Now THAT was a nice weekend, weather-wise if nothing else.  It was relatively entertaining also;  I’d say we made the most of it all around.  I even had the good fortune to have Friday off as a bonus.  Score!  It was a long week at work, so we didn’t really do much with Friday afternoon except wind down.  Went to the gym all day…  Which is to say we laid out at the pool all afternoon.  For dinner we traveled south out to Munkirs house.  It wasn’t as far as I remembered;  We took the dog to boarding, gassed up the car, packed some snacks and a change of clothes, and we were there before I knew it.  Last time we went out there we had to spend the night at a hotel somewhere in Overland Park;  This time we drove it straight through.  It was worth the drive though;  Grilled Kebabs and ‘tators, right up our alley.  For after-dinner entertainment we played some kind of card game.  I did a few seconds of research on Google and I can’t find it to provide a descriptive link though.  I think Janene may have made it up on the spot.  It was fun but I didn’t win, so I will never play it again.

Saturday I got up sorta early and got the yard mowed.  There is something horribly wrong with having to mow the lawn once a week in the middle of August.  Very unnatural.  After knocking that out, we had to go out and do a little shopping.  For the first time in my 43 years, I am going to some kind of event that necessitates a jacket.  Having never attended such an event, it stands to reason that I have never owned a “jacket.”  Well, after six or seven hours of arduous shopping, now I do.  I didn’t have much trouble finding something I liked, but it did take a little time to pare down the selections to something, errr, in my price range.  Actually I never did find something in my “price range,” but I settled on one anyway.  It was, quite literally, the cheapest one in the store, and I wasn’t going to drive all over the city trying to save $10 somewhere else.  And I do rather fancy it…  Just had a little sticker shock going on.  I had it in my head that a jacket should be, well, 1/2 the price of a suit.  Reasonable assumption, since it is 1/2 a suit.  Not so much;  They are roughly the same price.  Scam!!!  Oh well, now I have one.  Somewhat traumatized by this experience, we headed down to the Brooksider to enjoy the weather out on the deck.  Hung out down there a while, went home and grilled some burgers for dinner, and called it a day.

Sunday Donette got up and went to the gym with Susan, and I spent my day on a long motorcycle ride.  I met up with my friend Troy and a friend of his around 10:00, and we headed up to Weston to kick around a bit.  Did a little antiquing, poked around some craft shops, and had a tasty lunch at O’Malley’s.  (We really did have lunch at O’Malley’s.)  After Weston, we headed… ummmm, out of town, and, errr, went a different direction, and ended up at Lake Perry in Kansas.  OK, I am a bit directionally challenged.  I was good with Weston, but got a little turned around after that.  No matter, Troy was in charge of directions, I just enjoyed the ride.  We went through all kinds of little towns, checked out a few Civil War “historical markers” and pretty much took advantage of the fine, fine weather.  I put just over 200 miles on my bike over the day;  Good times.  Donette, meanwhile, was up in Liberty visiting with long-lost Todd, who was in town for his parents 50th wedding anniversary.  I likely would have re-scheduled my ride and gone up there also, but apparently he had forgotten to mention he was in town.  Sigh.

Just kidding, there is no good news.  It’s all as dark and gloomy as the perpetual rainstorms in KC.  Wow what a weekend.  It was my turn at oncall, and wasn’t a good one.  I essentially sat in front of my PC from Friday night until around 5:00 Sunday afternoon.  OK, there’s a LITTLE good news;  I think I actually got a little color from the rays coming off my 24″ monitor.  Little late in the summer for a tan but better late than never.

We did leave the house for a short bit Sunday night, to get some dinner.  We went to the new Los Cabos restaurant out at the Legends, and it was worth the drive.  (When we left the house I didn’t realize it was at the Legends or I probably wouldn’t have gone.)  Solid fish tacos though, and it broke up the monotony of staring at a screen all day;  That was worth the drive in itself.

Got another Pigfest in the books, and I suppose I am a little worse for the wear because of it.  Good times to be sure, I just think I am getting a little old for any event that lasts over 2 hours.

We flew into Indianapolis last Thursday afternoon (cheaper airfare,) rented a car, and headed for downtown Cincy.  I’m not exactly sure what the hurry was…  We got to the hotel by 3:00 and found ourselves with nothing to do.  No worries though, we’re pretty good at that.  We sat around the hotel for several hours and then met our friend Amy down at a place called “Knock Back Nats” for a little happy hour.  Nice lil’ pub, reminded us of Bobby Bakers.  We caught up on all the current Cincy happenings over a few hours, then turned in relatively early.

Friday was another rather relaxing day.  We spent the better part of it out at the hotel pool, enjoying the sun and reading books.  I have been honing my pool-loitering techniques this summer at Woodside, and actually am getting quite good at it.  My tolerance level is up to about 3 hours before I start getting fidgity.  So, we splashed around for a while, then headed out to lunch at the place I love to hate, Skyline Chili.  Weird stuff man, weird stuff.  We go there at least once every time we are there though, under the “When in Cincy…” premise.  After filling our bellies on oddly spiced psuedo-meat kinda-chili product, we walked back across the street to the same place as the night before, Knock Back Nats, to meet up with Kim & Ed and their posse for some evening entertainment.  Same drill as the night before, but we stayed out later this time and hit a few more spots.

Saturday was pig-day.  The day started out rather slowly when one of us couldn’t answer the bell for breakfast.  Or after breakfast.  Or checkout time, or lunch.  I don’t think it’s necessary to name names, but it wasn’t me.  Personally I like to maximize my pig-fest time by showing up around 11:00, but as it happened we didn’t even leave the hotel until well after 1:00.  I’ve been cheated!  Oh well, when you need to sleep in a little extra, there’s not much you can do but sleep in.  We made it out to the Paff Entertainment Complex a little after 2:00, and luckily there was still plenty of pig left.  (Dinner actually isn’t until much later…  I don’t know why I like to get there so early.  Same reason I like to get to hotels early, who knows.)  We passed the day enjoying some sun, catching up with all our Cincy friends, and taking our annual drubbing in cornhole.  (I actually made it to the second round this year though.)

Sunday was “travel back to KC” day.  We headed back to the Paff’s house under the pretense of “helping clean up” but ended up laying in their pool instead.  Some time later in the afternoon Donette started cipherin’ the math on how long it would take us to get back to Indy airport and decided we were already running a little late.  I rather grudgingly got out of the pool and we headed that way.  Indeed, we barely got there in time for our flight, especially after our Garmin led us to a big deserted building with a big sign that said “Airport Has Moved.”  Oops, time to update the Garmin.  We made it though, and it actually worked out good because just as we were passing the checkin desk they announced the flight was oversold by one and they needed somebody to stay back.  So, Donette quickly veered over and took them up on that.  Next trip is now paid for!

That was it for the day.  Donette’s folks picked me up in KC, I went and got Gabe from his Aunt Ronda’s house, drove straight home and wiped out on the couch.  Donette was in bed this morning when I got up, so presumably she got home also.  I managed to actually take some pictures for once over the weekend, I’ll do my best to get those up this evening.  Next trip, Kentucky!!

** Photos posted

I am off to learn about our fascinating legal process as I enjoy my first-ever experience with jury doodie.  So I guess I’ll try and do this later.

In lieu of an update I posted some pictures of the weekend, which consisted of bbq’ing up at Martin’s house from Friday night until Sunday morning.  It’s just no use doing an update at this point, I have been irrepairably thrown off my schedule by the whole jury duty thing.  It was quite uneventful, and mercifully short in duration, but inconvenient all the same.  The good news is that I’m $8.10 richer for the experience;  Yahoo.

Something is wrong with my webserver…  It was locked up when I got home from vacation & then this morning it threw some mysterious database error.  Oh well.  I shall ignore it for the time being.

So, odd computer behavior aside, we had quite the long weekend.  We flew out to Albuquerque on Thursday morning for our friend Grant’s wedding.  The wedding wasn’t until Saturday, but we like hanging out with the Ausherman family so we decided to get there early and put some fun time in.  Not that the wedding itself wasn’t fun, you know, but other kinds of fun.  So, anyway, we got into town on Thursday, picked up a rental car, and headed out to Chen’s for some lunch.  Why ever on earth you would go to a Chinese restaurant when you are in NM I cannot even begin to explain.  Something to do with the last time Donette was there with the girls they went and it was really good and blah blah blah.  Whatever;  I just drove there with nary a complaint and enjoyed my pork chow mein.  (It wasn’t too bad either, in all fairness.)  After lunch we headed to the Hyatt downtown and got all checked in.  Thanks to my highly gregarious nature, I struck up a friendly conversation with the guy at the front desk and found out that he also was from KC, and was familiar with several of our favorite haunts.  This somewhat extended conversation wouldn’t really bear mention except for the fact that he comp’d our parking for the entire weekend and hooked us up with a room that had an awesome view of the nearby mountains.  This, while nice, wouldn’t really be worth mentioning either, other than I got no end of entertainment when I found out that David & Jill, (parents of the groom,) who spent money untold at the hotel for rooms, the reception hall, etc, got dinged $12 a night for parking and had a less-than-favorable view of the hotel’s HVAC equipment out their window.  SWEET.  After reveling in this score for a while, we all headed out to Sadie’s for a little dinner.  I had the carne adovada enchiladas myself;  Oh my goodness.  After dinner all the “kids” went out to take care of business, in the form of their respective bachelor/bachelorette parties.  Not being quite up for that action, Donette & I joined David & Jill for a bit “tamer” entertainment before heading back to the hotel to turn in for a relatively early evening.

Friday morning we got up late and sorta hung out at the hotel for a while.  Jill had gone off to do “wedding stuff” (booooo) and David had to run up to the airport to pick up his friend Steve.  Later in the afternoon Donette joined Jill for still more “wedding stuff” (boooo) and David wanted me to meet up with him & his friend to pass some time.  I was a bit apprehensive about this turn of events, not being particularly fond of either meeting strangers or passing an entire afternoon with them.  However, when his friend pulled out a hand-written list of local breweries & brewpubs that he had researched and wanted to visit, I knew everything was gonna be OK.  So while the girls wasted their time on whatever silliness they were up to, we dove into some research of the local brew scene at Kelly’s.  We didn’t stay too long, and then headed back to the hotel pool to discuss what we had learned from our experience.  Our little meeting didn’t last long though before the girls started calling, bothering us with some nonsense about a so-called “rehearsal” and this and that, so we had to cut our pool time short.  We made it through the rehearsal, and then travelled to the mecca of New Mexican Cooking, El Pinto, for the rehearsal dinner.  (Neither Steve or Donette & I were actually in the wedding party, but were quite honored to get invited to the rehearsal & dinner.)  Anyway, El Pinto just may be my favorite restaurant ever.  Bold statement, but quite possibly true.  Man I love that stuff.  They had a buffet set up, and it was as if they had somehow picked all my personal favorite items off the menu for it.  I really don’t remember most of the evening, I think I may have blacked out for a while.  I sort of remember being introduced to a bunch of people and mumbling some kind of gutteral response with my mouth full, and I’m afraid I may have yelled at some lady who I felt was taking too long at the rib tray.  Ohhhh, the red-chile ribs, oh my.  I think I may have been personally responsible for the demise of at least 2 slabs.  Unfortunately I was quite unable to go out with everyone after dinner, as I had to get back to the hotel and suffer through a bad case of the meat sweats, which kept me up most of the night.

Saturday I got up quite early and drove David & Steve to a nearby golf course.  Our obligation for the afternoon was to meet up with several other guys to discuss & finalize the details of the upcoming ceremony over a few holes of golf.  There were twelve of us in all, which would have made for a nice round three foursomes, but I elected not to actually swing any clubs myself.  This was, believe it or not, the first time I had set foot on a golf course in my 43 years, and it was far too much pressure to actually participate.  So, I just drove the cart around with David, Steve, & Grant, fetched errant shots, watched the game, and tried to learn a few things.  (By the second hole I was wishing I had rented some clubs;  It looked fun.  Oh well, live & learn.)  We were on the course for the full 18 holes, then rushed back to the hotel just in time to get dressed and head to the wedding.  The ceremony was at a nearby winery, outside in the scorching Albuquerque sun.  Wow, was it hot, and the dark suit was not helping.  The good news is the actual ceremony only lasted ten minutes;  The bad news was it started forty minutes late.  (You can ask Donette about that part of the story, she likes telling it.)  It was brutally hot.  We survived though, and I probably needed to sweat off a few pounds of those ribs anyway.  After that we headed back to the hotel for the reception;  Good times.  Nice dinner, few hours of dancing;  General wedding reception activities.  (No, I personally did not engage in any dancing, thank you very much.)

Sunday we slept in, then met up with David, Jill & Steve at the pool to wind down and rehash the good, bad & ugly of the day before.  Very relaxing actually.  We got a late checkout from the hotel and just loitered down there all day.  We finally took off around 5 o’clock to head to the airport, stopping by Frontiers on the way for one last green chile fix.  This was a good thing in that it was truly delicious;  A bad thing in that we were so miserably full I was afraid we were gonna blow on the flight home.  We made it though, albeit very late in the evening & still very full.  We picked up Gabe from Aunt Ronda’s house, struggled home, and went straight to bed.  Whew.  Good weekend.  I’ll get back to the gym and take care of the overeating tomorrow.  Or Wednesday.  Thursday at the latest.