That was an unusual weekend.  Unusual for me anyway, which means anything outside of going to the Brooksider and watching TV.  A little exercise, a little entertainment…  Weird.  I started off normal enough on Friday, with a trip down to the Brooksider.  I enjoyed the still unseasonably warm weather for a few hours out on the patio, then had some Jalapenos for dinner.  Solid evening in my book.

Saturday morning I lounged around waiting for it to warm up, then Munkirs and I went on a mid-winter bicycle ride.  Two weekend rides in a row during January;  Can’t hardly beat that.  In addition to my new Garmin, this week I tried out my new cycling bibs.  Referred to as my “onesie” by Donette, this well could be the single most unflattering piece of clothing ever developed, even in the cycling realm.  Donette managed to snap one picture of me trying it on, and that will be the last time it ever sees daylight.  OK, just kidding.  As you probably guessed from the hair, that isn’t really me.  I will actually never, ever, ever be seen in mine.  While Munkirs has been known to mow the lawn wearing his, and Martin commonly sports one playing tennis, (with one shoulder off no less,) I am a bit more discreet.  Much like Scotten’s man-girdle, some things just aren’t meant to be seen.  I opt to retreat to the basement, deadbolt the door behind me, throw it on, and then layer as many pieces of clothing on top as possible.  (I originally donned it in the spare bedroom, but I forgot about the full-length mirror in that room.  I inadvertently caught a glimpse of myself wearing the onesie, and that image will haunt me for years.)  Anyway, I must say, it is a quite comfortable garment, if a bit ridiculous looking.  Pile a few jerseys over it, nobody will ever be the wiser.

After that bit of exercise, I picked up Donette and we headed down to Hamburger Mary’s for some bingo.  This is a fund-raising event she is involved with, and it’s a pretty good time.  I even won a game this time!  Her family came down and joined us, as did the Browns.  Bingo wrapped up early, and then we joined the Browns in the adjacent room to hang out for a while.  It seemed a nice, quiet venue;  As a matter of fact, we were the only people in there.  Around nine the waiter dropped by and let us know “The dance club will be starting shortly.”  Mmm hmm.  And start it did.  As Donette and Kevin sat with their backs to the room and carried on their rapid-fire conversation, Carol and I sat in stunned silence watching the scene unfold before us.  I’ll just say…  Well…  We didn’t fit in.  We were there a good hour though, although it seemed more like four.  Hey, everybody needs a place to have a good time.  I can’t even begin to describe the crowd, and it’s probably best I don’t.  Seriously, where do you even buy leather shorts?  (Asks the guy that rode all over town wearing spandex bibs.)  Anyway, head over to their Facebook page if you dare, and check out the “Bear Bust” photo album.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

Sunday we turned it down several notches.  We went and picked up our friend Susan, then joined Donette’s family down at Eggtc for some breakfast.  It was crowded as always, but we didn’t have to wait horribly long despite the size of our group.  With a nice full belly, I headed home to pick up the dog, then went to the nearby high-school to play some ball.  She was in rare form Sunday too;  We played for a solid hour and then I still had to practically drag her home to get her to quit.  Once home though, she wiped out on the couch for the rest of the day.  Seemed like a reasonable idea, so I joined her.

I was able to take the scooter to work today, breaking my record for extending the riding season.  Not too often it’s warm enough to ride in on the fifth of January, and wearing a light jacket at that.  I’m sure Donette is currently rethinking her long-standing dream of moving to a warmer city.  It now appears KC actually has one of the nicest climates in the entire nation, if not THE nicest.  Might plant some palm trees this spring.

I actually stepped out of the house a few times yesterday, which I consider a news-worthy event these days.  Mostly out of sheer boredom, I walked the dog down to Southwest High School for a little exercise.  They have a nice big field on the side of the school, and as long as you don’t get mugged it makes for a fine exercise area.  We managed to get in a good round of fetch without incident.  Having sufficiently worn down the pup, we went and picked up our friend Susan and headed down to the Plaza for a while.  We had tickets to a 4:00 movie, so we stopped by O’Dowd’s for a little food beforehand.  (Actually, we had planned to go to Stroud’s.  Unfortunately upon our arrival there we found they aren’t open for lunch anymore.  Huh.)  Anyway, we put away some fish and chips, then it was time for our movie.  We saw “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.”  It was a bit…  “graphic” for me I think.  And long.  And everybody spoke with accents so I couldn’t understand them.  Besides that, I rather enjoyed it.  It held my attention for the entire 2.5 hours so it must have been pretty entertaining.

One day down, 355 to go.  Sigh.  New Years are rather tedious.  We had a solid start to our year though.  Friday was a non-event as I was saving my strength for New Year’s Eve partying.  (This strategy didn’t really pay off, but it gave me a good excuse to lay low Friday.)  We went to the Brooksider, only to find it over-run with Iowa fans watching their bowl game.  We retreated to the safety of the patio, but that got a little chilly eventually so we wandered over to Hooper’s and watched the first half of the Missouri game.  That was enough fun for a Friday we figured, so we called it a day.

Saturday morning we started the day off right with breakfast down at Eggcetera.  Lay down a base for the day, if you will.  It was typically packed, but we found two seats at the counter, which suits us fine.  After breakfast I took the dog down to Penn Valley park for a little exercise.  That’s not nearly the facility that Shawnee Mission is, but a heck of a lot closer.  It was predictably crowded given the warm weather, so Teagan got lots of playtime in.  After that bit of exercise we cleaned up and headed down to the Brooksider.  Some friends of ours were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary, and as we just so happen to share the same anniversary date we figured we might as well go weasel in on some congratulations too.    Our scheme worked well, and we scored cake to boot.  After that we headed down to the Plaza and enjoyed a delicious dinner at Capital Grille for our own little anniversary celebration.  I rank that place my favorite restaurant in town.  Wish we could go more often, but it’s a bit out of our normal dinner budget.  I will commonly complain if the tip on a given dinner is higher than my average bill at the Brooksider.  Kind of my “cost benchmark” I guess.  Well, the sales tax on this dinner was higher than my typical Brooksider tab.  Gulp.  Eh, what the heck, we only go there every three years or so, and it was without a doubt the best meal I can remember in a long time..  (About three years, actually.)  After dinner we scurried back home and sat in front of the TV the rest of the night.  Didn’t see anything close to midnight again this year.

Sunday we decided to kick the year off right with some exercise.  Donette headed out and did a six-mile run by herself, and I joined a large group of cyclists down in the River Market for a semi-organized ride.  It was a 21.2 mile ride, and I could definitely tell that I’ve been off the ol’ bike for a few months.  The extra-hilly course, the 20 mph wind, and the 40 degree temp didn’t help things either.  It was a good time though, if it’s anywhere near 40 degrees next year I will do it again.  One of my high school friends showed up too, so I had somebody to suffer with for the duration.  (Although he’s actually been riding all winter, he wasn’t gasping nearly as hard as I was.)  I got to try out my new Garmin toy too, which worked as advertised.  Here’s the rather overwhelming data it kicked out of the ride:  Tour of Three Bridges Ride.  Luckily it doesn’t have an audible alarm on the heart-rate monitor, it would have been going off like a tsunami siren.

One of my many gifts from the holiday was a long-sought-after hard drive upgrade.  Not just any ol’ hard drive though;  I got one of the latest-greatest Solid State Drives.  While generally having a much smaller capacity and much high price tag than a traditional drive, the new SSD’s are also considerably faster and, having no moving parts, totally silent.  These two things made it a perfect fit for my home theater PC, a Lenovo Q150.  So, after much comparison shopping and user-review reading, I decided on the Samsung 470 series drive, 128 gig model.  That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of space in these days of multi-terabyte drives, but it’s more than enough for the computer I put it in, as I only use it to surf the web and stream movies.

The drive replacement wasn’t quite as easy as I anticipated, but then nothing seems to be easy these days.  For one thing, the directions for opening the case were entirely wrong.  The best I could figure out from googling the issue was that Lenovo knows the manual is wrong and they are going to update it someday.  Isn’t that helpful.  Following somebody’s advice of “use a guitar pick,” I finally got it apart by prying it open with one of my many Chopper-Shopper cards.  (I knew those things would come in handy some day.)  Once open, it was quickly apparent the instructions for removing the drive were wrong also, but I’d pretty much given up on reading the directions by then anyway.  I got the new drive installed finally though, and even managed to put the case back together without any breakage.

After confirming everything worked on the new drive, I set about putting Windows back on it.  My plan was to install Windows 7 from scratch using the DVD’s I’d bought a few years ago, and then use the serial number that came with the computer to activate it.  This plan, not entirely surprisingly, did not work.  For whatever reason, I couldn’t activate the Windows install.  So, rather than spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out why, I switched to plan B, which was to image the old drive over to the new one.  This strategy, after a little trial and error, eventually worked out.  I have a little kit that lets you hook up drives to USB ports, so first I got that all working.  Once it saw both drives, I tried to use Norton Ghost to copy everything over.  They had included this software with the new drive, presumably just for this purpose, but it didn’t work at all.  It complained about the different partition sizes on the two disks, and wouldn’t let me duplicate an external drive to an internal.  I cursed it for a while, then switched over to Acronis 2012, which I happened to have purchased recently, and it worked quite flawlessly.  Once it finished copying, I booted up the new drive and took it for a test drive.  It works quite fabulously.  Noticeably quieter, and the speed difference is rather remarkable.  They also run cooler than a traditional drive, so hopefully it makes my little mini-pc last longer too, as I leave it running all the time.  As long as it lasts the duration of the supposed 3 year warranty, I am quite pleased with the upgrade.