It’s friggin’ freezing out there!!  I generally don’t mind cold weather, but I guess I wasn’t quite ready for it yet.  It’s only December!!  EARLY December!!  Ridiculous.

Not a whole lot to report on from the weekend.  Friday was irreparably marred by work… Pretty much just sat at home and waited for pages.  Saw some movies, did a little “homework” with the dog, that kind of stuff.  Donette was out kicking it up with some group of yahoos, who knows what they were up to.  No good I’m sure, most likely something in the “shenanigans” category.  She got home quite ridiculously late, that’s all I know.

Saturday I got up early and went and helped a guy cut down a tree.  Nice “outdoorsy” kind of activity.  A friend had an apple tree that had split in half so we went over and cut it up.  We got as far as we could; The “standing” half of it was placed rather perilously between a power line and the cable TV line.  We circled it for quite a while, cipherin’ on the likelihood of a service interruption, and eventually decided the odds were pretty good.  So, we just cut up what was down and called it good.  I’ve got a nice little stack of smokin’ wood in the back yard to show for the mornings work.  Saturday night was the first in an upcoming rash of “Christmas Parties.”  Shudder.  I think I’d rather spend the evening poop-scooping the yard.  Of course, once I got there I had a good time, which is usually the case.  I spend the week before these parties dreading them like a flu shot, but then I always end up going and having fun.  Plus, I scored a cool little present, the XM receiver that I’d been wanting.  Pretty cool little unit.  Of course now I have to actually install it and sign up for the service… I’ll do that tomorrow.  Donette, meanwhile, was the only spousal unit not present at the party.  Once again, she was out running around with some rogue gang, and once again got home quite a bit later than I.  Seeing a pattern here?

Sunday was generally uneventful.  We went to Jalapenos for lunch with Christie, then hunkered down in front of the TV for the football games.  Donette finished decorating the TV room last weekend, so it’s really quite the cozy little hangout now.  I did venture out to the Brooksider with Todd to watch the second half of the Chiefs game, but then scurried right back home.  My Fantasy Football team was doing uncharacteristically well, so I wanted to watch the scoreboard.  I thought I had it all wrapped up, but then the other team came storming back and we ended up all tied up.  Both of us have players in the game this evening, giving me a rare reason to actually watch MNF.

Well, tonight is Gabe’s big “test”.  The culmination of 8 weeks of training is at hand.  The current line on him passing is 3 to 1.  (Whatever that means… Sounds good.  I’ll say 75%.)  He might be just a bit too young for such a class, but then he is something of a puppy prodigy so he may have a chance.  He is by far the youngest in the class, that’s for sure.  His biggest problem is with the “brushing”.  They’re supposed to sit still while some stranger comes up and brushes them, checks their teeth and paws, blah blah.  I tried to get a waiver on that part, since Gabe has about as much use for a hair brush as I do.  But, apparently it’s just part of the rigorous curriculum and can’t be left out.  The problem seems to be that Gabe’s little pea brain can only interpret an inanimate object in the hand two ways: 1) food, or 2) a toy.  And, the only way to differentiate between these two possibilities is to grasp said object firmly in the jaws and throw it around a bit.  This behavior can only lead to a “fail” mark, not to mention the poor tester going into cardiac arrest.  We’ll just have to see if he’s “on” tonight.  Worst case, we’ll just take the class again in the Spring.  I haven’t exactly been keeping up on his homework so he won’t be totally at fault if we get tossed out of the program.  Wish us luck…

One holiday down, one to go.  I do kinda like turkey-day though.  But then, I like just about everything associated with the sport of gluttony.  I’ll try my best to recap the long weekend.  I’m in something of a funk though, so don’t expect much.  The specter of the next holiday, with all its parties and shopping and driving everywhere, is hanging over my head like a black raincloud.  Humbug.

We celebrated Thanksgiving out at Mom’s this year.  Awesome meal;  Roasted turkey, stuffing, noodles, ‘taters, corn, pie… You know the drill.  I DO like Thanksgiving food.  Little “carb heavy” perhaps, but who’s counting.  I made the slight error of taking Gabe out there with me, on the premise that nobody likes to be alone on the holidays.  I thought I could stick him out in Mom’s big fenced-in garden and just give him a few toys to keep him occupied.  That lasted all of about 20 seconds.  Little bugger can climb chainlink fences like a monkey.  He ended up tied to a rope on the back porch and he did OK there… As long as I went out and played a little fetch with him every 30 minutes or so.  He was diggin’ the fetch game on the 3 acre yard.  After the feast, we headed down to Todd’s apartment for the annual Plaza lighting ceremony.  This is the first year in his new location;  Big upgrade from the last place.  We had a perfect view from his windows, no need to go down and mix it up with the mob.  He didn’t have any lunchables out this year though… What’s up with that?

Friday was a bit of a disappointment.  I am a big fan of the “Black Friday” sales, see.  As long as I can remember I’ve been out there in the wee hours, standing in line with a bunch of dorks so I could save $4 on some odd item that I don’t really need.  Then we all circle up at work and compare “bargains”.  Something of a ritual.  I just couldn’t get motivated this year though.  First, CompUSA messed me up by changing their opening to midnight, instead of 6:00 like it usually is.  That earned them a boycott.  My second choice was Microcenter, but they didn’t put their ad out on Thursday like they were supposed to.  So, I just said screw the whole thing.  I dragged in to Microcenter around 8:30 just to say I went, but it wasn’t the same.  You gotta be there at 4:00 in the morning, or it just isn’t Black Friday.  All the same, I picked up a pretty good load of junk.  I got a new pc case, power supply, wireless antenna, a few keyboard/mouse sets, 100 blank dvd’s, a backpack, and some other crap I’ve already forgotten about.  It’s a rather odd assortment considering all I wanted was a hard drive.  But, there weren’t any good deals on drives and I didn’t want to leave empty-handed.  The downside of my laziness was showing up at work for show-and-tell.  Everybody else had 19″ LCD’s, Tivo’s, laptops, and I’ve got friggin’ blank DVD’s.  Embarrassing.

Saturday was spent kind of winding down.  Aside from taking Gabe on an exceptionally long walk, I didn’t accomplish much.  I went and hung out at Todd’s for my evening entertainment.  In true bachelor fashion, he provided cigars and a bowl of dry cereal to snack on.  Oh, and grapes.  The cereal and grapes didn’t fill me up though, so Doni took me to Hoopers for a burger later.

Sunday isn’t even worth mentioning.  The storm shut us down.  I did buy a new cordless drill, and tried to put a few holes in the brick wall of the TV room.  Didn’t go too well, much like every other thing I’ve ever tried to do around the house.  I got one finished, but could only get about 1/4″ into the second one.  Either I ran into an exceptionally hard brick, or the $5 drill bit they sold me was only good for one shot.  Sheesh.

My weekend actually started a little early last week…  I had Friday off so Todd and I went out Thursday night and kicked it Plaza-style.  After nearly suffering an aneurysm trying to find a parking place, I met Todd at Diebel’s for a little shopping.  The reps from Partagas cigars were there, and they were giving away stuff and playing games and such.  Pretty entertaining, location not withstanding.  We played roulette for half and hour or so;  Todd won a $100 box of cigars.  And as for me… Well, I didn’t win.  I still got a bunch of free stuff though.  After that, we went down the street to O’Dowds, for what I have labeled “The Best Happy Hour in the World.”  They had all kinds of food out, and not just chicken wings and nachos either.  (Although they did have those.)  They had fish and chips, fruit and cheese plates, cheese sticks, all kinds of good stuff.  We walked out an hour later stuffed to the gills, and not a buck poorer for it.  Can’t beat that.  Hey, we WANTED to spend money, but nobody ever came by and asked us if we needed anything.  After a brief stop by the Granfalloon to enjoy our stogies, we headed over to Tomfooleries and watched Government Cheese play for a while.  (Todd’s favorite local cover band.)  After all that, I think I am “Plaza’d out” for a while.  I had a good time, besides the parking ordeal, so I better just quit while I’m ahead.

Friday afternoon, Doni and I took off for Omaha on a semi-business trip.  Business for her anyway, I was just along for the ride.  She had a work function Saturday night, so we went up a day early to visit our friends Tom and Tammy, who returned not long ago from a year-long Tour de Sand.  Since they have a little girl and had just bought a new house, this proved rather inconvenient, but the good ol’ Army apparently thought it a good idea.  We went out to dinner and relived “The Big One of ’91” and looked at a bunch of pictures they took on their recent trip.  Hmmmm, didn’t look as fun as Germany for some reason… Call me crazy.  I was reminded for the 4,245,628th time that I’m glad I gave that mess up.  Plus there’s always the chance they’ll get to go back for a second round too… What a friggin’ drag.  Saturday we messed around in downtown Omaha all day, checking out the “Old Town” area.  It was freezing cold though, and I forgot my jacket and hat of course.  I found a “Creighton Bluejays” sweatshirt in the 99 percent off bin at some place, and it did a good job of keeping me warm.  I was a little self-conscious wearing it though; I kept expecting Falhstrom or Brice to jump out and heckle me.  After that, we headed down to the arena and went to a party with all them crazy insurance people.  Same deal as last year;  They had a big party, then we caught the UNO hockey game.  Good stuff.  That college hockey is pretty entertaining.  After the hockey game we were pretty beat… We didn’t close the town down like last year.  We hung out in the hot tub at the hotel for a while and called it a day.

Sunday was taken up with the miserable drive back to KC.  We passed the time with some Books on Tape, and playing the “Count the Deer Roadkill” game.  Man I bet we saw at least 25 deer in the median; with our track record we were a bit nervous.  Luckily we didn’t see any of the live variety though.  We got home early enough to go down to the Brooksider and watch the 3:00 games.  Ed, Kim and Christie came down to lend a youthful perspective to the crowd.  Kim’s younger brother was in town too, and he even got us out of our chairs to play a little pool.  Football AND exercise.  (I have been so lethargic lately that I can rightly call pool “exercise.”)  About 6:00 or so we had to leave and get Gabe out of boarding, and that pretty much wrapped up the weekend.  We are tentatively planning another weekend trip to Omaha, just for fun… anybody in?

Not too bad of a weekend, all-in-all.  I started off on Friday by meeting Todd down at the Brooksider, sort of early-ish.  We wanted to get a jump on the weekend, I guess.  Pretty much the usual crowd, watching the usual tv’s, talking about the usual things.  I had two people tell me “Happy Veteran’s Day,” which I got quite a kick out of.  We called it a day around 7:00 or so, or at least I did.  Todd moved down to the Plaza and joined Doni and her band of hooligans, but I didn’t want any part of that place.

Saturday started off kind of rough;  Poor little Gabe was up all night throwing up.  Not too unusual actually… The boy seems to have a very sensitive tummy.  But this time he just KEPT going… He pretty much kept us up all night.  Then when he wouldn’t eat his breakfast, we got really worried.  He is not noted for his lack of appetite by any means.  So, I called the vet but they were all booked up.  They said to bring him on up anyway and they’d try to work him in between appointments.  After dropping him off, I headed out to the gym.  I’d let Todd talk me into signing up for their free tennis clinic, against my better judgment.  Doni’s coworker Christie was signed up too, so I figured what the heck.  So, I showed up at 1:30 and it was just the Pro, Christie, and an elderly lady.  Now I went in to this thing kind of expecting “OK, this is a tennis racquet.  This is a tennis court.  This is a tennis ball.”  But this joker starts off by asking questions like “So, in what instance do you want to use topspin?  And backspin?”  Dude what are you even talking about.  I’m not too worried about what spin to use, how about showing me how to hold the stupid racquet.  Anyway, he babbles on like this for a while, and then says “OK, let’s play a match.”  What the heck??!!  He puts Christie (who has played a little tennis before) and this elderly lady on one side of the net, and me and him on the other, and proceeds to humiliate me for an hour or so.  OK, maybe it wasn’t an hour, but it sure seemed like it.  Truly miserable.  This “elderly lady,” whom I will conservatively guess at 80 years old, seemed to take particularly great joy in abusing me.  She had some fancy double-strung racquet that put all kinds of wacky spin on the ball.  Christie would tell me later that she was smack-talking me too.  “Watch this, I’m gonna make the fat guy run.”  Bull crap man.  Next time I see her, we’re putting down the tennis racquets and takin’ things to the squared circle baby.  She only went about 85 pounds, I bet I could take her.  So, bottom line, I’m quitting the sport of tennis before I even got started.  The whole thing was kind of a sales pitch for their classes, but I ain’t falling for that crap.  Knucklehead puts me across the net from Lindsey Davenport and her Grandma to get tattooed by tennis balls for an hour and then wants $100 for more of the same.  No thanks.  After that brutal experience was over, I went home to check on the pup.  Doni had gone to pick him up, and apparently nothing was wrong with him.  Sure enough, he was back to his bouncy self.  Very odd.  They couldn’t find anything wrong, just gave us the ol’ “Here’s some antibiotics, keep an eye on him, that’ll be $120 bucks” speech that we know so well.  What can ya’ do.  Saturday night we had big plans to go out on a date, but neither of us were really hungry so we ended up just staying home and watching movies.  Plus, I didn’t want to take the chance of running into somebody that had seen me playing tennis.

Sunday I had invited some people over to watch the Chiefs game, so I got up at the unholy hour of 5:00 and put some ribs on the smoker.  Todd, Christie, Mike, Martin and Munkirs came over and watched the pathetic debacle in Buffalo.  After that game mercifully ended, I ran down to the Brooksider for a while with Munkirs and Todd to watch the 3:00 games.  Didn’t see much good football yesterday, but my Fantasy Football matchup was rather close for once so I spent the rest of the day watching that develop.  After the end of the evening game, my team (aptly named “Pathetic Pieces of Crap”) was hanging on to a tenuous 9 point lead.  The other guy still has one more player this evening… We shall see what happens.  Might actually win a game, although I’m not holding my breath.

Not too much went on last weekend, once again.  We started off down at the Brooksider on Friday for a little happy hour.  That apparently burned us out though; Saturday we got sucked into the dreaded TV vortex and never really did anything.

Sunday I set off on one of my patented travel follies.  I was scheduled for a class in Schaumburg IL on Monday morning.  Not wanting to be late, I made my flight reservation for 9:00 Sunday morning.  Why so early???  I don’t know, but I do the same thing every time.  And naturally I showed up at the airport 2 hours early too.  Wouldn’t want to get stuck in that horrible KCI airport traffic you know.  I don’t think the lines there have ever been over 30 seconds long.  Anyway, after a terrible breakfast of dreaded airport food, I killed the coupla hours in the terminal and then got on the plane to IL.  This put me at O’Hare airport at roughly 10:30 Sunday morning.  Gosh, hope I have enough time to get to the hotel for that 3:00 check-in time.  I gave brief thought to being adventurous and hopping the train to Chicago.  For a few bucks, I could ride downtown and watch the football games at a much more interesting venue than Schaumburg, then just ride back to the airport and get the rental car later.  But, then I remembered I was not adventurous, so I scrapped that whole plan and drove to Schaumburg.  This put me at the hotel around 11:30… Only 3 1/2 hours to kill before check-in.  By 11:45 I was suffering from extreme boredom.  I’ve been to good ol’ Schaumburg several times, and there’s just not much that interests me there.  (Yeah, I know they have that really big mall… Thanks.)  I opted to pick up some McDonalds and do a little war driving.  Sure, they had free Internet access in the hotel lobby, but what fun is that?  (For that matter, what fun is driving around with a hamburger looking for wireless signals… We won’t go into that.)  Well that pretty much sums up my Sunday afternoon… Watching my fantasy football scores and listening to the radio.  I did go out and have a good steak last night I guess.