I spent last week in San Francisco, so at least I can’t claim the “same ol’ weekend” story as I usually do.  However, it was spent at a work conference so I really don’t have to that much anybody would like to hear about.  Ate some awesome food;  If only I remembered the name of the restaurants I’d do some quick reviews on them.  Alas, I didn’t keep very good records.  I spent the week getting to know several of my industry peers (at least as much as my boring personality allowed for) and walking around the city.  I didn’t have a car so my range was a bit limited, but I got to see some cool stuff.  And, some not so cool stuff…  A downfall of the “I’ll just walk that direction and see what I run into” plan I supposed.  At the end of the conference our hosts took us all to AT&T Park, where they’d rented the entire place for the evening.  Obviously there wasn’t a game going on, but we got to tour the stadium, including going down on the field.  If you’re sure you don’t want to hear about traffic load-balancing techniques, that’s about all I got.

Wow I sloughed off that weekend.  Beautiful weather outside, and I opted to do a whole lot of nothing.  I got outside a bit, just to say I didn’t totally waste it, but not nearly enough.  Friday I made a late appearance at the Brooksider, just long enough to say hello to the gang.  They were on their way out the door by the time I got there though, so I didn’t stay long.  I headed out right behind them, and went home to cook some bratwursts and veggies I’d bought that afternoon at Corollo’s down in the River Market.  (If I haven’t mentioned, I got moved downtown again…  Corollo’s is one of the few benefits of this latest relocation.)  I’m not a particularly huge fan of bratwurst;  I am, however, a fan of sitting outside and grilling on a nice Friday evening, so it was all good.

Saturday, I watched the morning slip by, then finally got it in gear and went on a quick bike ride around noon.  Great day for a ride, I was glad I put out the minimal effort required to step outside.  After that, I met up with Donette and her family at 75th Street for a little lunch, then shut down for the rest of the day.  I think I may have done something fun that evening, but the details escape me.  (Guess it wasn’t THAT fun, then.)  We did finally get around to watching Identity Thief.  If you haven’t yet seen this blockbuster film…  Don’t bother.

Sunday again brought glorious weather.  And I, again, let it waste away.  I actually gave brief thought to joining Munkirs on the Cider Mill bike ride, just because it was so nice out.  I’ve ridden that one the last several years, but just didn’t feel like I had it in me this year.  After about 15 seconds of debating between the ride and walking to QT for a cup of coffee, I opted for the coffee.  The rest of the day went by in a similar fashion to the rest of the weekend.  I filled up Teagan’s little play pool for her and had a rather epic round of fetch, but that was about it.  Oh, and I took the glass recycle down to Brookside and dumped it.  Whew, exhausting.

This week I have a valid excuse for my continued erratic posting schedule.  It is, in my opinion, actually too hot out to type.  I get overheated very easily.  It’s a health concern.  So there you have it.  Well that, and an utter lack of interesting events in my life.  I spent all last week in beautiful Earth City, MO;  Not exactly a tropical oasis.  Donette joined me for a few days though, and we managed to have a little fun, or at least we ate well.

As to this weekend, it was somewhat low-key.  Now LAST weekend, that was a good one.  Unfortunately it wore me out so much I didn’t have enough strength left to recap it, and now it’s too late.  So, back to this weekend.  Friday we had a wedding reception on the calendar.  We didn’t make it though.  Donette fell asleep, and I “forgot” to wake her up in time to make it.  (Wink wink, nudge nudge.)  Ended up being a night on the couch, which was just fine by me as I’d just completed the arduous drive back from Earth City.

Saturday we accomplished a whole bunch of nothing.  Our friend’s daughter was getting married at 4:00, so we pretty much laid around killing time until then.  I spent the day with what passes in my mind as “chores.”  This included loading Ubuntu on my laptop, and getting the multimedia server working so I can stream movies throughout the house.  These projects didn’t go far towards getting the outside of the house painted, but I say stick with what you know.  Both were completed on time and under budget, successful projects indeed.  The Ubuntu is just slick;  Once again I am left wondering why I spent money on the new version of Windows.  It is honestly a more than capable replacement, and in some respects even better.  The media streaming project went well too, although it took a bit longer.  The idea was to copy movies onto my little NAS server, so we can watch them on various devices around the house.  My full sized PC upstairs has served this function for a long time, but we don’t really leave it turned on that much any more.  The little server is turned on 24×7, uses a lot less electricity, and puts out a lot less heat.  And, as it turned out after getting it working, it actually serves the purpose much better.  It streams to our iPads as well, which I could never get working from the PC.  If you aren’t already bored to sleep, I shall continue on to the aforementioned wedding festivities.  Well, it was a wedding, and a fine one at that.  It makes me feel a bit old(er) to be attending the nuptials of my friend’s kids, but I guess then I AM old so what can you do.  After a nice ceremony, we headed down to the west bottoms for a fun reception.  We spent the evening dancing and cavorting, and before we knew it, it was 1:00 and the lights were coming on.  OR, we sat at the table with our friends, then scurried back to Brookside at 9:00.  You have to guess which of those actually happened.

Sunday didn’t bring much entertainment value.  I had grand plans of firing up the grill and cooking something, but the promised thunderstorms (which never materialized) scared me off.  Instead, I walked up to 75th Street and watched the Royals game by myself.  Literally, by myself;  There wasn’t another soul in the place.  Hey, didn’t have to worry about getting the game turned on the TV that way.  I watched the entire game there, then Donette picked me up and we ran a few quick errands.  That included picking up a little kiddie pool for Teagan, which we filled up when we got home, much to her delight.  She does enjoy laying in the pool on a hot day, especially after a good game of fetch.  Rather comical actually;  She likes to run across the yard, get the ball, then blunder straight back to the pool for five minutes or so.  When she decides she has cooled off sufficiently, she’ll bring the ball back and do it again.  We ran that routine for a while, and never did get around to grilling.  As a reasonable substitute, I laid on the couch and watched back-to-back episodes of Pitmasters.  Much as I  despise any and all reality shows, this one has kind of sucked me in.  Pretty darn exciting, and interesting.  Local team Pellet Envy came out on top at the end of the evening, which was sort of expected, at least by me.

Man I am in a FUNK!  Just can’t seem to get this thing kept up.  Not like I don’t have anything to go off either, we’ve actually been quite busy.  Maybe that’s the issue, who knows.  ANYWAY, poor excuses aside, we had a great holiday weekend.  We locked up the house and headed north last Wednesday afternoon, destined for our friends Danny & Denise’s house outside Harvard, NE.  We visited them last year and had such a good time that when they mentioned hosting another big party this year, we were ready to go.  The party wasn’t actually until Saturday, but I’m not much on driving, so if there is a five hour car ride involved I’m gonna be there a bit.  Matter of fact, by the time we got across the river I was pretty worn out, so we stopped at Martin’s house and ended up staying the night there.  Gotta break those long drives up a bit.

Thursday we got back in the car and continued our north-west journey.  Despite several stops along the way, we made good time and got there around dinner.  We spent the rest of Thursday and all day Friday catching up, playing cards, and just sort of enjoying their farm, not to mention their pool.  Last year we took Teagan along, but decided against it this year.  This turned out to be a wise decision, as they recently brought two longhorns into their big assortment of animals, and I’m relatively sure she would have ended up impaled in short order.  There was enough trouble with the horses last time, I think these monsters would have been too much for her to resist.  I also spent a good amount of time wearing Dan out with irrigation questions.  Not sure why, but for whatever reason I found the pivots rather fascinating on this particular trip.  How do you water a square field with a pipe that travels in a circle?  How often do those things break?  What if the well runs out?  Poor guy probably thought a two-year-old was staying with him.  Then I noticed the surface systems and started all over again.  Hey I thought it was interesting, what can I say.

Saturday was the fiesta, which was held at one of his boy’s houses.  Actually the party was in the quonset, which seemed to be a quite popular structure on all the farms.  (Naturally, upon taking notice of this, I bombarded them with another likely ridiculous string of questions.  Hey, might as well get informed on these vacations.)  It was an all-day affair, and we had a great time.  The smoker was fired up with 20 pork butts working, there was a 100′ slip-and-slide for the kids, and assorted other forms of amusement.  The weather suited the outdoor activities just fine, despite the sometimes annoying wind.  Later in the evening a few more members of the 295th showed up, that I hadn’t seen in a good many years.  They didn’t bite on my attempts to draw them into a discussion on what types of irrigation they found most practical, so we ended up rehashing old war stories of the Big One Of  ’91, which as usual was good for several hours of laughs.  After the enormous potluck that was dinner, we all sat back and watched his boys put on a massive fireworks display.  I should add some pics in here, but of course I’ll never get around to it.  They had two full pallets of the goods, stacked about four foot high.  I have honestly never seen a display that big at a private party, it was great.  Incidentally, the “Children of the Corn” reference comes from the fireworks.  During the daytime the kids were shooting off parachutes, and with the high winds they were drifting off over the nearby cornfield.  There would be twenty kids there, and then they would just suddenly disappear into the corn.  It was eerie, I tell you. I’m sure the kids wondered why I insisted on calling them all “Malachai” all day.

Sunday was the unfortunate drive home.  Ugh.  I guess it wasn’t too bad, except I could barely stay awake.  Went a lot faster than the drive up there, mostly because I was too tired to stop so we just kept hammering, save one required gas stop.  We got home around 2:00, and opened to the door to an extremely baleful moaning from the second floor.  Didn’t strike us as out of the ordinary;  Kane (the cat) gets quite upset when we leave town for a few days.  We set about bringing our bags in, making sure the house seemed in order…  And still the wailing continued.  Huh, that’s funny, he is usually right down here voicing his displeasure as soon as we get home.  I called his name a few times, and he just got louder.  Finally I headed upstairs to check it out, and found the poor little guy had gotten shut in a closet while we were hurriedly packing.  On Wednesday.  Four full days earlier.  Oops.  Needless to say, he was even a bit more put out with us than usual.  That sounds like a crazy-long time, but he really didn’t seem too bad off.  He headed straight for his food and water bowls, then set about telling us all about the horrors of being locked in a small closet with no litter box for days on end.  He’s been known to hold a grudge too, we might be hearing about it for a few more days.

I don’t guess this is so much a review as I just liked the picture. And, I’ve already been slacking on my beer feature so I thought I should throw something out here. So, this is Summit Meridian, randalled with fresh peaches and house-grown mint. Festive! Not much to delve into on the brew itself, at least for my tastes. It’s a nice little session ale, fairly light in body with some belgian yeasts giving a bit of fruity flavor. This rather understated character lent itself well to the randall process though, at least by the recommendation of our friendly Bier Station beertender. I don’t recall the complete list of available ingredients that evening, but we decided to keep it simple with some peaches and mint. Honestly I felt kind of bad for ordering it: It monopolized a good 15 minutes of the girl’s time, between slicing the peach, going outside to pick some mint, and very slowly pouring the beer into a large french press. She seemed happy people were trying it out though, it’s one of their “things.” After waiting the recommended 15 minutes or so, Donette and I both had a try, and we were both very happy with the results. The extra flavors were very bold, much better than just the ale off the tap by itself. Sort of fun if nothing else, I’m sure we’ll try it again with some different combinations of beer and flavors soon.