I don’t really have anything to report for last weekend, but I’ll make a cursory update for the sake of keeping up appearances.  We did have a little impromptu gathering on Friday night; I was watching TV when Doni stormed the house with all kinds of people she invited over.  They played “beanbag toss” in the back yard for a while… I abstained.

I had to work for the rest of the weekend.  Boo hoo.  You don’t want to hear about it.  I do however get some level of interest from pondering this little factoid:  If I go out for “fun” I’m doing good to make it until 10:00, yet I can still manage an “all-nighter” at work.  Does this mean that I find work more interesting, and it keeps me awake?  That I use more energy playing than working and wear out quicker?  Hmmmm.  I’ll do some cipherin’ on that.

No rain for a weekend finally!!  The weather was most welcome.  We kicked off the festivities on Friday by doing absolutely nothing.  Doni was kind of worn out from a trip to lovely Omaha, NE, and as for myself I’m still rather fascinated by the number of channels I’ve got on the TV now.  So we just did a big ol’ bunch of nothing.

Saturday afternoon, Doni had one of those “parties” that the girls rotate through.  They go to each others houses and donate money to each other so the hostess-of-the-week can get some free stuff.  You know the drill, I don’t imagine I need to describe it in any more detail than that.  Meanwhile, Gabe and I went to puppy school, where we worked on “down,” a.k.a. “lay down.”  He had kind of a rough go at it… For some reason he keeps rolling over.  Amusing, granted, but not too technically correct.  We also received the rather startling news that he actually has to test out to “pass” the class.  Heck, I thought it was like Kindergarten; You just go on to the next class, you don’t really pass or fail.  We better buckle down on the homework a little more; I’ve been letting him slack.  Too much “fetch” and not enough “sit” spoils the puppy.  Saturday night, we went to the first show of the Starlight season, called “Disney’s On The Record.”  This was absolutely, bar none, unequivocally the single worst show I have ever seen in my life.  It had no plot, no dialogue, and no characters; Just a never-ending barrage of 60-some-odd revised Disney songs.  It was nothing short of brutal.  Over the past three seasons that we’ve been season ticket holders, I’ve devised an elaborate rating system for the shows, ranging from a low end of “tedious” to a high end of “tolerable.”  After watching this train-wreck though, I’ve added a special new category called “hara-kiri.”  I’ll have to remember to pack a sword to the remaining shows.  Fortunately, it looks like the schedule is generally downhill from here on out.  Mercifully, Doni pulled me out at intermission on this one.  The Martins came over for a while and we enjoyed the nice weather on the back porch, in blissful silence.

Sunday I got up at the unholy hour of 4:30, rousted by an uncomfortable stomach situation.  This was likely brought on by either the number of ribs I had at dinner before the Starlight show, or the show itself.  This worked out OK though; I wanted to fire up the smoker anyway.  I had a brisket on by 5:45, allowing plenty of time for it to finish before dinner.  This was the first brisket of the season, and it didn’t come out so hot.  There were a few contributing factors to the less-than-stellar results: For one thing, I used a “trimmed” brisket for the first time.  I’ve always wanted to try it, and now I have.  Won’t happen again.  Second, I didn’t do much in the way of seasoning, in an effort to accommodate Doni’s current “no salt, no sugar” rule.  This didn’t work out too bad, as you can always just dump on some sauce for flavor, but it was definitely lacking standing alone.  Oh well, plenty of time left to experiment before the big contest(s).  I’m out of wood though… Anybody got any pecan trees down?

Man this excess precipitation is bringing me down.  Can’t walk the dog, can’t mow the lawn, can’t sit on the deck.  It sucks.

The biggest news from last week was our switch from Time Warner to Everest.  Big news for our house anyway.  I’ve been wanting to upgrade the cable service for some time now, and Road Runner wouldn’t cut me any breaks for getting more service.  On the other hand, I could sign up as a new customer on Everest and get a month free service plus a free install.  All for the minor inconvenience of switching my email address, which Time Warner is going to do anyway when they give all their KC customers to Comcast.  Sounded like a no-brainer to me, so I went ahead and pulled the trigger.  We went from having 20 channels to all the digital channels, high definition channels, and HBO.  Just in time for all the rain too; it’s working out nicely.

As far as the weekend goes, our entertainment was definitely hampered by the stupid rain.  Kim and Ed came over Friday night and we sat around and played some 10-point pitch.  Ed and I dominated thoroughly of course; we had to wrap up around 11:00 when the girls wouldn’t quit crying.  Kind of embarrassing, really.

Saturday started off with doggie school at 10:30.  We’re working on leash-walking still, and threw “lay down” into the mix.  It’s going “pretty good.”  The boy ain’t too fond of sitting still, so it makes it kind of hard.  I think his attention span might be even shorter than mine, if that’s possible.  I can’t really think of anything else we did Saturday.  Probably sat around and cursed the rain and watched HBO.

Sunday I had planned on cooking a brisket, but got rained out.  MAN I’m sick of rain.  I kind of messed around all afternoon, then finally moped down the Brooksider around 3:30 to watch the Royals game.  After taking in my weekly dose of second-hand smoke, I went back home and watched the rest of the game there.  We finished up the weekend by going over to Susan’s new house and watching TV.  Had a little spaghetti, watched some Sopranos, tuned up her PC, and called it a night.

Thus ended another weekend.  Sigh.  If it ever dries out I’m gonna try the brisket thing again; keep it in mind for next weekend.

** Slight addendum.  I missed updating my website one place to reflect the new Everest service, thus the late update.  Didn’t feel it worth leaving work to fix; James can wait an extra few hours.  Also of note regarding the new cable:  Tonight will be my first night watching Monday Night Raw in over a year!!

Not a bad weekend, not bad at all.  Friday we started off by going out with our friend David, who was visiting from New Mexico.  He was making a quick pass through town and had time to swing by and go out with us.  Ed and Kim came over and babysat the puppy, affording us the luxury of taking him out and hittin’ the town.  As a little aside here, I want everyone to immediately cease making fun of me for getting babysitters for my dog.  The boy just so happens to suffer from extreme separation anxiety.  I cannot, in good conscience, leave him home by himself after he’s already been alone all day.  The potential for mental anguish and/or property damage is just too great.  So there.  So, anyway, we started the evening off down at the Brooksider.  All the regular crowd was there.  Nothing too noteworthy, other than one of the few remaining familiar waitresses was putting in her last shift before quitting.  Sigh.  Another one going off into the cruel world to work a “real job.”  Before you know it, there aren’t going to be any waitresses left that know us.  We’ll have to actually interact with them, telling them what we want and stuff.  Wholly unacceptable.  After hanging out there for a while, we headed over to Jalapenos for some burritos.  A good meal is usually the “coup de’ grace” on the evening, but for some reason this time it actually revitalized us, so we headed up the street to see who was at Bobby Bakers.  Much like the Brooksider, it was pretty much the same crowd as always, which isn’t a bad thing.  We were having a good time catching up with David, making vacation plans and stuff, and we actually ended up staying out rather late.  We may have damaged our babysitting privileges for the future… We didn’t make it back until well after 10:00.  (Ed says it was after midnight but I just can’t grasp that idea… I’m not buying it.)

Saturday I started off the day by taking Gabe to his puppy class.  Needless to say, he is the star pupil at school.  This week was leash walking though, which isn’t exactly his strong point.  Poor boy gets easily distracted, it’s not his fault.  He did pretty well though; we’ll have to practice a lot this week.  He seemed a little distressed after school, possibly as a result of his mediocre performance, so I drove him out to Dressler’s and Petsmart in KCK to do some shopping.  Got him a few toys, a few bones, and a new leash and collar set.  Plus, Gabe’s “Foster Mom” works at the Petsmart so we visited with her for a while too.  All that shopping pretty well killed the afternoon, so we went home and made some dinner.  Doni has started some crazy diet, so cooking has been something of a challenge lately.  The biggest limitation is no salt… How do you cook anything without salt?  I ended up with grilled salmon with mustard and dill.  Rather creative I thought, especially for me.  Prepared mustard has salt in it, so I whipped some up from dried mustard.  The fish didn’t come out bad… Needed salt.  We finished up the evening watching “Reservoir Dogs,” which wasn’t nearly as good as I’d hoped.

Sunday was the our usual “take it easy” day.  I did make it to the gym, for the first time in a month.  I’m going to try and make another run at getting there on a regular basis; We’ll have to see how it goes.  It would work out better for me if they’d take the dog in their day care center… I’ll have to ask about that.  Something tells me they are going to frown on the idea, but it never hurts to ask.  After a pretty good workout, I took the dog down to the Brooksider and hung out on the deck for a few hours with Todd.  Whew, nice day out yesterday.  We had a little lunch and just kind of took in the sun.  Around 4:00 we headed out with all of Doni’s family to watch the T-Bones game.  (And yes, we did get a babysitter again; Mike came over and stayed with the boy.)  Doug, Jackie and kids were in town from Houston, so we had a veritable mob.  That’s some good entertainment there, if you haven’t made it out to one of these games.  Tickets were a bit pricey at $14, but that was for top-notch seats.  We were about 4-5 rows back right behind home plate.  Aside from the rather miserable drive to get out there, I give it two thumbs up.  I expect we’ll go back soon, maybe take a grill with us.  As an added bonus, they won both games of the double-header, although we didn’t make it all the way ’til the end of the second game.

Man this week is off to a rough start.  Despite the generally reliable prediction of an average day by my horoscope, everything is going remarkably crappy.

1. My super-duper headblade hit the floor and broke.  Now I’m going to be running around like some kind of long-hair hippie until my new one comes in.


2. Doni put me on a diet.  Again.


3. The vending machine is out of Cheetos.  I had to eat fritos for lunch.  REGULAR fritos.