the Munkirs clan for putting together such a festive event though, even if it WAS in Kansas.

Sunday, against all odds, I headed BACK to Kansas.  Now that’s just plain wacky.  I met up with Martin and Brice over at Fahlstroms house to do a little barbecueing.  Even though Joe is technically not on the team anymore, we let him participate anyway, since it was his house and his smoker and all.  Plus, we needed a fourth for cards, so everything worked out OK.  Pretty much the entire day was spent playing cards and tending the smoker, which just really isn’t a bad way to spend a day.  Martin and I did some baby back ribs, Bob did a pork butt, and Joe mixed it up a little with a leg of lamb and some chicken wings.  (Lamb??!!)  Donette, Kelly and Todd came over and helped us eat all that.  We didn’t finish it all, but made a serious dent in it.  After the feed-fest we headed back to our house for the weekly Entourage event, and that was it.  Weekend over.  (Oh, and by the way, Martin and I thoroughly thrashed Bob and Joe at the card table.  Thoroughly.)