I’m on vacation in lovely Albuquerque and have no intention of wasting valuable time updating my Blog.  Suffice to say we are enjoying ourselves.  I’ll catch up Wednesday.

Given the brevity of last week’s update, I really feel obligated to post a veritable novel this week.  But the problem is, I really didn’t do anything all weekend so I’ve got no subject matter.  The only thing I’ve got to work with is my fantasy football draft Saturday night and the dog having an accident in the house Sunday night.  Pretty slim pickings there.  I’ll do what I can with what I have…  That’s all you can ask of me.

I suppose we did go out Friday night, but nothing of note really occurred.  Just went down to the Brooksider and enjoyed the stellar weather.  At some point Todd got restless and moved the crowd to Bobby Bakers…  Mistake.  We traded in a comfortable table outside in the fresh air for a cramped booth in a crowded room with intolerable air quality.  Next time I’ll take a pass on that place.

Saturday, despite my best intentions, I didn’t do anything.  We went to Costco for a little shop-a-thon, and had lunch down in Westport, but that’s about the whole of it.  I spent a good amount of time putting together info for my fantasy football draft that evening.  From the looks of my resulting team, the time would have been better spent mowing the lawn or fixing the gutters.  I got home from the draft event about 11:00 to find an empty house.  Doni had taken Gabe down to the Plaza to a little party, and they ended up staying out all night.  The results of this fiesta were quite disastrous, as I shall detail later.

Sunday turned out similarly non-eventful.  We met Doni’s parents down at the gym for lunch, which was a lot better than it sounds.  They put on a nice brunch; I’m for it.  I don’t know what happened to the rest of the afternoon honestly, but the next thing I knew it was time to start getting ready for the Sunday evening television events.  We hosted dinner this week, so there was a short burst of house-cleaning involved but nothing too major.  (Well, aside from the still-to-be-told tale of terror.)  We had spaghetti for dinner;  Mike’s Grandma sent some homemade sauce and he was good enough to share the wealth.  We made homemade pasta for the first time too;  Didn’t come out bad for our first attempt.  I’m not entirely convinced it was worth the effort, but it was kinda fun.  We voted it “worth doing again.”  Might branch out next time and mix in some garlic or basil or something a little saucier…

Well the only tale of the weekend left to tell is of Gabe’s “Incident”, alluded to briefly during the previous paragraphs.  I am sure nobody really wants to hear about my pup getting sick, but the scope of the horror was so gigantic that I really feel it bears re-telling.  It all began with Doni taking him to that party Saturday night;  At least that’s where I’m laying the blame.  I don’t know exactly what went on in that den of iniquity known as the Plaza, but the poor boy was kind of out of sorts all day Sunday.  Who knows, he might just take after me a little bit, which is to say he doesn’t like situations “out of the norm.”  Take him out of his element and bad things could happen.  At any rate, the pup pretty much just moped around all day Sunday.  Then, about 4:30, I walked into the TV room to find a mess of such proportions that I still shudder to think of it.  I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say he puked, but in all honesty I’m not really sure what came out where.  All I know is it was a bad scene; Poor Gabe was sitting there looking kind of sheepish, and there was a mess on the carpet, the drapes, the wall…  Oh it was bad.  I was so shocked I could just kind of manage a little gasp;  “help… help….”  Doni came running in, surveyed the situation, and immediately turned and ran for a pair of rubber gloves and some cleaning supplies.  Meanwhile, I headed to the garage to get a garden trowel and started shovelling.  (Seriously…  Shovelling.)  We found ground zero back behind the drapes, which is generally considered “cat territory.”  I was ready to push the blame off on Kane at that point, but I don’t think he is physically big enough to create an explosion of such magnitude.  I swear, 2000 square feet of hardwood floors and the boy picks our new carpet and drapes to get sick on.  What can ya’ do.  There doesn’t seem to be any permanent damage though… it’s “visible” but just barely.  Not as bad as it coulda been;  At first glance we were ready to condemn the house and move into a condo.  The whole event just went to further solidify my belief that I never would have been able to handle a kid.  Bottom line, no more parties for Gabe.

Well I was out of town all weekend so I don’t really have much to say.  Had to go to Birmingham Alabammy and work.  Remind me to scratch that city off the “Places I Would Like to Move” list.  I guess it was OK…  The drivers are considerably worse than here, and the weather was entirely intolerable.  Reminded me of the Fort Worth weather; Sorta armpit-ish.  Drawls (worse than mine) irritate me too.  I honestly couldn’t decide if the locals needed to talk a bit slower or a lot faster, but something was very wrong with the dialect.  On top of these indignities, I had to work all Saturday night.

I guess I can make a weak attempt at summing up the weekend anyway.  I left Friday morning on an early flight.  I walked out to my car around 6:30 to discover that I’d left my windows down all night during those big thunderstorms.  NOT a good scene.  Water standing in the floorboards, seats sopping wet;  It was about as bad as it could get.  Since I had to get to the airport, all I could do was throw some towels on the seat and go.  Then I had to leave the car out in the sun all weekend with the windows up, so now it smells like a load of sour laundry.  Might just sell it and get a moped, I haven’t decided exactly what to do yet.  The only other event of note was an unfortunate digestive malady that afflicted me during the entire trip, and you do NOT want to hear about that.  I blame this situation on some particularly rare lambchops I fixed last week, but who knows.  Things were kind of touch and go when I left town, and I thought all was well when I got there.  This proved not to be the case after a big rib dinner at a place called Jim ‘N Nick’s.  The ribs were delicious, but the resulting discomfort was so horrific that I fasted for the remainder of the weekend.  Haven’t eaten much since;  I’m a little scared.  Given that the main focus of my trips is eating, this was truly a disappointment.  Oh well, something tells me I’ll be back in ‘Bammy before too long, I’ll try again next time.

My weekend started on Friday last week, thus unleashing the non-stop torrential downpours we were subjected to the last few days.  What a drag.  My sprinklers were doing just fine, I could have done without the rain.  Oh well, a day off is a day off, no matter what the weather.  Still beats working.  I had scheduled Friday as a vacation day quite a while ago, initially with the intent of going to Pigfest in Ohio.  But, as the date drew closer, I realized the drive up there was just a bit too daunting for me, so I bailed.  Then a few weeks ago, I got a wedding invitation for some friends in Nebraska.  So I made some hasty plans to go to that event, seeing as I already had vacation and all.  But, no, couldn’t make that drive either.  Not as far as the Ohio event, but it still exceeded my 10 mile radius of safety by several hours.  So, in the end, I just sat home with Gabe and watched bad movies.  Met Martin for lunch at the Brooksider, called it a day.  When Doni got home we went to the wine tasting around the corner, then headed back home and watched a few movies.

Saturday was roughly as unproductive as Friday.  Munkirs came down and joined Gabe and I at the Brooksider for lunch, then Todd, Doni and Christy came down.  I had to take Gabe home when it started pouring on us, then I went right back down there.  We hunkered down inside, waiting for the storm to pass.  Since it never did, we ended up staying all day.  When we finally tired of the ‘Sider, we went up to Bobby Bakers to exercise the jukebox for a while, then went around the corner to 75th Street Brewery for dinner.  All-in-all, a good day.

Sunday I fired up the smoker to put on some ribs.  I’d intended to do them Friday while the rest of the world worked, but the rain screwed that plan up.  Turned out OK though, because nobody could come over Friday anyway, and the weather was perfect on Sunday.  I put 3 slabs of baby back ribs on around noon, and settled in to enjoy the weather.  I did leave them unattended for a little while so Doni and I could go play tennis with Christy and Todd.  Gotta mix some exercise in the weekend somewhere, you know.  Todd came over after tennis and tossed some chicken on the smoker, and it was back to sitting around doing nothing.  The Martin’s joined us for dinner, and Susan came over too; Turned into a regular get-together.  Watched a little HBO, then called it a weekend.

The rekindled home-cooking project is coming along nicely.  Besides the ribs and chicken on Sunday, I grilled some shrimp on Tuesday and made mahi-mahi fajitas on Thursday.  I was kind of partial to the shrimp; I put that recipe up in the cooking section.  The fish fajitas were pretty interesting too… That was Doni’s creative thinking at work there.  Tonight:  Lambchops in garlic with new potatoes.

Well the nice weather didn’t last too long.  Drat.  Oh well, Fall is just around the corner.  I’ll survive.  Perhaps.

That was a rather busy weekend.  Perhaps even too busy for my tastes, I haven’t decided yet.  Friday we kinda took it easy…  At first we weren’t going to do anything at all, but then decided that the weather was so nice we better at least make an effort at getting out.  We walked around the corner to Waldo Wine and hit the “free Friday tasting” for a few hours.  Can’t beat that deal.  Meet a few neighbors, taste a few wines that we’re too cheap to ever actually buy, and get out of the house for a few hours.  After that we went back home, hunkered down, and watched a movie.

Saturday was truly a day of entertainment.  Not sure if that’s a good thing or not; a little too busy for my tastes.  Doni wisely prepped for the day by sleeping until 11:00 in the afternoon with the menagerie.  As soon as she and Gabe saw fit to get out of bed, we loaded up and headed out to Petsmart for our weekend re-stock on treats, food, toys, etc.  We got the boy a few more “interactive toys,” which are supposed to occupy his time in his crate, and a few bones and such.  His foster Mom works there too, so we visited with her for a while.  After our little shopping trip, we headed up to the Northlands to hit the lake with the Martins.  Few hours of floating around in the water, then we went to a birthday party at one of their neighbors’ houses.  After THAT party we headed back to our ‘hood and picked up the pup, then went to a house-warming party at Susan’s.  This was quite the well-attended fiesta, and we ended up staying quite ridiculously late.  Gabe seemed to enjoy all the attention too, and he behaved very nicely.

Sunday we slept in for a bit, then trudged down to Jalapenos for a little lunch.  While we sat there munching our enchiladas, we also planned out our menu for the week.  Very organized of us, I thought.  The basis for this little rash of planning was reading Braun’s Food Blog.  He has single-handedly inspired me to get back into cooking.  Somewhere between the house in Texas and the apartment downtown, I kind of lost interest in the whole food thing.  It’s just so much easier to let somebody else cook it for you.  But, I’m gonna give it a try again, starting this very week.  Gonna start off slow…  Maybe just one or two nights a week, and see what happens.  After deciding on our culinary schedule for the week, we split up to go do “stuff”.  Doni hit the local markets to collect up the ingredients for said menu, and I went home to mow the lawn.  Somewhere during the one-mile drive from the restaurant to the house, I decided it was too hot to mow and went to Woodside to play tennis.  Hopefully everyone can appreciate the stupidity of this decision.  “Man, way too hot to mow, think I’ll go run around on a big slab of asphalt.”  Oh well, the sweat did me good.  Todd and I took on Mike and Kristy in a few games of doubles.  This was billed as the clash between our age and experience, versus their youth and energy.  Our age turned out to be quite a hindrance, and actually we don’t have any experience, so we lost rather badly.  What the heck, it was fun.  Wait a minute…  It sucked.  After laying on the couch for a few hours under ice packs, we went over to Susan’s for some Chinese take-out and HBO.

That wrapped up the week.  Tonight we’re going to the last Starlight show of the season, “Hello Dolly.”  Prime rib on the menu.  I’ll start my new cooking regimen tomorrow.