Last night I got out for a bike ride with Munkirs.  Generally we leave from Mission Farms shopping center on Tuesdays, but I was car-less last night so instead we left from my house for a 17-mile loop.  On an unrelated note, we haven’t had two cars for long time, why have we run into so many issues with transportation lately?  Who knows.  Anyway, it was a fine night for a ride, a nice change from the recent low temps.  Little on the breezy side, but that would be nit-picking.  After our short bout of exercise, we headed down to the Brooksider to watch some baseball and eat a little dinner.  (Munkirs had been exiled from his own house by a group of bunko players.)  Might have stayed just a little too late, it was a chilly ride back to the house, but oh well.

A good write-up on the concert from last weekend.

The Google is coming to Kansas City!

This weather is affecting my quality of life.  What the heck.  It was 60 degrees in our house this morning, we may well have to turn the heat back on.  At least that’s what the thermostat reported;  I think the wood floors were somewhere around 25 degrees.  I went ahead and hit the Brooksider as planned on Friday afternoon though.  I’d invested too much planning into my evening to just go home and watch movies.  So, I stood out on the patio and shivered for an hour or two before conceding it was just too cold.

Saturday brought some moderate entertainment.  I waited until two o’clock or so and headed out on a solo bike ride.  Brrr, it was cold.  I had on some relatively warm clothes though, and headphones stuck in my ears for entertainment, so overall it was a tolerable ride.  That night we headed down to Knuckleheads with Scotten, the Luecks, the Browns and the Martins for the big Rainmakers concert.  This was yet another “reunion” show for them, and made for a nice little flashback for all of us.  They were a big favorite of ours back in the college days, and used to play down at Warrensburg a lot.  I must say, they have… errr…. aged a bit.  But then, so have we.  They still sound solid though, I really can’t believe Bob hasn’t screamed himself out of a voice by now.  If I had to complain at all, and of course I have to, it would be that 1) I didn’t care for the setlist that much.  They started the show by playing their entire first album, in order.  Great way to start, and it was a lot of fun.  And then after that, well…  They moved into their “newer” stuff, which of course the 750+ 40-something fans in attendance didn’t have quite as much use for.  Also, 2) they could have ordered up a little nicer evening.  Knuckleheads is an outdoor venue, and it was freaking cold by the time they got done playing.  (Tack that on as number 3:  The show didn’t start until 10:00 at night.  I would say full 85% of the crowd, myself included, would just as soon have been in bed by that time.)  Overall?  It was a blast.  If not for the weather I probably would have gone back for the second show Sunday night.

Sunday didn’t bring much.  We didn’t get home until some unholy hour that morning, but of course I couldn’t sleep a minute past 6:00, so I was pretty tired.  I got the lawn knocked out before the Royals game, which was then rained out, leaving me with nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon.  So, I walked Teagan down to Brookside, where I saw several of the boys sitting on the patio at the Brooksider.  Works for me;  I walked the pup back home and then went back down and joined them.  We watched golf all afternoon, sort of fitting entertainment for an entirely boring day.  Moments before I would actually stick my thumbs in my eyes so I wouldn’t have to watch golf anymore, Donette called and said she wanted some dinner.  Whew, just in the nick of time.  So, we headed down to Jalapenos for a little grub, then called it a night.

Believe it or not I don’t have any terribly exciting tales to relate from the last few evenings.  But, given that I have slacked a few days, an update seems to be in order.  Most of our recent activity has revolved around the turning off of the cable.  It’s not working out quite as expected, as is the case with nearly everything we do.  The grand scheme was to connect the big antenna in our attic to the televisions, and take advantage of all the free over-the-air channels that are available.  In retrospect, this plan maybe should have been executed before turning off the cable.  I knew how I wanted to do it though, just hadn’t quite gotten around to actually running the wires.  I’m more of an “on paper” guy, you know.  Donette finally got tired of watching the snow on the TV’s and ran the wires…  And no TV channels.  Turns out our TV’s are both old enough that they don’t have built-in tuners, oops.  So, back to the paper planning.  I think I have developed another scheme to get it working, which I’m sure will be a washout equivalent to the last one.  Meanwhile, as far as programming, my only real concern was the Royals games.  I thought I had this one resolved with the streaming torrents available for free on the Internet.  Well, a few weeks has shown that the Royals games are almost never available.  Just my luck.  I have seen several evenings where every single MLB game is available for viewing, except the Royals.  Go figure.

Last night we had the parents over for a belated Mother’s Day dinner.  Luckily Donette was able to rush home from work a little early and get things started.  We had brisket, beans, and salad for dinner, and she made a homemade bread pudding for dessert.  We never get dessert at our house, so this was a bonus for me too.  It made for a good get-together, or as good as 18th-place brisket can be I guess.

When the heat finally got here, it came with a vengeance.  We still haven’t flipped on the a/c though;  We’ll see how long that lasts.  Something tells me it will be running when I get home this evening, which from the look of the forecast will be just fine.

That was a long weekend, and I’m a bit worse for the wear because of it.  I had the day off Friday, so Martin and I headed up to St. Joe around noon to participate in the Apple Blossom BBQ contest.  That event just might be my favorite competition of the season, at least when the weather cooperates, which it did this year.  This year brought a slight twist for the Triple Fat Back team;  We had so many guys interested in cooking that we fielded two completely separate teams.  We figured since we can’t seem to do worth a darn in the actual contest, we might as well hold our own little mini-competition.  It worked out great, I enjoyed it thoroughly.  The fun began when the event organizer was checking us in, and our “second team” found out that Martin had registered them under, shall we say, a less-than-flattering team name.  (Even less flattering than “Triple Fat Back.”)  Team Number Two, as we shall refer to them here on the family oriented website, was less than amused with their given moniker, which of course delighted us to no end.  On the downside, it apparently enraged them so much that they got down to business and beat us in the competition.  Beat us rather handily actually;  With the exception of pork they bested us in every category, plus overall.  Martin and I did best for the Triple Fat Back team with an almost-respectable 18th out of 49, but Team Number Two came in eighth, for what would be the only ribbon of the weekend between the two teams.  It was a good time all the same, and we can just chalk up the results to beginners luck.

I got home from that debacle Saturday night to find an empty house, as Donette was out with a bunch of girls for the evening.  I was in an exhausted haze, but I did manage to scrape the two days worth of smoke, dirt, and grease off me before hitting the bed sometime around eight.  I guess I’m getting too old for the all-nighters, I was shot.  I would have gladly slept all day Sunday too, but unfortunately the chores were beckoning.  I got the way-too-tall grass mowed, which actually took a pretty significant amount of time, and hopefully finally fixed the gutters on the garage which have been sadly sagging for the better part of the last decade.  Meanwhile, I started up the smoker and threw on a 12 lb. turkey too.  Yeah, just can’t get enough BBQ.  After two days straight of it, the smell of the smoke almost made me convulse, but the turkey was thawed and needed cooked so it had to be done.  In the midst of all that, we took a little break and headed up to 75th Street for a small Mother’s Day lunch.  A quick check of my family tree shows Donette is actually not my Mother at all, but she had been none-too-subtly hinting all day that she expected some type of recognition so a tasty lunch served the purpose.