The American Royal is finished, and so am I.  Spent.  Beat.  Done.  I think everybody had a good time; I know I did, and that’s what is most important.  I took over 160 pictures, I’ll try and work on those this evening or maybe tomorrow.  It takes time to weed out all the ones that might incriminate myself.

To recap:  We arrived onsite at the Royal Thursday afternoon to start setting up our spot.  We ended up with a huge spot this year, and it had some ideal qualities… It was in an alley, so we had wind blockage from at least two sides.  We backed up to one of the buildings, so there wasn’t anybody behind us.  We were on the end of the row, so we could park our cars at the end of the spot without getting hassled.  Overall, a great spot.  We dropped Zim’s 30+ foot camper at one end, giving us yet a third side protected from wind, so weather-wise we were in good shape.  The rest of the day was a blur of cigars, poker, and cheesesteak sandwiches.  We put the “party food” on sometime close to midnight and then sat around watching it cook for the rest of the night.  Somebody came up with moniker “Float Trip on Asphalt” for the Royal, which is very appropriate.  Same bunch of guys, doing the same thing we do all day and night at Pettit’s campground, just without the river.

Friday we got down to the business of preparing for the big party.  This involved lots more poker and cigars.  Unfortunately it didn’t involve any tasty cheesesteak sandwiches, since we’d eaten all those the night before.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.  Kevin hosted a little lunch party for his bosses around noon.  He served spareribs and chips, which came out pretty well.  Around three o’clock we started getting seriously busy; slicing meat, setting up tables, putting out the chafing dishes, etc.  We were a little better prepared than last year;  At the designated time of six o’clock, we had six briskets, four or five pork butts, around eight slabs of ribs, and then a bunch of chicken, sausage, and turkey, all sitting out and ready to go.  (OK we actually had FIVE briskets… I don’t want to hear any lip.)  For sides we had a tomato basil salad, two pans of beans, a black bean salad, and a big bowl potato salad that Doni’s Mom brought us.  When the smoke cleared, we estimated that we fed roughly 200 people.  This was based on a plate count:  We had a total of 300 plates, figure 100 of those got used for nachos and cheesesteaks and such that the team used, and that leaves a rather conservative estimate of 200 that went to guests.  Now THAT’S a party.  The party broke up around midnight, and then it was back to cooking.  We got our competition entries rolling and then it was another long night of sitting around watching the smoke roll.  I only put on one competition brisket, which turned out to be a grave judgment error.  Hey, I was tired, it happens.

Saturday was pretty much all business.  Lots of prep work, checking the fire, tending the meat, and getting the turn-in boxes ready.  Doni’s nephew Joshua came down to assist with the sampling and shuttling the entries to the judges.  All this effort resulted in scores that were roughly as dismal as last year.  Sigh.  I think I’ll just give up on brisket and do a dessert entry next year.  Stupid #$(*)^ judges wouldn’t know a good #$(@# piece of brisket if I hit them over the *@$%^ head with it.  Well, in all fairness, it WAS a little too tender.  I thought it tasted good though.  Oh well, what can you do.  I soundly thrashed our nemesis, the Red Glove BBQ team, so I’ll take small comfort in that.  Well, that and my AWARD WINNING ENTRY at Kearney.  Our best entry was sausage.  Let me recap the sausage entry for you:  Bruce wakes up around 6:00 in the morning and rolls off the pile of straw that he’d slept on all night.  He walks over to the ice box in his boxers and dress socks, grabs a handful of pre-packaged sausage links, and tosses them carelessly in the corner of the smoker.  He then stumbles back over to his little manger of straw and goes back to sleep.  Around 9:00 he gets back up, gets in his car and goes home, leaving his sausage to whoever cares enough to turn it in.  Not wanting to take a zero, Zim graciously chops it up and carries it to the judges.  Yes, naturally this effort resulted in our best entry by far.  Nothing short of maddening.

We did however have a few bright spots in the weekend, contest scores aside.  We set out a few buckets for ALS donations, and at the end of the party pulled almost $700 out of them.  I was expecting more along the lines of $200, so I was more than pleased with these results.  That’s a nice chunk of change there, thank you to all who contributed.  Also, our party was infinitely better than last year.  Our party site and our food preparation were head-and-shoulders above our last attempt, and since we’re in it more for the Friday night activities than Saturday, we can claim an unqualified success there.  And, Doni won a gallon of barbecue sauce in a raffle, so we didn’t leave totally empty-handed.  Call it a consolation prize.

Honestly I don’t have anything to say.  So, if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.  We went to Chicago last weekend, and did “Chicago” kind of stuff…  How much can you really say about that.  I’ll throw out that it continued the trend of getting more enjoyable every year.  We stayed right down in Lincoln Park this year, which I liked tons better than downtown.  We went to the Lincoln Park Zoo again, which was well worth a mention.  I guess maybe it was the cool weather, but the animals were all up and moving around for once, instead of just laying around half asleep.  If I wanted to see sleeping animals I’d just stay at home and watch my pets.

In other news… Todd and Susan came over and watched the football game on our porch last night.  Is that “news”?  Perhaps not, but I’ll throw it in here.  The game stunk but it was a nice night and we lit up the fire pit for the first time this season.  The American Royal BBQ is this coming Friday.  Come down.  Enjoy.  OK, that’s all I’ve got in me.  Honestly, that’s the best I can do.  I’m sure this will bring a stiff rebuke from the more discriminating pkenagy.com visitors, but what can I do.

Dang, that was a busy weekend.  I feel like I’ve been beat with a stick.  I’m tired, sore, and sunburned.  Oh, but it was fun.  The weekend kicked off mid-Friday, when I snuck out of work a bit early and headed North to Kearney for a barbecue competition.  The contest was at the Jesse James festival, which has been held annually for who-knows-how-long.  This was the inaugural competition for our newly-formed BBQ team, The Triple Fat Backs, aka TFB.  Actually, the “new” team is the same team we had at the Royal last year, with a few new members and a more politically correct name than “The Re-Todds”.  Plus, Brown built us a big smoker to use, so now we’re big-time.  We had a nice little party Friday night.  Zim hauled his 30-foot camper up there so we’d be nice and comfy, and several people kind of dropped in and out… A little more low-key than the Royal.  We had a good feed-a-thon too;  Zim and Chud had a buffet of sausages, and Martin supplied brisket, ribs, and chicken.  All that good food sitting around getting cold and I think for the most part I ate nachos.  Go figure.  About 11:00 Friday night we got to work, putting on the briskets, pork and turkey.  When I say “we” that included Chris and I;  The rest of the slackers conveniently dropped off their submissions and left us to cook them.  Every team has a few weak links I guess.

Saturday morning started bright and early.  The first thing I did was meet the neighboring team next door;  Friendly cusses.  I’m afraid that out of embarrassment that’s all the detail I’m gonna go into on that matter.  Let’s just consider that a closed subject.  After those introductions, it was back to work.  We got the brisket and pork wrapped up in foil, and then got the chicken and ribs on around 8:00.  Meanwhile, while Martin and I were driving the smoker, Todd joined Ed and Kim for a 10k race in town.  That boy just ain’t right.  When they got back around 10:00, Ed and Kim were sporting fancy shiny medals around their neck, and Todd was sporting a bitter scowl.  Apparently, there were 85 participants in the race, and of those 80 of them received medals of some type.  The beautiful irony of it was that somehow Todd’s broken-down 40-year-old abused frame actually managed to keep up with the 25-year-olds, then they got medals and he got the shaft.  It seems that through the magic of the age brackets, Todd just happened to get stuck with a bunch of absurdly fast old men.  Rest assured we got lots of mileage out of those results back at the camp.  Around 11:30, it was time to get down to the business of the ‘que.  Todd got his turkey carved up and turned in, then chicken, ribs, pork, and finally brisket.  That flurry of action went until 2:30, and then we got the camp cleaned up and decided to hang out for the awards ceremony.  Lo and Behold, Triple Fat Back BBQ brought home some ribbons!!  Todd landed an “honorable mention” for his turkey at 7th place, and I got 3rd place and $75 with my brisket.  There was a total of 49 teams, so we were nothing less than ecstatic with the results.  I was so elated with my ribbon you’d have thought it was a Nobel Peace Prize.  The wacky part was that I didn’t even really like the brisket.  I gave it an optimistic “marginal” rating when I was turning it in.  Heck, I even put sauce on it, which I consider pure heresy, because I thought it was on the dry side.  Those crazy judges; What can ya’ do.  Here’s a few pictures of the event.

After the big BBQ, I went home and crashed hard.  I was thoroughly exhausted.  Doni had gotten us tickets to go on the Waldo Crawldo event, but I was in no shape to go anywhere.  Plus, I had a rather embarrassing sunburn on my forehead from wearing my hat backwards all weekend;  Whoops.  Doni hooked up with Ed, Kim and Mike for the Crawldo, which she came to regret.  Shoulda stayed home with me.  Sounded like they all had fun though.

Sunday morning I woke up marginally refreshed to go on our ALS walk-a-thon.  The weather was kind of lousy…  Actually it rained on us rather hard.  There was a good turn-out though and the rain cleared off pretty quick.  Truth be told, I didn’t even walk… I had Gabe with me so we just hung out at the little fairground they had set up.  There were several other dogs walking and ol’ Gabe doesn’t always play well with others, so I decided to play it safe.  We stayed around the park until around 11:30, then headed back home to rest up some more.  Doni crashed out instantly, but I changed my mind and decided to join Todd down at the Brooksider to revel in our BBQ success.  He brought down a couple of Padron cigars, which I would consider grossly extravagant.  But hey, we were celebrating, and more importantly it was his nickel.  We hung out down there and enjoyed the nice day out on the deck, then went in and watched a few football games.  Headed home after a while, watched the Chiefs game, and called it a weekend.  Whew.  Next weekend…. CHICAGO TRIP!!!

I can’t think of a catchy title this week so I guess I’ll just commence to typing.  That was a busy weekend, which I am generally against.  Vacations always end that way though… Everything just builds up while you’re gone.

Friday we headed down to the Brooksider after work for our friend Lisa’s 40th birthday party.  Everybody is getting old.  Someday I’ll be 40 too I suppose.  They had some good food out but it was a little on the crowded side so Todd and I retreated to the deck after a bit.  We called it a night early.  I went home and watched movies with Gabe while Doni went out with “the girls.”  They stayed out rather ridiculously late.  Apparently they’ve never heard the phrase “There’s nothing to do after 10:00 but get in trouble.”  Rabble rousers.

Saturday I woke up early and contemplated the enormous list of stuff I had to do.  I contemplated, and contemplated, and contemplated and before I knew it, it was noon.  We were supposed to be in Lawrence by that time watching a volleyball game with some friends, but Doni didn’t even get up until around 11:30 so we just cancelled that event.  After she got up, I finally got the prompting I needed to start my task list.  I started off with mowing the lawn, which I hadn’t done in two weeks.  I need to turn off the sprinklers or something…  The grass was just crazy-tall.  C’mon man, it’s friggin’ September, enough with the mowing already.  After that nasty chore, we headed out to Mom’s to work on her PC.  Her email had been down for three weeks so I was due for a Sev 1 helpdesk call.  When I got her re-connected, she had 142 emails waiting, which took over 30 minutes to download.  Proof positive that dial-up should be banned.  After getting Mom all fixed up, we headed over to the Munkir’s domicile.  He was hosting a little happy hour, and then everybody was going to some Greek Festival.  Not being of Greek lineage, however, we opted to just partake in all the free food and drink at their house and then headed home.  The rest of the night was spent in a vain attempt at catching up on a particularly time-consuming work project.  I made a small dent in it at best.

Sunday was a similarly over-booked kind of day.  Man, I am never going on vacation again.  I didn’t get all my work done Saturday night so I worked on that for a while, then turned on the tube to watch the opening day games.  I didn’t get even close to finishing either my work or home projects, but football took precedence.  While the games were on, we did shuttle back and forth to the kitchen on a freezer-cleaning project.  We uncovered all kinds of treasures, like a nice meaty turkey carcass and a few slabs of ribs.  This scrap-bounty yielded a good 6 quarts of stock and about 3 lbs. of meat…  Looks like gumbo on the menu for next weekend.  Doni also worked several hours on cleaning my car.  The ol’ Civic passed the commonly accepted levels of sanitation about two months ago, and has gotten steadily worse since then.  I think the final straw was when I left the windows down during a rain storm a few weeks back and all the dust turned into some kind of muddy sludge all over the dash.  She spent a good two hours on it; It’s like a new car.  It was kind of nice to drive in to work this morning without having to worry about my pants not touching the door or steering wheel.  After the afternoon games, we grilled up some fajitas and had people over for the evening game.  Doni had a salsa tasting too, with all the jars we brought back from New Mexico last week.  I think El Pinto was the over-all favorite.  Everybody picked Pace last though, which was encouraging.

Well that’s not my best work but I’m done.  Spent.  Exhausted.  Let me be.  I gotta rest up for the BBQ next weekend.

Well that was a heck of a vacation.  Unfortunately it’s over, but I suppose that’s inevitable.  Let’s see… How to summarize.  I can’t get TOO detailed, we did too much stuff and I would be rambling on forever.  Plus I’ve got 240-some-odd pictures to sort through and post, so that’ll take a while too.  Oh well I’ll just dive in and ramble away.

I took Gabe up to a boarding facility called Country Kennels on Wednesday morning, since he’s too high-maintenance to just have somebody drop by the house and check on him occasionally.  They boarded him when he was with the Rescue so they all know him and were excited to get to see him again.  We worked all day, then flew out around 6:30 to get our vacation started.  Incidentally, I don’t guess I mentioned, we were going to Albuquerque to visit our friends David and Jill, who we met during our Texas foray.  We’ve been there a couple of times to visit, and as it turns out they might be moving to Chicago so that might be our last trip to N.M.  Anyway, Jill picked us up at the airport and we headed over to their house, where we gabbed for a while then turned in early.  I’ll throw Thursday in this paragraph too since it was relatively uneventful; David and Jill had to work so we just kind of checked out the town and stuff.  When they got home David grilled up some awesome fillet mignons… Now THAT’S eatin’.

Friday we started getting down to some vacation action.  We drove up to the base of the Sandia mountain range, and took the tram ride.  Their son Grant was on leave from the Marines for the weekend, so he came along too.  I conveniently provided that link to the website about the mountains so you can read about them; That way I don’t have to type it all in here.  It’s billed as the longest tram in the world; Pretty awesome ride.  There’s a restaurant at the top where we had a drink, then walked around a while and headed back down.  For dinner we headed to El Pinto restaurant.  Now that’s some killer feed… And as an added bonus it’s Green Chile season, so the chiles were extra fresh.  Man, those things are everywhere down there; they sell them for practically nothing too.  I’d put them somewhere in my top five foods probably.  Last time we visited Albuquerque I carried home a big burlap bag of them, but didn’t feel energetic enough for that this time.  Plus, they’re just better fresh; I don’t really buy into the freezing bit.  Guess it’s better than canned.

Saturday for our vacation diversion, we headed out to Sky City.  Again, I have provided a informational link to relieve myself of any excess typing.  The Acoma Indians live there, and it is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States.  They duped me into the drive by telling me it was only 45 minutes, but it was really more like an hour and a half.  Oh well, it was worth it.  Now for dinner this night, we went to Sadie’s.  We were having a little show-down between this place and El Pinto.  There wasn’t a real clear-cut winner though; They are both awesome.  I’d say Sadie’s was a little higher on the “Sweaty Bald Head” scale though.  I wore a ball cap to try and maintain some appearance of normalcy, but it was breached pretty quickly.

Let’s see… That takes us to Sunday.  The “event of the day” on Sunday was the Bernalillo Wine Festival.  Oddly I can’t find a link to this event so I’ll have to briefly describe it myself.  Good grief.  Bernalillo is a quaint lil’ town right off the Rio Grande river, with a nice view of the Sandia Mountains.  Great place to have a festival and walk around sipping wine all afternoon.  We stayed there several hours but eventually the heat and crowd wore us out.  I left with a nice little sunburn on the back of my neck, complete with a nice glaring white strip from my camera strap.  Revenge of the Nerds hits New Mexico.  Luckily it blended in a little after a while.  I’m sure you’ve noticed a pattern by now;  The next order of business was dinner.  We talked David into doing fillet mignons again.  Grant invited over 3 of his friends, and we had a veritable “fillet buffet”.  Apparently David was trying to burn us out on the steaks so he wouldn’t have to fix them again the next night; He grilled enough for everybody to have seconds on the fillets.  Obscene, but true.  It was quite an exercise in gluttony.

That brings us to Monday, the Holiday.  Once again… We had an “event” followed by over-eating.  First we drove out to Tent Rocks National Park for a little hiking.  It’s one those places where you hike around and ooh and ah at all the cool rock formations.  Took a few dozen pictures, did a little walking… You know the drill.  I’m tiring of typing, enough with the descriptions.  After that we almost drove up to some hot springs for a little swimming, but it was too far to drive.  Been there, done that anyway.  So, we went back to the house and sat on the roof of the house for a while, watching the sunset.  (Hopefully the landlord isn’t reading this…)  They’ve got an awesome view of the Sandias, and it’s quite a sight at sunset.  Check out the pictures… When I get around to posting them.  For dinner we had salmon, grilled on a cedar plank.  I’ve always wanted to try that… Now I’ll get around to it ’cause it was GOOD.  Grilled up some asparagus too.

Tuesday was the end of the vacation, boo hoo.  We went back to El Pinto on the way to the airport and gorged ourselves one more time at their lunch buffet.  I’m not really sure what all I had;  By the time I got done spooning green chiles over everything that’s pretty much all you could taste.  We did a little shopping too;  Picked up 5 quarts of Sadies salsa, a huge plastic jug of El Pinto salsa, and some green chile sauce.  That should hold us for a week or so.  We got back home around 6 o’clock, and I headed down to the Brooksider to round out the vacation.

Well that’s pretty much it… I’m exhausted.  I picked up Gabe from the kennel this afternoon, and he doesn’t seem any worse for the wear.  Actually he is dead tired…  He’s been asleep since we got home.  They even gave him a little “report card” which of course contained nothing but glowing comments.  Hopefully he liked it, because we’ve got all kinds of trips coming up…