I had a good weekend but a rough morning…  I’ll do my level best to slop through an update though.  The main event for my weekend was the Saint Joe BBQ contest.  I headed up north Friday afternoon on my trusty scooter and met up at Martin’s house to get ready, stopping by North Oak Quality Meats on the way to pick up a few briskets.  From there we headed even farther north to the beautiful metropolis of St. Joe, where Zim and Chad were already set up and waiting.  I’d say we had a pretty solid party Friday night, although Martin, Brice and I kind of stayed away from the action.  Moody artists, you know.  The TFB margarita machine was a big hit as always.

I felt I worked my brisket plan a little more effectively than at the Royal;  I put a new dry rub recipe on them around midnight and bagged ’em, then snuck in the trailer to catch a little nap.  Brice woke me up at the unholy hour of 3:00 to take over fire duty, so the briskets hit the smoke at 4:00, precisely as scheduled.  I must say, I was in rather high spirits all morning, dare I say even a smidgen excited.  There was no hint of trouble until I pulled them at noon, and one of them broke in half when I picked it up.  Overcooked AGAIN!!  I was so frustrated I seriously decided I was done with the sport.  I didn’t even want to turn it in, and if not for the fact that it has some rather negative implications for the team I would have thrown it straight in the trash.  So, I cobbled together the best shreds of beef I could find and dejectedly took the march of shame up to the turn-in.  As it turns out, it placed seventh.  Not exactly great (there were only 24 teams) but not too shabby either.  I honestly was almost a bit perturbed, as by the time Chud phoned us the results I was quite at peace with my decision to hang up my tongs.  So, I guess I’ll live to burn at least one more hunk of beef.  Overall, the event was a good time had by all, and team TFB didn’t do too bad in the standings… Better than the Royal anyway.  After the ‘que contest we headed back to Martin’s house.  They were having a Cinco de Mayo party that night, so Chris and I snuggled up on the couch and caught a little shut-eye.  (How long will it take you to get that visual out of your head?)  Donette and I managed to hang in there at the party until 10:30 or so, then we bailed back to the safety of the southlands.

Sunday was kind of a washout, literally.  We had a neighborhood party planned up the street, but their basement flooded so they were busy bailing out the mess.  We bummed around Costco for a bit, then headed back up north to pick up my junk I’d left at Martin’s.  The good news is I recovered all my BBQ gear, the bad news is I took off my rain jacket and left it there.  Dang, ANOTHER trip north in my future.  Other than a rather unfortunate incident involving the dogs, our muddy back yard, and our previously light tan carpet, it was an uneventful day.  I even took a few pictures, in case we have to turn this one in to insurance.  Sigh.  That’s just the steps in the pictures;  The carnage continued into the bedroom, the office, and the majority of the downstairs.  Actually nobody saw them in action, so it may have been the cat.  Right.

Wow, that was a pretty busy weekend, at least for us.  Especially since we didn’t really have anything planned.  Friday wasn’t anything special, but fun I guess.  I started off after work with another round of the now-hated physical therapy on my shoulder.  It is really doing some good, but at the cost of some rather extreme discomfort.  Should just be another few weeks though;  I’m going to run out of money or patience soon.  After that I met Donette at the Brooksider, where K.B. and Bruce joined us briefly.  I wasn’t in much of a mood for that place though, so we went down to Carmen’s for some dinner.  It was solid as always;  We had calamari and salads to start things off, then split a plate of linguine diablo for dinner, which is probably my favorite item on the menu.  The big plate of pasta effectively ended us for the night, we went straight home and went to bed.

Saturday was looking like a fine, fine day out, so I rolled my motorcycle out in the driveway for the first of my planned “updates.”  I was wanting to clean up the rear fender in some fashion, and finally decided on using the directions I found on this page.  I followed the directions very precisely, even using the same color masking tape, which may or may not have been important.  Can’t be too careful.  As with every other project that involves me and tools, it took a lot longer than advertised, but I managed to get everything back together and functional.  I also took the opportunity to meet the guy across the street, who is something of a gear-head.  He was out working on his huge mud-mobile 4×4, so I strolled over to chat.  Compare manly mechanical projects, you know.  I’m sure he was duly impressed;  For a second I thought I saw him roll his eyes but it was pretty bright out, probably just the glare.  Actually I was hoping he had some kind of tool I could use, but no luck.  He excitedly pulled out some air tool that looked like it would be more appropriate to sawing the bike in half than trimming up a little plastic.  Thanks but no thanks, I’ll just run up to Sutherlands.  Anyway, I dubbed the project a success.  Pretty minor update but I was excited about it all the same.  If I had it to do again, I would definitely pay a little more attention to the way things came apart, particularly what electrical connection went where.   (Yes, for those of you trying to recall, I was an electronics major at CMSU.  Nine years of college down the drain.)  Luckily there were only six connections, a little trial and error got everything working.  I even put up a few pictures of the project in the photos section.  There was still plenty of daylight left when I got done, so Donette hopped on the scooter and we rode out to Martin City to enjoy a limeade at Sonic.  After Sonic we took a rather circuitous route home, stopping by to visit a co-worker and just generally enjoying the day.  We didn’t do much that night, just watched “Anger Management.”  I would say it’s probably the worst movie ever made, we didn’t even make it all the way to the end.  It would seem that, in our quest to select movies that both us might enjoy, we keep finding ones that neither of us can stand.

Sunday we got up bright and early and walked up to Waldo to take part in the Trolley Run.  We met John & Susan and enjoyed the leisurely 4-mile walk down to the Plaza.  Last year we made the critical error of semi-jogging;  This year we walked the whole thing, which was infinitely more enjoyable.  After the “race,” we went over to Todd’s apartment for his post-party, featuring his Mom’s breakfast casserole, donuts, and a beautiful arrangement of fruit and yogurt.  Todd didn’t even make it to the run this year, apparently he was too busy working on the spread.  After breakfast, we all agreed that despite our casual pace, we were a bit sore.  So, we went our separate ways for nice afternoon naps.  After that I washed my motorcycle, then Donette and I spent the evening on the back porch separating out her large collection of state quarters.  She had a gallon ziplock bag stuffed with quarters, so we filled up four of the little books they make for them, with plenty left over.  My job was smoking a cigar and separating them all into the “D” and “P” mint categories.  Ahhh, another wacky night at the Kenagy’s;  Does the madness ever end?  Later John & Susan came over and joined us watching the weekly Sopranos and Entourage episodes, both of which I thought ranked rather high in entertainment value.

I believe Spring has finally arrived with some consistency.  I was able to ride assorted two-wheel vehicles all last week, and this week is looking good too.  As for our weekend entertainment, things started off rather lame on Friday with my first visit to a physical therapist, in an attempt at fixing up my bum shoulder.  My right arm has been a generally useless appendage since Martin maliciously injured it last August…  I figured it was about time to do something about it.  The Doc agreed with my assessment;  He even thought it might be just a few months overdue.  Things went very well, I was quite pleased with the results of our first session.  (Everything but the bill, that is.)  I can actually raise my arm over my head for the first time in eight months;  Remarkable!  The good Doctor did infer that I might need to work on my communication skills before our next session though, which I wasn’t entirely clear on.  Apparently he felt I wasn’t adequately expressing my discomfort levels to him, to the point that he actually seemed a bit frustrated.  OK, now I’m not the one with all the degrees hanging on the wall, but it seems reasonable to me that if you take a metal object and drive it between some muscles, it’s going to hurt.  If you grab somebody’s arm and twist it until it pops, it’s going to hurt.  Do I really have to say “yeah that hurts”?  Come on now.  I guess I’ll just sit there and chant “ow… ow… ow…” next time.  That little torture session effectively ended my day.  We stayed home for the evening, grilled up a rather tasty dinner, and then watched “Hitch,” which we actually both agreed was a pretty lousy movie.

Saturday morning looked like a good day for a motorcycle ride, so I rode up north to Barry Road and visited the Red Buffalo BBQ team.  They were entered in a small competition, so I looked over their shoulders for any free ‘Que ideas.  Hopefully I took good notes, because they did pretty well in the standings, including a fourth place finish in brisket and fifth place overall.  I enjoyed my little ride too, except it was so dang windy it tore up my license plate.  After that, we spent the rest of the day sitting on the deck at the Brooksider with Ed and Kim, enjoying the weather.  Later in the evening they went to a party, and we headed back home for another night of TV.  The dogs had been left alone all day, so we had to give them their “social time.”  Sigh.

Sunday looked to be another great day.  Although I wasn’t aware of it, Donette had declared it a “work in the yard” day though.  Apparently she had invited Ronda and Josh over to help till up the back yard, which we are trying to level out and re-seed.  Much to my dismay though, my aching shoulder prevented my from assisting in the project.  Darn the bad luck.  They made big progress though, and even managed not to tear up the sprinkler system.  Now we just have to see if we can actually get some grass to grow…  Something tells me that is going to be rather challenging with the dogs.  Watching all that work had made me rather hungry, so I made some blackened fish for dinner, which came out rather tasty.  We closed out the weekend in the usual fashion;  Watching the Sopranos and Entourage, both of which received high marks on the entertainment scale this week.

I don’t have a whole lot to go on from that weekend.  Donette is out of town so I hid in the house and babysat the dogs and watched movies.  Friday I didn’t even do that much, I just played on my computer all night.  I was engrossed in my latest project, Puppy Linux.  After some finagling, I was able to successfully boot Puppy from a thumb drive.  The whole operating system lives on the flash drive, along with any new programs, files, etc. that you might modify while you’re running on it.  So, you can move the thumb drive between computers and have your same exact environment where ever you are, with no modifications at all to the PC you booted from.  This opens up some rather interesting options, none of which I will go into.  As the saying goes, I could tell you but I’d have to kill you.  I also put together the pictures from last weeks Float Trip; thanks to Zim and Martin for supplying me with some more material.

Saturday for some reason I can’t really explain, I became engrossed in Ebay.  I was on an absolute mission to buy something, with no real concern as to what it was.  I can see how people get sucked into bidding on that junk, I was getting quite perturbed because I kept getting outbid on everything.  At the same time I was rather amazed at the prices people will pay for stuff.  Apparently they don’t do a lot of comparison shopping;  most things can be had brand new for not much more money.  For afternoon entertainment I met up with Martin, Todd, Bob and Joe down at the Brooksider.  Not much to relate from that outing, just general tomfoolery and lots of barbecue talk.

Sunday I woke to find that I’d been outbid on every single one of my Ebay items.  For the prices people paid for everything, they were welcome to them too.  Finally, more out of frustration than anything, I bid on a used tail light housing for my motorcycle.  That’s a rather “unique” item, I figured there wouldn’t be much of a demand for something like that.  Sure enough, I was the lone bidder, so I’m the proud owner of an extra piece of plastic for my motorcycle.  It was actually something that I was wanting though;  I want to do the “rear fender trim” using the directions on this page, and I’d rather have an extra in case something goes horribly wrong.  We’ll see if it actually shows up at my doorstep.  For dinner I went over to John and Susan’s new house, where we had pasta and watched the Sopranos.  I feel another lame season coming on…  It’s pretty tedious viewing.  Dinner was good though!

We have returned safe and sound from yet another annual Easter Float Trip.  At least I would say we are no less sound than when we left.  We headed out Wednesday night and made the five-hour journey to Dora, MO, where Zim graciously housed us in his camper for the evening so we wouldn’t have to struggle with our tent in the dark.

Thursday we awoke to find possibly the best weather of the weekend;  Sunny and 40-ish.  We took advantage of this balmy climate and made the relatively short float from camp down to Dawt Mill.  I think this is becoming everyone’s favorite float anyway;  It is shorter than the other options, has some of the best scenery, (including the world famous monkey-deck,) and is generally devoid of river hazards…  With the exception of one rogue boulder that nearly de-canoed me.  I imagine we made for a rather interesting picture floating down the river in coats, pants and boots, but you gotta do what you gotta do.  It was no fashion show.  It’s a good thing we didn’t dump, we surely would have either frozen or sunk from all the clothes we were wearing.  Luckily it was a nice dry float though, and we returned to camp five hours later to a delicious dinner of fried chicken, mashed ‘taters and slaw.

Friday morning, after much spirited debate, the general consensus was “no float.”  It took roughly 2.7 seconds to talk me out of it, but there were a few die-hards who at least professed to wanting some river time.  When all was said and done though, only Zim and Chad actually loaded up a canoe and launched.  The rest of the group stayed back at camp and huddled around the fire, passing the time with several thousand rounds of cornhole.  I might take just a moment here to interject that at the end of the day I was the UNDEFEATED CORNHOLE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD!!!  Or of Dora at least.  Actually there is an asterisk by my title though, as I did not win the championship round against Eisenbarger by two points.  I’d given my all at that point and simply didn’t have another throw left in me;  I was mentally and physically exhausted.  Beside that, it’s probably the only thing I’ve ever won in my life, save the speed-typing contest in Angel Fire;  Let me have my moment of glory.

Friday night proved to be the coldest of the trip.  While I haven’t been able to research it fully, most in the group generally agreed it was, overall, the coldest trip ever.  Granted, you’re taking something of a chance with the weather when you go camping every Easter, but we’ve had glorious weather for the last several years running so we’re a bit spoiled.  This year, however, the official low in Dora (the closest town) was 21 degrees.  I’d say it qualified as “bitter cold,” and I heard several other descriptive adjectives attached throughout the evening too.  There was an extremely short-lived conversation about sticking it out until Sunday, but that idea didn’t get a lot of support.  We were low on supplies, frozen, bored, and the firewood was gone.  BAIL!!!  We pulled into KC later in the afternoon and had a short victory celebration at the Brooksider.  (Outside on the deck in the freezing wind, naturally.)  When all was said and done though, still a good trip.  Hey, at least we didn’t have to make many trips for ice.  Always the optimist.

Sunday, after a refreshing 14 hours of sleep, (seriously,) we had Easter dinner at our house.  Somehow or another we managed to squeeze a dozen people in the dining room, and had a nice little feast of brisket and ham along with several sides and desserts.  Good stuff!!  After dinner Todd came over and watched the Sopranos, and that was a weekend.  Only 345 days until the next Float Trip, start counting them down.