I go to Mexico and it’s sunny and 70 in KC;  I come back and they predict the first snow of the year.  What can ya’ do.  Entertainment was precious thin this weekend, if not non-existent.  Matter of fact, I just might go with the “one paragraph” update here, and sprinkle in a few more throughout the week.  ** GASP **  That’s how I roll.  Because, while the weekend was rather dead, I do have a few exciting items lined up for the week.  That is including, but not limited to, making a pot of mussels this Wednesday.  Exciting is a relative term, people.  Anyway, Friday night we went to happy hour, mostly just for the sake of happy hour.  Bleh.  Lasted an hour or so, then got hungry and went to Cantina del Ray for dinner.  It was solid as always, although I sort of wonder how long they are going to stay open.  They’ve been pretty empty the last several times we’ve been there, and they sure aren’t gonna stay open off our $12 dinner tabs.  There was a stretch after the KC Star gave them a good review when you couldn’t even get seated, but I guess people have moved on to the next “spot of the moment.”  Saturday I worked all day.  So went Saturday.  Sunday I took Donette to the airport, where she was flying to Vegas to try and win me an early retirement.  Since it’s a forgone conclusion that she is going to win at least $10k or so, I stopped by Costco on the way home and picked up a new camera.  After hours and hours of reading and researching on endless online sites, I went with the first one I ran into at the store, which happened to be a Canon T1i.  My only regret (so far) is that we perhaps should have bought it before going to Mexico.  Oh well.  After Donette gets rich in Vegas we’ll just take another trip.  (Speaking of Mexico and cameras, I did put up some pictures.)  The rest of the day was essentially rained out.  I read camera manuals, watched boring football games (except that night game, that was rather exciting,) and surfed the ‘Net.  And looked for mussel recipes.

I will give an honest effort at an accurate recap of our weekend in Mexico, and try to convey some sense of enthusiasm while doing so.  The “enthusiasm” part will be the most difficult to pull off;  I feel like I just got off the plane ten minutes ago, I’m beat.

We flew out to Cabo last Thursday morning, and I do mean “morning.”  Our flight was at 06:30, so that meant a nice early 04:00 wakeup.  We actually did manage to drag outta bed, get on our flight, and met up with Ed & Kim in Denver for the plane to Cabo.  The trip went remarkably well;  We scored seats at the front of the plane which meant we were first in line at customs in Mexico.  (I have a deep-rooted aversion to standing in long, slow lines;  Quite possibly the only thing I picked up in the Military.)  We breezed through that part, waded through the 2,459 “greeters,” and instantly found our pre-arranged driver standing outside the airport.  OK, there was a very slight delay with the transportation, as we stood around waiting for a mysterious “third couple,” who never did show, then we boarded the van and made the 45 minute drive to our hotel.  Walked right up to the desk and checked in, put our swim suits on, and hit the pool, where we (not so remarkably) found the Martins.  They’d been in Mexico since Monday, so they had already pretty much hit their stride.  The first night was definitely our best effort at staying out late and partying.  In comparison to the next three nights, we may well have even burned ourselves out right off the bat.

Not sure what I could really elaborate on, as far as the rest of the trip.  The hotel pool more than met my rather low requirements for entertainment.  I was very content to sit in the pool all day, every day, and pass the time.  The alternative was to head down to the actual beach and sit on some sand, but the view of the beach was quite nice from the pool, and you didn’t have to run the gauntlet of vendors lying in wait as soon as your toes touched sand.  We did leave the safety of the hotel for the obligatory trip into Cabo, which was time well-spent.  We picked Saturday for that jaunt.  Our full schedule could be summed up as:  Thursday, got there around noon and celebrated the Martin’s 15th anniversary.  Friday, celebrated Kim’s birthday in very much the same fashion as we did Martin’s anniversary, with the addition of festive room decorations and a self-styled “pub crawl” around the resort.  Saturday, we celebrated the Martin’s anniversary and Kim’s birthday in very much the same fashion as the previous two days, with the addition of walking to Cabo.  Sunday, the Paffs had to leave, and we just barely celebrated anything at all.  We actually had a pretty strong start to the day but by about 11:00 it was clear we were on our decline.  Personally I’d had enough sun for the weekend, so most my time was spent trying to find suitable shade and watching football games.  (On Spanish-language channels, which made the few available games even more boring than they already were.)  The diet may well have been catching up with me too.  I have a (possibly bad) habit of trying everything available, and perhaps that’s not always a good strategy.  For instance, I found myself quite fond of the sardines at breakfast and loaded up several each morning.  While I may have been fond of them, the inverse wasn’t necessarily the case.  Yeah.  But, being a slow learner, I went the same route every morning.  (With potatoes, 5 or 10 different kinds of cheese, eggs, assorted sauces, mystery meats…  Hey maybe I’m starting to figure out why I wasn’t feeling so hot towards the end of the trip.)

Monday we had to check out, and the entire day was spent on travel back to KC.  We got in late last night, hence the lack of a timely update.  All in all, a very good trip.  Both Donette & myself gave the trip a high eight out of ten.  The hotel was great, I’d recommend it if you have any Cabo trips in your future.  I may even be prepared to rank it over our “favorite” place in Playa, but I’m not ready to make that bold a statement just yet.  There is some kind of line between “extremely attentive” and “annoyingly overbearing” that I will have to study on for a bit.  They took care of you, that was for sure.  I know that by the time I left I was about to go Pulp Fiction on somebody.  “Say hola one more time, I DARE you!”  Pictures, of course, should be forthcoming.  By the time I get done weeding out the ones not fit for public viewing they may well not even be worth posting, we shall see.

As you can probably guess from the title, I’ve got a real barn-burner of excitement whipped up for today.  Ohhhh yeah.  My prediction of “blowing it out” last weekend didn’t exactly come to fruition.  I guess it never does when you plan it that way.  Honestly, a re-cap of the breakfast places we hit is about the best I can do, so here goes.

I had Friday off, which is always a good start to a weekend.  Donette spent the night at the Argosy on Thursday with a gaggle of girls, so I drove down to pick them up Friday morning.  On the way back to Brookside we stopped by Happy Gillis for a little breakfast.  You would think the address would be on that website someplace, but I couldn’t find it.  I think it was somewhere around 3rd street on the north edge of downtown.  The menu was definitely not what I expected when I walked in the place.  It had a definite low-rent-diner feel to it;  Mismatched chairs & tables, seat yourself, get your own drinks, etc.  The menu for the day was scribbled on a chalkboard behind the counter, and I was a bit surprised to see that all the plates started at eight bucks.  I decided on the juevos con frijoles, on the assumption that you can never go wrong with eggs and beans.  It definitely had the eight buck presentation going on;  Two corn tortillas, topped with red beans and a poached egg, garnished with shredded cabbage and a sliced radishes.  Probably the tastiest breakfast I can remember in recent history, although I must say I could have eaten at least three more servings of the same.  Probably a “one and done” place for us, if I had to guess.  For afternoon-slash-evening entertainment, I headed down to the Brooksider, of all places.  I enjoy a good early happy hour when the opportunity presents itself, so having the day off I showed up about 3 o’clock.  Martin & Brice showed up at some point, and I hung out with them until it started getting a little crowded with the Halloween nuts so we relocated to The Well.  That place definitely isn’t the spot to get away from a crowd, so we were only there about 30 minutes and called it a night.

Halloween was for all purposes a non-event.  Not for a lack of opportunity, we just never got going.  We used to really enjoy Halloween too…  I guess we got old or something.  We started off strong with breakfast at Amigos down off Steele road in the Rosedale area.  I thought they had a website but I can’t find one at the moment.  This place was a recommendation from our friend Anne, which instantly made it a must-visit.  Plus, it’s right across the street from Dressler’s, one of the best pet supply places around, and we needed some stuff for Gabe anyway.  Amigos was right up our alley;  The breakfast prices ranged from $3 to $5, depending on if you wanted a huge plate or obscenely gigantic.  I went with the pork chile, which came with tortillas, two fried eggs, beans and rice.  Donette had chorizo and eggs, with beans, potatoes, and tortillas.  Was the food as good as Happy Gillis?  Well, no, but we were stuffed and got out for less than 1/2 the price.  Trade-offs I guess.  For the evening, we didn’t do anything at all.  We had a grand total of four kids come by very early in the evening, and that was it.  (Maybe because we had all the lights out, I’m not sure.)  Anyway, the one group that did come by gave us some entertainment;  They rang the bell about 5:00 or so, and Gabe went into his typical seething rage.  Donette rushed downstairs to find him snarling and barking at the storm door, hair on end and the whole nine yards, with a little two-year old Cinderella on the other side of the glass chanting “Hi puppy, hi puppy!!!”  Our neighbor who was taking her around (and knows that Gabe falls in the “all bark” category) said it was extra-funny because she was absolutely terrified of his clown costume.  Crazy kids.

Sunday was similarly boring.  I did several hours of yard work, mostly in an attempt at enjoying the rather rare weather.  Took Gabe for a nice long walk, watched a little football…  Yeah that’s about it.  Oh, breakfast…  I nearly forgot that was my theme of the day.  For breakfast we headed down to Sharp’s at the rather unholy hour of 7:30;  Bitten by the time change I guess.  Having never been there at that time of morning, we weren’t really sure on their hours.  As it turns out they don’t open until 8:00.  Rather than waste the gas traveling the 3/4 mile back home, we got a paper and waited it out.  Sharps doesn’t really merit another review…  I think I’ve covered that place enough.  Solid food, decent prices;  Done.

OK this weekend REALLY gave me nothing to work off.  I was oncall, so that pretty much screwed up my entire block of “entertainment time.”  Friday was actually the only time I even left the house.  They had a Trick or Treat event up at Donette’s school, so we headed up to check that out.  Basically a bunch of parents decorated their cars and parked in the lot, and handed out candy to all the kids.  I assume the thought there was that they then don’t have to actually walk anywhere, the lil’ buggers can just get all the goods in one place with no effort expended on the part of either kids or parents.  Very efficient, I like it.  We brought a bunch of candy but got there too late to get parked and decorated and all that, so we just walked around and checked out the costumes and stuff.  It seemed to me that it was all a rather elaborate ploy by Donette to have an excuse to buy candy and then keep it for herself.  Hey, it worked.  After that we went home for a late dinner;  Chorizo stuffed poblanos.  If you can’t go out and have fun, I guess staying home and cooking is a reasonable substitute.

Saturday I got up and started on my super-duper Windows 7 install.  I bought it off Newegg at a pre-release price several months ago, and it showed up in the mail on Friday.  Friday night I stayed up executing my rather elaborate back-up plan, so I was ready to go first thing in the morning.  While I’m not ready to give a full review yet, the initial impression is quite positive.  My PC is probably about two years old, and everything worked right off the bat;  I didn’t even have to install a single device driver.  Can’t even say that about my beloved XP Pro.  It did do a few “weird” things…  Maybe “unexpected” is a better word.  Nothing that can’t be worked around though.  My biggest fear was restoring my 80 + gig of music to iTunes, which turned out to be a total non-issue.  That project went on for the better part of the day.  It looked so nice outside that I did get out and mow the lawn, hopefully for the last time.  It didn’t really need it, that was mostly just an excuse to enjoy the weather a bit.  Meanwhile, Donette was in Waldo renting a storage unit for our excess junk.  I don’t really enjoy speaking of this project;  It strikes me as inherently sad that two people can have so much crap that it can’t be stored in a three bedroom house.  But, I will grant that there are extenuating circumstances that make it “convenient,” such as the ongoing basement project.  The plan is to only keep it through the winter while that gets completed.  Truth be told I imagine we will have it forever, but we shall see.

I stayed up working all night Saturday, then got up just in time for the football games.  I kept 1/2 my attention on the game and the other 1/2 on restoring more PC stuff.  Maybe a little more than 1/2 was given to the PC, as the Chiefs game wasn’t exactly riveting.  Meanwhile, Donette was experimenting in the kitchen, whipping up a pot of butternut squash and carrot soup.  It came out very well, and was supposedly even healthy.  Shortly after the successful soup project, we got to work on our third effort at tamale making.  I thought this batch came out even better than last week’s;  I think we’re getting the hang of it.  We filled them with my disastrous brisket from the American Royal, which proved to be a quite fitting use for it.  (After simmering it the slow cooker for several hours.)  That’s about the whole of the weekend.  Next weekend, NEXT weekend is gonna be fun.  Oh yeah, I’m gonna blow it out next weekend.

Well I broke my recent trend;  Went with two lame weekends in a row.  I probably shouldn’t say “lame,” because I rather enjoyed it.  “Restful” maybe.  Friday night sort of set the tone.  We skipped happy hour and walked up the street to Cantina Del Ray (yes, that’s how they spell it…) for some dinner.  That place is probably my favorite Mexican restaurant by now, perhaps on location alone.  The food is certainly solid, and reasonably priced, but at the end of the day I like any place I can just walk a block to get to.  Happily stuffed, we went back home and fired up the Wii for an evening of gaming.  After running all the way through the standard “Wii Sports” game (new record in golf) and a little Mario Kart, we rounded out the night with a few hours of Rock Band.  I always forget how much fun that game is, and wonder why I don’t play it more.  (The Wii in general.)  Maybe if I played too much it wouldn’t be fun anymore?  Hmmmmm.

Saturday we both slept in.  Not too unusual for Donette (part of her daily ritual actually) but I have a hard time sleeping past 7:00 most days.  But, I’d stayed up late honing my drumming skills, and I guess it got the better of me.  It was noon before we knew it, and we had a big fish fry to go to.  Our friend Ronnie (of the “Brooksider crowd”) has an annual fish fry, which always makes for a solid afternoon of entertainment.  As with all Brooksider-related events, it seems to get bigger every year too;  I am guessing at one point there was 25 – 30 people there.  I pretty much stuffed myself on everything…  It’s kind of a pot-luck deal and there was some delicious feed there.  (Not the least of which being the actual fish;  Farmed crappie, deep-fat-fried.)  The party was still going when we left, but I had to work at 8:00 so we took off a little early.  The rest of the night was spent working from the couch while watching college football games.

Sunday was similarly modest in the entertainment arena.  After once again sleeping in (this time because I worked well into the wee hours of the morning) I spent a good part of the day on the couch watching football.  Donette had crossed the river to go to Josh’s birthday lunch, but I didn’t get up in time to make that trip.  So, I watched the rather tedious Chiefs game.  So tedious, in fact, that I mixed in some garage-cleaning for entertainment.  Winter is coming quickly, time to clear some space so we can stuff everything in there for the cold months.  After the 3:00 games, Donette got back home and we spent our evening making tamales.  This was our second attempt (well my first, Donette made the first batch alone) and I was rather pleased with the results.  Since the first try, we had quizzed several “in the know” resources, and found out that “ready to use” masa really isn’t.  As a matter of fact, I am still a bit mystified as to the purpose of the “ready to use” stuff.  I don’t get it.  Anyway, this time we used dry ingredients, with a generous helping of good ol’ lard, and the results were much more satisfactory.  Our next project is “smoked brisket tamales” in the near future, maybe next weekend even.