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.

Wow that was a decent weekend.  I never have a weekend that rates “great” anymore, so decent is pretty good.  No running around all over the place, minimal phone calls, intermittent entertainment… just overall relaxing.  I had the day off Friday, which is a solid start to any weekend.  Since the weather was so nice, I took the pups to the Bark Park and let them run themselves silly all afternoon.  It was a work day, so I figured nobody else would be there, and that theory was dead on.  We had the entire place to ourselves.  Later in the evening we headed a bit south to attend yet another in the recent string of 40th birthday parties, for one Carl “Chuck Rotten” Scotten.  It was a well-attended event, and turned into the usual reminisce-a-thon.  Todd was notably absent however; he decided to go to a “tennis mixer” at the gym instead, continuing on his current run of questionable decision making.

Saturday we started the day with a visit from the Dog Guy.  It was sort of a waste of time really.  All I wanted to work on this week was leash-walking, and it was pouring rain out.  We really didn’t work on too much else… she is doing pretty well on her sit/stay stuff, but isn’t quite ready for any more advanced stuff until we can get her to walk a lot better on the leash.  After that was over, we cleaned house for a while.  Donette’s parents have been helping us keep the place clean, but they’ve headed off to Texas for their winter hibernation so we’re on our own for a while.  (Something tells me the odds of finding a cleaning person that doesn’t mind two Pitbulls running around the house is pretty remote, although I guess we haven’t really tried.)  That depressing round of chores took a few hours, and then we started cooking for some odd reason.  Apparently inspired by her recent trip to Albuquerque, Donette was on some kind of mission to make stacked enchiladas.  We decided on a recipe and went at it, boiling up some chicken, roasting chiles, chopping up the “stuff,” and making a few side dishes to go with them.  Oddly, I think my favorite part was baking them on dinner plates in the oven.  Don’t ask me why… I’ve just always liked hot dinner plates.  Weird, I realize.  Anyway, the Martins came over and joined us for the taste test.  They came out OK;  At no point did I close my eyes and feel like I was actually at El Pinto eating though.  Not bad for a first try.  After dinner we threw some 10 point pitch with the Martins, and the evening saw the men return to their standard dominating card form.  I can’t remember the exact numbers but I think the second game was 40 – 0.  Something like that.

Sunday was good ol’ football day.  Not much more to say there.  We also made a second run at the stacked enchiladas, with all the leftovers from the night before.  The Sunday recipe turned out much more favorably than the Saturday one;  Sorry Martins, you got shafted.  It was a pretty solid effort, plus I got to bake on dinner plates again;  Two times in as many days.  Ahhhhh, life in the fast lane.  Not much after that.  It was too muddy to take the dogs anywhere, so we curled up and watched the games, baseball and all.  While nothing is ever certain, I think my Fantasy Football team is even going to win this week… Will miracles never cease.

Yes my update is 1.5 days late.  I started on one last night, and quickly came to the startling realization that nothing exciting had happened to me.  And, believe it or not, the last 24 hours has not changed that fact.  I was oncall all weekend, and will be for the remainder of this week.  Kind of limited my entertainment options, as well as my mobility range.  Prevailing wisdom is that if you go over 15 minutes from the nearest Internet access, you WILL get paged.  It’s a known fact.

Seriously, I didn’t do anything last weekend.  Basked in the glow of a 14″ LCD laptop screen and kept an eye on things.  Meanwhile, Donette was in Albuquerque with some friends for the hot air balloon festival.  What a scam.  Somebody has to stay home and watch the dogs I guess.  In my sole effort at social interaction for the weekend, Todd came over and visited Sunday night.  He claimed to be worried about my mental health;  Something about the post-traumatic stress of my less-than-favorable performance at the American Royal.  He brought over a few good stogies and we sat on the back porch in the rain and listened to Johnny Cash.  Not exactly a real pick-me-up, but well intentioned I’m sure.

Today I got a new toy, so I can throw that in the mix too.  One of the benefits of a late update, see?  One of my co-workers hooked me up with a 32″ LCD TV, so we finally have a replacement for the 300 lb. boat anchor up in the “office.”  AND it has a “PC monitor” mode, so I ran a 8′ VGA cable across the floor and I am currently typing this in 32″ widescreen mode.  I am so cool I can hardly stand it sometimes.