This weather is suiting me just fine.  Sure, I hear we can use some rain, but I’ll take the sunny 70-degree weather any time.  Case in point, Friday I rolled down to the Brooksider to soak in a little sun.  Alas, I found they had put up the stupid tent.  Well, that was sort of a drag, but at least it was warm so I stayed down there for a few hours.  If they would have asked me, I would have recommended they wait at least two more weeks to put that behemoth up.  They did not ask me, however.

Saturday morning Donette got up early and went on an eight-mile run with her training group.  I drank coffee and watched cartoons.  When she got back we headed up to Martin’s for a day in the northlands.  This plan came about when one of the team members on this charity thing she is doing asked if we would cook some bbq for her upcoming golf tournament.  (“Upcoming” being Sunday…)  Hey, what the heck;  It was a beautiful day for doing some cooking.  So, we got there about 10:30, got the smoker rolling, then Martin and I headed even further north to join K.B. at his folk’s house for some shootin’.  I haven’t done any blasting in a while, that was a fine time.  We killed some targets for a few hours, then headed back to watch the smoker and enjoy the fine weather the rest of the day.

Sunday was effectively spent on the golf tourney.  It went well and the food was a hit.  The beef went over particularly well.  Either they just weren’t a big pulled pork crowd or I need to work on my recipe.  (I’m guessing the latter;  It was a little bland I had to admit.  At the same time, I will take brisket over pork any day, so who knows.)  She definitely got a lucky break with the weather.  Doesn’t get much nicer than that for a mid-fall golf outing.

Geez that was a long weekend.  That means I’m in for a long week.  Can’t have it all.

As we approach the end of the year, I’m getting in my annual not-so-bad situation of needing to burn some vacation days.  So, I took off Thursday and Friday and drove Donette down to St. Louis to visit her sister.  We took the pup with us, which went moderately well.  She and her little doggy cousins didn’t hit it off so well.  They did just barely OK together;  I don’t think they will be sending each other Christmas cards though.  For the most part they just ignored each other, which is better than some alternatives I suppose.  Speaking of Teagan, we got to visit a bit with the girl that picked her up off the street, which was nice.  She was glad to see her rescue getting along so well, and had some funny stories of her short time keeping her.  (No good deed goes unpunished.)  After that visit, we walked down the street to some-place-I-forget-the-name-of and had some pizza and watched the baseball game.

That was pretty much it for my St. Louis trip.  I drove home Friday morning, and Donette headed to Indianapolis to watch her sister run a marathon.  I made it home just in time to join the boys down at the Brooksider for a bit.  And that’s pretty much it for my weekend.  Kept a low profile.  Worked in the yard a bit, played a few dozen hours of catch with the dog…  Not much to relate.  Donette took the Megabus home on Sunday, in sort of an experiment to see if it was a viable transportation option for future trips.  It didn’t exactly receive glowing reviews, I think that was a “one and done” experiment.

Last weekend BBQ season wrapped up, and I think this weekend cycling season ended.  Too cold and windy.  Kind of a bummer because my new bicycle is starting to get broken in really well, but what can you do.  It’ll be ready for next year.  And who knows, maybe I’ll be able to sneak in a ride here and there over the next month or so.

That weekend was dialed back considerably from last weekend, which I needed.  Friday I got back into my Brooksider rut.  I spent a few hours down there regaling the boys with stories of our best ‘Que performance ever.  I’m sure they were duly impressed.  After it got too dark to sit outside, I headed home and joined Donette for a fabulous dinner catered by Taco Bell.

Saturday we got out of the house just a bit.  Finally got down to the City Market, which I’ve been meaning to do all year.  Man, what a great place.  I imagine the produce has dropped off from the peak season a month or so ago, but there was still plenty to choose from.  I thought about buying a big fat steak from one of the ranches that sell down there, but ended up cheaping out.  We bought some porcini mushroom pasta instead, and some sausage from Carollo’s to go with it.  It came out really well;  I meant to type in the recipe but haven’t gotten around to it.  (I’ll do that right after I post the pics from last weekend.)  After that I sorta loafed around the rest of the day.  Watched the Missouri game, mowed the lawn, exciting stuff like that.

Sunday was a non-event.  I had to work late the night before, and ended up doing the same for a good portion of the day Sunday.  Donette worked in a 5k run with some friends, and went out to dinner with some people.  All I accomplished was watching football all day, and I fit in a few homework sessions with Teagan.  She is now in her second obedience class.  She does really well in class, but seems thoroughly disinterested when we practice at home.  I guess she likes an audience, who knows.

Another BBQ season, in the books.  And believe it or not, it ended on a high note for once.  My weekend kicked off on Thursday when I met up with a few team members down at our site for the American Royal BBQ.  We did a little light setup work and then spent the better part of the night sitting around a fire on Brown’s sweet junk-yard minivan seats.  Now that’s good entertainment there.

Friday started off with an unplanned flurry of activity.  Sometime during the night the team adjacent to us had taken an ill-advised joyride on one the volunteer golf carts and had been rather rudely asked to leave the grounds by the KCPD.  Unfortunately their camper butted right up to ours, and we had to tear down our entire site so they had room to get their truck in.  We felt kind of bad for them, as they were pretty nice guys and rather entertaining characters.  But, being opportunists, we also saw the upside of the situation;  We moved our camper over onto their spot, giving us a lot more party space, and commandeered their port-a-jon for the rest of the weekend.  The rest of our team showed up over the day and we got set up in record time.  Our party went off pretty much without a hitch, and I think everybody had a good time.  My Mom and sister came down for a bit, and several friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.  Overall my least favorite night of the event was a rather enjoyable fiesta.

Saturday doesn’t really bear re-telling.  Not many guys come down, it’s mostly just spent cleaning up the overwhelming amount of trash from the night before and going over our pre-game strategy for the BBQ.  (The trash takes about 12 hours and we spend about 10 minutes on our game plan.)  Right about midnight we got down to the cooking business.  The pork and the brisket went on at 1:00 Sunday morning, and then the rest of the night was spent in the trailer watching movies and stepping outside to check on things every now and then.  It was a good year for team Triple Fat Back, I would say down-right respectable even.  Out of 475 teams, our results were:

Chicken  – 125th
Ribs – 165th
Pork – 259th
Brisket – 74th
Overall – 105th

We turned in beans and sausage too, but those results haven’t been posted yet.  Although I put most of my effort into the brisket, I must say I got quite a kick out of our chicken finish.  Our chicken chef, Zim, was hurt and wasn’t able to make it down to cook this year, so that job defaulted to Martin and I.  A few hours before it was due, we decided it was probably time to think about what we wanted to do.  We spent about twenty minutes cutting it up like we wanted, then walked around sampling all the spices the rest of the guys were using.  We settled on the rib team’s dry rub, sprinkled it on, threw the bird on the smoker, and let it be.  Then shortly before turn-in, we decided the pork team’s mop was rather tasty, so we slathered some of it on too.  Lo and behold, this somewhat half-hearted effort ended up scoring pretty well.  Our best brisket finish ever came with some comedy too.  We always put together some elaborate concoction of multiple sauces, spices, and various other super-secret ingredients for our BBQ sauce.  Alas, this year we had inadvertently used all the sauce at the party on Friday and didn’t have anything left.  We ended up walking over to the Expo center and buying some unknown bottle from the last vendor that was still set up, and just poured it on straight from the jar.  Hmmmm, considering our finish, maybe we should stick with this “less is more” strategy in the future.

After the turn-ins, Donette came and got me and I spent the rest of the day on the couch.  Well, after I spent about 30 minutes standing in the driveway while she took a pressure-washer and some steel wool to my filthy carcass.  You might notice that nowhere in the synopsis above is any mention of going home.  Nope, I spent the whole four days down there this year.  The weather was great and the time was passing quickly, and I just never got around to it.  They have showers at the site, but the people who used them generally reported feeling cleaner before, so I stayed away from that option.  Oh well, it’s just a little grime.  I’ll try and get some pictures of the weekend posted some time this week.  I didn’t take many but I do have a few.

That weekend went fast.  I think I was cheated somehow or another.  We started things off slow on Friday down at the Brooksider Patio.  One could also argue that I went to the Plaza Art Fair too, but it was purely by chance, or a better description might be by poor planning.  I decided I needed to run down to Diebel’s to pick up a cigar;  Bad idea.  It was a mob scene down there.  Luckily I was on the scooter so I could just hop up on the sidewalk for some convenient parking.  I still had to walk through that disaster though.

Saturday started off well, then slowly dissolved into somewhat of a bust.  Donette got up early and headed down to Brookside for the annual “Strut With Your Mutt” event.  She and another girl had a booth set up to do some fundraising for her upcoming 1/2-marathon.  They were selling assorted homemade doggie treats, which she had been up all night baking.  Teagan and I walked down there at a slightly more reasonable hour and joined her.  Teagan did very well, and all the excitement wore her out nicely.  Donette did good with her fundraising too, it was worth a few hours of sitting out in the beautiful weather.  The only thing we had planned after that was the first class in Teagan’s next “grade;”  Intermediate Obedience.  It was scheduled at 4:00, which was something of a day-killer in the first place.  As it turned out, the instructor called at 2:00 and said class was re-scheduled until next week.  Well crud, that’s nice to know, I had a list of other things I would have much rather done.  Oh well, what can ya’ do.  Instead I mowed the lawn, grilled up some pork chops, watched a few movies, and called it a day.

Sunday was a full day.  Donette headed out in the morning to run in a 5k event with some friends, and I headed up to Martin’s house to start the preparations for the Royal next weekend.  By the time I got there around 10:00, he already had eight pork butts nestled snugly in the cooker, merrily smoking along.  We figured there wasn’t much use in staring at the smoker, so we headed out on a brisk 17-mile bike ride to pass the time.  (The term “brisk” referring to the weather, not necessarily our pace.)  It was a nice ride, but there’s some hills up there in them northlands.  Whew.  After our ride, we sat out in the back yard the rest of the day, enjoying the weather and pretending we were working on the BBQ.  Mostly we just ate.  His neighbors brought over some pancakes to fill us up after the bike ride, and no sooner had we finished gorging on those then a buddy showed up with some sliced brisket and ribs.  By the time we polished that off, Martin had a tray of jalapeno poppers ready to come off the grill, and then we washed those down with a few more slabs of ribs, some chicken wings, a pumpkin souffle and a big green salad.  Eeeesh, it’s making me a bit queasy just thinking about it.  I was miserably stuffed, but that didn’t stop me from trying the smoked-meat chili another neighbor brought over later.  Ohhhhh my belly.  I think I might need a few (dozen) more bike rides to work that one off.