Chad hooked us up with a suite at the Royals game last night. For some reason he’s not in the picture though…

Teagan’s new “indoor ball.”

Wow, finally some decent weather, if a month behind schedule.  Doesn’t look like it will last long either.  I’m leaving town next weekend though, so maybe it’ll get back on track while I’m gone.

I am somewhat limited in material this week.  I went oncall Friday, which always puts a moderate to severe damper on my activities.  Friday, for instance, I did one whole bunch of nothing.  Luckily there were some passable movies on HBO, and that met my modest entertainment requirements for the entire evening.

Saturday I got up and decided to work on my super-duper little webserver.  It is a relatively low-maintenance machine, but does need the periodic tweak or two.  I was several revisions behind on the actual operating system, so I took care of that first.  After that I decided to get a new backup scheme devised.  Besides hosting this website, this fancy little device also serves up movies and music to various other devices around the house, and stores all our pictures, documents, and assorted other media.  All of this stuff is regularly backed up to a different disk, but not the website.  It’s excluded from my weekly Acronis schedule because…  Well, never mind why, it just isn’t feasible.  Leave it at that.  Although I’m not particularly attached to this site anyway, I will admit I’d be a bit remorseful if I woke up one day to find I’d lost a decade’s worth of blog posts.  Granted, not especially meaningful blog posts, but there would be a few tears shed.  Anyway, after a few failed attempts with various methods, I got Backup to Dropbox working, or at least it appears to be working.  It “should” kick off at 02:00 Tuesday morning and automagically transfer everything to THE CLOUD.  As you can imagine, this will surely be a sleepless night as I excitedly wait for this monumental event to transpire.  This and other similarly fascinating ramblings should be safely preserved from harm, whew.  After that waste of half a day, we both headed up north for her sister Ronda’s fund-raising event.  This is the event we’d spent last weekend BBQ’ing for, so we were returning to serve it up.  Unfortunately we had a bit of an issue getting it re-heated for some reason;  I’ll blame the clubhouse oven we were using.  We figured two hours at 250 would be more than enough time, but it was barely warm after that.  Oh well, what can you do…  Serve it up.  Despite the rather tepid serving temperature, it seemed to be well received.  Now I don’t like to stereotype, but I will say, them northlanders can do some eatin’.  I’ve honestly never seen anything like it.  By my rather quick scan, I counted 35 people in attendance.  We’ve done more than a few of these events, and by our standard unscientific formula 12 pounds of ‘que should have been plenty, with left-overs to boot.  Luckily I rounded that up to 20 pounds just because we had it.  They killed that with ease, and I swear if I had put out another brisket it would have been gobbled up too.  I’m not kidding, it was 9:00 at night and people were still fixing pulled pork sandwiches.  WHO EATS THAT LATE??!!!  Eh, whatever, we had fun doing it and I think the event was a success.

Sunday we slept in, totally missing the Trolley Run.  I usually like to walk down the street and watch the runners, but just couldn’t seem to pull myself out of the house.  When we finally did get up, Donette headed out to the ballpark to watch the Royals game with Kelly, and I geared up to go on my inaugural bike ride of the season.  I’m going to conservatively guess I had 300 miles under my belt by this time last year, and here I am going on my very first ride, tsk.  I blame a combination of weather, schedule, and a general lack of motivation.  (At the end of the day, I’d say mostly the last item on that list.)  It’s on now though, the season has begun.  I wrapped up my ride at the Brooksider, just in time to catch the last few innings of the ball game on the patio.  Donette met up with me after the game and we headed over to 75th Street for pizza, and called it a day.

Another weekend in the books, albeit a somewhat subdued one. Friday I did make my regularly scheduled stop at the ‘Sider, but it was cut short to head north and pick up Donette at the airport. She was supposed to come home Saturday, but after three weeks of suitcase-living she just didn’t have one more night in her. As soon as we got home she hit the hay, and slept until roughly Sunday afternoon.

Saturday I got up quite early to begin the first barbecue project of the year. Donette’s sister Rhonda is having a fundraiser soon, and I had been tasked with cooking up some ‘que. So, first thing on the agenda was some serious fatback trimming. I had four pork butts and two full briskets, which took me a rather remarkable two and a half hours to get trimmed up. Man, either I’ve forgotten how to trim meat or forgotten how long it takes; That sort of threw my whole day’s schedule off track. I made it up to Martin’s around 11:30, quite a bit later than originally anticipated. We proceeded to sit around all day and watch the rotisserie turn, which is about as excited as life gets in my book.

Sunday consisted of a whole lot of nothing. Much like Saturday, but I sat on a couch in front of a TV instead of a lawn chair in front of a smoker. Important distinction. Thank goodness for the Royal’s double-header or I’d have likely watched bad horror movies all day.

I took another quick weekend out to Naperville, IL for my entertainment the last few days.  Didn’t do a whole lot, just sort of relaxed.  Donette is out of town for three weeks straight, so Friday I dropped the pup off with her parents and flew out to Midway airport to meet her.  Upon my arrival we headed straight to Giordano’s Pizza for some dinner.  It clearly states on the menu that the medium is for 4-6 people, but I had my doubts and ordered that size anyway.  Turns out they may be familiar with their product, as we didn’t even finish half of it.  Not to worry, it provided breakfast for the rest of the weekend.

Saturday we got a late start, as we had a remarkably difficult time deciding what we wanted to do.  Some KC friends were also in town so we considered heading downtown to meet up.  The weather was not cooperative though; it was raining off and on and quite cold.  As I only brought shorts with me, this somewhat limited my options on entertainment.  After not-too-much debate, we decided to just hang out in the west ‘burbs where we were staying, which provided plenty of entertainment for me.  (Being one of rather low entertainment requirements.)  We checked out the local attractions online, and decided on trying to catch the nearby Two Brothers Brewery tour.  Our original plan was to eat lunch and then take the late tour.  When we sat down though, our waitress offered to get us into the early group, and even saved our table while we toured.  It was a great tour, I like seeing the setups at the smaller breweries.  You could tell they were very proud of their product and it looks like they are supported very well in the local area.  We went through all their recently expanded operations, which allows them to produce 30,000 barrels a year.  By comparison, Boulevard is now at 600,000 barrels a year, so they are definitely a bit smaller.  After the tour we had a tasty lunch in their attached restaurant, then headed off for some light shopping, as I had grudgingly conceded I was going to require some pants before the weekend was out.  We met up with some of Donette’s local friends for dinner at a place called Heaven on Seven.  Whew, it was delicious.  I opted for the Oysters Ravigote, a nicely spiced linguine dish.  I have to admit the horseradish sauce threw me off for a while, but it grew on me the more I ate.  After dinner we met another couple at a nearby Bar Louie location.  It was all good until about 10:00 or so, when suddenly the music (and I use that term loosely) hit a deafening level.  Time for the old folks to take their leave, BAIL!!

Sunday didn’t bring much entertainment;  I don’t like doing anything on travel days.  The weather was much more tolerable, so we headed to downtown Naperville to walk around.  We stopped in Jimmy’s Grill for a nice lunch, then just walked about and enjoyed the sun.  Headed to the airport around 3:00 and called it a trip.  By all reports Teagan managed to behave herself while we were out, always a grave concern.  Kane on the other hand…  Ohhhhh poor little Kane.  One of the (few) positive attributes of a cat is that you can reportedly leave them for some period of time without any supervision.  This may be the case as far as basic survival is concerned, but rest assured there is a price to be paid.  That cat throws a fit that would do a two-year-old child proud.  There will be a few more sleepless nights at the house while he continues to loudly voice his displeasure at being left alone, then he’ll get back into his routine around Thursday or so.