Holiday weekends are a good thing.  I’m shooting for “thorough but brief” this week, because it’s nice out, I have the day off, and I feel like I’m missing out.

Friday the Martins came down and we went to dinner and played some cards.  Dinner was at Jalapenos, cards were on our back porch.  The boys’ winning streak continued at the card table; I believe the count is now 4,659 victories.

Saturday was had a bit of a twist to it…  A guy we met a few weeks back has to get rid of his little female Pitbull due to the recent onslaught of bans, so we agreed to keep her for the weekend and see how she and Gabe did together.  The jury is definitely still out on this little experiment.  Lets just say they aren’t best of buddies yet.  When they are playing everything is good, but when somebody steps in the other’s space, or takes a toy away… not so good.  We’ll see how it goes.  Here is a picture of Belle, and one of her and Gabe during a “good” moment.  Non-related but still of interest, I caught the Scotten family rolling through the ‘hood in their minivan.  While they quickly threw out a cover-story about going to the zoo, it was apparent that they were on a house-hunting trip in an effort to “bring back the magic.”  More to come on that hot story, I’m sure.

Sunday was a solid day, as days go.  I definitely felt I maximized its potential.  In order to make sure I didn’t miss one good minute of weekend, I rolled out of bed at the unholy hour of 2:30.  I’m not sure why… I wasn’t sleeping anyway and it just seemed like the thing to do.  Maybe it had something to do with the 140 pounds of canine quarrelling next to the bed every 15 minutes, I dunno.  Anyway, I was planning to fire up the smoker anyway, so I went ahead and lit ‘er up and threw on a brisket.  Then I watched a few horrible movies on HBO, drank a pot of coffee, and waited for Donette to wake up.  When she finally got up, we headed up north to her parent’s house and had a fine breakfast of biscuits and gravy and more coffee.  I felt a little better about the whole two-dog-household idea after a visit up there:  They were kind of hard to count but I’m sure I tallied four dogs and at least two cats.  A veritable menagerie to be sure.  We didn’t stay too long because I was fretting about my smoker going out, so we rolled back home around 11:00.  The rest of the day was spent poking the fire and watching brisket cook.  Hard to go wrong there.  Martins came over and threw some ribs on, and their neighbor Dave stopped by to check out his old ‘hood (seems like the thing to do this weekend) and eat a little grub.  The brisket came out crappy by the way.  Very dissappointing.  My new recipe was a complete failure.  Back to the drawing board on that one.  After dinner the girls demo’d a few more dessert entries, and I called it the end to a very long day.

We have returned from our weekend at Tablerock with the Martins, slightly worse for the wear.  But more on that later.

Martin and I headed out for Tablerock on Thursday afternoon, with the S.S. Schmartin in tow.  With a full tank of gas in the boat, we averaged roughly 45 MPH all the way to Branson;  Munkirs would have been proud.  We arrived to find the cabin we rented would provide more than adequate accommodations, and settled in to smoke a cigar and wait for the girls.  They arrived shortly thereafter, and that pretty much wrapped up Thursday.  Long drives wear me out.

Friday started out kind of rough.  We weren’t getting a lot of weather cooperation.  It was freaking pouring, so the girls bailed out for the outlet malls.  Martin and I settled in to smoke a cigar and wait for them to return.  Sort of a trend there.  After a while the rain burned off and the chicks ran out of money,  so we hooked up the boat and headed for the lake.  We got in a good two hours of boating;  Kind of checked out the lay of the lake, swam around a bit, and enjoyed the sun.  Around 7:00 Martin had to head back in to take a conference call though;  One of the penalties of being an extremely important resource at his job.  While he feigned responsibility, the girls and I grilled up some fajitas, and then they cooked a few more “practice desserts” in preparaton for the American Royal.  I was “for” the grilled peaches with fancy cheese topping, and “against” the other dish.  I was so offended by it I can’t even really remember what it was.  I do remember it had “cardamom” in it, which I can assure you is the single worst-tasting thing that anyone has ever intentionally put in a recipe.  I almost called 911, as initially I was certain that Donette had finally fed me a rat-poisen cocktail, which is something of an ongoing concern at our house.  I smoked two more cigars and ate the leaves off a nearby tree to get the taste out of my mouth, and went to bed.

Saturday started off strong.  We laid down a base of Martin’s semi-famous breakfast casserole at the crack of 11:00, and then got the boat out on the water to enjoy what turned out to be a fine, sunny day.  Things were good until we tried to throw physical exertion into the mix.  We broke out the tube and drug Kelly and Donette around for a while, which went all well and good.  Then I had the bright idea to take a turn on the devil-donut on our way back to the dock.  It was fun, sure, but inevitably I crashed and felt a solid “pop” in my arm.  It rated an “uncomfortable” on the pain scale initially.  After I got back in the boat and felt the nice smooth slope where my shoulder previously was, the nausea and extreme pain set in.  By the time we got back to the dock, my head was spinning around and I was uttering vulgarities I didn’t even know were in my vocabulary.  Donette summoned a nice Ranger over, but all he did was give me a sling, despite my insistance I needed a quick round through the skull.  Donette ended up having to drive me to the emergency room, where they confirmed a dislocated shoulder.  I was still cursing like a demented sailer, begging for a sharp rap on the head, or a teaspoon of cardamom, or anything to take my mind off the shoulder.  I don’t think the poor doctor knew whether to give me anesthesia or an exorcism.  Eventually he opted for putting me under and snapping everything back in place.

That’s all the tale I am going to relate.  Things are still quite sore and I am deathly afraid of this thing popping out again.  It was pretty much a weekend-stopper at any rate;  What a drag.  If it weren’t for bad luck…

I am sorry to report that, due to a bad wing, I am currently unable to type at my full rated speed of 100 WPM, thus making a timely entry of the weekly update impractical.  I’ll get ‘er in tonight when I’m able to hunt-peck at my leisure.

Not a whole lot happened last weekend, which was just fine by me.  Friday I met up with Todd, Martin, and KB down at the Brooksider to celebrate the double-digit temperature.  It was warm, sure, but not TOO warm.  Tolerable.  I only stayed until 6:00 or so though;  It was my oncall weekend again so I needed my rest.  The remainder of the day, predictably, was spent watching television and playing a little fetch with Gabe.  Oh, and speaking of Gabe, I forgot to mention last week that he passed his Canine Good Citizen class again.  Yeah, he already took (and passed) the test once, but a little tune-up never hurts.  Passing twice qualifies him for the rare and coveted “Canine Super-Duper-Extra-Good Citizen” status.  He celebrated his accomplishment by tearing up Donette’s day-planner and terrorizing Kane (the cat) all week.  They didn’t cover either of those topics in class apparently.

Saturday I got up and took Gabe for his walk, and then made the drive to visit Mom down by the Arkansas border.  Her PC was minorly messed up, so I got it fixed up (I hope) and then ate a tasty lasagne lunch.  Homemade, not even the frozen stuff like we make at our house.  After that, I did a little grocery shopping, and then I’m not entirely sure where the rest of the afternoon went.  We went to a wine tasting around 6:00 down at Cellar & Loft in Brookside.  We didn’t go so much for the wine tasting (that place is a little high fallootin’ for me… more Todd’s style) but to talk to this guy whose dog we are lightly considering taking in.  Donette met him last weekend at the tasting, and then we went and met his pup “Belle” on Monday.  I would describe young Belle as… “energetic.”  Yeah, that’s a nice adjective.  A common phrase beginning with “ram” also comes to mind, but we’ll stick with “energetic.”  At any rate, the guy wasn’t there so no progress on the new dog.  After that social event, we met up with the Martins at Starlight for the production of “Rent.”  You never know when children might be reading this, so I shall eschew the barrage of expletives that come to mind and just say that I didn’t care for the show.  Loud, confusing, pointless, and the girl in front of me kept flipping her hair on my leg.  Not to mention, I thought they were having prime rib for dinner and it turned out to be flank steak.  I don’t even LIKE flank steak, as evidenced by my two enormous helpings.

Sunday I started the day by hitting the gym, for the third time in the week.  That’s almost a routine!!!  Unfortunately since I’ll be out of town next weekend it will be a short-lived routine.  After that I went home and fired up the smoker to cook some spareribs for dinner.  The ribs were a bit of a sore subject;  I picked them up at Price Chopper, against my better judgement, because they were on sale.  I got home and unwrapped them, and they were friggin’ half slabs.  Not only that, but just the large end to boot.  Crap.  Get what you pay for, I guess.  But I couldn’t really just throw them out, so I gave them some dry rub and threw them on.  Todd came over around 2:00 and threw a few chickens on too.  While the flesh was cooking, I got out the food processer and made a basil-arugula pesto recipe I’d been wanting to try; not half bad.  All that cooking pretty much took up the entire afternoon.  Donette, meanwhile, was researching dessert recipes to enter for the ARB contest.  Ed, Kim, Susan and John (Susan’s beau of late) came over for dinner and helped with the taste-testing.  She made like four different styles of bread pudding, all them pretty darn good, most involving grilled or toasted bread soaked in cream, topped with fruit and stuff.  That was pretty much a night-killer for me.  Four plates of rich desserts after a barbecue dinner is a little much, even for a glutton of my magnitude.  We managed to get through the Entourage showing, and that was IT.

I am feeling rather creatively stifled today.  Bear with me please.  Before I forget, let me mention that I fixed a long-running issue with my web server that was preventing large-ish downloads, so now I can share such fascinating content as the JoCo Rap song, and the video of Gabe doing the hurdles.  It was quite a perplexing issue actually; I was quite stymied.  This was actually the first time I just threw up my hands and (GASP!!) went online to talk to strangers.  And, what do you know, they actually fixed it for me.  You can read all the action-packed banter on the lighttpd forum if you are in need of some excitement.  Actually it not FIXED, but they gave me a work-around, which is fine for me.  Ol’ Mr. xummxxu isn’t as pleased, but you can’t make everyone happy.

Well let’s see, what did I do this weekend?  Started off  pretty well on Friday by stopping in at the Brooksider on my way home to see who was there.  Lo’ and behold, Belanger and Lueck were sitting there doing some psuedo-business kind of stuff, so I pulled up a chair with them.  After a while Todd and Downtown Brown stopped in too, and we hung out for a while.  And, of course, all the usual people were there too.  Donette, meanwhile, was out with her band of hooligans somewhere at one of her more posh events.  She’s getting too well-to-do for the ‘Sider I suppose.  Kind of like Todd, although he graces us with a guest appearance now and then.

Saturday night I had to go in to work, so that kind of nixxed the whole day.  I don’t like to do a whole lot before a night of work, just sit around and mope.  I spent the morning working on the Woodlands Trophy site, which took all of about 30 minutes.  The place where it was hosted previously just up and dissappeared one day, so I had to move it to another provider.  Due to my fastidious backup scheme, (or sheer luck) I had a copy of the site at home so it was pretty easy.  Oh, and I made my semi-quarterly trip to the gym too, which is always exciting.  Whew, do I feel a lot healthier.  Ohhhhh yeah.

Sunday I slept in a bit, since I didn’t get home from work until some ridiculous time.  At least I considered it a ridiculous time;  Donette was still out kickin’ it when I got home.  She was at Westport of all places, on some kind of wedding-shower-slash-bachelorette party kind of thing.  I don’t know what time she finally drug in, but she brought the morning paper in with her so it must have been well after I called it a night.  I took this to mean she was going to be asleep for a while, so I snuck on down to the Brooksider to watch the Royals game around noon.  If anyone watched that first inning, it was abundantly clear that the baseball game wasn’t going to provide a real big source of afternoon entertainment for me.  Luckily “The Group” showed up around 1:00, so I sat around with them and watched golf and Nascar.  Neither of those are even remotely interesting to me.  But, neither was the prospect of sitting at home playing computer games so I chose the lesser of two boredoms.  I finally ran into Donette around 6:00 or so, and we sat around watching television for the rest of the day.  We somehow got sucked in to “Remember the Titans” on network TV, and then I had to go online to research how much of it was actually true.  As usual, the weekend wrapped up with the latest episode of Entourage, and that was about it.