I’m on break, gearing up for the Holidays.  Cut me some slack.

Buenos Dias, I hope everyone had a nice holiday.  We certainly did.  Thanksgiving may have surpassed July 4 on “favorite holiday” list.  I never get to shoot fireworks myself anymore, which greatly detracts from July entertainment, but I DO still enjoy Thanksgiving in every sense.  Maybe I’ll buy a gross of bottle rockets next year and see if that makes a difference.  Maybe I’ll shoot them off on Thanksgiving day… Now THAT would be a holiday.

We didn’t do much worth relating over the weekend, so I’ll back up all the way to the holiday.  We had Thanksgiving dinner over at my Aunt Kathi’s, and a fine feed-fest it was.  Pretty much the traditional feast; greenbean casserole, mashed potatoes n’ gravy, noodles, cranberries, corn, rolls, stuffing, dressing, and both smoked and roasted turkeys.  At least I guess that’s our “traditional” foods.  I’ve heard that not everyone puts noodles on their mashed potatoes.  What can I say besides “they should.”  After that we put together a big Charlie Brown jigsaw puzzle, and I went out and helped the nephews build a snowman.    I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I haven’t built a snowman in 15 years.  Probably a good reason for that too, I think I slipped a disc.

Friday I hit the “Black Friday” sales like a madman.  That’s something of a yearly event at work, and embarrassingly I kind of look forward to it.  We develop our game plan on Wednesday, and give everyone an assigned store.  (Not like Jones and Kohl’s… Electronics stores like CompUSA and Microcenter and such.)  Then Friday morning we descend on them like a swarm of nerd locusts, buying up everything in site.  I got a little more carried away than usual this year… I did some serious damage.  I was at CompUSA in Independence at 5:00, standing in line, and it paid off handsomely.  I hit the jackpot on every good deal I could find.  No small victory there… Several of the things I got were limited to like 10 per store.  From there I hit some of the other stores and picked up a few of the “less critical” items, which is stuff that I have no earthly use for but bought anyway just because it was cheap.  Yes I am aware that indicates a serious problem.  When the smoke cleared, I came away with a 19″ LCD monitor, an 80 gig hard drive, a stack of DVD’s (movies), 2 DVD burners (??), Norton Antivirus, 50 blank DVD’s, an optical mouse, some cool little Atari games, a wireless network card, rechargable batteries, some flash memory, and several other items that shall go nameless because they’re “secret.”  Whew.  Ohhhhh yeah, we tore it up.

We really didn’t do anything over the weekend of note.  Kind of rested up from the holiday.  Saturday, apparently still caught up in the shopping frenzy, we did go out to Nebraska Furniture Mart and purchase a new TV.  Hopefully this will be the impetus to finally complete “the room.”  I’m a little nervous about the whole purchase… There is a very real chance that the TV won’t fit in the room.  I guess we’ll worry about that when they deliver it.  Sunday, we kind of just hung out and messed around in the house.  Cooked some gumbo, cleaned the house a little bit, pre-made some meals for this week, that kind of stuff.  We watched the Chief’s game too, whoo-hoo.

Well, we made it back from Mexico safe and sound.  We ducked out last Wednesday morning, under cover of darkness, and boarded a plane for Playa Del Carmen.  We had some first class tickets in our hands, thanks to our Albuquerque traveling buddies Jill and David.  I’ll say one thing, it’s a darn site closer than Hawaii: we were sitting on the beach soaking rays by 2:30 that afternoon.  SWEET!!

To sum up the trip, let me just say “All Inclusive.”  That pretty much wraps it up.  We stayed at the Gran Porto Real, and I’ll give the place an A+ under the “relaxation” category.  My goal for the trip was to move no more than 300 yards a day under my own power, and I met or exceeded that goal each and every day.  It was a rather stunning display of sloth even for myself.  I did start to feel a bit bad about the situation after the first two days.  Nobody should eat and drink that much without countering it by doing some type of physical activity.  It just ain’t natural.  I managed to fight through the emotional rollercoaster and stick it out ’till the end though.  Our daily agenda went something (exactly, actually) like this:

• 6:00 AM – Stumble outside and stake our claim to four premium lounge chairs, by using the international symbol of the beach towel draped over the back.  Go back to bed.  This was by far the closest we came to work the entire trip, taking sometimes as long as 10 minutes to accomplish, and definitely carried the most responsibility.  We split these duties with David and Jill, every other day.


• 7:30 AM – Get back out of bed, pick up clothes off floor, put them on, and go to breakfast.  Typical breakfast consisted of a large omelet, several sausage links, assorted fruit, chunks of cheese, scrambled eggs with ham, potatoes, french toast, and a few pieces of the “meat du jour,” all covered liberally with pico de gallo and washed down with 4 cups of coffee.  You may think I’m exaggerating… I’m not.


• 9:00 AM – Switch out shorts for swim suits, shuffle out to the aforementioned lounge chairs and read the newspaper.


• 10:00 AM – Everisto, our personal bartender, shows up for work and brings us a round.  We grossly overtip him, ensuring prompt returns, and lay back in our chairs.


• 1:00 PM – Lunch time gluttony, consisting of nachos, guacamole burgers, french fries swimming in copious amount of chili and cheese sauce, ceviche, and assorted other artery-cloggers, all buried under a few cups of the same awesome pico de gallo.


• 4:00 PM – Nap time.


• 6:00 PM – Dinner.  Although the content varied a little more than the other meals, the portions were quite similar.


• 8:00 PM – Here we mixed it up a LITTLE bit, but not a whole lot… Just kind of went with the flow.  Check out the nightly show, sit out by the pool and chit-chat, watch a red-neck wedding, that kind of stuff.

Think you could hold that pace?  Not as easy as it sounds, bub.  Not for lounge-rookies, I’ll tell you that.  Any oddities on the trip, you ask?  Well… All the topless chicks kind of took me by surprise.  Not an all-together unpleasant surprise, mind you, but it kind of threw me off my game.  There was always that underlying feeling that something just… Wasn’t right.  A bit unnerving.  Plus, I think it distracted Everisto, and that’s just not good for anybody.  We also went and saw a Michael Jackson impersonater one night.  THAT was something to see.  There is a very good possibility that I may live out the rest of my life regretting not getting a picture with ol’ Michael.  Would’ve been a fine keep-sake.  Oh, oh, and I can’t forget the Red-Neck wedding, alluded to above.  The wedding party wasn’t all that remarkable actually; relatively normal people with horrible drawls.  But then there was Will, and he was quite a case.  Will (pronounced “Whee-Ull”) sat out on the beach every day in a cowboy shirt, properly-formed ballcap, Wranglers, and well-worn boots.  Honestly, watching and listening to Will provided me with more diversion than the topless chicks.  (That sounds like something out a “you know you’re getting old when…” skit, but it’s true.)  He had many memorable lines, few of which can be repeated.  One of my favorites was when he wandered by, soaked from head to toe, (and still in the clothes described above) and stated “%$&%#*-*$%#@, that was a bad decision.”  Other than that, the synopsis above pretty well covers things, with the exception of a few items filed under “what goes on south of the border, stays south of the border.”  Well, there are several little “catch phrases” we picked up on, (besides Will’s,) but they just wouldn’t work on here.  You have to actually hear them, and for that matter you have to hear them the FIRST time to get the full effect.  So never mind on those.

Well, see, I’m kind of at a loss for material today.  We went to Omaha with Ed and Kim, A.K.A. “The Kids,” for the weekend, so the scope of activities was limited to “being in Omaha.”  I can’t stretch the same event into a whole lot of verbiage.  “Friday we were in Omaha.  Then, Saturday, we were in Omaha.  Sunday, we woke up in Omaha.”  See my dilemma?  I suppose I could break it down a bit, though.

Friday we were in Omaha.  We took off from work a bit early so we could hit the road, which I assumed was an effort at missing the north-bound traffic rush.  Turns out, unbeknownst to me, it was because we were supposed to be at a hockey game.  Nobody ever gives me the details, I swear.  Now, to hear Donette tell the story, I was given the information and chose to ignore it.  I’m sure everyone would agree that this would be totally impossible.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter that we were going to a hockey game; It’s not like I would have refused to go just based on that.  I would have, however, worn jeans instead of shorts.  It was just a bit chilly in the ol’ hockey rink.  It was tolerable though, and the hockey game was rather engaging too.  It was the local college team, UNO, and they were playing in the new-ish Qwest Arena.  Very nice facility, maybe KC will have one some day.  After the game, we checked into the hotel, then went out to eat at the Upstream Brewery down in the Old Market district.

Saturday we spent the better part of the day looking for a place to eat lunch.  I won’t go into details on that.  After our late lunch, we went to the highly touted Omaha zoo.  I’d say it lived up to the hype pretty well.  We were there a long time, so we must have been interested.  Man, it was a lot of walking though.  After the zoo, we took a short coffee break back at the hotel and then walked back to the Old Market district for dinner.  That area, by the way, was very cool.  Our River Market area could take some tips from them, although I suppose they aren’t exactly the same kind of thing.  Which isn’t to say they shouldn’t or couldn’t be the same thing, but that’s just my opinion.  Anyway, we had a little dinner and then took off on something of a tour to check out all the places we deemed “interesting.”  We had a rather loose criteria for “interesting”… Not quite as stringent as the “apostrophe-s” rule we had in Chicago.  Basically, I think it went something like “no cover charge and no tablecloths.”  I won’t cover the entire tour, but we had a great time.  We ended up at T. Henry’s, which was a particularly cool building.  They had the bonus of live music, which wasn’t all that horrible… Rather enjoyable actually.  They were kind of funny though… We’d clap after their songs, you know, just being polite by nature and all.  It was like nobody had ever done that before; We were like some kind of fan club by the end of the evening.  Anyway, the night wore on, and we were having a pretty good time, when all of a sudden some chick comes over and tells us we gotta go.  Get out.  Not now, right now.  I was somewhat baffled… “What, are we in trouble for the whole clapping thing or something?  Geez, lighten up a little.”  Turns out it was closing time.  I haven’t seen that in a while.  Closed a place down, and a college-crowd place at that!  Dang man, I am CRAZY!!!

Sunday, we drove home.  And, that about covers Sunday.

Well I don’t have a whole lot to report, but for the sake of consistency I suppose I should type something up anyway.  Let’s see:

Friday night we went to Chuck E. Cheese pizza place in Olathe KS, for my nephew’s 7th birthday.  While this deviated quite a bit from my “normal” Friday evening surroundings, it was a pleasant dinner.  I will admit deriving some amount of entertainment from watching kids “have fun.”  I particularly like the little movie camera thing, where they can dance around in front of it and it shows them up on the wall.  All of them have that incredulous expression of “this is absolutely the coolest thing on the planet.”  Little do they know that in a mere 15-20 years, they’ll be tethered to a chair in a 6×6 cubicle, arguing vehemently about insignificant issues via email and telephone, eating microwave hotdogs out of a vending machine for lunch, clock-watching until 5:00 finally comes so they can rush home and watch some horrible reality television show until it’s time to go to sleep, so they can get up and go BACK to the same chair and… uhhhhh, I digress.  Never mind.  Good pizza.

Saturday was such nice weather out, I decided to do a little “home maintenance.”  I took the front door off, carried it out to the front yard, sanded it down and put a new coat of finish on it.  It came out pretty well… A little glossier than I would have preferred.  Doni, meanwhile, worked on “the room” project.  She got a coat of primer on the walls and ceiling, and a pretty good coat in her hair too.  Some day it will be finished.  I also worked on the ol’ Civic a bit.  It’s been blowing fuses for several months, so I finally dug in and looked for the problem.  I found that there were 8 wires running up to the hatchback, and all 8 of them were cut.  Kind of “smashed” really.  So, drawing heavily on my 9 year education in Electronics, I bought a little wire-splicing kit and hooked them all back together.  Evidently my CMSU education was worth the time; I now have functioning brake lights, rear defrost, and the “hatch open” light stays off.  For another few weeks anyway.

Sunday we had people over to watch the football game on the back porch.  It seemed like a good idea when we checked the weather reports, but actually it was a little on the chilly side.  But, considering the time of year, it could’ve been a lot chillier.  After the unspeakable horror that was the Chiefs game, we went over to Susan’s and watched a few old episodes of “The Sopranos.”  Then I went to bed to await the dawn of another Monday morn’, so I could go in and sit in my chair in my 6×6 cubicle and… whoops, I digress again, sorry.