I rode the motorcycle in again this morning;  Brrrr.  I think the riding season has about come to an end.  Of course, I’ve been saying that for several weeks now so who knows how long I will stretch it out.  I’m definitely switching back to the scooter if nothing else, I know that much.  While the motorcycle might have a few style points, the scooter is infinitely more practical for the morning commute.  Matter of fact, I rode it the vast majority of the time this year.  For one thing, the windshield makes it much more comfortable in the chilly weather.  I didn’t think it would make a huge difference, but over the last two mornings I found out it most certainly does.  You can carry a lot more stuff on the scooter too.  It has tons of storage space;  The motorcycle is limited to whatever fits in my backpack.  And then there is the drive itself.  The scooter is exempt from all those pesky driving rules and regulations, which comes in handy, especially with the dozens of brutally un-synchronized stoplights I have along my route.  Bus lanes are fair game for scooters too, as well as a few other unmentionable maneuvers that might be considered gross violations of the law for any other vehicle.  Mind you, all these exemptions are purely in my mind, hopefully karma doesn’t catch up with me.

I got my money’s worth out of that weekend for once.  We were busy pretty much all the time, which makes the weekend seem a bit short perhaps but at least I didn’t feel like I wasted it again.  We even went out Friday night, a bit of a rarity.  I’m usually too beat down on Fridays, but this time around we had volunteered to work at a poker fund raiser so that got us out of the house despite the driving rain.  I ended up being a dealer, which was fun.  I had no idea how to deal poker, but as it turned out it was easy enough and none of the participants seemed overly concerned with the details of the game anyway.  We were there well into the night;  Quite the late Friday for us.

Saturday we got up, slowly got around, and headed up to the Northlands for a day of cooking at the Martin’s house.  Donette’s family was stocking up on food for the holidays, so we had two briskets and two pork butts on for them, and Martin did another two pork butts, a turkey, and a slab of ribs.  Might as well load the smoker up if you’re burning fuel.  While all that was sitting happily in the smoker, we worked on a mojo-batch of gumbo too.  With all the roux-stirring and chopping and boiling, it took nearly as long as the briskets.  We came out of the day with a fridge full of food though, so all the effort was well-spent.  After all that work the night rather strangely morphed into an evening of impromptu parties.  I don’t know if that is typical Northland behavior or not, hard to tell without more data.  At any rate, we ended up at the neighbors house for quite a while, and then a small mob descended on Martin’s house late at night, and a party developed over there.

Sunday we got around even slower than Saturday.  First we dealt on all the food from the day before.  Got all the pork and brisket divided up into more manageable portions and food-saved it all, and froze the gumbo for some future event.  After that Donette promptly retired to the couch, and I went over to Ronnie’s house to watch the Chiefs spectacle.  Despite the less-than-entertaining game we had a good time of it.  These events are getting to be quite the “thing” lately.  Everybody brings a dish and we make a decent party of it.  Beats sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the Brooksider all afternoon, where you can’t even hear the TV.  Heck, yesterday Ronnie even turned on the heat in the house, I imagine for the first time this year.  It works very well too…  It got so hot in the house I spent the better part of the game on the front porch watching the TV through the window.

I am rather less that inspired to type this up.  My four-day weekend is coming to an end and I’m rather disappointed that I have, for all intents and purposes, wasted it.  Bummer.  Friday, as a matter of fact, I didn’t do anything at all.  Later in the evening we did meet up with the Martins and Browns down at the P&L to celebrate the Martin’s anniversary.  We went to McFadden’s;  First time I’ve been there as far as I can remember.  Aside from being ridiculously loud, we had a fine time.

Saturday Donette took off for St. Louis with Susan, and that’s when the trouble set in.  Left to entertain myself, I will more often than not just sit on the couch.  Luckily a co-worker called later in the day and invited me to a party out in Blue Springs.  Not sure about the wisdom of a work-related function on my long weekend, but it was a good time.  Musta been anyway, I stayed much longer than I planned.  Took care of my whole day, as a matter of fact.

Sunday I very slowly got around, thrown off by the time change as always.  It took me a while to catch on, but I finally figured out I’d gotten up at 4:30 in the morning.  Rats.  By the time the football games rolled around, I felt like I’d already been up a full day.  I wandered down to the Brooksider to see what was up, and what do you know, they had the football games on all 25 TV’s.  I pulled up a chair and commenced to wasting the day;  And waste it I did.

And today?  Looks to be a repeat of the rest of the weekend.  I’ve sorted out all my audio books, played with my webserver a bit, and watched ESPN for countless hours.  Whippy.

Another month down.  Still riding the scooter, although I have to think that will be coming to an end pretty quickly now.  About time to start the three-month banishment to the Metro.

That wasn’t an all bad weekend, considering I was oncall.  Given that qualifier, I’d go so far as to call it a good weekend.  Friday was something of a bust I guess.  I headed straight home and hit the couch to sort of get in the “oncall” mode.  Watched a few Halloween movies on Netflix, and called it a day.  The first selection, Rumplestiltskin, was predictably horrible.  I watched the whole miserable thing though.  After that was Day of the Dead, which was marginally entertaining.  (Can’t go wrong with the zombie genre.)

Saturday we got up (relatively) early and headed to the gym.  That’s a solid start to a day;  Kind of gets you in the mood for some productivity.  Case in point, on the way back home we stopped by Sutherlands and bought some lawn bags and electric hedge shears for some long overdue shrubbery maintenance.  It took a few hours to knock down all the bushes in the front yard and get it all cleaned up, and then it was on to the back yard to tackle the Shrub From Hell.  We’ve only got one lonely “bush” in the back yard, but it’s a doozy.  I’d guess it is more in the weed family than an actual shrub.  I have no idea what it is, but it’s quite resilient.  We’ve cut it to the ground at least twice, but it just comes back even bigger and uglier than before.  I gave it a good hacking this summer, but it had already bounced back and was a good nine feet high.  So, I drug out the ladder, some loppers, and the new electric shears, and went after it.  I beat it down to a manageable level I suppose.  Donette gave the work a thumbs up, but Kane was none too pleased with the effort.  That was his hunting blind, where he liked to stalk chipmunks from.  At his age and fitness level he’s never going to catch one anyway, but he does like to try.  Oh well, it’ll grow back I’m sure.  After I got that mess cleaned up, the Missouri game was well underway.  I figured I’d earned a break, so I rode my bike down to the Brooksider and hung out on the deck watching the rest of the game.  Bah, disappointing outcome.  I hung out there for a while enjoying the nice weather anyway, then headed home for a delicious spaghetti dinner Donette cooked up.  After dinner I tried to watch Dolls;  I think I might have made it through the first ten minutes before falling asleep.

Sunday we kicked off the day with a good breakfast down at Sharp’s.  It ain’t no Eggtc, but I didn’t feel like driving all the way down there.  (It’s at LEAST another mile, possibly even two.)  I knocked off a plate of biscuits and gravy, then headed back to work in the yard again.  The project that day was leaf clean-up.  I only made it through the front yard, but that was quite an accomplishment.  Whew, lot of leaves.  I missed the first half of the Chief’s game due to that chore, but caught the second half.  After that nail-biter, I watched the late game and monitored my Fantasy Football teams.  My season is shaping up nicely;  I’ve only lost one week to the wife so far, and won most match-ups in a most convincing fashion.  I would expect this is largely due to my superior male sports-genes, as well as my grasp of the game in general.  I’ve been instructed not to gloat though, so I won’t mention it.  Anyway, later in the evening, we actually turned on our porch-light for a short bit and handed out some candy.  We probably had a dozen or so kids come by in a few groups.  We didn’t stick around long though;  We turned out the light and headed over a block to our friends Tom & Nancy’s for their annual Halloween party.  Their street must be something of a Halloween destination.  There were tons of cars and kids roaming around, and lots of driveway parties going on.  We hung out for a while, then headed back to our boring block to watch the baseball game.

As anticipated, my big day off was a total waste.  Oh well, it was to be expected.  I did get some PC-related issues cleared up between all the worthless television episodes though.  One involved replacing my “storage” drive on the main PC.  It has been pushing the “too full” condition for quite a while now, so I upgraded from a 320 gig to a fancy new terabyte drive.  I gave consideration to leaving the 320 in there and running all three drives, but decided I didn’t need to burn the extra electricity.  I give it about 3 weeks before I invariably decide, “well there’s no sense just leaving it in the closet, I’m putting it back in.”  I can backup my backups to it or something ridiculous.  I also finally switched my laptop over to Ubuntu Linux.  That one has been a long time coming, I’ve had that thing for well over a year.  I gave an honest effort to liking Windows Vista, but finally conceded it is junk.  I like Windows 7 well enough, which I use on my PC, but I couldn’t see buying a $150 operating system for a $300 laptop.  The Linux does just fine;  I’d recommend it for anybody.  Matter of fact, it does several things quite a bit better than Windows;  Notably, it manages my super-duper firewall, and even more importantly it has built-in Sudoku.