If anybody hasn’t stepped outside for a few days, I’ll save you the trouble;  It’s still hot.  Despite the lingering heat wave, we enjoyed a bit of semi-outdoor entertainment this weekend though.  We kicked off Friday at the ol’ Brooksider.  I headed down there directly after work (by way of the house to put some shorts on,) and took up my spot on the patio.  It was so hot there wasn’t even a waitress out there for a while, but they opened for business at five.  It actually wasn’t that horrible;  It’s shaded if you get the right spot, and the fans were moving the air around a bit.  After a while Donette and Johan joined me;  They’d spent the afternoon at the pool.  We hung out down there for a few hours, then headed off to dinner at Cantina del Ray, which was typically tasty.

Saturday kicked off with doggie class up at Petsmart.  After I finally found a parking place, (it’s right next to the new Trader Joe’s, which is still absolutely crazy,) we put in our hour of learnin’.  She did a little better than last week, although “lay down” is proving to be a bit of a stumbling block.  Who wants to lay down when there are treats flying all over, people walking by, kids wanting to pet you, etc?  Sheesh.  Matter of fact she never did lay down, not once.  Better do our homework this week.  After that we loaded up the car and headed <gasp> across the river to hang out at the Martin ranch.  I wanted to take Johan to one of our competitions, but that didn’t work out so the next best thing was toss some meat on the smoker and have a little party.  Actually, given the weather, I’d say it was a better option;  The idea of sitting outside all day was not very appealing.  Saved a lot of fuel too;  We didn’t have to actually light the smoker, we just set it in the sun and it ran about 250 all day.  We threw on two briskets, four slabs of ribs, a handful of chicken wings, and some jalapeno poppers for good measure.  It turned into quite the party, good times.  As an added bonus, Team Brisket might have actually stumbled across our next “tweak” too;  Look for a double-digit finish at the next contest!  (As long as there are fewer than 100 teams anyway.)

Sunday was a bit of a down day.  That BBQ took it out of me.  Poor little Teagan was shot too, so we didn’t have to worry about entertaining her.  I honestly am not sure I’ve ever seen her that tired, she slept all day.  Between kids throwing her ball and playing with the Martin’s temp-pup, she was flat worn out.  I did drag Johan down to the Brooksider in the afternoon so we both could feign interest in the sporting events of the day.  I have to admit I was a little surprised/dismayed to find the place was absolutely packed with people watching the soccer game.  Hey, I appreciate the enthusiasm, but could you do it somewhere else?  Luckily the regular crowd was there, (not that “lucky” actually…  wasn’t really very surprising at all,) so we had someplace to sit.  They had nearly every TV tuned to the soccer game, but they did throw the Royals game on one for us.  I will admit, the soccer game was exciting, especially at the end.  Passed the day at any rate.  For evening entertainment I watched Secretariat.  While well outside my usual genre, it was a very good flick.  I would recommend it to everybody, but then I imagine most have already seen it.

The heat is bringing me down.  Misery has officially set in.  It was nearly tolerable over the weekend though, at least until yesterday.  Friday Johan joined me down at the Brooksider to kick off the weekend in traditional fashion.  It’s tradition at our house anyway.  We hung out there for a short while, and then Donette’s family joined us down at Jalapenos for a tasty dinner.

Saturday I started the morning with my weekly dog-training class.  Young Teagan started off strong, she did a fine job of showing off her skills we practiced all last week.  After that we moved onto the new curriculum for the week, which included “loose leash walking.”  (Or “heel” or whatever you want to call it.)  This exercise she does not necessarily excel in.  Oh well, that’s the reason for the class I guess.  She does barely OK, unless there is any type of motion within a 100 yard radius, and then forget about it.  Definitely a work in progress.  After class, Johan joined me for an educational trip down to the cigar shop in Westport, and then we all headed down to the Rock The Crossroads event for some evening entertainment.  That was a good time.  Johan even participated in the run with Donette and her friends;  I elected to stay behind and watch all their stuff.  Since they didn’t actually have any stuff, it made my job even easier.  After the race we stuck around for the concert.  The music was rather abysmal, or at least the sound system was, but it was a nice night out so I enjoyed it all the same.

Sunday morning, Donette and her Mom took Johan to Branson for a few days.  Shopping, shows, fun stuff like that.  Me, I stayed behind to mow the lawn and assorted other miserable tasks.  I did actually get the lawn mowed too, which was a good week overdue.  I spent the rest of the day working on my weed-eater, which hasn’t run for several weeks now.  When all is said and done I imagine I will just throw the thing in the trash in a frustration-fueled rage, the same fate my last few have met, but at least I can say I tried fixing the dumb thing.  Any small engine mechanics out there???

I spent the better part of yesterday fretting about my stupid bicycle.  While I never figured out for certain what was causing the flats, it was pretty clear I needed new tires at any rate.  (Many have mentioned the problem could well be a triple-fat-back load on a 1/2-back rated tire.  I choose to ignore the taunts.)  I hadn’t noticed that they were so bad, but closer inspection showed they had worn flat in the center, with quite a few threads showing through, and the sidewalls were coming apart.  Determined to find a quick, reliable, inexpensive solution, I spent my lunch hour tire-hunting.  I immediately found that a tire meeting all three criteria doesn’t exist in the local shops, at least within my lunch-time driving range.  Despite my desire to get back on the road quickly, I just couldn’t bring myself to pay motorcycle-tire prices for a 23 mm wide piece of rubber.  Similarly, I wasn’t too interested in a Walmart solution that was just going to come apart again by the end of the summer.  Off to the good ol’ Internet.  I ended up making my purchase at probikekit, a site that was recommended to me by a friend a while back.  They had the exact tires I was looking for, at right about half the price I could find them locally, or on other websites for that matter.  Toss in free shipping and boom, done deal.  The bad news?  Well, I’m not exactly sure where this place is, but it’s a long ways away.  As you might guess from the currency selector option at the top of their page, and their spelling of “tire,” (tyre,) the warehouse is not nearby.  Best case, I’m grounded for at least a week.  I always have the trusty mountain bike hanging in the garage as an option though, we’ll see if it comes to that.

Last night I joined Munkir’s for another ill-fated bike ride.  I met up with him at Mission Hills shopping center for our usual Tuesday night route.  Last week’s ride ended badly for me when I got a flat tire about 1/2-way through the ride.  Luckily that time I was within walking distance of Munkir’s house, so I headed over there, got fixed up, and went on my merry way.  Last night I made it about 3/4 the way and flatted again.  Same tire, hole in the same spot, same result.  While I was able to limp home last week, last night I just bailed out and called Donette for a ride.  Could this be bad mojo coming back on me for snickering at Martin and his chronic flat tire issue last year?  Just might be.  The evening was topped off when we got home and found young Teagan had dug up the “dooley” again.  She apparently had the same issue working around the pesky rose bush that I did, so she dug it up too just for good measure.  Sigh.

That weekend seemed a little brief.  I don’t think I used my time very wisely, but that’s not too rare an occurrence.  I’ll throw out a brief recap.  Saturday I got up at the crack of 11:00 and took Teagan to her first obedience class at the Ward Parkway Petsmart.  It went OK I guess.  They use that “clicker training” method, which I’m a bit skeptical of, but I’ll give it a shot.  Honestly the results can’t be any worse than what I’ve been trying by myself, so what the heck.  After that, I headed back home and threw a slab of ribs on the grill.  Ribs were on sale everywhere this weekend, so I’d decided to practice up.  For round one, we bought a slab of “St. Louis” style spareribs from Super Target.  I put that in quotes because they didn’t really cut them right, if you ask me.  The “flap” was still on the back of them, and they hadn’t cut off the entire top part correctly either.  Knuckleheads.  I went ahead and threw them on the smoker as they were though.  The job the butcher did on them turned out to be the least of my worries anyway, as I didn’t  exactly do a spectacular job cooking them.  Probably needed about another hour of cooking, and they were way too spicy.

Sunday I got up much earlier than Saturday, and Munkirs came over for a morning bike ride.  Oh, you mean Sunday morning when it rained so hard?  Yeah, that Sunday morning.  Luckily we got a pretty clear heads-up on what was coming when the ear-splitting thunder started.  We had time to get back to my house before the real downpour started.  After the rain subsided, I fired up the smoker again and started on round 2 of the rib project.  This time we made our purchase at the local Price Chopper.  Donette brought home a full slab of spareribs and I cut them myself, and I liked the results a lot better.  I used a much sweeter rub this time too, and a less spicy sauce as well.  I got about an hour of cooking on them and it clouded up and started pouring again.  I mean it was really pouring.  I decided the ribs were a loss and we just headed up to 75th Street.  We killed about an hour and a half up there, then headed back home to survey the damage.  Remarkably, the smoker was still at a rock-solid 200 degrees and burning fine.  Pleasantly surprised, I went back to the business of cooking the rest of the afternoon.  This slab came out far better than the previous day’s effort, that is until I decided to finish them up on the gas grill.  I had the bright idea to “crisp them up a bit.”    By the time I came back outside about 5 minutes later, they were indeed crispy.  Took several minutes to put out the fire, as a matter of fact.  The only good news, if there was any, was that they were on the grill with the bones down, so only that side got blackened.  They went from being probably one of my best sparerib efforts ever to “edible” in the last few minutes of cooking, RATS.  We ate them though, and honestly I think they were still better than the slab on Saturday.

Monday we briefly considered cooking another slab of ribs, but for one thing we still had most of the others left over in the fridge, and for another thing I was still mad about the fire.  Instead, I started work on digging a hole in the back yard to bury our fancy new “Doggie Dooley” we bought a few weeks ago.  Yes, that is basically a small septic tank you see there.  It turned into a bit more of a job than I anticipated.  A 2′ x 2′ x 2′ hole turned out to be quite a bit bigger than I thought, especially when you’re digging in a corner where there is only one side to dig from.  Luckily I waited until the sun was nice and high to get started too, so I’d be fully miserable.  The whole time I was digging Teagan was laying on the ground beside me sleeping.  I couldn’t help but think that, as many holes as she has dug in my back yard, it would be useful if she’d help with this one too.  Not a lick of help though.  After I finally got that dang thing sunk, we headed off to the pool to relax.  It was crowded, but the weather was great and so was the water, so we hung out several hours.  After that we briefly considered heading to 75th Street to watch the Royals, but neither of us really felt like it so we just finished out the weekend at home.

Final story of the weekend.  So, as we’re enjoying the ballgame and some Sonic hotdogs, I think to myself, “Say, that dog has been gone a while.”  Unusual for her, since she is always glued to our sides.  Worried that the fireworks had scared her, I started looking around to see where she had gone.  She was nowhere to be found, then finally I glanced out the window and saw her in the corner of the yard, about shoulder-deep in the ground, digging just as hard as she could around the new doggie dooley.  Oh no.  No no no no no.  I’ll tell you what, for a lil’ thing she had moved a pretty impressive amount of dirt in a short time.  Where was all that energy when I was digging the hole the first time? I got it filled back in for the most part, and blocked off her doggie door so she couldn’t just do it again, but it appears we have a problem.  Ever tried to convince a terrier-breed dog to give up on one of their “projects” they’ve started?  Especially a terrier breed that some brainiac decided to cross with the stubbornness of a bulldog?  Fantastic.  Maybe I can just click that little thing they gave me in class and she’ll quit.  Uh huh.