Seriously, that was not a weekend you want to hear about.  It was my much-dreaded oncall weekend, so I spent the vast majority of my time huddled in a dark room in front of the glow of an LCD monitor.  And it ain’t over yet, I’ve got the entire week looming in front of me like a dark cloud.

The little entertainment I did have this weekend was “Grease” at Starlight.  It pretty much sucked, and was made even worse by the constant buzz of my stupid pager.  (Well, that and the 95 degree heat.)  We bailed at intermission.

Last night we went over to Susan’s house to watch a couple of back episodes of Entourage.  The spaghetti dinner was great, the TV marginal.  The excitement for the evening was watching Gabe tackle his new chew treat, which was rated on the package as lasting “UP TO ONE HOUR!!!”  He took this as the challenge it was, and gnawed through it in a remarkable 20 minutes.  (Material in the “excitement” category is woefully slim this week.)

That’s it.  That’s all I got.  Heckle me in the forum, I don’t care.  My life is already miserable, how much worse can it get.  Sigh.  Sigh.

I’m toning down the title of this weeks posting.  I do not want to inadvertently trigger another emotionally charged maelstrom like last week.  Wow, twelve postings in the comments section;  A new record.

We started the weekend strong on Friday by going to the O.A.R. show down at the City Market.  Ed got us listening to this group when he moved to KC;  We’re not hooked quite to the point he is (borderline stalker… they mentioned him by name if that’s any indicator for you,) but it’s good music for sure.  Martins came down too, so there were a total of 4 people at the concert over the age of 27.  OK that’s an exaggeration, we saw at least 2 other people that may have been as old as us.  We didn’t ask them though for fear of finding out otherwise.  Despite the fact that we were old enough to have been biological parents to 95% of the attendees, it was an awesome show.  Anybody that pulls off a concert that good at the freakin’ City Market puts on one heck of a performance in my book.

Saturday was kind of slow;  Most of the day I sat inside playing with my computer thinking what a great day I was wasting.  It happens.  All too often, as a matter of fact.  I did head over to Ed’s house around noon, and we fired up his new bullet smoker.  No small event;  Ed’s inaugural foray into the world of KC smoking.  He made a wise first choice;  two beer-can chickens.  Hard to go wrong there.  (OK, actually one was a beer-can and one was a Pepsi-can.)  We loaded up with coals and a mix of apple and mesquite wood, and left the smoker to do it’s thing.  Can’t beat those bullet smokers;  they pretty much take care of themselves.  We all met back up at their house around 5:30 to find the birds all cooked up and ready to eat.  Several other people came over too and we enjoyed some hen, cornhole, and jovial banter.  Todd invited the Woodside Racquet Club over too, so we even got to meet lots of great new people, awesome!!

Sunday we drove up to Smithville and hit the lake with the Martins.  NICE FREAKING DAY FOR ONCE!!!  Not too hot, not too cold, not too windy, not too crowded, pretty much perfect.  We bobbed around in the lake for about 5 hours, enjoying the rare weather, then scurried back south.  Had a good dinner at Jalepenos, then hunkered down inside the TV room to wind down watching some Entourage.

We had a lot busier and ejoyable weekend than that lame summary would indicate.  You’ll just have to trust me on that.  Monday is a rough day to try and conjure up an engaging repartee.  But, as it generally directly follows the weekend, what else can you do?

Crap, that was not a fun weekend. Friday was OK;  We went to see Dr. Doolittle at Starlight with the Martins.  We upgraded our seats to the third row so we’d get the A/C coming off the stage, which was key to our enjoyment of the show. I’d like to be up there for every show, but the cost of the tickets is a bit prohibitive.  The pre-show dinner was good too;  Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy.  Right up our alley.

Saturday, I spent the entire day working with the neighbor to clean up the aftermath of our new driveway install.  We waited until it got good and miserable out, and then laid sod on both sides of the drive, and started replacing his retaining wall that got torn out.  Wow, I am not in good health.  There is not a single part of my body that isn’t in moderate to extreme pain, and a few that are barely functional at all.  The worst part was, we didn’t even get very far on the wall.  We spent the better part of the day working on it anyway, because it’s gotta get done one way or another.  We gave it up around 8:00, and Donette and I went down to the Brooksider for a little dinner.  It was an early night though, we didn’t stay long.

Sunday I spent the entire morning hobbling over to the window to see if the neighbor had started working again.  Luckily (for me anyway) he got paged and had to go into work all afternoon.  I took advantage of the break by going and getting a pork butt and practicing a little ‘queing.  That pretty well killed the day, messing with the smoker and watching TV.  Remarkably, I had trouble keeping the smoker hot enough.  The dang thing was 125 degrees before I ever even lit it, and then I could only get it up to about 175.  Needed a bit more charcoal I guess, the wood just wasn’t burning hot enough.  It got done, but not to the “shredding” stage;  I’ll throw it in a slow cooker to finish it up this week.  That pretty much wraps up the weekend.  Ed and Kim and Todd came over and ate some pork sandwiches and watched Entourage, and then I shuffled off to bed to try and sleep off the pain.  It didn’t work, I am still suffering mightily.

I suppose I survived my first Pigfest, albeit in a somewhat degraded state.  I feel like I’ve been beat with a stick for two days straight.  Dang kids.

Donette and I flew down Friday morning, joined by Kelly Martin.  Kelly was so bouyed by her second-place finish in the cornhole tourney at our house that she decided to take her game out-of-state.  That night we hooked up with Ed and Kim and a bunch of their friends at the “biergarten.”  They had a nice outdoor deck, complete with cornhole boards naturally.  We hung out there relatively late, but when the young ‘uns headed off to catch “a show” we decided it was time to bail back to the hotel.  Incidentally, the hotel worked out well for us.  We stayed at the Millennium downtown, which Ed knew from experience was rather easy to get on priceline.  So we gave it a shot and got rooms for $35; the best rate I can find on their site is $120.  Ding ding.

Saturday was the Pigfest and as Ed mentions on his site, the events of the day don’t really translate well into text.  We ate some great food, played hours on hours of cornhole and whiffleball, with a little volleyball mixed in for good measure.  There was some excellent music too, provided by Mer out of Chicago.  The music was going over well and everyone was having a great time, but things got cut short some time after midnight with a rather unfortunate incident involving six squad cars, enough officers to turn back a small riot, and some very unfriendly members of the canine squad.  The good news is that Ed was allowed to leave the state and come back to KC, provided he sticks to the somewhat restrictive terms given and keeps his leg monitor on at all times.  With any luck it will all be cleared up in time for him to get next years fest set up.  To support the effort, we will be setting up an online donation site at http://Free_Ed_&_Mer.com;  donate lots and often.

Sunday was spent travelling back to KC.  Kelly treated us to a 3-way at Skyline Chili, and then we headed home.  Chuckle chuckle.  Man that is some “different” chili.  That’s all I’m gonna say.

Dang, I shouldn’t have made that rash promise about a big holiday weekend synopsis.  I got nothing.  Or, more accurately, I am too beat to retell it.  Something like that.  It was “almost” a four day weekend, marred only by a half day of work Monday and a few little oncall interruptions.  We started strong on Friday with a little get-together at our house.  It was too hot to go anywhere else, so we just invited people over.  We threw together some chicken taco fixins, broke out the beanbag boards, and had a little mini-tournament in the back yard.  I don’t know if anyone else enjoyed it, but the most important thing is that I had fun.  Being a rather short-notice event though, I didn’t have time to think up a good prize for the winning team.  But, since that team was Chris and I, I’ll come up with something nice.  I put some photos of the event up already… rather timely posting for me.

Saturday started off bright and early with the last of Gabe’s agility classes.  There is actually one more to go, but we’ll be out of town next weekend so we have to skip that one.  These classes were a lot more fun than the obediance classes;  I plan on signing up for it again this fall.  He won a medal too, which he was very proud of!!!  OK, everybody got a medal, but Gabe’s was the biggest.  After nearly sweating to death during class, we headed over to Mom’s for a bit, then bolted back home to hide in the A/C for a while.  Larry and Sharon were in town, so they stopped by and visited with the little-un’s.  I even got pictures of the agility class and the kids up already too!!  Man, I’m on a roll.  (While these were distinctly separate events, I didn’t feel like breaking up the pictures.)  Saturday night’s entertainment was the opening of the Starlight season.  We have season tickets with the Martins again, so we met up with them and sweated through a fine performance of Riverdance.  While I take some enjoyment from exaggerating my suffering through these tedious events, I have to admit this one was pretty dang good.  Next time we have a party Chris and I are going to have a dance-off to see if we learned anything;  Bring your favorite clogging shoes and come on over.  In addition to the good show, they served all-you-can eat Jack Stack ribs for dinner, which was awesome.  They had some beans and corn and some other stuff too… whatever.  They just set that junk out as filler for the rookies I guess;  Just ribs and pickles for me.

Sunday we headed up North (gasp!!) with Ed and Kim for a day on the Martin’s boat.  That was pretty much a day-long event, and I’m not sure how much I can really write about sitting on an inflatable chair and floating around all day.  Very relaxing though, I can tell you that.  After a few hours of aimless rafting, the KB clan showed up too, so we barged up with them and floated some more.  Not a really productive afternoon, per se, but then that wasn’t the goal.  Unfortunately I managed to sunburn my backs, dang it.  Quite uncomfortable.  After spending the entire day on the floatilla, we all went to Rancho Grande for a little dinner to wrap things up.  We had an excellent dinner (at least I did) but then, in the only snafu of the day, came out to find a flat tire on Donette’s car.  Luckily Chris “Pit Crew” Martin had that fixed up in an amazing 3.75 minutes, and we were on the road back to the safety of the southlands.

Monday was a work day for me, dang it.  Had to go to work, and I was oncall.  I picked the holiday to be oncall on purpose, thinking nothing would be going on, but it didn’t work out that way.  Never does.  It wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t that good either.  We did have a little fiesta that night over at Susan’s house.  Lots of good food, and she bought some fireworks too so I got to have my 4th of July fix.  Unfortunately all the explosives fell into the “safety” category, but that doesn’t really matter to me so much anymore.  My needs are simple; I just wanna light a couple of fuses.  There was one large explosion involved, but details on that one must be withheld to protect the not-so-innocent.

Tuesday we didn’t have anything planned, and consequently did absolutely nothing.  We slept in, then hit Sharp’s for a late breakfast.  After that, I can’t thing of a single thing we did.  I worked on putting all those pictures up, and a few other unnoticable website changes, and that took up most of the afternoon.  I did make one little aethethic change and made the links black instead of blue like the rest of the text.  I don’t really like that look, but I was getting some feedback that people couldn’t see the links.  So, always on a quest to please, I went with a nice basic black.  I’ll probably change it again some day when I’m feeling a bit more creative.  (I’ve never had one of those days to date, but you never know.)  After wasting the entire holiday in this fashion, we went over to Ed and Kim’s house to work on a few projects.  Donette helped Kim with some painting, while Ed and I ran a new cable drop to his office for his cable modem.  We only drilled one extra hole in his wall;  Not too bad.  True, it is a really BIG hole, but it coulda been worse.  After we finished that stuff, they grilled up some chicken kabobs and we sat around on their porch enjoying the veritable war-zone of fireworks all around them.  Man, no respect for the law down on the Plaza.