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.

I don’t want to deprive anyone of the possible crazy action that I could partake of tonight or tomorrow.  I have everyones best interests at heart in this decision.

For those of you who have been losing sleep with concern about the demise of my wrt54g, you can now rest easy.  Thanks to some help from Mike, my router has been revived.  It took some scotch tape, copper wire, a magnifying glass and this web site, but it’s back in business.  Not only am I properly firewalled again, I don’t have to drop $50 on a new router.  WHEW!!  Don’t pretend you weren’t worried.

I really don’t have a whole lot to cover from last weekend.  Friday, I went to the Brooksider by myself and sat on the deck, while Donette hung out downtown with Kim and Christie.  With nobody to entertain me, I went home pretty early.  Relatively useless evening really, at least from my standpoint.

Saturday kicked off with Gabe’s second-to-last agility class.  I’m ready for that class to end, mostly because I’m a bit tired of waking up and driving out to Peculiar every Saturday.  And, it’s been too hot to really enjoy anyway.  Gabe still seems pretty excited about the whole thing though, so I guess that counts for something.  I will grudgingly admit that the little Sheltie in the class is now running the obstacles a bit better than Gabe, but not by much.  Gabe gets bonus “enthusiasm” points though.  For dinner that night, we went to the Hyatt Regency for Donette’s 20-year class reunion.  I suppose it goes without saying that meeting an entire room full of people that I don’t know and will never see again isn’t really my cup of tea, but it wasn’t so bad.  Never hurts to brush up on the ol’ “mingling” skills, you know.  Unfortunately I had the spectre of having to go in to work at midnight hanging over me like a black cloud, so that kind of cut into my normally enthusiastic demeanor also.

Sunday kind of got shot down with a little unplanned work-a-thon.  I didn’t get the lawn mowed, didn’t go to the pool, didn’t go to the dog park, just sat on the couch and typed away all day.  Darn them bills and the need to pay them.  That debacle ended just barely in time to get ready for dinner.  Kelly, Susan, Kim and Todd came over and we grilled burgers, with homemade fries, corn on the cob, and Kelly’s nuclear baked beans on the side.  Actually dinner got started an hour late, and we finished eating just in time to catch Entourage.  That was the end of the weekend.  Kind of a slow one, but we needed the rest anyway.

Lastly, a special note of condolence goes out to Carl as he struggles with the potential demise of his favorite band.  Let’s all keep Carl in our thoughts as he struggles with what must be a very difficult time for him.  First Buck Owens and now this…  When will it end?  Truly this could mark “The day the music died” for Carl.