Back to the boring weekends;  I guess I can’t go on Float Trip every week.  (Thank goodness.)  Not all bad though, and this week should start strong too.  I have a (very good) ticket to the Royal’s game today, and I think it’s going to stay dry.  (Jinx.)  As an added bonus, I found a long-forgotten high dollar cigar buried in the bottom of my humidor.  Ah yes, the potential exists for a nice day indeed.

This weekend was sort of a blur.  I worked some odd hours, which left me feeling rather jet-lagged.  Friday afternoon I headed down to the Brooksider to celebrate the belated arrival of warm weather.  I was late getting there, and by the time I showed up it looked like the better part of the city had the same idea.  Luckily I found some friendly faces parked right in front of the TV, so I pulled up a chair with them and watched the rest of the Royals game.  Good stuff, it’s always exciting (and rare) to see them score runs like that.  After the game I went back home and made some tasty tacos, courtesy of a left-over steak I found in the ‘fridge.  Movie night after that;  Not remarkably, I can’t remember what I watched, and highly doubt it was worth remembering anyway.

I laid low Saturday for most of the day.  Played a little ball with the dog, and dove into some lawn work.  First mowing of the season, ugh.  All downhill from here.  It’s been so long since I’ve mowed I forgot the cardinal rule of lawn maintenance:  Pick up the dog poop BEFORE mowing.  I guess the good news is, I no longer have to worry about picking it up, because it’s all either on my shoes or the mower wheels.  After that inspired effort, I watched the highly disappointing baseball game, then took a good nap to get ready for work.  Ahhhh, Saturday night work;  It can mess up my entire weekend.  What can you do.

Sunday I got home from work in the wee hours of the morning, grabbed a few hours of sleep, then my alarm went off at the unholy hour of 5:30.  I don’t set an alarm very often due to my old-man sleeping patterns, and when I do use it, it’s always a very confusing experience.  All I can figure out is that there is a very loud noise somewhere in the house.  I usually blame the dog first, then the cat, and by the time I figure out it’s coming from my phone it has stopped.  Although I identified the source of the offending noise, I still never realize what it means.  I’m just relieved that it stopped, and close my eyes again.  Ten minutes later, repeat same process.  Without Donette here to hit me with some large object, this cycle can sometimes repeat up to three or four times.  Sunday I figured it out on the second round though, which is lucky because I’d only allowed myself 30 minutes to get up, get ready, and meet Munkirs out in Overland Park.  We’d volunteered to work at a rest stop for the Brew to Brew run, which fell into the “It seemed like a good idea at the time” category.  Eh, it was OK I guess.  I’m not sure I fully understand why they wanted us to show up at 07:00 when there was no possible way any runners would be there before 09:00, but whatever.  It wasn’t too bad, and passed the time.  Munkirs and I took the arduous role of parking attendants, which was infinitely more complex than I anticipated.  Much as the volunteer coordinator had predicted, there were far more vehicles than I would have ever guessed.  Geez I thought it was a RUN, not a Sunday drive.  We made it through though, amusing ourselves by directing 500 cars into a state of total gridlock.  I ran into quite a few people I knew too, some of whom I hadn’t seen for a very long time.  I told most of them I had to volunteer as part of my work-release program.  In retrospect I probably should have followed that one up with a “Just kidding,” but oh well.  The traffic died down enough by noon that we decided to call it a day.  I took myself to lunch at 75th Street, and stayed around for the better part of the Royals game.  I had the not-so-brilliant idea to eat an entire pizza by myself during this time, which relegated me to the couch for the rest of the day.

Got another Float Trip in the books.  And, as sheer luck and the river deities would have it, a fine float at that.  Our annual adventure began Wednesday after work, as Munkirs and I departed on the arduous five-hour journey to Pettit’s Campground.  We made it to camp around 10:00 that night and found several in our group already set up and enjoying the decent weather.  (The phrase “our group” loosely referring to those in the mid-to-late-forties age group.  This is as opposed to the “Old Men” group who, remarkably, are even older than us, the “Young Guys” who aren’t even really that young any more, and the “Actives,” who are currently enrolled at UCM.)  We got ourselves oriented to the great outdoors for a few hours, then turned in for a restless night of slumber on the cold hard ground.  (Actually Todd had sprung for a cabin, and Munkirs and I gladly took him up on his offer of warm, dry shelter.)

Thursday we got up and prepared for our first DOR of the weekend.  (That’s the well-known acronym for “Day On River.”)  The skies looked somewhat threatening, and the online forecast was even more foreboding, but we’re a pretty hard-core group.  Several other adjectives have been used in reference to our group, but let’s stick with “hard-core” for the purposes of this writing.  We launched around 11:00, destination Dawt Mill.  As is the case more often than not, as soon as we hit the river the clouds parted and we enjoyed a grand day on the water.  The term “grand” is, of course, a very relative word here.  There will undoubtedly be nicer days to float this year, but if you consider both our expectations and those of the weather experts, grand is not too far-fetched at all.  Shorts were definitely in order, with light jackets.  Matter of fact, in a quite rookie moment, I burned myself to a rather embarrassing case of raccoon-eyes;  I definitely underestimated the UV-factor for the afternoon.  Our small three-canoe barge made it effortlessly and safely down the river, arriving at Dawt around 3:00.  We had burned most of what little energy we still possess keeping Todd safe on the downriver run, so instead of turning around and paddling back up to camp we opted to wait for the bus.  Once there we stoked up the fire and enjoyed a nice dinner of ham and beans at the Zim & Chad Cantina, then sat around singing Kumbayah and toasting marshmallows for the rest of the evening.  Wait a minute…  Maybe we scurried back to the cabin and watched basketball on a laptop, I can’t remember.  One of those.

Friday morning brought an even grimmer weather outlook.  It was quite a bit chillier, and raining intermittently.  Without too much discussion, we declared “camp day” and settled in for a day of storytelling.  (The same stories we’ve heard for the last 20+ years, but they’re still pretty darn funny stories.)  Those campers who had arrived later Thursday, meanwhile, were forced onto the river, and we took much pleasure in their impending misery.  As was the case Thursday, it wasn’t that bad a day at all.  I will profess mild regret we didn’t float, but only mild.  We had fun at camp, and there is no sense pushing your luck after a successful float the first day.  Additionally, the top of the river was closed due to some debris, leaving our only option as floating the exact same route we’d done the day before.  Enjoyable, but not optimal.  I stand by our decision.  When all the happy floaters got back to camp, we again dined at the Cantina, and then the younger guys had organized some Fraternity Trivia Games to test our historical knowledge.  No… No wait…  Actually I think we went up to the cabin and watched basketball on the laptop again.  Yep, that was it.

Saturday we made the trek home, stopping by a car wash in Springfield along the way.  (The car wash was for us, not the vehicle.  The stench in the truck cab was nearly unbearable.)  We were home by noon and I promptly hit the hay, sleeping until the later hours of Sunday morning.  Having sufficiently recovered by then, we drove up north to enjoy a delicious Easter dinner with Donette’s family.  I must say, it’s rather remarkable what dishes look appealing when you haven’t seen anything resembling a vegetable in three days.  I ate way too much, then we scurried back to the southlands where I sat on the couch and moaned in bloated misery for the rest of the evening.  I closed out my weekend with a showing of “The Mooring.”  Holy crud, there’s an hour and a half of my life I will never get back.  If you were just getting in your car to run up to the nearest Red Box and rent that title…  Don’t.  Twelve hours later, I still have no idea what the point of that film was, if there even was one.  (I’ll probably watch it again this evening in case I missed some critical moment in the plot development.)

I see another lackadaisical effort at a blog update on the immediate horizon.  Blame the weather, it’s got me down.  Another foot of snow?  Really?  I’m more than ready to start cycling and I can’t even get through the drift at the end of my driveway.  I must admit, I am not thrilled about the prospect of Float Trip next weekend.  (Then again…  Am I ever really thrilled about driving five hours to sleep on the ground in sub-freezing weather?  I might try and tell myself I am, but that’s about as close as it gets.)

I did have a fine weekend though, so at least I have a little material to work with.  Friday evening, I headed up to the airport and flew to Chicago to meet Donette for a sort of cheap weekend get-away.  She’d been there working all week, so she already had a car and hotel lined up;  I just had to bring my pretty face.  I got there late Friday (well, late for me anyway,) got checked into the hotel, then we walked to a nearby Buffalo Wild Wings to watch some basketball.  I must say, BWW’s are a decent place to watch sporting events, but they’re a bit much for me.  They did, in fact, have every possible game tuned in on various large TV’s, but it was so stinking loud you couldn’t really follow any of them.  Just like every other location in their chain I’ve visited, it seems like they purposely design the rooms to be big echo chambers.  And of course nobody can converse in a normal tone in a sports bar;  They have to yell.  In order to be heard over the yelling table next to them, they have to yell even louder.  Add in five different basketball games, all turned up to max volume, and it’s just a big acoustic nightmare.  I stuck it out for about an hour (roughly the time it took to order and scarf a tasty chicken sandwich,) and bailed for the safe silence of the hotel room.

Saturday we didn’t really have much of a plan.  Watch some basketball, find some tasty food, do a little shopping…  That kind of stuff.  I slept in (or at least as late as my old body ever sleeps) and then we walked over to a nearby Zoup for a quick bite.  After lunch we took a drive to Aurora, IL to check out the fancy Chicago Premium Outlets.  While not in Chicago, per se, they were in fact “Premium.”  I can’t say as I’ve ever seen a Tag Heuer outlet, for instance.  Also in my line of interest was an Oakley store, Staub and Le Creuset cookware, a few high-end electronic stores, and a really nice perfume outlet.  (I just threw that last one in to see if anybody was actually reading this.  No, really.)  I definitely had my eye on a few nice items, but unfortunately no money to actually pay for them.  There was a great deal on a Staub skillet, but for one thing it was still rather pricey and for another I wasn’t too keen on lugging a cast iron pan back on the plane.  At the end of the day, Doni bought a nice purse and I got a new watch.  (No, mine wasn’t from the Tag store…)  That was more than enough shopping for one weekend, so we then headed to Warrenville and ended up at a place called Mullen’s to watch some basketball.  They had a fantastic menu, but unfortunately we weren’t really that hungry yet so we just had an appetizer.  After we got tired of watching the games, we checked out the town a bit and then scurried back to the hotel to watch the late games.

Sunday we kicked off the day with a fantastic breakfast, although the name of the place escapes me.  Didn’t eat again the rest of the day, I know that.  We checked out of the hotel, then went to a place called Black Finn to wait for our flights and watch the afternoon games.  It was a great place, we’ll put it on the list for a return visit next trip.  They had a ribeye steak that was calling my name, but I still had a belly full of lox and eggs.  Meanwhile, throughout the day, Donette had been getting frequent texts that the status of her flight was bouncing all over the place.  We’d ended up on separate flights for whatever reason, so we weren’t really sure how that was going to end up.  We showed up at the airport as scheduled though, and it ended up her flight took off right on schedule, whew.  She took both our bags with her and headed out to KC to get the car, pup, etc, and wait for me at the airport.  I showed up at my gate an hour later, and they waited right up until it was time to board and cryptically announced we were going to be delayed.  Nice.  I wasn’t the one getting texts all day!  It was, in fact, delayed, to the tune of five hours and one plane change.  It was honestly a rather comical chain of events though, everybody really took it pretty much in stride.  First they had no flight crew, for what reason they never really explained.  Finally found some flight attendants an hour later and boarded, then had to wait an eternity on de-icing.  Having completed that and rolling out to the runway, some idiot light came on and sent us back to the terminal.  (After waiting an hour for a gate to open.)  After assuring us we were finally on our way, they then decided we’d burned too much fuel sitting on the runway and we had to change planes.  Our long-lost flight attendants followed us to the new gate, but for whatever reason we needed new pilots for this plane;  Back to holding.  Oh well.  Thank goodness for the generation of iPad’s so I could watch movies the whole time.

I must say, I’ve rather lost interest in updating this, partially because it strikes me as a tedious labor and partially because I haven’t been doing anything worth recounting.  Last week, for instance, I was in Not-So-Beautiful Earth City all week working.  That place is about as boring and industrial as a city gets.  Save a McDonald’s and a gas station, entertainment options are non-existent.  That’s not to say I didn’t have any fun though.  Tuesday night I met up with several old college buddies (and I mean that in the most literal sense of “old”) at The Village to watch the MU game.  Eight or nine guys showed up, a fine turnout indeed.  Seems like an awfully big social effort considering I’m going to see them all again at Float Trip in a few weeks, but I had a good time.  Wednesday and Thursday I went to dinner with my sister-in-law and her hubby, and got to check out their new house.  Pretty awesome neighborhood they moved into;  I’ll grudgingly admit it might even be funner than Waldo.

As far as the weekend, I don’t exactly have a plethora of material to work with.  Probably our most notable outing was the St. Patrick’s 4 Mile Run down in Westport.  That was a lot of fun, or at least as much fun as one can have running.  (Which, by definition, just isn’t really fun.)  We ran into all kinds of people we knew;  As a matter of fact pretty much everybody except the ones we were supposed to meet.  We both completed the run (errrr….  Run/Walk) with relative ease, then hung out in Westport for a while.  After that we felt we’d earned a few calories, so we headed up to 75th Street and had some tasty feed.  Unfortunately we ran smack into a pub-crawl, which we are entirely too old to tolerate, so we didn’t stay long.

Sunday didn’t bring much entertainment.  I think I was moderately sore from the previous day’s event.  Matter of fact, other than our weekly trip to Costco, we stayed inside all day.  For dinner we cooked up a nice pot of fish stew, then settled in for an evening of bad TV and gin rummy on the iPads.  Sheesh we’re old.

Back from our trip.  Had to happen sometime I guess.  We had a good time, although it was spoiled rather quickly when we touched down in KC.  What a snowy mess.  Portland may not have been a beach-side resort, but it was a lot better than this.  I’ll attempt to briefly recap our week, as I realize that was a pretty weak effort on the last update.  Hey, I was typing on my iPad, give me a break.  All dates and events listed are subject to my sketchy memory.

We got to Portland Saturday and proceeded to navigate to our hotel.  The driving conditions out there were OK I guess.  A little worse than KC but certainly not Chicago or LA.  I can say that next time we travel I will be taking the Garmin.  The smart phone apps are functional, I suppose, but a far cry from an actual GPS.  It got us there, at the end of the day.  (Literally…  The end of the day.)

Monday we decided to tour some of the wineries in the region.  I honestly didn’t even know Oregon was a wine region;  Learn something every day.  Apparently they have a few though, so I picked out four in the nearby Willamette Valley that mapped out nicely.  We took our time about it, not really having anything else to do for the day.  I’m sure with some research I could come up with the exact wineries we went to, but I can’t pick them out of that formidable list right now.  That effectively used up Monday, and we wrapped up with a late dinner at Max’s Fanno Creek.

Tuesday we switched to brewery tours.  If I was gonna do it over again I’d work out a side-trip to Bend, OR, where a lot of the actual breweries are located.  I like to do tours, where they can tell you all about their operation and why they produce the absolute best brews in the country.  As it happens, the majority of the places in downtown Portland are Brew Pubs;  Pretty much restaurants that serve said brew.  Some of them did actually brew on site, but it isn’t really the same thing.  That’s not to say they weren’t some of the best Brew Pubs I’ve been to though, they were certainly more knowledgeable on their taps than most other places I’ve been.  They all would do a “custom flight” too.  Instead of just picking a sampler off the menu, if you would tell them what flavor profiles you like they would make some selections for you.  Probably my favorite was Lucky Lab.  This one wasn’t on our original schedule, but was recommended by a guy at another spot.  The kid there put some serious thought into our flight, it was like an interview process.  I liked the place so much I bought my official vacation souvenir from them, a nice cycling jersey.

Wednesday we decided to drive down to the coast.  Driving tours are far from my favorite vacation option, but it was OK. We stopped at Tillamook Cheese for a while, drove Highway 101 for a bit, stopped at some beaches along the way, all the good touristy stuff.  It was nice as drives go… But still a drive.  I of course would later regret not stopping at a few other places we saw, but I was getting antsy and decided it was time to head back.  I even skipped the fish hatchery;  I like those for whatever reason.  Oh well, what can you do.  There were a lot of hazelnut farms too.  I’m not sure why you would want to look around a hazelnut farm, but then I’m not sure why you wouldn’t either.

Thursday we were out of gas for the most part.  Done.  Finished.  We hung around the hotel, then we did make it out for a nice dinner.  We went to Jake’s Famous Crawfish, which was recommended by several people.  It didn’t really work out as planned, but we had fun.  Our original plan was to work our way through all the appetizers, so we could get a little taste of everything.  Turned out that after a 1/2 dozen oysters and a bowl of seafood gumbo, we were so stuffed we couldn’t even think about food.  And besides that, as is too often the case, we ended up sitting next to That Guy, who while entertaining for a short time eventually wore us out.  I can’t adequately describe him here.  Next time you see Donette ask her about him, she does a good imitation.  He was in some kind of bizarre loop.  He’d just pull out a random name (with no prompting what-so-ever,) and say for instance:  “Ahhhhhhh yeah, Jimi Hendrix, I remember him.  One time I asked him (insert odd nonsensical question) and do you know what he said?”  Then he would break into a spirited air-guitar and sing.  Over and over and over.  My favorite line of the night, though, was probably the only thing he said that strayed from this format.  There were some kids between him and us, and they were admittedly rather outrageously dressed.  They were, however, nice enough and minding their own business.  As a matter of fact I greatly appreciated their presence because he was focused on them for a while.  He finally wore them out though, and as soon as they left he moved over by us, ugh.  The first thing he says is “Man, they were weird huh?”  Uhhhhh, yeah.

All-in-all a good trip.  Got a little feel for the place, we’ll know to make a few little tweaks should we make it out that way again.  We got home Friday night and have been shoveling ever since.  Like I said, all dates and times above are subject to my horrible memory.  As I quickly proof this, I already noticed I missed Sunday.  That means everything could be off by a day, or I totally forgot about something already.  Sigh, it ain’t easy getting old.