Bad time to depend on a scooter for everyday transportation.  I even get sweaty on the way in to work at 6:30 in the morning.  It’s tempting to go back to riding the bus every day, as they manage to keep it at a constant 42 degrees on there, but then there is the walk to the bus stop to consider.  Oh well;  July in KC, deal with it I guess.

That was a pretty fine weekend, especially considering it was my oncall weekend.  I never expect too much of those, so if I squeak in any fun at all it’s a bonus.  Friday some friends were in from out of town, so that occupied our day.  (Well, that and work.)  One of my “Old Army Buddies” Scott & his wife Trish were visiting from the fine town of Wolbach, NE.  They were on a semi-business, semi-fun trip, so we tried to help out with the fun part.  Donette showed them around all day, I can’t remember where all they went.  I did get to meet them for lunch at Arthur Bryant’s, which was definitely a solid pick on the wife’s part.  That’s one of the bonus’ of seeing people from out of town;  We tend to take them to places we know are good but for whatever reason we never go to.  I hadn’t been to Bryant’s forever.  Had an awesome brisket sandwich, made for a bit of a long afternoon though.  I swear it had a full pound of beef on it, if not more.  I met up with them again at the Peanut (Main Street location) after work.  From there it was off to the Brooksider to relax for a while.  Smart money would have called it an evening at that point, but I had other ideas.  I decided to drag everybody down to Grinders to see what was going on.  They had some music out in the open area, and we ended up staying much too late.  The Zeros and a band called “Sellout” were playing.  The Zeros I’ve heard of plenty;  I generally associate them with ruining my evening at the Brooksider.  Not to say they’re bad or anything,  I just don’t go there to listen to music.  Get those crazy kids in there listening to their loud music and I can’t even hear the televisions.  Bah.  I wasn’t familiar with Sellout at all though, and they were pretty entertaining, especially outside on a relatively decent evening.

Saturday we slept in, a rather remarkable event in itself.  Well, for one of us anyway.  If not for the fact that we were supposed to meet Scott & Trish for lunch I may well have slept until noon.  But, we had plans, so I rather reluctantly drug myself out of bed and headed out.  We decided on the Power & Light district for lunch, then further narrowed it down to the Flying Saucer.  We all decided on hamburgers;  Bad decision.  I will go on record as labeling this the worst hamburger in KC.  Our guests claimed to like them, but I have to think they were just being nice.  Maybe it was just a bad day in the kitchen…  I’ll never know because I will never risk ordering another one.  Note to self:  “Stick to the soft pretzels at the Saucer.”  We killed the rest of the afternoon in random fashion, then for dinner headed up to Donette’s parents.  After that burger I needed some good food, and this trip filled the bill.  Fried chicken & Smokehouse BBQ, yum.  And, for a bonus, a homemade coconut creme pie that may well have been the best I’ve ever had.  (If maybe not the best for my ever-expanding gut.)

Sunday started off strong.  Got up and went on a 35-mile bike ride with Munkirs.  We seem to be stuck at the 35-mile mark for whatever reason;  Gonna have to man up and bump the mileage at some point.  I think we’re up for a longer ride, as far as our “conditioning” goes.  (I put that in quotes because I’m not sure “conditioned” would describe my current health status.)  But, it takes around two hours to go 35 miles and I think that’s about the limit of my attention span.  Not sure what to do about that;  Maybe hire a traveling circus to ride alongside and entertain me or something.  After our ride I headed down to the Brooksider with intentions of having some lunch and watching the Royals game.  Alas, the game was blacked out.  What is up with that?  Literally threw my whole day out of whack.  I did have a tasty sandwich, which took care of the lunch part of my plan, but didn’t want to sit there watching bowling all day so I went back home and listened to the game on mlb.com.  After that I pretty much wasted the rest of the day.  Luckily Donette brought me four new PS-3 games home from her shopping trip, that effectively killed the rest of my evening.  I spent a few hours puzzling over Madden NFL.  Wow, that game is a far cry from the last electronic football game I played.  (Being the hand-held with the little red dots flashing on it;  Amazing technology at the time.)  There’s almost too much going on for my old mind to process, and definitely too many buttons to keep track of.  It’s very entertaining though, as long as I keep things on the “beginner” setting.

I made it all the way to Friday.  Unfortunately this holds no significance at all this week, just means I am going oncall.  Time to sit on the couch and watch TV all weekend, and wait for the phone to ring.  We went out last night to celebrate Thursday though, so hopefully that gets me through the entire next week.  Didn’t do much;  Went down to the Brooksider and watched TV and enjoyed their A/C for a while.

Hmmm…Doni trying to help Phil out by uploading a picture but I am not smart enough (or don’t care) to get it to work.  Phil can figure it out later.  🙂

I (being Phil at this point) shall now try my hand at this.  Yeah I don’t really “get” how to put pictures on here either.  The purpose of the post was to recap our “date night” yesterday.  While it is true that we go out more nights than not, last night we ventured out of the Brookside/Waldo area, qualifying the evening as a “date.”  Our entertainment of choice was a beer tasting/dinner at Grinders.  The event was sponsored by Magic Hat Brewing.  We met their local rep at the Brew Ha Ha last weekend and talked for quite a while, so when we saw this event pop up we decided to show up.  She actually remembered us too, we must have talked longer than I thought.  It was a fun event at any rate.  Much different than the dinners we’ve been to at 75th Street.  Decidedly more casual themed for one thing.  I wouldn’t call that good or bad, just “different.”  We’ll probably check a few more of them out (second Tuesday of every month) and see if they are all that good.

OK that’s not really what I had in mind for the picture but it’s on there.  I’ll mess with it later.

Ahhh, another week begins.  Swell.  I am betting it will be a real hum-dinger too.  Plenty of cubicle time to pass the days and rain to ruin the evenings.  Whippee.  It was a decent weekend though.  Friday, given the relatively nice weather, I went down and sat with the boys on the patio at the Brooksider.  Had a cigar, caught up on all their weekly golf scores, the usual.  After a bit Donette came by and we headed to dinner at Kin Lin’s down near UMKC.  I am pretty sure I have never actually sat down and eaten there before;  We always get delivery or takeout.  It was good though, I’d go back for sure.  Well, other than the peculiarly chatty waitress.  She was certainly nice enough, or so it seemed anyway;  I couldn’t understand a word she was saying.  She was quite determined to be conversational though.  There was lots of smiling and nodding involved on our part.

Saturday was pretty full.  I got up, had a little breakfast and read the paper, then Munkirs came by for a bike ride.  There weren’t any “group” rides that we could find, so we picked the route from the Thursday night ride and headed out.  We got in a solid 35 miles at a decent pace.  Now if we could just do that 3 nights a week instead of 1, we’d be making some headway.  After the bike ride I headed up to meet Donette at the pool for some lounging.  Luckily she’d gotten there early and grabbed some seats, because it was packed.  We grabbed some lunch there and hung out for a few hours.  After that we headed back home, cleaned up, and then went downtown to the 3rd annual Brew Ha Ha.  We’ve volunteered to work at this event the last two years, and we signed up this year too.  It was a good time as always.  Didn’t seem like the crowd was quite as big this year for whatever reason;  Maybe the “newness” is wearing off.  The only downside was we got stuck working with a real schmuck.  I’m sure everyone has met the type;  Knows everything about everything and wants to make sure you are aware of that.  Myself, I am quite accomplished at dealing with these people.  Nod, perhaps occasionally offer up a “yep,” and then walk off and do whatever I want.  Donette, well, not so accomplished.  About the 18th time he proposed a new “system,” she finally wore out and there was a minor skirmish.  Honestly, it was very annoying though.  Seriously buddy, we’re filling water pitchers here, not trying to cap an underwater oil spill.  Our system went something like, “pick up empty pitcher, fill with water, set down full pitcher.”  Not very fancy, but reasonably effective.  We still had our fun though, and fulfilled our philanthropic duties for the year.

Sunday was a bit of a bust.  Maybe not a “bust,” because we didn’t have anything planned in the first place, but it was a quiet day for sure.  I started off with a bit of webserver geeking.  I ended up picking up the website and moving it to a new machine.  My favorite little Linux boxes just ain’t cutting it anymore.  I was rather surprised that picking out new packages, installing and setting them up, and moving the site over only took about 2 hours.  The only thing not working (so far) is the poll.  Well, either it really doesn’t work or I’m just tired of draining my creative spirit trying to come up with a new one every week and used this as a convenient excuse.  After finishing that project, and a few hours of random web-surfing, we headed down for lunch at Jalapenos.  My post-lunch plans were to walk up the street and watch the Royals game at the Brooksider.  This idea was derailed when I walked in the door to find the place absolutely packed, and every TV was tuned to the World Cup game.  Granted, our “regular table” was in attendance so I could have joined them, but I just wasn’t really interested in the least with the soccer game.  So, I walked straight through, out the back door, and home to lay on the couch, where I would spend the remainder of my weekend.

I took a night off finally.  I had stuff scheduled, it just didn’t come together.  I took a pretty good rain-dousing on my motorcycle on the way home from work and it kind of knocked the energy out of me I think.  I was actually walking to the bus stop, ready to just leave my bike downtown for the night, when my trained meteorological eye determined I could make it home before the really hard stuff started.  I am now 0-fer in those predictions.  Actually I believe I would have made it last night, if not for all the construction on Main.  For the last few weeks they have been tearing up what little good asphalt remains and pouring decorative concrete cross-walks.  This effectively backs up traffic for blocks, as apparently they can’t just do one intersection at a time.  I can only imagine the reasoning behind this ridiculous project.  They have to be very careful while digging too, so as not to disturb all the pot-holes and steel plates, which I’m sure they have no intention of ever fixing.  Sigh.  Only in KC.

Anyway, I was about three miles north of home when the driving rain caught me.  Ouch.  Thank goodness for sunglasses, although a windshield would have been nicer.  Oh well.  I got home, dried out a bit, and turned on the TV for a night of nothing.  Donette was out helping Dakin with a fund-raiser activity, so I seized the opportunity to watch some TV.  I fired up Netflix and after a little searching decided on “Best of the Best 2.”  (Because the first in the series was so good the public demanded a follow-up I guess.)  It was a pleasantly dreadful show.  I don’t want to be a spoiler, in case you were planning on watching it this weekend, so quit reading now if that’s the case.  Basically, “The Team” from episode one has opened a martial arts school.  All is hunky-dory,  but behind their backs Chris Penn has been doing some underground fights at “The Colosseum” in Vegas.  Naturally he comes up against The Bad Guy, who kills him in the ring.  The other two Good Guys spend the rest of the movie training out in the desert (always the desert) for the Big Show-Down, as well as trying to coach Good Guy #1’s son through earning his black belt.  (Which, oddly, he never does;  I think in all the excitement they forgot about it.)  Believe it or not, they do eventually come up against the Bad Guy, and kill him.  The best part?  Bad Guy #2 was none other than Wayne Newton.  Awesome.  After that I watched Zombieland, which was actually remarkably good.  Sorta disappointing.