I really can’t get too fired up to type anything, but in light of last weeks less-than-mediocre update I suppose I’m obligated.  So, type I shall… But I won’t like it.  I think the weather has me in a funk;  At least that’s what I’m blaming it on.  I don’t mind the cold so much, but I can do without the snow and ice, or at least the associated mess it makes.  Worst of all, I can’t ride my super-duper scooter.  Buncha crap.

Friday, of all things, we went to the Brooksider.  It was Donette’s final day of work, so we went down there to celebrate her retirement.  Or perhaps to mourn the loss of the paycheck…  Depends on how you view the situation.  The Martins came down, Ronda  and Justin showed up, and even Todd came out of hiding for the evening.  We were forced to leave early though;  Some stupid band was coming in.  Live music; bah.

Saturday we didn’t do a whole lot, for whatever reason.  We went out to Martin City and had lunch at Jackstack, which was solid as ever.  Then we headed over to Sutherlands to catch the big moving sale.  They are moving to Harrisonville and everything in the store is 25% off.  We picked up quite a few things… A lot more than we intended.  I guess we got caught up in the excitement of the sale.  Whew.  Our coolest purchase was a Little Giant ladder.  Wow, 24 ladders in ONE!!  These are wonderful times we live in.  I figure any product endorsed by Al Borland has got to be high quality.  That wrapped up our Saturday for the most part.  We wanted to watch a movie for our evening entertainment, but apparently one of our knucklehead house guests from Friday night had the bright idea to turn off the heater in the TV room.  You could dang near see your breath in there by the time we noticed that.  So, we threw a few filet mignons on the ol’ George Foreman grill and had a nice little dinner, and called it day.

Sunday we headed down to the Brooksider and watched the Bears/Saints game.  I was kind-of-sort-of-not-really pulling for New Orleans, but everybody else at the table was for the Bears; Whatever, works for me.  We had lunch there too, and found that the Brooksider had changed their menu too!!  Man there is some kind of culinary shakeup going on in Brookside, and I’m not too fond of it.  I was grudgingly forced to admit that the menu was better, mostly due to the new improved french fries and the addition of blue cheese in the burger menu, but I made it a point to complain anyway.  Just because.  After that game we headed back home to watch the late game.  Our TV room had warmed back up to an inhabitable level by this point, so Todd came over and we hunkered down in there for the rest of the day.  Thus ended our snowy weekend.  It doesn’t look like it’s going to thaw any time soon either; our “one car family” experiment isn’t going so smoothly at this point.

I don’t have any news.  Absolutely nothing happened to us last weekend.  Well, we went out to dinner one night.  That was it.  Too cold to go out.

It occurred to me lately just how silly the titles of these things are.  But, if you don’t enter a title, it looks funny.  So just ignore them.  Or, know that at least 5 seconds of thought went into it, and it may or may not have some vague association with some bit of content in the corresponding post.

Friday night, we stayed home and made soup.  (See?  That is the “vague association” for the week.)  Potato soup with chicken-andouille sausage.  That was about it for the evening… I’m not sure how much mileage one could reasonably expect me to stretch that into.  After dinner we watched “Black Sheep,” which could probably be considered one of the less-than-classic of the Chris Farley/David Spade movies.  It passed the time though.

Saturday comprised the bulk of our weekend entertainment value.  The Martins came down and joined us at the Brooksider to watch the Chiefs playoff game.  Mind you, the game itself didn’t provide much entertainment value, but it was a diversion.  The ‘Sider was in good form too; packed wall-to-wall with rather enthusiastic fans.  Everybody stayed for the duration of the debacle, ourselves included.  After the game, we trotted down the street and had dinner at Jalapenos.  In a rather exciting and shocking twist to our weekend, they had changed their menu!!  I opted for one of their new items, the tilapia.  It was a decent-sized, heavily seasoned slab ‘o pescado, served with flour tortillas and rice.  It was good… perhaps the seasoning was a little much.  After dinner we headed back to our ranch, where we played a few games of Pitch and Euchre while watching the Dallas/Seattle game.  (Which proved quite a bit more entertaining than the home-town game…)

Sunday, still reeling from the shock of the new Jalapeños menu, we hunkered down in the safe confines of our house.  We made two more pots of soup; A tasty white chili and an interesting new recipe with sausage and artichokes.  Both came out rather well, and I’d say we’re set on lunches for the rest of the week.  After that we hooked up the back speakers in our new surround sound setup, and watched a combination of movies and football games for the rest of the day.  Wow… the surround sound adds quite a new dimension to the TV; I didn’t think it would make that much difference.

Well that’s really about it for the weekend.  The scooter/moped project is coming nicely.  I rode it in to work three out of the four days last week, and hopped on it for this mornings commute also.  I filled it up for the first time last week; cost me $4.50 for premium.  Gotta like that.  I have also found an answer to the question I posed to myself when buying this thing;  “How cold could I possibly get in six short miles??”

Ahhhh, the first post of ’07.  Oh the excitement.  I better keep it brief, I know everyone is still reeling from the length of last weeks post, which judging from all the negative feedback still wasn’t granular enough.  Sheesh.  Plus, I added three new sections in the “photo album” section, which should count for something.

Saturday we got up bright and early and headed up to Mom’s for our second Christmas celebration.  All the little ‘uns had a great time opening all their presents up.  They all seemed quite overjoyed by the whole situation, most likely because they didn’t have to drive.  Ahhhh, youth.  After the present-opening, we enjoyed an awesome meal; honey-baked ham, scalloped potatoes, green beans, and assorted other goodies.  This all went on well into the afternoon, and left me quite exhausted.  We went home and rested up a bit, then I met Todd down at the Brooksider for dinner and that boring NFL game.  For whatever reason, this was the last time Todd would be seen or heard from for the remainder of the weekend.  We are semi-concerned for his well-being;  He won’t even respond to text messages.  If you have any information on the whereabouts of Todd, please call our hotline at 1-800-findttr.  There is a $25 reward offered for information leading to his safe return, or callers can remain anonymous.

Sunday was declared “Farewell to Ed and Kim” day.  We met up with them up at the Brooksider to watch the football games, marking the last time they would ever, ever set foot there.  OK perhaps not, but for a while anyway.  As I’m sure everyone is aware, it was quite an exciting day of football.  Ed’s Bengals lost, throwing him into a 30 second funk, but it was all part of the grand scheme that would eventually culminate in the Chiefs going to the playoffs, so nobody felt bad for him.  After the 49ers/Broncos game, Ed and Kim joined us across the street at Carmens for our New Years Eve dinner.  We had a great meal, and then headed back to our house and played cards for the rest of the evening.  Not an overly wacky New Year celebration, but thankfully they saved us from just sitting at home and doing nothing.  It was our wedding anniversary too, so we’re rather obligated to do SOMETHING on the holiday.  Yep, it marked 16 years, in case you didn’t know.

Yesterday doesn’t even warrant a mention.  I don’t know if it was the relatively late night we had Sunday, or the cold I’m battling or what, but I never even managed to get dressed.  Just laid on the couch all day and watched the bowl games with the dogs.  I guess that’s what you’re supposed to do on New Years Day.  It suited me just fine, so whatever.  I rode my super-duper scooter in to work today; that went relatively well.  My buddy Wally up at the coffee shop, who is a rather avid motorcyclist, recommended only riding if it’s over 35 degrees.  After today’s 26-degree jaunt, I might just tend to agree with that.  I’m sure the feeling will return to my fingers some time today.

We’re inching ever closer to the end of the holiday season.  My sanity remains intact thus far, or at least as much as it was before the holidays.  One pseudo-Christmas and the New Year remaining, and then I can get back to the predictable drudgery of my normal schedule.

Friday was a generally unremarkable beginning to the long weekend.  We were let out of work early, and I spent the rest of the afternoon running errands;  Out to Microcenter to do a little last-minute shopping, swung by the Scooter shop to see if my helmet was in, (which it wasn’t… One of my co-workers had the rather innovative idea to paint my head with shoe polish in the meantime,) and dropped my car at the shop to get inspected.  After all that was done, I spent the rest of the evening putting together my new PC, which was my Christmas present from me.  It came together very nicely, if not exactly as planned.  For those who care, which I would imagine are very very few, I shall detail the specs of this super-duper new machine.  After much shopping, research, and gnashing of teeth, I decided on an Abit KN9 Ultra motherboard.  I’m sure most of you have already moved to the next paragraph so I won’t waste keystrokes on how and why I finally came to that arduous decision.  The rest of the components were a bit easier to select;  most were picked by the all-important “on sale” criterion.  For storage, it has two 320 gig SATA-II Seagate drives, plus an extra 80 gig SATA-I generously donated by Martin for some backup space.  For the rest, I went with an AMD 2 GHz dual-core processor, 2 gig of DDR2 RAM, a 512 MB Geforce 7600GS video card, and two 18x DVD burners.  All of this almost comical overkill is housed in a very nice Antec P180B case with a 500 watt Ultra power suppy.  I added a few other niceties also, like a built-in memory card reader and a CPU fan that rivals our home central air unit in both size and cooling capacity.  If I wake up tomorrow and decide I want to be a serious gamer or maybe a graphic designer, I’ll be ready to go in the PC department.  Until then, I will be the proud owner of a machine capable of the fastest game of solitaire in the neighborhood.  The only “glitches” encountered in the project were the hard-drive setup and the Linux install.  I had intended to set up the two 320’s in a raid 0 array, mostly because I like saying “raid array.”  It was acting a bit odd in that setup though, so I scrapped that part.  I had also originally planned to put a Linux install on the 80 gig drive, and dual-boot it with Windows, which would let me get rid of my Linux box that sits in the basement.  This turned into a several-hour debacle and a non-booting PC though, so I ended up giving up on that too.

If you managed to power through that stretch of tedium, that brings us to Saturday.  Most of the day was spent restoring stuff to the new PC, and tweaking it for optimal performance.  Which is to say, jacking it all up and then trying to get it back to working order.  Sigh.  After a generally wasted day, we crossed the river and hit the Martin’s Christmas party.  It was… Loud.  I have known quieter evenings at the Brooksider.  Oh well, all in the name of festivity.  I did enjoy lots of good food, including some almost-award-winning pork and a passable effort at a brisket.  I slunk off a bit early in the evening, leaving Donette to fend for herself in the gift exchange.

Sunday I woke up nice and early and threw a brisket on the smoker, in preparation for the Christmas dinner.  That was a pretty effective day-killer;  Cold-weather smoking takes a bit more attention I guess.  It ended up taking 12 hours, so not much else was accomplished during the day.  We had the grand idea to watch a few Christmas classics for evening entertainment, but were quickly reminded that they suck, so we went to bed.

Monday we got up bright and early and dug into all our gifts.  I got a new PC, some new kitchen knives, and a new shirt!!!  The surprise was somewhat tempered by the fact that I’d purchased all this for myself in the previous weeks, but it was exciting all the same.  (Santa did leave me some goodies in my stocking, but I can’t go into that for fear of having to share.)  The puppies got stockings full of toys, which they promptly destroyed, and Kane got a snoot full of catnip.  Donette got everything she wished for too, which was yet another year of marital bliss and a steam cleaner.  Score!!  Later in the afternoon we headed north (again…) for Christmas with Donette’s family.  After quite a large gift exchange we enjoyed an awesome BBQ dinner; Ribs, beef, and pork with all the sides.  Perhaps not exactly the traditional holiday fare, but I’ll take some ‘que any day.  My second overloaded plate was my undoing… I was thoroughly uncomfortable for the rest of the day, if in a contented kind of way.  I wound down the holiday down at the Brooksider, watching the football game.  Unfortunately, the sole Miami touchdown proved to be the undoing of my Fantasy Football season.  Although my team was on an 8-game winning streak, and favored by a whopping 28 points to win it all, every one of my players managed to pick this week to go on an uncharacteristic touchdown drought.  Arrrgghhhh!!!  Oh well, second place still pays better than last, I guess.