I am considering testing the waters with a few mid-week updates.  Kind of see how it goes.  I’ve become rather disenfranchised with Facebook and need an outlet for my sharing my near-constant activities.  Or lack there-of, as the case may be.  If the experiment fails, I’m sure that will be the cause.  I am painfully aware that 85% or better of my evenings go something like:   “Sat on the couch and watched the Royals game.”  Kinda hard to work with that.

Last night?  Well, I celebrated Cinco de Mayo in grand fashion.  I walked the dog around the block, then sat on the couch and watched the Royals game.  Yep, here we go.  Today, though…  TODAY could be different.  I am starting the day with two cups of coffee.  We bought a Keurig brewer a few months back and like it quite a bit.  One of the extra bonuses from the purchase was that I dropped from 3-4 cups a day to one.  This is mostly because I’m a cheapskate;  Them little cups are rather pricey.    Today though, I woke up with that “what the heck” kind of attitude and just brewed that second cup like I was made of money.  We will see if that downright edgy outlook carries into the rest of the day.

Well as I just enjoyed a five-day weekend, I guess I am obligated to provide some type of a synopsis.  Probably should have hit it last night;  Today it already seems like it was a month ago.  And, two days of it was spent driving so those don’t count.

Anyway, Thursday morning we took off driving for an extended weekend in Dallas.  I can’t remember the exact purpose of the trip, if there even was one.  Basically we needed a little sun and a visit with our Texan friends David & Jill, and Brooke.  (OK Brooke has only lived there a week now but she’s a Texan already.)  Well and then there was the fact that it was Art Festival weekend in Brookside;  Always a good time to leave.  We made it to Texas by dinner-ish, and Jill fixed some great pasta, then we retired to the hot-tub to recover from the horrific trauma of the drive.

The rest of the weekend was spent in usual Dallas fashion.  You know, clubbin’, eatin’, more clubbin’, that kind of thing.  Saturday night they hooked us up with a sweet hotel in Downtown Dallas, which was…  “adventurous.”  I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever been in downtown Dallas, and I’m quite sure I’ve never spent the evening there.  It was very “Dallas-y.”  As luck would have it, the hotel we stayed at had opened a roof-top pool and deck that very day, so we couldn’t have asked for better timing on that.  We spent a considerable amount of time up there, it was a pretty sweet set-up.  In between pool lounging, we mixed in trips to the entertainment districts and a quite unique dinner.  If I had any idea where all we went I would try and summarize the names;  But I don’t.  I remember Vickery Park, Victor Tangos, & Barcadia, but the rest of them seem to have run together into a jumble of pretty people and loud music.  As I said, Dallas-y.  Sunday morning we headed to David & Jill’s house, and spent the day lounging by the pool, enjoying the best weather of the weekend.  We wrapped things up with an awesome steak dinner;  Honestly nobody cooks a filet like David, and that’s the truth!

Monday we got up and started the drive again.  For the sake of excitement, we took 75 home instead of I-35.  Call us crazy.  I think it took a little longer but that may have been the end-of-weekend impatience setting in.  As soon as we unloaded the car, I changed shoes and went about mowing the lawn, a grim reminder that the weekend was indeed over.  Turned on the TV, watched the Royals lose…  It was like we never left.

We are driving back to KC from Texas, I’ll update this if we ever actually get there.

Yes, I have a 3-day week upon me.  Thursday we are off to Fort Worth for a little R&R.  Things are off to a screaming good start too;  For the first time in weeks I made the light at 51rst street this morning.  Of the 42 traffic lights I go through on the way to work, that particular one is especially annoying.  It turns yellow on me every single morning, and after I’ve just gotten done sitting through the equally ridiculous light two blocks before.  It’s one of those stupid lights that serves no purpose either.  It’s set way too long, and nobody ever goes down 51rst at that time of morning.  Today I finally got a good run at it and made it through.  Small victories, people.  Let’s not go into nit-picky details like how fast I was going when I went through it.  The simple fact is the light was definitely mostly green.  I’m sure this coup shaved at least 3 minutes off my total commute time.

I suppose that was a decent weekend.  I’ve had worse.  On the upside, I didn’t have to mow the lawn, due to the standing water.  Of course that will just make things worse if and when it ever dries out, but I’m all about a little procrastination.  Friday evening, for no particular reason, I spent the evening hanging out at the Brooksider.  It was a “decent” night out, so I just sort of hung out on the deck and enjoyed it.  Watched the Royals get a particularly brutal thrashing, then called it a night.  Donette, meanwhile, got some kind of wild hair and headed out south to see some band with her friend Lori.  That’s two late Fridays in a row for her.  Dang kids.

Saturday I got up pseudo-early and headed down to the airport to meet Munkirs again, for our third round of cycling.  Didn’t up the mileage any this time, stayed at the almost-20 level.  I suppose we’ll have to bump that up a little sooner or later.  We may need to mix up the route a bit too, I’m getting a bit weary of riding in circles.  (Albeit nearly flat circles, which is nice.)  We managed to time it right too.  It started raining as soon as we were leaving.  One more lap and we’d have gotten soaked.  It was lunch time when I got back to the house, so we headed up to the Well.  They’ve got a good enough menu, but for some reason I just don’t care for the place much.  Maybe because we were stuck inside with the rain, I don’t know.  My sandwich was good, the service was good, the price is good…  The place just doesn’t do it for me.  The day didn’t progress much from there, we sorta hung out on the couch and watched the rain come down.  Luckily later in the evening Zim called to let me know he was in Brookside, saving me from totally wasting the day.  I went and met up with the Zims down at the ‘Sider and watched the Royals with them.  Well, at least until the stupid band started their stupid sound-check, and I couldn’t hear the stupid TV’s.  I maintain they should not have bands when there is a local sports event on, it’s annoying.  Meanwhile, they maintain no interest in my opinion.  Fair enough.

Sunday Donette was scheduled to participate in the Trolley Run with Kelly & Susan.  When 7:00 rolled around though, she rather predictably informed me that it was raining too hard and she wasn’t going.  I’m not sure how she managed to ascertain this buried beneath the covers.  Her plot fell apart when I went out to get the paper and discovered it was actually quite dry.  With some help from Kelly, we were finally able to shame her into going, although she stubbornly continued to insist it was pouring, even as we stood outside under the clear skies.  They made it up to the start in time though.  Meanwhile, Gabe and I sat at the end of the street and watched the festivities.  Wow, it was huge this year;  I’m not sure but I think they may have gone over 10,000 participants this time.  Gabe had a big time too, he got all kinds of attention.  After the race, we all headed up to 75th Street and enjoyed a rather gluttonous brunch.  The whole Brown clan made it up too.  (They did the Trolley Run also.)  After that…  Well, not too much.  Watched the Royals game from the couch, and then we rented “Blind Side” for evening entertainment.

That weekend fit into the category of “hit it hard early and then hunker down.”  We started things off on Friday by going out with a bunch of youngsters on a party bus.  Seriously.  Our friend Brooke is headed off to grad school in Texas so her friends got the bus to throw a going away party.  The whole deal sounded sketchy enough, and then I looked closer at the invitation and noticed the fun didn’t even start until 8:00.  Given that is about an hour before my bedtime (maybe an hour and a half on a Friday) the evening had all the makings of a train wreck.  But, against our better judgement, we found ourselves on a bus with a bunch of 25-year-olds heading to Lawrence, KS.  Luckily they behaved OK, we only had to put two of them in time-out and threatened to pull the bus over once.  Mostly they just sat in their seats and listened to their crazy loud music, while we sat up front and talked to the bus driver about the impending Medicare & Social Security changes.  When we got to Lawrence we spent several hours at “The Wheel,” which I found to be a quite suitable place for me.  After that we piled back on the bus and headed back to KC.  I thought we hung in with the children pretty well, I considered the evening something of a success.  Then we found out the bus was headed to the Brooksider to continue the party.  We waited until it slowed down for a stoplight at Wornall & Gregory and jumped out a window, then walked home.  Didn’t want to push our luck.

Saturday morning I met Munkirs at the Downtown Airport to do some more bike riding.  We upped our mileage one extra lap from last weekend, which put us at just under 20 miles.  (Well I did just under 20;  Munkirs circled the parking lot until his odometer read the full two-zero.)  After that little spurt of exercise, I spent the rest of the day at The Well in Waldo, sitting on their deck with Martin & Brice.  A fine way to waste a sunny Saturday afternoon.  After that I headed home to find that Donette had picked up a couple of nice strip steaks for dinner.  After several weeks of trouble-shooting, we finally got our gas grill operational and were ready to give it a try.  (Turned out it was out of propane.)  We enjoyed a nice steak dinner and that pretty much wrapped up Saturday.

Sunday we got off to a slow start.  Got sucked in by that dang ol’ Internet again, and the next thing we knew it was 1:00 in the afternoon.  We didn’t want to waste the entire day, so we headed outside for a few hours of yard work.  Got the bushes all trimmed up and cut the stupid lawn for the fourth time already.  I kind of felt like I’d earned some leisure time after that, so I spent the rest of the afternoon with “the boys” down at the Brooksider while Donette joined “the girls” down the street at Jalapenos.  They had the TV’s going out on the deck so I watched the Royals game and enjoyed the fine weather.  For dinner we had hotdogs, which was about as surreal as the bus ride to Lawrence.  Seriously, when was the last time anybody had hotdogs for dinner?  Must not have bothered me too much, I had three of them.  After dinner I “watched” some bad Jean Claude Van Damme flick.  (As if there is another kind of Van Damme movie.)  I vaguely remember some guy getting killed in the first few minutes, and then I woke up and the credits were rolling.  Oh well, probably didn’t miss much.