Good grief, I must be old.  I feel like I got hit by a small car.  Float Trip was good.  Yes, it did rain quite a bit.  But hey, we were in canoes, we were gonna get wet anyway.  Yes, a tornado came a little too close for comfort, but it just added to the excitement.  Highlights that can actually be documented in a relatively clean blog?  Well, those are few.  I saw my first (non-captive) bald eagle, which was rather exciting.  It was an even more patriotic event when it took an enormous crap right in front of our canoe.  Ever seen a bald eagle crap?  Impressive.  There was a rather humorous exchange with the campground owner when he came flying down the hill to warn us of the impending tornado, but that one loses something without the Ozark accent so I’ll skip it.  Oh, special thanks out to Zim for letting me beg a bed in his nice warm DRY camper for the weekend.  It was definitely NOT tent weather.  I expect that’s about all the detail I need to relate.  I am trying to flush the memory of some things I saw and heard from my mind, and re-hashing them would only lengthen the cleansing period.

We got back Saturday, and after cleaning up I summoned every last bit of strength I had to go to the Royals game.  Some friends of ours from Nebraska were in town to see the game, so when Martins offered us some tickets it provided a quite convenient means to hook up with them.  I made it to the sixth inning, but then ran out of gas.  After the game we scampered back to midtown and had a late dinner at Cantina Del Rey up the street from our house.  With a full belly and battered body, I rolled myself down the street to our house and slept for about twelve hours.

Sunday I tried to rally a bit, with extremely limited success.  Our friends John & Susan called and wanted to go to Grand Street Cafe for their Easter brunch.  Sounded like a tasty menu, so we headed that way.  Luckily Susan called before we got there, and when we found out it would be a three hour wait we changed dining plans.  We opted for some BBQ down at Fiorella’s, always a solid bet.  After that, well, I watched the Royals game and Masters.  That’s some boredom for you right there.  That’s actually the first golf I’ve ever watched at home, and almost surely the last.  It got me through the afternoon though, so it served a purpose.  With nothing else on the tube that I could find, we started on a puzzle.  Yes, a good ol’ jigsaw puzzle.  I am that old.

Wow that weekend went by entirely too fast again.  Bad stuff man.  Oh well, a few days of vacation are on the way.  We kicked off our weekend Friday with a short happy hour down at the Brooksider.  The only reason we went there was to hang out on the deck for a bit and enjoy the weather.  As it turned out, it wasn’t really that nice out, so we didn’t stay very long.  After that we went to Donette’s school for a big shrimp boil.  Can’t go wrong there for dinner;  They even threw in some crawfish for variety, which I pretty much had my fill of because everyone else in attendance seemed a bit skeptical of them.

Saturday I once again headed out to Mom’s to give the ol’ motorcycle a try.  After a delicious lunch at The Best Burrito, (chile relleno, yum) I went over to her house and fired it up.  Unsuccessful once again.  My battery charger said it was ready to go, but it turned  over once and gave it up.  I guess I will have to break down and buy a new battery.  In all fairness, it is a five year old battery, I’m sure it’s due.  But for what they charge for those little suckers it should last the lifetime of the bike.  Oh well, given the weather changes I probably shouldn’t be in such a hurry to get it home anyway.  Saturday night entertainment consisted of going in to work and playing with all kinds of neato stuff.  Wanna hear about it?  I didn’t think so.

Sunday I went out get the paper, and was fully prepared to stay inside for the rest of the day.  Snow??!!!  You gotta be kidding me.  Luckily our friend Susan called and shamed us into going to the gym for a while, so we actually left the house.  After that, since I was out anyway, I headed over our friends Mark & Anne’s house for a little PC tuneup job, then went back home and helped Donette make a few tons of sausage.  The flavors of the day were kielbasa and a summer sausage.  Unfortunately we ran out of casing rather early in the project, so we now have some enormous “loafs” of sausage sitting in the freezer.  Oh well, it all tastes the same.  For dinner I met Munkirs down at the Brooksider, so we could have one last planning session before Float Trip this coming weekend.  After an hour and a half of planning, our itinerary consists of:  Drive very far to the river, try to stay warm for two or three days (depending on our threshold of pain), drive very far home.  That’s been the Easter schedule for the last few decades, why shake things up now.

Wow that weekend went by fast.  I seem to still be on vacation time or something.  It seems like I just left work on Friday and now it’s starting over again.  I think I’ve been cheated.

We spent most of the weekend with the Wilcox clan.  I went over there Friday after work to deliver John’s PC, which I’d been working on for a while.  After several hours of staring at it in bewilderment, I finally resorted to randomly removing and replacing things.  Eventually I decided it has some bad memory slots…  At any rate it is once again running.  Hopefully it stays that way this time around.  After that we headed over to our house and watched TV for a bit, and that was pretty much it for Friday.

Saturday I dove into all my new gifts that had arrived during the week.  I got a brand spanking new Camelbak, so I got it all adjusted and ready for the season.  It’s finally time to retire my old one I guess.  It was actually the same model, but it’s probably 10 years old so I think I got my moneys worth out of it.  I also got some new river-shoes in preparation for the upcoming Float Trip, which is right around the corner.  (Never mind that six inches of snow on the ground, it’ll melt off.)  Last but not least, I scored a three-pak of four-gig flash drives, which kicked off an afternoon of messing around with my web server.  In addition to upgrading to the latest greatest firmware, I now have double the space and a fancy raid array.  I decided to go the raid route after Munkirs demanded 5 nines uptime;  We’ll see how it works out.  After that we headed back over to the Wilcox’s house for dinner and basketball.  The basketball games didn’t work out so well, but the tacos were delicious.

Sunday we almost hunkered down on account of the snow.  Around noon we started getting a little stir-crazy though, so we headed off to the gym.  We made a short effort at working out, but the better part of our time was spent sitting in the hot tub and steam room.  We hung out there for a few hours, then once again hooked up with Wilcox’s and headed to the Brooksider.  We hadn’t been there in like three weeks;  Something of a record I think.  Pretty much nothing had changed though, so it was all good.  We caught up on all the latest gossip, and all was well until the girls had to stir up some freaking McCain/Obama debate.  Good grief.  Faced with listening to that, throwing myself through the plate glass window, or leaving, I took the easy route and left.  More TV for the rest of the night, and so ended the weekend.

I shall do my best to struggle through some semblance of an update, given my rather lackadaisical effort last week.  That said, I am still rather disoriented from vacation.  I did however put pictures up already so hopefully that provides some kind of diversion.  Some of them are from Kelly’s camera, so that’s the reason for all the different resolutions.

We spent all last week in Arizona with the Martins.  Home base was Sedona, which proved to be just a fine little town.  The weather was nothing short of glorious all week, and according to the locals that was just for us.  Apparently it is generally on the chilly side in mid-March.  I vaguely recall our trip itinerary, which I shall attempt to run down.  We flew out Friday the 13th, not being particularly superstitious.  As a matter of fact, it turned out to be a rather lucky trip when we took a bump in Denver in return for some travel vouchers.  On the downside, we didn’t get to Sedona until 2:00 in the morning KC time.

Saturday we slept in, then went to the St. Patrick’s Day parade in big downtown Sedona.  It was quite possibly the lamest parade ever, but then we hold our parades to a rather high standard.  It passed the time at any rate, and given the weather made for a decent diversion.  (OK from here on out exact dates and times are kinda fuzzy so don’t hold me to this timeline.)  Sunday we started the day with an early morning jeep tour.  I don’t know who’s bright idea it was to paint the jeeps pink.  Call it an insecurity but I never was totally comfortable riding around in a bright pink vehicle.  I had to admit they were pretty bad machines though;  They ran them over some impressive terrain.  After that we drove to a nearby trailhead and went on a 5-mile hike.  It was rather moderate terrain, but I think everybody agreed 5 miles was a bit excessive.

Monday we enjoyed a lovely drive out to the Grand Canyon.  It took like 9 hours I think.  Or maybe 2…  All I remember was it was very, very long.  It was worth it though, the canyon was very scenic indeed.  I’d go so far as to say “grand” even.  We spent all day out there hiking around.  Tuesday is a lil’ fuzzy.  I think the Martins went hiking and we stayed back at the condo and sat by the pool reading.  We cooked up some corned beef & cabbage for dinner and…  Some other stuff.  Wednesday we made the arduous drive to Surprise AZ to catch a Royals game.  Our original plan was to roll a Cubbies game into the afternoon also, but they were all sold out.  The Royals provided us with a decent amount of entertainment though, although they lost.  Donette got Zach Greinke’s autograph, which she was excited about.  At least she claims it is his autograph;  It’s quite illegible and the photo Dakin took was not exactly proof either.  Thursday we took a nice little bike ride.  Maybe not an over-the-top crazy mountain bike adventure, but it was fun and once again the weather was perfect.  Friday we flew back to KC, picked up Gabe, and went home.

The weekend was mostly spent trying to get our clocks back on track.  Saturday we did get down to the Power & Light and sat around watching the basketball games on their big screen.  We intended to go back there Sunday but it didn’t happen.  Instead we went down to the Brooksider to try and watch the MU game, but all the Jayhawk fans were naturally taking up two or three parking places each so the lot was full.  Wouldn’t want a door ding, you know.  While we were circling the lot I took a quick census of the handicap spots too;  Sure enough they all had Jayhawk bumper stickers.   Just pointing it out.  I guess we could have walked down there, but they steal chairs also, so it just wasn’t a safe option.  We walked Gabe up to the library and back, and then sat around the house the rest of the day.

We are in Phoenix celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, and as such I am wholly unable to update this.  While the weather might be fantastic, the Internet connection isn’t.  As I write this, I am balancing on one leg while hanging over the deck in Martin’s room, stretching my laptop as far towards where I imagine the nearest access point to be as I dare without risking severe bodily injury.  I’ll write up our little vacation later.