Wow, I am so glad to be back home in KC.  This nice little snow-fall provides me a timely reminder of how lucky I am to live in a climate that has these changes of season, so I don’t have to look out the window and see the same ol’ 79 and sunny weather every single day.  Yes indeedy.  That’s exactly what I was thinking as I was stuck on the bus in a snow-drift for an hour and a half this morning.  Indeedy.

I do apologize for the lengthy website outage, that was quite unintentional.  As a matter of fact, I had planned to keep a running update of our island time while we were gone.  Alas, in my zeal to save an extra 48 cents on the light bill while we were gone, I apparently flipped one switch too many on the way out the door.  Oops.  That leaves me with an entire two weeks of updates to type in here, so here goes.  Day 1:  Sat on the beach and did some snorkeling.  Grilled some fresh fish for dinner.  Day 2:  Sat on a different beach and did some snorkeling.  Grilled another kind of fish for dinner.  Day 3:  Sat on another….  OK you get the idea.  With the exception of one rain-out day, one off-shore snorkel trip, and one dinner cruise, that pattern effectively describes every day of our two-week trip.  We did take a few (literally, “a few”) pictures, which have been posted already, before I mess around and never get it done like after our Colorado trip.  I also have a ton of videos taken with our super-duper new GoPro camera, some of which are rather cool, which I haven’t quite decided what to do with yet.  I’m not so sure this site would handle them, maybe I’ll just link to utube or something.

So anyway, the vacation is over and it’s back to the routine.  My New Years resolution is to update this page a bit more regularly (although I really can’t imagine with what) so we’ll see how that works out.  I guess this week could feasibly be spent covering some of the highlights and lowlights of our trip…  After that things might get dicey.

I hope everyone has a merry Christmas. Updates may be a bit sporadic over the next few weeks as we enjoy ours. So I will throw in “Happy New Year” while I’m at it too.

Ahhhh, Christmas week is upon us.  Already.  We’ve managed our share of celebrating too.  Heck, I’d go so far as to say I am looking forward to Christmas this year.  I’ve definitely been to more holiday parties than usual.  For instance, Thursday night we headed down to the Brooksider for the annual Christmas Caroling event.  Several of the “regular patrons” there go out singing every year, always starting (and ending) the event at the Brooksider.  They hit a packed house too this year for whatever reason, there wasn’t an empty table in the place.

Friday evening was the “official” annual Christmas party at the Brooksider, so we headed down there again.  As usual for this party, it was over-crowded, loud, and nearly annoying.  Free food will do that I guess.  Luckily for me they fired up the heaters on the back porch, so me and a few other guys retreated out there for the evening.

Saturday was, for the most part, spent on the couch watching basketball.  Several entertaining games on, even if they didn’t all come out quite as I wanted.  Around 5:00, we wandered down to the Brooksider of all places.  Our friend Brooke was in town, so she and several friends met up with us down there.  We stayed for quite a while too, later than usual for us old folks. After a while she and her merry band of youngsters headed out on the town.  We, on the other hand, did not.

Sunday we expanded our horizons a bit.  No trips to the Brooksider, whew.  Instead, we went to O’Dowds and watched the Chiefs game.  You really can’t beat the ol’ Brooksider for watching TV, but O’Dowds was certainly a serviceable alternative, and much less crowded.  There was another contributing factor too:  They are in the KC Hopps group of restaurants, and they were running a special Christmas deal where we got $10 off our meal and 100 bonus “points.”  The points are something of a running joke with us.  We like to accumulate them, and if they come out with a deal like that where you get extra points we will show up every time.  But, we never actually use them, just keep building them up.  Who knows, some day we may cash them in and throw a party or something.  At any rate, we had a quite tasty lunch and loaded up our card with yet more points!

Here are some swell gift ideas if you were wondering what to get me, which I am sure is the case.

Tattoo Arm Warmers.  These things are awesome.  Munkirs would be so jealous if I rode in these he wouldn’t know what to do.  I’m hoping they come out with a matching skull cap too, but I haven’t found it yet.  Oh yeah, these things are “me.”  Note that they are, in fact, “inspired by real tattoos.”

New Computer Combo.  I never really had any interest in a gaming computer until I saw this sucker.  The thing that really makes it sweet is that it comes with a set of dog tags and a tee-shirt, which I assume you are required to wear while playing games on it.  Naturally you’d probably want to cut the sleeves off immediately.  The deal-breaker is the shirt only comes in a large;  Bummer.

Welcome to this week’s edition of “what I didn’t do last weekend.”  I have many exciting tales of life from the couch again.  Cold weather is rough on us, what can I say.  Things started off reasonably strong with an evening at the Brooksider on Friday.  I stopped by Diebels on the way and picked up a cigar for the evening.  I even let them talk me into a new selection this visit, a Siglo Limited Reserve.  While a bit trendy for my usual taste, and certainly higher priced than my usual taste, it made for a good “special occasion” cigar;  Said occasion being the last time we will be outdoors for the foreseeable future.  We went home and ate a little dinner, then watched Public Enemies.  I found the movie a bit disjointed, never really following where the plot was going.  This may have been in part because I kept nodding off for 5 minute stretches throughout the show.  I finally managed to work up to some level of alertness for what was presumably the big showdown, as the agents closed in on the gangsters hideout.  Just as the shoot-out was about to begin the DVD messed up and wouldn’t play.  Oh well, another two and a half hours of my life wasted.

Saturday…  Well, Saturday never quite got started for us.  We made a few very half-hearted efforts at getting around, but they never came together.  I had intended to kick around the gym for a while, but the next thing I knew the college basketball games had started.  Victimized again by the television.  After  watching all the games that at least moderately interested me, it was dinner time.  So, I fixed myself some leftovers, and while I was eating I noticed that the weather had turned quite unfavorable outside.  Just what I needed, another excuse to return to the couch, which I promptly did.  Fired up the Netflix and spent the rest of the evening suffering through a few painfully unremarkable films.

Sunday brought a limited more amount of entertainment.  We spent the better part of the morning convincing Kane that he is, in fact, a feline, and as such is well within his rights to use a litter box.  For whatever reasons swirl around in his little pea-brain, he had abruptly stopped using it last summer, insisting instead on being let outside for his business.  Hey, all the better for us, who wants to clean out a litter box anyway.  This convenience hit something of a snag when the temperature dropped to the single digits and a few inches of snow fell, though.  It was an amusing situation, if also a bit annoying.  He would repetitively come upstairs and loudly voice his discomfort, only to wail even louder upon stepping out the back door and immediately retreating back inside.  Any effort to show him the litter box was met with an indifferent stare and more wailing.  The deadlock was finally broken when Donette, rapidly nearing insanity after the tenth trip down the stairs, forcibly set him in the litter box.  He looked like one of those cartoon characters when they get a bright idea and the light bulb comes on over their head.  He’s been perfectly content to use it since then, like it’s some wonderful new kitten invention…  One that he hadn’t consistently used the first seven freaking years of his life.  Cats are odd.  Hopefully he switches back to the great outdoors next spring.  After spending our morning re-training our cat, we headed over to our friend Ronnie’s house to watch the Chief’s game.  The “theme” of the day had been declared a chili pot-luck, and as such we had four or five excellent variations to choose from.  Naturally I sampled them all too, much to the dismay of my ever-aging digestive system.  Aside from the uninteresting, embarrassing debacle masquerading as a football game on the TV, we had a fine time of it.