Well we’re back from our tour-de-midwest, still in good working order.  I’d say that was a good, relaxing vacation.  Wednesday Donette was working in Omaha, and I just kind of hung out at the hotel and surfed the Internet.  Not too wacky, but I entertain easily so it worked for me.  Thursday we made the short drive to Lincoln, settled into the hotel, and then decided to go check out the town.  I’ve been “through” Lincoln several times, but can’t recall that I ever stopped, so it was something new to check out.  Donette pointed the car downtown and we ended up wandering into a district called the “Historic Haymarket.”  It turned out to be a lucky guess;  There was plenty of shopping, eating and drinking to keep us entertained for the rest of the day.  If you go down the list of establishments on that website there, that will pretty much tell you what we did all day.

Friday we made the drive to Lovewell Lake to do a little “camping.”  The quote marks are to indicate that we had no intention of actually staying in a tent or anything crazy like that, but since we were in fact at a State Park, and would be spending some amount of time in the outdoors, we called it camping.  The reason for the trip was the 15 year reunion of the group I went to Germany with during “The Big One of ’91.”  Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen some of these people.  You know it’s been too long when people bring their teenage kids that you’ve never met.  Heck one guy brought his six grandchildren.  Wow.  There was a great turnout though, good times.  You can probably make a pretty accurate guess how the weekend went from there…  Buncha people sitting around telling our old “war” stories and laughing until our guts hurt.  Several of them had also been on some much less desirable tours since our Germany trip, so we caught up on all that too.  On the downside, it absolutely dumped rain pretty much the entire time.  Didn’t really bother us too much though, because we were in a cabin Friday night and bummed a bunk in one of the many campers Saturday night.  There were a few tent-campers in the group, but they just bailed to a nearby hotel and then came right back.  Oh, and in the category of “it’s a small world,” my younger sister and her family ended up not only in the same State Park in the middle of nowhere, they actually camped directly behind us.  WEIRD!!  So, we also got to see them for the weekend, including the monumental event of my nephew Thomas taking the training wheels off his bike.

Sunday, naturally, we woke to a bright, sunny, cloudless day as we packed up to go home.  Go figure.  On the good side, since we weren’t really camping in the true sense anyway, we didn’t really have much to pack, and hence no muddy wet crap to load up.  We made the miserable treck across Kansas in pretty good time, picked up Gabe from boarding, and went home for a solid nap.  We woke up in time to go over to Susan’s for a fine spaghetti dinner, then watched Entourage.  That has taken the place of Sopranos as our Sunday night entertainment, and so far has served as a fine replacement.  For one thing, it’s only 30 minutes long so it doesn’t test the endurance of those of us with limited attention spans.  And, today, I guess it’s back to work, most likely for (gasp) a full week.  Probably should have thrown a “buffer” day in there…

I am about to enjoy a nice two-day work week.  SWEET!!!  Wednesday morning I’ll be joining Donette on a trip to lovely Omaha, NE, and then we’re going to follow that up with a camping trip to Lovewell Lake in KS.  Should be relaxing.

Well I’m not really too keen on typing today, and I’m going to use that as an excuse for a brief update.  In addition, we really didn’t do much, so I don’t have anything to relate anyway.  I find this brutal heat rather oppressive so I just stay inside for the most part.  Friday night, case in point, we just stayed home and watched TV.  I did find time to work on my nifty firewall that I was bragging on in last week’s update.  This project culminated with me ruining my router;  Oops.  My beloved wrt54g firewall/router is now a blue and black plastic paperweight.  Oh well, it lived a relatively long life, I got my moneys worth out of it I suppose.  They aren’t very expensive anyway.  I found this an opportune time to read the documentation on the firewall software, and found the error of my ways.  Now I just need a new router.  Crap.

Saturday morning kicked off with Gabe’s agility class.  He continues to excel, and is even getting a bit better on the stupid weave-poles.  They introduced the “A-frame” this time, which is pretty much just a big ramp that they go up and over.  No problems on that one.  After class we went over to Mom’s and installed a new printer for her to use with her digital camera.  Pretty sweet printer… you can just plug the camera into it and print borderless 4×6’s with one button.  After that short project Mom made some lunch; Grilled ribeyed with sauteed mushrooms, and zucchini on the side.  Now that’s a lunch!!!  Far better than the chips and dip I probably would have eaten at home.  SCORE!!  We didn’t do anything that night… tried to watch King Kong but I fell asleep about 30 seconds into it.
Sunday Gabe and I got up early and went to the “Dog and Jog” at the Plaza.  I had some reservations about taking him down there, but he did just fine.  Sure, there were a few very minor confrontations, but no worse than any of the other mutts.  Hey, the boy doesn’t like having his butt sniffed, who can blame him.  I have thought about getting him a shirt that says “You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone” but decided against it because A) if you’re close enough to read the shirt it’s probably too late, and B) dogs can’t read anyway.  We had fun though, I put up just a few pictures here.  The walk didn’t take too long, and after that we met up with Donette’s parents for some breakfast at Sharps.  I’ve had the chicken fried steak the last three times I’ve been there, might need to branch out a little next time.  It was mighty good though, except we got stuck with the crazy “psuedo-non-smoking” booth.  Exactly how you can call a booth “non-smoking” when smoking is allowed at the one right next to it kind of escapes me.  Joke.  After that we took care of our weekend “home maintenance” chores, then wound up the weekend down at the Brooksider.  Todd came over and watched “Entourage” with us, since the Sopranos is now over.  It rated “OK”.

We slowed things down quite a bit last weekend, mostly so I wouldn’t have to engage in a rambling, 3000 word update today.  Always thinking ahead.  But, in a huge bonus for all, I am not going to start with the usual “Friday” events, and instead jump all the way back to WEDNESDAY!!!  Oh yeah, we’re gettin’ crazy now!!!  Anyway… Wednesday I went to the DMB concert out at Verizon with Ed & Kim.  I’ve always wanted to see Dave, but I am quite a staunch Verizon-hater.  That place plain sucks.  While I’ve seen some good shows there many moons ago, everything about the whole amphitheatre experience has been crappy.  Actually, when declining the occasional concert invitations I get, my mantra has always been “I wouldn’t go see Dave Matthews & R.E.M together at that hole.”  But, Ed ended up with an extra ticket to this show, and in a possible indication of the apocalypse I went ahead and picked it up from him.  I will call the evening an overwhelming success.  I think the key was that Ed is much more show-savvy than I;  He had us in and out of that miserable parking lot death-trap with barely a slow-down.  It seems like they’ve lightened up on the rubber-glove-searches getting into the gates too.  Overall, much less painful than I remember.  And the show itself?? Nothing short of awesome.  Mind you, I have no intention of following him all over the country seeing all the other shows on the tour like Ed.  I’m more in the “OK I’ve seen my DMB show now, check that one off the list” category.  Definitely something to remember though.

Friday I don’t guess I have anything to report.  We shut down and watched movies.  At least I think we did… Honestly I don’t really remember.  Next thing I knew it was 9:00 at night and I was starving.  We fired up our hand-me-down Weber Kettle grill and cooked up some salmon and potatoes.  Man I haven’t grilled on charcoal for a long time, and I’ve missed it.  It came out rather well if I do say so my darn self.

Saturday started off with round two of Gabe’s agility class.  He did even better than last week, if that’s even possible.  Easily the star of the class, in my unbiased opinion.  Well, OK, there was that little incident where he panicked in the middle of the collapsible tunnel.  The instructor-lady has a little repair work to do on her equipment this week.  Oops.  Overall he did quite fabulously though.  After that we headed over to Mom’s for a little lunch.  My nephew Matthew has been staying with her all week, so we got to see him too.  (Sorry Carl, no pictures this time.)  After lunch it was back home to kick back and do a whole lot of nothing, save mowing the lawn.  I spent the greater part of the afternoon working on my new firewall project, which finally ended successfully.  I am now using my Linksys WRT-54G as a nifty little firewall, managed by “firewall builder” software running on a Fedora FC4 box.  Oh yeah, I’m cool.  After wasting the day in that manner, the Martins came over and joined us for a little Mexican take-out food.  I think we had plans to play cards or something like that, but we ended up just sitting on the back deck watching Gabe run around all crazy with the neighbor dog.

Sunday our big project was installing a doggie-door for Gabe.  I swear, that boy is a mess.  I would surely not be able to handle a child, I guarantee that.  Now that he is no longer welcome at his daycare place (which is a whole other story) we have got to find something to do with the boy during the day.  For the last year and a half, I’ve rushed home immediately after work to let the boy out of his kennel.  Something of an inconvenience, but tolerable with those couple of “daycare” days when I can stay at work if I need to, or stop by the Brooksider on the way home, or whatever.  Now that he’s stuck at home full time, we need some options.  We’ve tried leaving him in the house when we’re gone;  Suffice to say that did not go well.  We’ve tried leaving him in the yard, but he tears up the screens and gnaws on the fence.  So, the latest idea is to let him in and out as he pleases.  This is directly against all his training, which is that he gets told when to go in and out, but I’m ready to make some concessions.  He was howling pitifully at the back gate when I left this morning, which is not a good indicator of things to come, but we’ll see what happens.  We wrapped up that project just in time for the Martins to join us for dinner again.  I fired up the charcoal grill again and threw on some sirloins, while Martin did pork chops and tuna.  After that we watched the merciful end of the pathetic Sopranos season, and called it a weekend.

Well, look at that, I rambled into another long update anyway.  Just wordy I guess.  I turned on the “comments” thingy for these too.  Don’t ask me how to use it, I don’t even know if it works.  One spam message and it’s right back off, I can tell you that.

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.