In lieu of an actual weekend, I got to be oncall.  Bah.  To back up all the way to Thursday though, I did get to go out that night.  Donette came home from Chicago a day early and we went out on an official “date night” before my lock-down started.  We started our evening with a nice steak dinner at the Oak Room down on the Plaza.  Never been there before, but it was quite a meal.  Can’t beat a well-cooked steak.  After dinner we headed up Broadway a short distance to see Grace Potter at the Uptown Theater.  We’ve seen her a few times before at the Mile High Music Festival in Denver, but haven’t ever caught one of her local shows.  It was a fantastic concert, and the group sounded great in the small venue.  (Quite a bit smaller than the enormous outdoor stage in Denver.)  A bit loud and a bit late for the old folks, but we made it all the way through.  (Well, close anyway;  My ever-present fear of being stuck over 5 minutes in traffic caused us to miss the encore.)

The rest of the weekend was spent (when not on conference calls) installing and testing my new copy of Windows 8.  Oh, the excitement.  I don’t even particularly like Windows, but I do like messing around with new things so I raced right out Friday and grabbed a copy from Microcenter.  I decided to use my laptop as a test platform, as we really don’t use it much anyway and definitely don’t have anything we mind losing on it.  The install went nearly perfect and very quickly. It didn’t auto-detect the video chip, but got everything else.  Given the age of the laptop, I was pretty impressed with that.  The new interface everybody is squawking about is certainly…  “new.”  I haven’t decided if I like it or not yet, I’m still trying to get used to it.  I did install an alternative start menu (pokki) to help me out while I get familiarized with the new setup.  Aside from the rather baffling aesthetic changes, I’m liking the actual functionality.  My creaky old laptop is running very smooth, much better than it ever did on Vista, even when new.  My favorite feature is that when an application is minimized it goes into a sleep mode, using very little resources;  Much different than on Windows 7.  You can check this out in the much-improved Task Manager, it’s pretty slick.  I’ll be testing it out a few more weeks, but I imagine I’ll be putting it on my other machines soon.

We managed to get out of the house a bit more this weekend than last.  Friday I got back into my regularly scheduled Brooksider visit, but didn’t stay long.  Had to go pick up the dog from doggy day care, you know.  Sigh.  The life of a responsible parent is not always an easy one.  We headed back home and settled in for a night of TV, but when Donette got home from another week in Chicago she wanted to go back out for some dinner.  After some minor negotiating we decided on Mike’s Tavern down at 55th and Troost.  I leave their parking lot on Mondays for a weekly bicycle ride, but I’d never actually set foot in the place before.  It’s long been on our list of places to try though, especially since one of our neighborhood Mexican restaurants (Cantina Del Ray) closed down and took their menu there.  As we sort of expected, the place was pretty crowded, mostly with college-age kids from UMKC watching the baseball game.  The food was very good, and very inexpensive;  If it wasn’t a whole three miles away from the house I’m sure we would frequent it for dinner.  The waitress cautioned me that the chile relleno I ordered was different than the one they served at Cantina Del Ray but I got it anyway, and it was delicious.  Donette had her favorite from the old restaurant, the carne asada enchiladas, and reported them just as good.

Saturday we took care of a few outstanding chores in preparation for the rapidly approaching winter.  I ran the scooter up to the shop for some scheduled maintenance, and they said they could finish it the same day so we headed over to Maloney’s for some lunch.  This is one of a very small handful of places I will eat at across the state line, and then only because it has the same owners as the Brooksider.  We had a solid lunch there, and hung out watching some football, but the scoot still wasn’t done so we headed on home.  Since it was so nice out we decided we might as well take care of the motorcycle too, so Donette found a storage unit out south and we ran the bike out there along with a small number of boxes from the basement.  By the time we finished with all the extra paperwork on the unit (I sort of got the feeling they weren’t too keen on the motorcycle being in there) the scooter was ready, so we went out and picked it up and headed home for a night of movies.

Sunday we started our day with a rather heavy brunch down at Harvey’s.  We bought a groupon quite a while back but every time we’d tried to use it the line was too long.  We hit it just right Sunday morning though;  No wait for a table and the food lines were short too.  I’m don’t remember what we paid for the groupon but we definitely got our money’s worth.  We stayed for quite some time seeing how many different things we could try.  It was all very good;  We might hit it again sometime, although it’s a bit pricey for our regular rotation.  Then again, given the fact we might not have to eat for the next two days it might be worth the price.  The weather was perfect out again, so when we got home I put Teagan in the car and headed out for the park over at Swope.  This was the first time we’d been there when there was a crowd, apparently the weather brought everybody out.  Teagan’s not there for the social aspect though;  She is there to play ball and nothing else.  She immediately laid claim to a stray tennis ball, and it was game on.  We played fetch for a good hour or so, which was probably a bit too long.  Poor lil’ pup was so exhausted she could hardly breath.  I finally caught on that she was a few tosses past done and took her over to the “break area” for a drink.  And, as she tends to do, she tried to drink the entire park dry as fast as she could.  I told her no more water, but of course all the nearby do-gooders insisted she needed more, so I stepped back and let her chug.  Predictably, she lapped up all she could, took a few steps back, and barfed up about a gallon of water, grass, leaves, and half-digested dog food.  And yeah, you know what happened next;  It was like somebody rang the dinner bell at some grotesque buffet.  As all the horrified owners tried to pull their dogs out of the mess, Teagan and I decided it was time to go and discreetly took our leave.  Maybe we’ll go to Penn Valley next time and hope nobody recognizes us.

Snuck in a down weekend there.  We actually had some big plans, but everything fell through last minute, so we decided to take advantage of the situation and just lay low.  Here’s my do-it-yourself weekend summary: So, (Friday/Saturday/Sunday) the wife and I sat on the couch (upstairs/downstairs) and watched (movies/football/baseball.)  Just mix and match the words inside the parentheses to create a very accurate portrayal of our last few days.  Outside of that, well not much to report.  Saturday I took a stab at dinner, and whipped up this recipe.  Now, before you start in on me, I was not out cruising marthastewart.com looking for valuable household tips.  I merely googled “shrimp basil pasta” (because that’s what I had on hand) and that’s the first recipe that came up.  I swear, try it yourself.  Anyway, it came out pretty well, I may try it again with some minor changes.  That killed an hour or so, then it was back to the couch.  Sunday was even less eventful.  I walked up to QT for a delicious breakfast, mostly just to get out of the house for a bit.  Hung out with the other ne’er-do-wells and enjoyed a fine meal of sausage biscuits and coffee, which is about the most entertainment you can expect for $3.50.  Maybe not the moderately wild weekend we had planned, but it was quite relaxing.

Got another American Royal BBQ in the books.  Wow those things are hard on an old man.  I’m feeling a bit beat up today, but considerably better than I was yesterday when I got home.  This was the first year I didn’t head down there on Thursday, which probably helped out a little bit.  Three nights sleeping on a cot is about three too many in my book.  Plus, I have a cold, haven’t been sleeping well, and myriad other excuses.  So, I rolled into the site Friday morning around 9:30 and soaked in my expected abuse for skipping out.  (Mostly dished out by guys who would leave that evening, never to be seen again for the remainder of the weekend.  Just pointing that out.)  Luckily they hadn’t done all the work on Thursday, there was still plenty left to do in preparation for the Friday night fiesta.  If you had a chance to go outside Friday, you may remember it as a rather crummy day.  Yeah, it was pretty chilly.  Despite the weather, we had an above-average turnout for the party, and everybody appeared to be having a good time.  On my several walk-abouts around the grounds, I definitely noticed we had one of the larger parties going on, and it lasted a lot longer than most.  Must have been our gregarious personalities, who knows.  Everyone declared it a success at any rate.

A small handful of us spent the night down at the site, and woke up Saturday morning to a disaster of leftover food, dirty dishes, and a few hundred empty cups, cans, and bottles.  Mixed in with that trash were some mildly more interesting artifacts;  Roughly 50 discarded coozies, a hat or two, some stray single gloves, and a couple of tee shirts.  Hmmmm.  Whatever.  Given a total lack of alternative entertainment for the day, we spent most of it cleaning up that toxic wasteland.  I would say we need more trash cans for next year, but I don’t think it would do any good honestly.  The day passed quickly enough, and around 6:00 we started doing our prep-work for the BBQ competition.  Good thing somebody made that call in time, because it got very dark and very cold shortly thereafter.

After a mostly sleepless night checking the smokers and trying to stay warm, we got up Sunday and rather lethargically plodded through the competition.  They started the Sunday turn-in thing three or four years ago, and I still have mixed feelings on it.  On one hand, there is really no way we could have done our prep work and got everything going in the middle of the party Friday night.  On the other hand, by the time Sunday finally comes around we are all so tired and disinterested that our main focus is just turning something in and getting the heck out of there.  Despite our lackadaisical effort, we did pretty fair in the results.  Surprisingly fair, as a matter of fact.  And, as usual, my predictions were remarkably skewed from the actual numbers.  Our best score was brisket, which I seriously expected to be at or near the bottom of the entire competition.  Go figure.  Next was the chicken, which despite a decent appearance really wasn’t very good.  Third-best were the ribs, which I was absolutely certain would be our best entry by far.  I could have eaten an entire slab of those things, they were awesome.  Last was the pork, an entry I was sure would do well just on appearance alone.  I will never figure out the results at those things.  It’s not just me either, all the guys that cook on the team had similar evaluations.  Especially on the brisket;  It just wasn’t good.  Oh well, what can ya’ do.  I think we all had a good time and it’s not like we ever expect to win anyway.  We thoroughly defeated our arch-rivals Team Red Glove and that’s all that matters in our BBQ world.  I slapped a few pics of the event up for those who missed it.  Note the omission of the brisket turn-in box.  I was so appalled I didn’t even take a picture of it.

Squeezed in another 3-day weekend;  Can’t get enough of those.  We got up early-ish Friday and rolled down to the Plaza for a pancake breakfast at the Cheesecake factory.  They were having a fundraiser for a good cause, and we like pancakes, so it seemed a reasonable start to the weekend.  After that we went back home, threw some clothes in a bag, loaded the car, and headed towards Harvard, NE to visit our friends Dan & Denise.  They achieved empty-nest status several years back and moved to a farm outside of Harvard, but we’d never made it out there due to the horrifically long drive.  That’s only a slight exaggeration;  It was a pretty doggone long trip, especially with an antsy dog pacing around the car.  We did finally make it though, with a only a few slight navigational snafus.  For the record, we tried three products to get us to their house;  Our trusty Garmin (with recently updated maps,) the new iOS maps on our iphones, and Mapquest.  The Garmin was ruled out right off the bat when it couldn’t find road 321.  Both the Apple and Mapquest offerings mapped it out, but with significantly different endpoints.  Given all the bad press the new Apple maps have been getting, we went with the Mapquest route. Bad decision, it sent us about 15 miles east of their house.  Switched over to the Apple map and it took us right to their front door.

Saturday we woke up to some great weather and drove to a nearby town to watch two of their grand kids play soccer.  The kids were 5 and 7-ish years old, so they were on different fields.  We walked back and forth watching them, and it was quite entertaining.  The older ones actually had a pretty good grasp of the game, we saw some good plays over on that field.  The little ones were just a pure comedy show.  They’d be running the wrong direction, or standing around in a big group waling away on each others shins while the ball was 10 yards away, or they’d just suddenly lose interest and start wandering off.  We got a good show on both fields.  After that we headed back to their house, and started getting ready to throw a watch party for the Huskers game.  When we planned this weekend a while back, we originally intended to drive to Lincoln and have a tailgate party.  As it turned out all the hotels there were full so they decided to just host the party at their house.  Good plan for me;  I was done driving anyway.  The game started at 7:00, and we had quite the party.  I will admit only a slight interest in the game, although they fixed me up with a Cornhusker shirt and coozie so at least I’d look the part.  Of much more interest to me was the feed table.  One of his boys brought out a large smoker and spent the day cooking up a ridiculous spread.  He did a brisket, several slabs of ribs, stuffed pork chops, bacon-wrapped shrimp, cream-cheese stuffed chicken breasts…  We did NOT go hungry.

Sunday we spent the day driving home.  The WHOLE day.  For whatever reason it seemed a lot longer trip heading that direction.  I was struggling to keep my eyes open most of the time, and Donette couldn’t take a nap because she had to keep an eye on me.  Whew, I’m too old for parties like that.  Teagan was totally wiped out too, she was immobile in the back seat all the way home.  I think she had as much fun as we did over the weekend.  She was an…  “acceptable” house guest.  There were a few mild squabbles with their dog, and she wasn’t overly fond of the horses.  (Especially when Donette went for a ride on one.)  For the most part she just enjoyed the big yard and all the fascinating new stuff to check out.  She had a big ol’ time at the party too.  Lots of kids to throw her ball for her, people dropping food all over the place, holy smokes it was a pittie paradise.  Next time she goes to a party and everybody feeds her treats I’m going to require they spend five hours in the car with her the next day to suffer the consequences with us.  Whew.