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.

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”.