Well that was an odd vacation.  As previously referred to, our cruise fell through, so that left us to our own devices for entertainment.  Having no devices, that translates to precious few options.  Let’s see…  I spent a prodigious amount of time at various dog entertainment venues around town.  Fun for Teagan I suppose, and to some extent I enjoy them also.  She had her first real attempt at swimming;  I see a doggie-life-vest in her future.  We rode the motorcycle up to Lexington, MO for a day, mostly just to enjoy the awesome weather.  We spent more than one afternoon basking in the sun on the patio at the Brooksider.  I got caught up in the whole March Madness event for once, but effectively lost all interest after Missouri crashed and burned.  And I think that about covers vacation.  Gas hit crazy prices right on queue for us, so we really didn’t want to go over a few miles away for anything, limiting our options even further.  What can ya’ do.  Our cruise has been rescheduled for late May, we’ll try it again.

The weekend itself was just sort of tacked on the end of the vacation I guess.  We got with the Martins to celebrate St. Paddies day and that about covers it.  Actually the girls did go out and celebrate;  Chris and I stayed home and slaved over a hot smoker all day so they would have a traditional holiday feast waiting when they got done carousing.  Ain’t that the way.  Maybe it wasn’t so traditional of a preparation though.  Convinced that anything worth eating is better on a smoker, we lit up some coals and prepared the entire meal over some nice hickory smoke.  I’ve done the corned beef on the smoker before, so I knew that was going to work out.  The cabbage and potatoes were something of an experiment, with mixed results.  I was a big fan of the cabbage, it was great.  We cored it, then stuffed it with butter, italian sausage, and some fresh thyme, then loosely wrapped it in foil and let it go about 4 hours.  Solid.  The potatoes we just tossed with oil and salt and put them right on the grate.  Eh, they were OK.  Probably should have foiled them also, at least for part of the time.

So, the good news is I am on vacation!  Yay for me!  The bad news is I am sitting on my couch at home typing this.  We are supposed to be on our way to a beautiful beach in the Bahamas, which I must say we’ve been looking forward to quite a bit.  Alas, it was not to be.  We had all the details squared away.  Bags packed, check.  Dog-sitter lined up, check.  Time off work, check.  Passports, uhhhhh…  Whoops.  We had the rather stomach-lurching realization on Saturday afternoon that they were locked away in our safe-deposit box at the bank.  The bank that had closed an hour earlier.  This rather deflating news effectively wiped out our week-long vacation.  So, if anybody is looking for a great deal on a cruise package to the Bahamas, we are willing to let our tickets go for a great price.  The only catch is  you have to have access to a time machine also.  Any takers??

In spite of our vacation crash-and-burn, we tried to make the best of the weekend, with some limited success.  We went down to the Brookside parade on Saturday, which is always a festive event.  I swear it gets bigger every year too, the streets were packed.  From there we caught the bus down to the Power and Light and went to the Missouri game.  THAT was a blast.  Even having less-than-optimal seats, it was an exciting game.  Afterwards we hung out in the KC Live area for a while, just sort of people-watching, which there was plenty of opportunity for.

We spent most of Sunday furiously making phone calls, in a last-ditch effort to change the national immigration laws before our flight Monday morning.  Alas, our efforts would ultimately prove futile.  Even my best arguments fell on deaf ears.  (1.  “Are you SURE the Bahamas aren’t in the US?”  2.  “This is my vacation we’re talking about here.”  3.  “Pretty please??”)  We did actually get in touch with the bank, which I thought was our best bet.  Unfortunately the news was that the vault was on a time lock, and simply couldn’t be opened until Monday.  RATS.

Now isn’t that a novel title for a weekly entry.  Thought that up all by myself.  I’d fully intended to post some actual content last week, but never got around to it.  My new router, which I was obviously so proud of, went south on me and I spent the better part of my week obsessing over possible solutions.  Sigh.  But, I won’t bore anybody with the fascinating details again, much as I want to.  Instead, I shall bore everybody with the not-so-fascinating details of my weekend, which began Friday down at the Brooksider.  Not a bad evening on the ol’ patio either.  Sat out back with the boys, while Donette made a rare appearance catching up with “inside” crowd.  When the sun started going down it got chilly pretty quickly, so we grabbed some takeout from Jalapenos and headed home to enjoy some dinner.  After that I’m relatively sure I played Angry Birds for some extended period of time, although I can’t really recall.

Saturday morning Donette got up and headed downtown for the Oscar Movie Marathon at the Main Street AMC.  She went last year too and I guess it must have been fun because all the same girls went again this year.  You buy one ticket, and they run all the films nominated  for “best picture” back to back over a 24 hour period.  I can imagine no worse fate, but they apparently enjoy it.  Meanwhile, I was home dog-sitting with Teagan and our friend Susan’s new pup Walter.  They get along quite famously, so it’s a pretty easy job.  Around 2:00 I headed down to the 810 Zone to watch the big basketball game.  Normally this would be one of the last places I would head to watch a basketball game, but Brice had hooked us up with the Skybox so we had our own private viewing area away from all the riff-raff.  About a dozen guys showed up and we had quite a time;  Right up until the end of the game anyway.

Sunday we took things pretty easy.  Donette came dragging in around 10:00 and promptly went to bed, while I took Teagan out to play some ball.  She ran out of gas quickly for once, so I returned to my spot on the couch for a few hours.  Around 2:00 I noticed the temp had passed 60 degrees outside, which I decided was just too nice to waste.  I headed out on a rather leisurely bike ride, indeed a wise choice.  I didn’t ride particularly hard, just sort of enjoyed the day.  For our Sunday evening entertainment, Donette went over to Susan’s for the big annual Oscars party.  She won the pot for the most correct picks for the third year in a row!  (Good thing, maybe she can pay for all the new hardware I need to fix the home network problems.)  Meanwhile, I took myself out for dinner at 75th Street.  Enjoyed a delicious pizza on the patio while watching the World Series of Poker, can’t go wrong.

Having no valuable content from the 3-day weekend as far as entertainment, I shall instead blather on about the new router I was forced into purchasing.  (Actually, I had a rather fun weekend, filled with quite a few engaging activities.  I elect to cover the new router, all the same.)

So, as I’m sure everyone recalls from my breathtaking post back in November, I picked up a new wireless N router at Microcenter, which for the price (free) has served me rather admirably.  This weekend, though, it at least appeared to give up the ghost.  It refused to hand out any local addresses, and the wireless connection dropped to the point where I couldn’t stream Netflix movies.  (Which, having no cable TV, essentially leaves me with no form of entertainment.  Deal-breaker.)  I spent quite a bit of time Sunday morning trying to fix the problem, with limited to no success.  I finally decided it had served it’s purpose, and headed up to Microcenter for a new one.  On the sage advice of Mr. Munkirs, I ended up going with the Netgear WNDR3700.  After some research, my requirements were gigabit support and simultaneous dual-band wireless support, both of which this model covered.  (I would later learn that none of my wireless adapters support the 5Ghz range, making that feature a rather significant waste of money;  oops.)  The gigabit support is a huge upgrade though, and something I have been planning on getting anyway, so that’s worth the cost.  (So I tell myself.)  Those requirements aside, so far it has performed just famously.  It does have something of a confusing interface for some of the more advanced features, which several online reviewers complained of.  But, unlike the Tenda I was coming from, at least it has the features;  Just took a little cipherin’ to use them.  The wireless performance is rather remarkable, both speed and range.  I had a repeater set up downstairs to get my PS3 and Wii connected, but the new router actually performs better without it.  It has some other fancy features too, like the ability to connect a network drive and share it out.  I have no earthly use for this functionality, but since I paid for it I will most likely get it working in the near future…

I’ll throw out an update while it’s still actually Monday.  Not that I’m even consistent on that anymore but what the heck.

So last weekend we took a lightly-planned drive to Cincinnati to visit with the Paff family.  We’ve been trying to plan a weekend with them someplace for a while now, but it never quite worked out for both our schedules.  As it happened, they were having a Beer Festival in Cincy this past weekend, so we figured that would work as well as anything.  Donette’s parents were nice enough to watch Teagan on short notice, so we packed up the car and headed east.  We made it as far as St. Louis on Thursday night, where we stopped for dinner with Jeff & Victoria and got a good night’s rest.  Friday morning we hopped up early and got back on the road, and got to Ed and Kim’s around four.  That left us just about enough time to change clothes and head out to the first night of the beer fest.  We met up with Ed’s family as soon as we got there and proceeded to make the rounds of the endless selections.  I don’t think I had a single thing I’d tried before during the entire night, and I’d say most were from breweries I’d never even heard of.  The event was rather lightly attended for the enormous venue it was held in, which worked great for us;  Huge selection and no lines for anything.

Saturday morning, Ed got up and headed back downtown to attend the 5B conference downtown.  Believe me, I was more than a bit disappointed that I missed out on this event.  I mean c’mon;  A whole conference dedicated to blogging?  That’s just too nerdy to be true.  Which is to say, right up my alley.   But, alas, I waited too long and they were all full by the time we decided we were making the trip.  Who knows where it may have led had I gotten in.  Actual interesting content on this site?  Doubling my hit-count per week to, say, four-ish?  The sky would have been the limit.  Oh well, there’s always next year.  I DID, however, get to go to the “Connoisseur Reception” with Ed and some friends before the general admission opened up at the Beer Festival Saturday night though, which was pretty sweet.  They had a selection of beers there, paired with some interesting foods, that we walked around and sampled for an hour or so before heading down to the main floor.  It was quite interesting, as the people serving the beers at this event were generally very knowledgeable about what they were pouring.  (In some cases even the Brewer.)   Downstairs it was more of a “Yeah we’re just volunteering, which one would you like.”  Unfortunately this just lasted a short time and then we headed downstairs to find an absolute mob scene at the main festival.  They posted a picture of the madness on the Hoperatives site.  Not quite the scene for this old man;  I didn’t last too long.  Kim came down and rescued us and we headed back to the house for some peace and quiet.  Ed posted some more info on the event at his site, as well as a few of his favorite brews of the weekend.  My favorite?  Well, I’m going to say the Imperial India Pale Ale from Green Flash Brewing.  Not exactly a bold pick but it was just that good.  Close second was the White Rajah IPA from The Brew Kettle, or maybe the Double Stout from Green Flash.  (I really liked the Green Flash selections;  They should broaden their distribution for my benefit.)

Sunday we discussed a few possible entertainment options, but ended up just hanging out with Ed, Kim and Trey all day in Cincy, which suited us just fine.  We were a bit worn out.  We had our obligatory lunch at Skyline, then drove around and checked out some local shopping, including probably the single coolest grocery I’ve ever been to.  Rash statement, but true.  Ed had a hockey game at 6:00 so we all went and watched him play, and that pretty much finished us off for the weekend.  Today we got up and made the rather brutal drive all the way back to KC.  And aren’t we glad to be back;  Lovely snow, just lovely.