I guess the holiday season is here again, and there’s not a dang thing I can do about it.  Suffer through it and wait for Spring.  We are doing Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year, which promises to be an adventure.  Not sure what we’re going to do with all the beasties while we try to eat though;  that has me a bit concerned.  I can already envision the cat jumping up on the table and helping himself to some gravy, and the dogs drooling all over everyone’s feet.  Sigh.  I am planning to grill the turkey on a Weber, and that should be an interesting feat in itself.  The directions on the website sound deceptively simple… color me skeptical.  I put the odds on food poisoning at about 50%.  (Don’t worry though, there is a good chinese place down the street that I’ve got lined up for a backup plan.)

Not a bad weekend overall.  Friday we met all the young ‘uns (and Todd) down at George Brett’s on the Plaza for some appetizers.  After dinner they all went to a movie, while the old folks bailed for home.  I spent the rest of the evening tweaking my new home firewall policy, as I felt I hadn’t spent quite enough time working on firewalls all week.  Good grief I am a friggin’ LOSER!!!  I now have a dedicated PC in the basement running Fedora FC5 that does nothing but manage the firewall, because I’m too cheap to spend the $50 on the Windows version.  Rather sad and ridiculous now that I think about it.  (It’s a pretty darn cool firewall though, I must admit…)

Saturday we spent the majority of the day at Nebraska Furniture Mart.  Oh, the horror.  We had planned on going, but I wasn’t aware they were doing some kind of pre-Thanksgiving sale.  It was nightmarish to be sure.  As soon as we saw the line to get in the parking lot we bailed out for lunch to gather our wits.  We had a very tasty lunch at the Yard House to soothe our nerves a bit, then dove into the fray.  Our main goal was a surround sound system for the TV room downstairs.  We had our sights set on a Sony system because it was the only one I’d seen with a good wireless option for the rear speakers.  I don’t really like Sony stuff though, for no particular reason, so I wasn’t overly excited about it.  We ended up with a Samsung system instead, which looks pretty nice.  Unfortunately I can’t hook it up because I don’t have the evil HDMI cable yet.  NFM wanted $99 for a 3′ cable; I found a 6′ one on mwave for 9 bucks but I have to wait for them to ship it of course.  Now, granted it doesn’t have a lifetime warranty like the $99 one, so if it mysteriously goes bad I can replace it nine more times.  After that purchase, me made the poor decision to stroll upstairs and look at bedroom sets.  Three hours and a credit-limit-extension later, we left with a new set up for our bedroom.  I’m actually pretty pumped about it… we finally will be getting the king-size bed we’ve wanted for fifteen years.  Not to mention, an actual dresser to put our clothes in, so we don’t have to just stack them on the spare bed anymore.  Odd things make me happy in my old age.  All that shopping wore us out, so we went home and rested a bit, then headed up north with Ed and Kim to have dinner at Ronda’s house.  (Donette’s sister.)  She fixed a grilled chicken dinner that would have fed at least 15 people.  Not wanting to waste any of it, I ate enough for about 7 people and then we hung out and watched college football for the rest of the evening.

Sunday was the same ol’ same ol’.  I guess Donette did have to run back out NFM and pick up our stereo, but I graciously declined that trip.  It turned out to be a bad decision on my part, as I ended up spending a few hours cleaning up a little accident that Gabe had, involving about half of the first floor of our house.  I’m sure everyone would get much joy from the sordid details, but I’m still a little queasy about the whole situation and don’t think I’m quite ready to talk about it yet.  Shudder.  Just take my word for it;  the time he puked in the TV room pales in comparison.  After that, I headed down to the Brooksider to watch the football games and let the house air out a bit.  I’m trying not to get overly pumped and jinx myself, but my Fantasy Football team is just kicking butt.  I would not be surprised if I end up with more in high-score payouts than whoever wins the first place gets.  I’ll get another notch this week unless some kicker tonight makes like 10 field goals over 40 yards… things are looking good at this point.

Man that game stunk.  Actually it wasn’t that bad of a game…  but KC lost, which in my limited scope of football analysis means “it stunk.”  Unfortunately my despair over the defeat seems to  have carried over into today, rendering me unable to post a good, solid update.  Or it could just be a basic lack of interest.

We actually had a pretty busy weekend.  I had the day off on Friday, so I trekked out south and visited Mom for the afternoon.  Had a good lunch in lovely uptown Peculiar at their swanky new coffee shop and checked out all the pictures from her recent cruise.  After all that driving I had to nap for a while, and then we headed down for a few hours at the Brooksider.   Remarkable, but true.  After chatting with everyone for a while, I drove Donette and Susan down to some restaurant down on Southwest Blvd for their “girl’s night.”  The name of the restaurant escapes me now, but since I wasn’t there I don’t guess it’s that important anyway.  I know they had “tapas” for dinner, which for some reason rates one as of my top ten annoying words.  Try to remember that should you ever get the urge to ask me out for “tapas.”  Maybe that works in Johnson County, where people think using an annoying word will actually make the food taste better.  I can do without “tapas,” or “little plates” or any other trendy term.  “Appetizers” will suit me just fine.

Saturday I spent the greater part of the afternoon working on a friend’s PC.  Wow… virus-ridden mess.  Never did get his email working but at least it quit randomly dialing 900 #’s, which is a good thing.   For our evening entertainment we went to a “garage party” at a friend’s house.  This guy does a show on a local radio station, The Blues Kitchen, so he was able to hook up some awesome blues talent for the party.  Add to that some good barbecue and a solid crowd, and it made for quite a party.  The Martins came out with us, and we actually stayed for like 5 hours, which is at least 3 good hours past my usual attention span.  There was some good “people watching” entertainment to be had also… I can’t even begin to explain some of the characters, so I won’t bother trying.  Words wouldn’t do justice; definitely required a camera.

Sunday… well, you know, football and television.  Since my fantasy football outlook has improved considerably as of late, I find myself actually half-interested in a lot of the games.  I went down to the ‘Sider and watched the noon games with the usual crowd, and then headed home and watched the 3:00’s on my couch with my laptop.  After all that lethargy, the Martins came over again (they just can’t stay out of Midtown) and we went to Susan’s for a tasty shrimp dinner.  Her and John stir-fried a bunch of shrimp in some scallions, garlic, and a rather prodigious dose of chili-garlic paste.  Quite tasty, in a my-mouth-is-on-fire kind of way.  Nothing a big bowl of vanilla ice cream didn’t fix up.

I was oncall again this weekend, so that consumed the vast majority of my time.  Either working, or sitting there waiting for the inevitable work to come.  Not as fun as last weekend.  I did get down to the Brooksider on Friday and see everybody.  That kind of sums up my entertainment for the weekend though…

Saturday I spent most of the day putting up a new garage door opener.  Our old one just up ‘n quit working last week.  That is probably a two hour job for most homeowners, but it took me the majority of the day.  And, while I was as it, I couldn’t help but notice that our garage door is (literally) falling apart.  I guess I never really had a reason to look at it.  So, the garage-door-dude is coming tonight.  Sigh.  After that project, Donette took off for a night out with the girls.  They ate, and shopped, and then went to some hotel down on the Plaza that they had price-lined.  Who knows what kind of treachery went on from that point;  I didn’t ask.  Meanwhile, in something of departure from my usual form of entertainment, I trotted up the street to a party at a neighbor’s house.  These people (I’d never met them) went around and dropped an invitation in everybody’s mailbox to come over for an open house.  How downright gregarious of them.  I was not so much interested in seeing the house (although they did do a very nice job on it I must say) as meeting people who would do such an odd thing as inviting over a bunch of strangers.  As it turns out, He (whose name I’ve since forgotten…) was a pretty nice guy; generally normal.  I never got a chance to meet Her.  Anyway, I hung around for several hours and chatted with everybody, and had just a real fine time.  Actually, when I looked at my watch on the way home, it had been just under twenty minutes;  But it SEEMED like several hours.

Sunday was relatively uneventful.  Donette got a new ipod last week… the super-duper new 80 gig model.  No lie; 80 gig.  That’s as much as our computer.  Wacky.  Anyway, I took possession of her little four gig hand-me-down, and spent the better part of the morning building my playlists and stuff.  I find that iTunes stuff very non-user-friendly for some reason.  I got it loaded up pretty well though.  Unfortunately, as I start listening to it, I am finding my playlist needs a little fine-tuning.  I just kind of went through our music library and added every song I liked.  The unfortunate result of this method is that one minute you will be listening to Frank Sinatra, then Staind, then an 80’s tune, then the KC Symphony… you get the idea.  It was kind of humorous actually, but there’s also about a 85% chance of severe schizophrenia setting in after a while.  After that, I cooked up a big pot of gumbo and watched football all afternoon.  Pretty tolerable day.  All the stars aligned in my Fantasy Football league and I was vaulted from third to first place;  Not too shabby.  First in my division anyway… which is luckily a rather weak division.

This weekend we went back to the “run all over the place” mentality.  We started off on Friday with a going away for one of Donette’s co-workers down at the ‘Sider.  I didn’t stay too long though…  They had a band starting at 9:00-ish so I feigned interest in the World Series game and went home.  Donette stayed until some ridiculous hour though… I don’t really know when she got home but it was well after I turned in.

Saturday was a veritable smorgasbord of events.  I warmed up for the day by going down to the Brooksider and watching the MU game with everybody.  This is the second of their games that I have watched this season, both of which resulted in their only two losses.  I think I’m a jinx or something.  After the game we headed over to Ann and Mark’s for a fish fry.  Our buddy Ritchie catches all these fish and then occasionally throw a big fish fry, which I am a big fan of.  I had hush puppy duty again, like the last time, and again they didn’t come out too hot.  Man, I don’t remember hush puppies being that hard to make back in my Caption D’s fry-cook days.  Must take practice or something.  After the fish fry, we headed back home and then went to a costume party at one of our neighbors.  It was a good time… It probably would have been even more enjoyable if A) I liked costume parties, and B) I liked talking to strangers.  Oh well, it was fun anyway.

Sunday we had tickets to the Chiefs game, so we started off the day with a tailgate party.  We went a little more “upscale” than usual… ribs, chicken, green rice casserole, assorted chips and dip, and of course Munkir’s specialty cookies for dessert.  As far as the game, it provided plenty of entertainment and the weather was close to perfect.  I don’t think it could be much better on a late October game.  All good stuff:  Good tailgate, Chief’s victory, and good weather.  After that we bolted back home, pretty well exhausted.  Todd came over and watched some re-runs of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” but I was having a hard time keeping my eyes open.  I struggled through the first half of the Cowboys/Panthers game, and called it a weekend.

Since my little mid-week post below this one, I have changed servers yet again!!  (Control your excitement, please.)  This could actually be the final iteration of my little project.  Once again, still a little Linksys box, but now it is running on a small flash drive instead of an external hard drive.  Takes less electricity, hopefully more reliable, and much quieter.  I was so excited I even took a picture of it.  That is the whole thing in the picture… no keyboard or mouse, no monitor, it’s the whole shootin’ match.  That little box is running this site, http://www.kingwoodtrophies.com, and the message board for the BBQ Team.  Nifty!!  And, while I was messing around with it, I also posted some more pictures for your browsing enjoyment.  We have a (huge) photo album of the American Royal, and a few pictures from this last eventful weekend.

My latest super-duper web server is up and running.  This mid-week post really serves as nothing more than a test to make sure this part is working OK.  The new server, on the off chance that you are interested, is pretty much the same as the old one;  A Linksys NSLU2 running Unslung, attached to an external 80 gig hard drive.  It is not, however, running all the extra crap like the old one… no streaming music, no time server, and several other little “experiments” that I don’t really use anyway.  It isn’t “overclocked” like my other one either, which seems to make this page load just a bit slower.  For reasons even less entertaining than the rest of this post, I don’t want to do that part just yet.