Finally, some decent weather.  Not to say we haven’t had any decent weather this year, but I think we’re in for a good consistent stretch.  Thus predicts Phil The Forecaster.

We started the weekend Friday by doing several hours of absolutely nothing.  Gotta hunker down and take a night off now and then.  Doni picked up a few Chipotle burritos and we stayed in and watched Walk The Line.  The burritos were good.  No comment on the movie.

Saturday I spent a good portion of the morning working on my new webserver project.  It’s coming along “OK”.  The layout took a huge step forward last week thanks to Ed, it can be previewed here.  I got MySQL working, and PHPmyadmin, at least I think I did.  I also made the tentative decision to stay with the same message board format.  I found another script that looks the same as the old one, but has several improvements.  Blah blah blah, I know.  ANYWAY…  After working on that for a while, Gabe and I went to the big Armour Hills Dog Social.  Yeah, that was about as stupid as it sounds.  They had a bunch of local “dog people” down in our neighborhood park, giving away stuff and taking pictures of your dog and so on.  Gabe has been having some “trouble” at daycare so I went and checked out the options on taking him other places.  He was denied admission by no fewer than 4 different places!!  Awesome.  So, I guess he’s stuck at the current place for now.  Believe it or not, the “trouble” is that he keeps getting picked on by the other kids.  He’s got a hunk out of one ear, and last Monday when we picked him up he had a bum leg, couldn’t even put weight on it.  And it seems that the people there are not so much concerned that he keeps getting hurt, they are more worried that he is going to snap and go Paulie Walnuts on every dog in the place.  Probably a valid concern, can’t really blame them.  Anyway, for the time being he’s staying semi-isolated at daycare, which ain’t much fun for him but a little safer.  By the time the Dog Social was over, it had warmed up nicely so we headed down to the ‘Sider to hang out on the deck.  People kept coming and going, and we ended up spending the entire rest of the day there.  Todd even had a psuedo-date with him, which is always interesting to sit back and watch;  Sort of like a slow-developing train wreck.

Sunday Doni headed up North to help her sister paint, and took Gabe with her.  After a few chores, I headed down to the ‘Sider and hung out for while.  Sort of a slow day actually.  I tried to make some ham and beans for dinner, but they didn’t get done so we had to heat up some leftover brisket.  Todd came over and watched the Sopranos, which continued it’s current stretch of almost unbearable drudgery.

Work has begun in earnest on release 2 of pkenagy.com.  I figured since the site has remained basically unchanged in 8 years, it was probably about time for a significant redesign.  All input is welcome, if most likely ignored.  It looks like the hardware is all up and working, and should be ready for beta testing soon.  Just in case you managed to forget my rambling paragraph from a few weeks ago on this subject, let me recap briefly for you.  The new webserver is a Linksys NSLU2, attached to an external 250 gig Seagate drive.  After a detailed perusal of the NSLU2 description, I’m sure you are saying right at this very moment, “But that’s not a webserver, it’s a NAS!!!”  Ahhhhh, but that’s where the REAL fun begins.  You go to this site and download their “unslung” firmware, follow their not-so-simple instructions, and presto, you’ve got a webserver that fits in the palm of your hand.  Flashing that new firmware was the hard part… “Hmmmm, should I really take my spiffy new $200 toys and render them useless the first day I have them?”  Yes, yes I should.  All went well luckily, and so far I’ve managed to get to the point of a working webserver with PHP support, an FTP server, with SSH access to the server.  Perl/CGI support isn’t going so well, still working on that.  I would guess a Windows box set up to run these same services could be up and running in about 20 minutes and 3 or 4 clicks of a mouse; I probably spent the better part of my weekend trying to get them working on this little thing.  I probably learned more Linux in the past three days than the past three years.  Fun stuff man.  As soon as I can weasel Ed into making me a PHP template for the site, it should progress rapidly.

So, anyway, what did we do last weekend?  Friday I was kind of sick, so I stayed home and slept.  At some point I woke up and started working on the web site described in tedious detail above, and that went on well into the night.  Thus ended Friday.

Saturday I got up early and again started cipherin’ away on my new site.  Never should have got started on it; It pretty much wasted my whole day.  But it was nasty weather out anyway, so I didn’t miss out on much I figure.  Around 5:00 or so we headed south to Peculiar, and had some pizza at Mom’s house.  My youngest niece was in town so we had to get a visit in.  She’s up and walking around, screaming unintelligible 1-year-old stuff, and eating pizza!  We visited for a few hours, and then went to the Plaza for Ed’s birthday party.  I should probably interject a rather sad situation that occurred at said birthday party.  I made a reference to the passing of the great Buck Owens, and not one single person in attendance knew who I was talking about.  One youngster even asked “Is that the guy Bob Huggins replaced?”  Sigh.  So I clarified my statement with “No, Buck Owens, from Hee Haw!!!”  Again, blank stares.  Granted, I don’t imagine any of them were born during the Hee Haw days, but I thought EVERYBODY recognized Buck Owens as an American icon.  Just a little commentary on the state of the youth today.  What can ya’ do.  Anyway…

Sunday, I again started hacking away on my new webserver, but then the weather started getting nice so I turned it off before I wasted another entire day on it.  I took Gabe over to the neighbor’s house for a “play day” with his dog, while I did a little Spring tuneup on my mower.  I got the lawn mowed and knocked out a few other mundane household chores, and then met Todd down at the Brooksider to watch the afternoon basketball games.  I am pleased to say I am still (somehow) leading my bracket, despite the untimely demise of Connecticut.  After basketball, Todd and Susan came over and we made pizza and watched the Sopranos.  This may, however, have been the last of the “Soprano Sunday” parties.  I simply cannot take another lame episode.  Somebody better get whacked, and I mean soon.

Now that was a little better.  At no time during the past weekend was I over four miles from my house.  Keep that up for one more week and I should be all better.  Of course if the crappy weather keeps up I won’t be able to go anywhere even if I wanted to.

We started off the weekend strong with a good night of basketball and St. Patrick’s revelry down at the Brooksider.  The St. Paddy’s stuff was kind of secondary to the games, but definitely couldn’t be avoided.  There was a veritable mob scene in the bar all night.  Luckily “the regulars” got down there early in the afternoon and secured prime seating for us.  Even Zim and Chud made the drive down to join in the festivities.  All was well in the world until the KU game came on, and lured in all the riff-raff that is generally associated with said games.  Man, those freaks drive me nuts.  Nothing to do with sports, per se’, as I’m not that big of a sports fan, it’s just that they are an unbelievably rude lot.  I will put them well below the Denver fans that we keep in the basement during NFL season.  At least the Bronco-lovers stay downstairs for the most part, minding their own business.  If one of them does stray upstairs you can just give them a good scolding and they’ll slink back down the stairs like Gabe getting busted on the living room couch.  But these KU people descend on the place like a horde of locusts, junking up the place with their chain smoking, screaming, and nonsensical chants that even they can’t explain.  And I swear, I have never been asked so many times in such a short period if I was getting ready to leave.  What is it that gave these supposedly educated people the idea that myself or anyone else at the table was leaving?  Was it the half-eaten hamburger in my hand?  No, no, that wouldn’t make sense.  The 7″ cigar in Todd’s hand that clearly had another two hours on it?  Nope, that wasn’t a good clue.  One girl actually asked if she could share my stool, “since I was really only sitting on half of it.”  GET OUT OF MY STATE!!!  SHUT UP AND GO DOWNSTAIRS!!!  JUST GO AWAY!!!

Saturday we went to the gym for a few hours, and then it was pretty much more basketball watching.  This is the first year I’ve actually filled out a bracket, and it’s making things a bit more fun to watch.  Remarkably, I’m even tied for first place, but things are looking rather grim after the last few games.  I spent a good part of the day ripping our CD collection too.  I got a good chunk of them done; at last count I had like 2700 songs on the computer.  Still have a long way to go, but it’s progress at least.  If you would like to partake in any of this collection, I’d recommend getting an AOL Instant Messenger account.  If you prefer FTP I can certainly accommodate that too, just ship me an email.  There’s yet another option for sharing via itunes, but I have no idea how to do that, if anybody does let me know.  I got all the Christmas music you need in one convenient location.

Sunday, well, more basketball.  Followed by more basketball, and then more basketball.  While those were going on, I threw a corned beef on for dinner.  I’ve been wanting some corned beef ever since the sales started running a few weeks ago, but never got around to getting one.  So, Doni finally brought one home, and after quite a bit of looking around I decided on this recipe.  The braising method worked out well, although it didn’t do my cast iron pot any favors.  Susan and Todd came over and ate dinner with us, followed by the latest episode of The Sopranos.  I might also add, that was the absolute worst episode ever, in the history of the show.  Ever.  It was all I could do to stay awake through it.  The one exciting moment occurred when they applied that big bandage-thing to Tony’s gut.  Those very same bandages happen to be marketed by our very own Chuckie Scotten, so it gave the show a little hometown appeal, you know.  I think they shoulda cut away from the scene to a little sidebar with Chuckie: “The medical supplies in this scene can be yours by calling this convenient 1-800 number.”  THAT woulda been more exciting.

Dang I worked too much this weekend.  That’s always a bad thing, it gets me all disoriented on Monday.  I’ll spend all week thinking it’s Friday.

Friday we again had a semi-date-night.  It was a stay-at-home thing though, it takes too much energy to go out on Fridays.  I fired up the grill and did some salmon steaks, and a nice little medley of potatoes, peppers, garlic and onion.  It came out pretty well; The fish was a bit oily, perhaps due to the liberal dousing of olive oil.  Tasted darn good though.  After dinner we watched “The 40 Year-Old Virgin.”  Not too bad of a movie, but a bit long.  Good grief, who ever heard of a 133 minute comedy?  My attention span goes 90 minutes tops, so I was pretty distracted by the end of the flick.  I found the similarities to Todd rather unsettling also.

Saturday was, of course, parade day.  We didn’t make it to Snake Saturday Parade this year though, we decided to focus on the Brookside event.  I had planned to take Gabe, but Doni didn’t think that a very good idea.  Turned out to be a good choice; it was a lot more crowded than I expected.  Nice weather brings everybody out, I guess.  We scored an awesome table on the Brooksider deck, and watched the whole event from there.  After the parade, we headed to Lee’s Summit for Brett F’s 40th birthday celebration.  Man, ANOTHER 40th party.  I really need to quit hanging out with all these old people, it’s making me feel older.  Matter of fact, I think I actually did age about 5 years just due to the friggin’ drive out there.  From our house to Lakewood must be the longest 20 miles in the entire city.  And, you would think with the prices of the homes out there they would be able to afford legible street signs.  We finally got there though, safe and sound.  I had to work at 10:00 though, so we didn’t stay too long.

Sunday afternoon was pretty much a waste.  I had a little work event that drug into the early afternoon, and by then the storms were all over the place.  Every time I would step outside to do something, it started raining.  So, I pretty much played games on the computer and worked on my message board for a few minutes.  Incidentally, the messages are now limited to 300 characters.  I can’t imagine anyone I know having anything longer than that to say.  This latest change is due to the never-ending battle against the stupid message-board spammers.  What an annoyance.  I changed the page name a while back and that seemed to work, but then it started up again.  So then I started blocking ip’s, but now they are coming from a different address every time.  The thing they all seem to have in common is that they are very, very long though, mostly made up of a bunch of html crap that redirects your browser to stupid search sites.  So, when I found the latest posting for “Shaved German Teens” I decided it was time for yet another technique.  We’ll see how long this one lasts.  Anyway… After a generally uneventful day, Todd and Susan came over for a spaghetti dinner, followed by the kickoff of Sopranos, season six.  Gosh, will the excitement ever stop at the Kenagy house.

That was a nice “relaxing” weekend.  Friday night we actually went out on a pseudo-date.  Donette had the rather edgy notion of leaving the circle-of-comfort.  I was none too keen on the idea, but being the accommodating type I agreed to branch out a bit.  She drug me well outside the Brookside area to meet the Munkirs for some dinner, somewhere at or near the edge of the earth.  Our first choice for dining was McBride’s, but by the time we got there the Munkirs had already checked it out and been quoted an hour and a half wait.  (I might point out that I have never, ever, ever had an hour and a half wait at the Brooksider or Hoopers.  Not really relative, just thought I’d mention it.)  That wasn’t happening, so we bailed out to Jason’s Deli.  Donette loves that place, and there was no waiting.  I give it a thumbs up; Honestly it’s pretty hard to go wrong with any place that has a soft-serve ice cream machine.  After a big ol’ sandwich and about 4 bowls of soft-serve, we headed over to the Munkirs and played some cards.  Hearts was the game of choice, which turned out to be a bad choice because I lost.

Saturday we woke up early and met my Mom out in Grandview at the IHOP for breakfast.  Yes, that makes two long drives in one weekend.  Sigh.  Well worth the trip though, I kinda like IHOP.  I had the dieters-special plate: Chicken fried steak with gravy, fried eggs, and three pancakes.  And yes, I did eat it all, thank you very much.  Mom and Donette ordered a bit more conservatively with the omelets, but there was plenty of food on their plates too.  Good way to start a day.  That night we had to stay home, having already used up our monthly allotment of car mileage.  Ed and Kim came over and we cooked up some chinese food (complete with fortune cookies and sherbet… nice touch) and played hearts again.  Apparently the game the previous night was a learning experience, as I won this time rather handily.

Sunday Donette went up north to help her sister paint, and I took Gabe to the park for a little exercise.  All the rain on Saturday made things a bit muddy, but he didn’t seem to care.  After that I spent several hours rebuilding a messed-up PC that has been sitting in my basement for months.  Probably wasn’t the best choice of activities, given the nice weather outside, but it needed done.  For the evening entertainment we went over to Susan’s for her annual Oscar party.  After enjoying a big dinner of homemade spaghetti, I sat riveted to the TV and watched one spellbinding acceptance speech after another, and marveled at all the beautiful dresses.  Or I sat on the back deck and smoked a cigar with Todd, Munkirs and Martin; You have to guess which one is true.