Greetings all, and welcome to the four-day work week.  I trust everyone is well rested and prepared to give it all in their respective endeavors.

Wow, where to start.  The weekend was so full of continuous exciting events that to try and recount them all here would just be impossible.  Pretty much just a series of non-stop action for the Kenagy Clan.  Ohhhhh yeah.  Non-stop.  I’ll just have to summarize as best I can.

Friday night Todd and I went to the Brooksider and hooked up with the “work crowd.” Doni and Susan met us there for a bit, but apparently they tired of the work-related banter (and rightfully so) because they snuck off to other haunts at some point.  We stayed and enjoyed the relatively nice weather out on the deck for a while, but not too late.

Saturday morning marked the beginning of Gabe’s latest training class, which I had to drive all the way out to Peculiar for.  I thought it would be fun to try an agility class, so he could have a little exercise without terrorizing the general public like at the dog park.  Overall he did very well; he already mastered the tunnels and the tire jump, and is catching on to the hurdles.  The stupid weavepoles are another story.  He seems to enjoy plowing straight through them instead of around them, much to everyone’s amusement.  Not quite technically correct, but it’s just for fun anyway so what the heck.  Actually he’s kind of funny on the hurdles too.  Since all the dogs are new to it, she had them set at like two feet.  Just to be on the safe side, Gabe likes to launch himself as high as he can though, clearing them by a distance of what some might call “overkill.”  He’s nothing if not enthusiastic about the whole thing.  After sweating through the class for a few hours, we went home and rested up for a big fish fry.  I was on hush-puppy duty, so I spent a few hours chopping and mixing and such.  I elected for a recipe off foodtv, and they came out pretty well, if a bit ugly.  They tasted good, but the batter was way too thin so a lot of them just broke up into little rabbit-turd-puppies.  Hey, it all tastes the same, no matter the aesthetics.  If anyone feels the need to try that recipe , cut back on the water, or leave it out all together.  Anyway, the fish fry was a good time.  Most of the crowd was comprised of the Brooksider regulars, so it was kind of like any other Saturday night except outside, with better food.

Sunday we scored an invitation to take a tour of Lake Smithville on the U.S.S. Schmartin.  Somehow the planets aligned and they were able to get the Schmidt, Martin, Holst, Brown and Falstrom* clans together all at one time, sans children.  (* Pending legalization.)  KB and Joe brought their respective water vessels too, so we had plenty of room for all.  Despite the rather intense sun, we ended up spending the entire day out on the water.  We got home late in the afternoon to find that the days entertainment had come at the price of our new porch screen; some time during the day it had been mis-indentified as a chew toy by either Bondi or Gabe, with rather catastrophic results.  Sigh.  (I have a pretty good idea who the actual culprit was.)  After that somewhat disappointing discovery, we decided it best to stay home and keep an eye on the boys, (we were dog-sitting Bondi all weekend,) so we shut down and watched movies the rest of the night.  Despite an almost overwhelming backlog of DVD’s we haven’t watched yet, we decided instead to go with re-runs of Old School and Joe Dirt.  Can’t go wrong with that lineup.

Monday the rain kind of threw us off.  We were literally getting ready to walk out the door with the dogs, on our way to the park, when the thunderstorms started.  It rained steady all day, so I ended up wasting the holiday working on the reincarnation of my old webserver.  So far that project is an abysmal failure.  My big plan was to build it with enough similarities to my existing one that I could easily sync the sites up between them, and flip them back and forth if I needed to mess with something on one or the other.  Everything was going just hunky-dory until it got to the SQL part.  I’ll spare you the gory details, as I’ve come to realize it’s not really that interesting.  (OK I realized that a long time ago, I just enjoy babbling about it.)  For dinner we headed up north to Ronda’s (Donette’s sister) new house.  She was having a house warming party to show off her new place, and all her and Doni’s hard work painting. (I was, uh, otherwise engaged all those weekends…)  After feasting on good ol’ Memorial Day BBQ fare (burgers and ‘dogs) we scurried back home to check on the dogs.  Thankfully they did a little less damage than the previous day, especially since they were inside the house this time.  I was pretty nervous about the situation, but other than the curious rearranging of several items of furniture, everything was generally intact.  For evening entertainment, I shut down and watched quite possibly the worst movie of all time, titled Gimme an ‘F’.  I have something of a fascination with bad cinema, and believe me this one ranks high on the “bad” list.  I would liken it to a horrible train wreck involving Footloose, Porky’s II, and Dirty Dancing.  Truly, honestly, an awful movie, and I enjoyed every moment of it.

Well it’s official, I am old.   The odometer rolled over another decade last Thursday.  I enjoyed something of a rather prolonged celebration by taking off work Thursday and Friday.  I took a progressive approach to the situation, to sort of ease into the grim reality of things.  Wednesday night started things off; I met Ed, Kim and Christie down at the Brooksider and hung out on the deck for a while.  They got me some dry rub and a meat thermometer from Williams Sonoma, which I was just pleased as punch with.

Thursday and Friday I just kind of took it easy and enjoyed my time off.  Munkirs came down to the ‘Sider on Thursday for burgers, and Friday afternoon I can’t really think of a thing I did.  I hung out at the coffee shop for an inordinate amount of time, as old people will do, wandered aimlessly around the local shops and bought nothing, as old people will do, and ambled down the trolley trail with the dog, greeting everybody with “Morning” or “Nice day huh” or just “Hey”, as old people will do.  Then I just sat around the house opening all my birthday cards and watching TV.  Actually I only got one birthday card, from Southwest Airlines, so that didn’t take too long.  Sigh.  (OK my Mom gave me a card too, but that was last week.)  Later in the evening, Doni took me to Morton’s for my official “birthday celebration” dinner.  I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that place is even better than Capital Grille, an admittedly bold statement.  Of course I don’t eat at either enough to make a head-to-head comparison, but I do order the same cut at both and in my admittedly addled memory the Morton’s offering is better.  At any rate, we ate far too much, killing any hope of going out after dinner.  We were both so miserably full we went straight home and to bed.

Saturday morning we participated in the big neighborhood garage sale with our neighbor Rick, which ate up the most of the morning and afternoon.  We got rid of a little junk, but the Civic didn’t sell, dang it.  I did score a nice humidor from Rick’s pile though.  After the garage sale Doni had some girls over for some kind of makeup party, so I hunkered down and watched a little TV for the rest of the afternoon.  After all that was over, we headed downtown to John’s Deck to celebrate Kevin Brown’s coming of age.  Despite the horror of traveling twelve whole miles, we had a great time once we finally got there.  We stayed out rather late (relatively speaking,) even later than the actual birthday-boy.  Lil’ K.B. got sent home early.

Sunday I bought a few pork tenderloins and fired up the smoker.  I wanted to test out the new weapons Ed and Kim gave me, and the weather provided a perfect opportunity.  I made a few tweaks to the smoker too, due to some air-flow issues I’ve been having, and needed to test out those changes.  The Martins joined us, and of course Todd and Susan. (Actually Todd is currently serving a 6-dinner suspension for poor conduct, but he came over anyway.  He sat in the driveway and we tossed scraps over the fence.)  Everything came off the smoker in good shape; the new dry rub was quite tasty, and my temperature-regulation problems seem to be fixed.  Plus, Kelly and Susan found my lack of mail so pathetic that they brought me birthday cards too. All-in-all, I think I made the best of the situation and got through the whole incident in pretty good shape.

This morning I got back from my daily dog-walk to find Donette packing up a suitcase.  It would appear that she is either going on another business trip or leaving me;  in either case I will require amusement for the next few evenings if anyone has any suggestions.

We slowed things down a bit this weekend, which means pretty much a dead stop.   Just not a whole lot going on.  Friday night I don’t recall that we did anything at all…  I think I sat in the back yard and played with the dog or something similarly boring.  Boring for me anyway…  Gabe thought it was pretty fun I guess.

Saturday we headed over to Ed and Kim’s and helped them move from their apartment to their new house.  Their realtor threw in a moving van with the deal, so it went well.  We crammed the entire apartment in the back of the van, (panel truck, whatever it’s called) except the kitchen stuff.  They were just moving across to the other side of the Plaza so it didn’t take long.   That’s going to be my rule from now on:  If you absolutely HAVE to move, keep it under five miles.  After that project, we headed back home to check on the dog.  This was our second attempt at leaving him out of his kennel while we were gone.  (The first try cost us a few sets of blinds and some slobber-damage.)  As far as we can tell, things went OK…  there were a few things “re-arranged” but no actual damages.  After a dinner of leftovers, we shut down for the evening.  Our neighbor Rick came over with his dog Bondai, and we started up the outdoor fireplace and hung out while the dogs tore up the yard.  I had to work at midnight, so I sort of just took it easy and waited for the fun to begin.

Sunday, as you hopefully remembered, was Mother’s Day.  We headed down to Peculiar to celebrate so that took up most of the afternoon.  Mom provided lunch too;  I’m not sure that’s the way it’s supposed to work but I ain’t complaining.  We enjoyed grilled burgers with beans and ‘tater salad on the side, and a Cold Stone Creamery ice cream cake for dessert.  After lunch we scurried back to the ‘hood to finish out the day.  Unfortunately our convenient little neighborhood wine shop is going out of business, so we stopped by there and said our farewells and picked up a few bottles of heavily-discounted vino.  Then Donette dove into the rather overwhelming mountain of laundry while I headed over to try and help Ed figure out how to add a cable TV run to his house.  We ciphered and ciphered, eyeballed, hypothesized, tapped walls, and looked around in the attic, but didn’t really do anything.  Sort of like projects at my house.  Then the next step is to lay awake a few nights kicking around all kinds of implausible ideas, and then you call somebody and pay them to do it.  Actually, he did try and get the cable guy to put it in, and for some reason they wouldn’t do it.  I think we have it all figured out though, with the exception of the part where you actually run the cable and put ends on it.  Hey, you gotta have a good plan before you go executing it.  The only thing I can’t understand is… If our final scheme is as easy as it looks, why didn’t the cable guy just do it that way?  Bah, probably a rookie, didn’t know what he was doing.  By the way, does anybody have a 2 foot drill bit, 1/2″ hammerdrill, 40’ extension ladder, chop saw, and about 50 lbs. of plaster we can borrow next weekend?

Well, as you can see, I’ve switched back to WordPress for my “Current Events.” Turned out my problems were the result of my webserver package, thttpd, not the blogger software. So, I after a brief attempt at Apache, I settled on lighttpd, and all appears to be well. Whew.

Friday was the first day of Brookside Art Fair, so we were virtual prisoners in our home all weekend. I suppose the fair is a good thing, but it pretty much shuts down the entire area. No place to park, too many people, and too much artsy stuff. So, denied access to our usual haunts, we decided to host happy hour at our house. And, since it was Cinco de Mayo, we thought we’d throw that in for a theme too. So, we cooked up some pork and chicken for burritos, got a bunch of chips and dip, and called it a fiesta. We had a good time of it, I posted some pictures Doni took here. The weather was a bit uncooperative, but we made do. What’s up with the cold weather anyway??? Crazy.

Saturday was spent for the most part fiddling with my webserver. I had planned on taking Gabe for a little jaunt down to the art fair, but given the recent unfortunate incidents in Methdependence I thought I’d better just keep a low profile. So, instead I borrowed the neighbors dog and took them to the park at Wayside Waifs. Predictably, there was nobody there so the boys had the whole place to themselves. I don’t know why nobody uses that park but it works out well for me. Later in the afternoon I headed down to the Brooksider and watched the Derby with the usual crowd. I stayed out a lot later than I intended, so I must have been having fun.

Sunday Doni got up early and left for one of her many business trips. Left to fend for ourselves, Gabe and I sort of just shut down. The poor pup must have been worn out from his big day Saturday, because he didn’t get out of bed until 2:00. Meanwhile I just sat at my computer all day, didn’t even bother getting dressed until well after noon. I was having a problem with the password protected area of my site, and I finally had to go international for assistance. I hit up Johan for help and he gave me enough hints to get things going pretty quickly. Later in the afternoon Todd came over and plopped down on my couch, despite my repeated assertions that I had no entertainment, no food, and no game. So he sat there watching bad TV all evening, which meant not only could I not go to Brookside because of the Art Fair, I couldn’t even watch TV in my own house. I spent the remainder of the day sitting at the computer… Todd must have left at some point because when I went down to watch the 10:00 news the TV was free again.

OK, the new site is officially online, albeit in something of a beta status. There are still a few tweaks pending. As you likely have not noticed, the recipe section is missing. That’s because I can’t decide how to lay it out, not to mention nobody uses it anyway. That’s probably in the “long range” category. I haven’t moved any of the old pictures over either, and I’m not too sure I plan on it. I am not sure I like this WordPress thingy either, which is running the Current Events page. It uses an SQL database, which seems to be a bit taxing on my poor little 133 Mhz processor. Hence the ~6 second lag when you hit this page. At any rate, everything seems to be functional, so I’m happy with it for now. Thanks again to Ed for all the help with the layout and other random issues that cropped up.

Wow, we had a relatively busy weekend. We started off Friday with our usual meet-and-greet at the Brooksider. We spent a few hours there, and then our friend David met up with us. He was on a driving trip from Chicago to Albuquerque, so he took a little layover to visit us. For the most part we just sat around and caught up on news, and enjoyed the El Pinto salsa he brought us.

Saturday we started things off by laying down a good base of grub down at Sharp’s in Brookside. David needed some carbs to continue his drive, you know. I’ll have to say, I’ve been kind of down on ol’ Sharp’s lately, but they served up a good breakfast Saturday. Might have to put them back in the rotation. Todd joined us for breakfast too, and after feeding we took off to the dreaded Johnson County to watch Ed’s hockey game. We finally found the place in time to watch about the last 10 or 15 minutes of the game, after wandering aimlessly up and down 135th street for at least an hour. Most of this hour was spent either sitting at one of the thousands of unsync’d traffic lights, or trying to get around the idiot KS drivers who seem to revel in going 10 mph under the speed limit. Mark my words, I will never, ever, ever, ever go down that street again, no matter what the occasion. MISERABLE. After the hockey game, we hightailed it back across the state line and hit the Red X to do some shopping for Todd’s big party on Sunday. All that driving wore me out, so I sorta hunkered down at my computer for the rest of the day. Doni and I hit Carmen’s in Brookside for dinner, and then watched Mr. & Mrs. Smith for evening entertainment. (Thumbs down on the movie.)

We kicked off Sunday by participating in the annual Trolley Run. Although I was fully prepared to skip the event, Doni surprised me by actually wanting to get up and go. Personally I was kind of counting on a rain cancellation, but what the heck. Kevin B. had hooked everybody up with entries from Capitol Electric, so we already had the shirts and everything ready to go. (Which is the most important part of any run, bike ride, etc.) As I mentioned, I was taken off guard somewhat when Doni got up and made the “go” call on the race. I was even more surprised when she took off jogging right from the start. We had signed up to WALK, and believe me I had every intention of doing just that. Not to be shown up though, Martin and I gamely joined in the trot. At least I was wearing some semblance of running clothes; Martin was wearing khaki cargo shorts. Anyway, to make a long, arduous, painful, agonizing story short, we actually jogged “most” of the four miles. Rather remarkable actually, considering my last jog of any note was last year’s Trolley Run. While it is possible that I may be in moderate to severe pain for the next few days, it was rather enjoyable. After the run, we all met up at Todd’s for his post-race fiesta. We undid any possible healthy effects of the run with some mimosas, muffins, and the James-Family-Recipe breakfast casserole that Todd’s Mom brought. We were having a festive good time, but eventually the run took it’s toll and I had to go home and take a nap. After a solid sleep, we had our usual Soprano’s gathering. We had a little larger crowd than usual; Bruce, the Martin’s, Susan, and Todd all came over. We had a little spaghetti, watched the show, and called it a week.

Well, I actually had what I thought to be a much better post put together earlier, but when I hit “save” it disappeared into WordPress never-never land. Sigh. Learning curve I guess. If this one gets eaten too there is a good chance I shall (literally) throw the whole thing out the window and go back to Blogger.