Well that was a heck of a vacation.  Unfortunately it’s over, but I suppose that’s inevitable.  Let’s see… How to summarize.  I can’t get TOO detailed, we did too much stuff and I would be rambling on forever.  Plus I’ve got 240-some-odd pictures to sort through and post, so that’ll take a while too.  Oh well I’ll just dive in and ramble away.

I took Gabe up to a boarding facility called Country Kennels on Wednesday morning, since he’s too high-maintenance to just have somebody drop by the house and check on him occasionally.  They boarded him when he was with the Rescue so they all know him and were excited to get to see him again.  We worked all day, then flew out around 6:30 to get our vacation started.  Incidentally, I don’t guess I mentioned, we were going to Albuquerque to visit our friends David and Jill, who we met during our Texas foray.  We’ve been there a couple of times to visit, and as it turns out they might be moving to Chicago so that might be our last trip to N.M.  Anyway, Jill picked us up at the airport and we headed over to their house, where we gabbed for a while then turned in early.  I’ll throw Thursday in this paragraph too since it was relatively uneventful; David and Jill had to work so we just kind of checked out the town and stuff.  When they got home David grilled up some awesome fillet mignons… Now THAT’S eatin’.

Friday we started getting down to some vacation action.  We drove up to the base of the Sandia mountain range, and took the tram ride.  Their son Grant was on leave from the Marines for the weekend, so he came along too.  I conveniently provided that link to the website about the mountains so you can read about them; That way I don’t have to type it all in here.  It’s billed as the longest tram in the world; Pretty awesome ride.  There’s a restaurant at the top where we had a drink, then walked around a while and headed back down.  For dinner we headed to El Pinto restaurant.  Now that’s some killer feed… And as an added bonus it’s Green Chile season, so the chiles were extra fresh.  Man, those things are everywhere down there; they sell them for practically nothing too.  I’d put them somewhere in my top five foods probably.  Last time we visited Albuquerque I carried home a big burlap bag of them, but didn’t feel energetic enough for that this time.  Plus, they’re just better fresh; I don’t really buy into the freezing bit.  Guess it’s better than canned.

Saturday for our vacation diversion, we headed out to Sky City.  Again, I have provided a informational link to relieve myself of any excess typing.  The Acoma Indians live there, and it is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States.  They duped me into the drive by telling me it was only 45 minutes, but it was really more like an hour and a half.  Oh well, it was worth it.  Now for dinner this night, we went to Sadie’s.  We were having a little show-down between this place and El Pinto.  There wasn’t a real clear-cut winner though; They are both awesome.  I’d say Sadie’s was a little higher on the “Sweaty Bald Head” scale though.  I wore a ball cap to try and maintain some appearance of normalcy, but it was breached pretty quickly.

Let’s see… That takes us to Sunday.  The “event of the day” on Sunday was the Bernalillo Wine Festival.  Oddly I can’t find a link to this event so I’ll have to briefly describe it myself.  Good grief.  Bernalillo is a quaint lil’ town right off the Rio Grande river, with a nice view of the Sandia Mountains.  Great place to have a festival and walk around sipping wine all afternoon.  We stayed there several hours but eventually the heat and crowd wore us out.  I left with a nice little sunburn on the back of my neck, complete with a nice glaring white strip from my camera strap.  Revenge of the Nerds hits New Mexico.  Luckily it blended in a little after a while.  I’m sure you’ve noticed a pattern by now;  The next order of business was dinner.  We talked David into doing fillet mignons again.  Grant invited over 3 of his friends, and we had a veritable “fillet buffet”.  Apparently David was trying to burn us out on the steaks so he wouldn’t have to fix them again the next night; He grilled enough for everybody to have seconds on the fillets.  Obscene, but true.  It was quite an exercise in gluttony.

That brings us to Monday, the Holiday.  Once again… We had an “event” followed by over-eating.  First we drove out to Tent Rocks National Park for a little hiking.  It’s one those places where you hike around and ooh and ah at all the cool rock formations.  Took a few dozen pictures, did a little walking… You know the drill.  I’m tiring of typing, enough with the descriptions.  After that we almost drove up to some hot springs for a little swimming, but it was too far to drive.  Been there, done that anyway.  So, we went back to the house and sat on the roof of the house for a while, watching the sunset.  (Hopefully the landlord isn’t reading this…)  They’ve got an awesome view of the Sandias, and it’s quite a sight at sunset.  Check out the pictures… When I get around to posting them.  For dinner we had salmon, grilled on a cedar plank.  I’ve always wanted to try that… Now I’ll get around to it ’cause it was GOOD.  Grilled up some asparagus too.

Tuesday was the end of the vacation, boo hoo.  We went back to El Pinto on the way to the airport and gorged ourselves one more time at their lunch buffet.  I’m not really sure what all I had;  By the time I got done spooning green chiles over everything that’s pretty much all you could taste.  We did a little shopping too;  Picked up 5 quarts of Sadies salsa, a huge plastic jug of El Pinto salsa, and some green chile sauce.  That should hold us for a week or so.  We got back home around 6 o’clock, and I headed down to the Brooksider to round out the vacation.

Well that’s pretty much it… I’m exhausted.  I picked up Gabe from the kennel this afternoon, and he doesn’t seem any worse for the wear.  Actually he is dead tired…  He’s been asleep since we got home.  They even gave him a little “report card” which of course contained nothing but glowing comments.  Hopefully he liked it, because we’ve got all kinds of trips coming up…

I’m on vacation in lovely Albuquerque and have no intention of wasting valuable time updating my Blog.  Suffice to say we are enjoying ourselves.  I’ll catch up Wednesday.

Given the brevity of last week’s update, I really feel obligated to post a veritable novel this week.  But the problem is, I really didn’t do anything all weekend so I’ve got no subject matter.  The only thing I’ve got to work with is my fantasy football draft Saturday night and the dog having an accident in the house Sunday night.  Pretty slim pickings there.  I’ll do what I can with what I have…  That’s all you can ask of me.

I suppose we did go out Friday night, but nothing of note really occurred.  Just went down to the Brooksider and enjoyed the stellar weather.  At some point Todd got restless and moved the crowd to Bobby Bakers…  Mistake.  We traded in a comfortable table outside in the fresh air for a cramped booth in a crowded room with intolerable air quality.  Next time I’ll take a pass on that place.

Saturday, despite my best intentions, I didn’t do anything.  We went to Costco for a little shop-a-thon, and had lunch down in Westport, but that’s about the whole of it.  I spent a good amount of time putting together info for my fantasy football draft that evening.  From the looks of my resulting team, the time would have been better spent mowing the lawn or fixing the gutters.  I got home from the draft event about 11:00 to find an empty house.  Doni had taken Gabe down to the Plaza to a little party, and they ended up staying out all night.  The results of this fiesta were quite disastrous, as I shall detail later.

Sunday turned out similarly non-eventful.  We met Doni’s parents down at the gym for lunch, which was a lot better than it sounds.  They put on a nice brunch; I’m for it.  I don’t know what happened to the rest of the afternoon honestly, but the next thing I knew it was time to start getting ready for the Sunday evening television events.  We hosted dinner this week, so there was a short burst of house-cleaning involved but nothing too major.  (Well, aside from the still-to-be-told tale of terror.)  We had spaghetti for dinner;  Mike’s Grandma sent some homemade sauce and he was good enough to share the wealth.  We made homemade pasta for the first time too;  Didn’t come out bad for our first attempt.  I’m not entirely convinced it was worth the effort, but it was kinda fun.  We voted it “worth doing again.”  Might branch out next time and mix in some garlic or basil or something a little saucier…

Well the only tale of the weekend left to tell is of Gabe’s “Incident”, alluded to briefly during the previous paragraphs.  I am sure nobody really wants to hear about my pup getting sick, but the scope of the horror was so gigantic that I really feel it bears re-telling.  It all began with Doni taking him to that party Saturday night;  At least that’s where I’m laying the blame.  I don’t know exactly what went on in that den of iniquity known as the Plaza, but the poor boy was kind of out of sorts all day Sunday.  Who knows, he might just take after me a little bit, which is to say he doesn’t like situations “out of the norm.”  Take him out of his element and bad things could happen.  At any rate, the pup pretty much just moped around all day Sunday.  Then, about 4:30, I walked into the TV room to find a mess of such proportions that I still shudder to think of it.  I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say he puked, but in all honesty I’m not really sure what came out where.  All I know is it was a bad scene; Poor Gabe was sitting there looking kind of sheepish, and there was a mess on the carpet, the drapes, the wall…  Oh it was bad.  I was so shocked I could just kind of manage a little gasp;  “help… help….”  Doni came running in, surveyed the situation, and immediately turned and ran for a pair of rubber gloves and some cleaning supplies.  Meanwhile, I headed to the garage to get a garden trowel and started shovelling.  (Seriously…  Shovelling.)  We found ground zero back behind the drapes, which is generally considered “cat territory.”  I was ready to push the blame off on Kane at that point, but I don’t think he is physically big enough to create an explosion of such magnitude.  I swear, 2000 square feet of hardwood floors and the boy picks our new carpet and drapes to get sick on.  What can ya’ do.  There doesn’t seem to be any permanent damage though… it’s “visible” but just barely.  Not as bad as it coulda been;  At first glance we were ready to condemn the house and move into a condo.  The whole event just went to further solidify my belief that I never would have been able to handle a kid.  Bottom line, no more parties for Gabe.

Well I was out of town all weekend so I don’t really have much to say.  Had to go to Birmingham Alabammy and work.  Remind me to scratch that city off the “Places I Would Like to Move” list.  I guess it was OK…  The drivers are considerably worse than here, and the weather was entirely intolerable.  Reminded me of the Fort Worth weather; Sorta armpit-ish.  Drawls (worse than mine) irritate me too.  I honestly couldn’t decide if the locals needed to talk a bit slower or a lot faster, but something was very wrong with the dialect.  On top of these indignities, I had to work all Saturday night.

I guess I can make a weak attempt at summing up the weekend anyway.  I left Friday morning on an early flight.  I walked out to my car around 6:30 to discover that I’d left my windows down all night during those big thunderstorms.  NOT a good scene.  Water standing in the floorboards, seats sopping wet;  It was about as bad as it could get.  Since I had to get to the airport, all I could do was throw some towels on the seat and go.  Then I had to leave the car out in the sun all weekend with the windows up, so now it smells like a load of sour laundry.  Might just sell it and get a moped, I haven’t decided exactly what to do yet.  The only other event of note was an unfortunate digestive malady that afflicted me during the entire trip, and you do NOT want to hear about that.  I blame this situation on some particularly rare lambchops I fixed last week, but who knows.  Things were kind of touch and go when I left town, and I thought all was well when I got there.  This proved not to be the case after a big rib dinner at a place called Jim ‘N Nick’s.  The ribs were delicious, but the resulting discomfort was so horrific that I fasted for the remainder of the weekend.  Haven’t eaten much since;  I’m a little scared.  Given that the main focus of my trips is eating, this was truly a disappointment.  Oh well, something tells me I’ll be back in ‘Bammy before too long, I’ll try again next time.

My weekend started on Friday last week, thus unleashing the non-stop torrential downpours we were subjected to the last few days.  What a drag.  My sprinklers were doing just fine, I could have done without the rain.  Oh well, a day off is a day off, no matter what the weather.  Still beats working.  I had scheduled Friday as a vacation day quite a while ago, initially with the intent of going to Pigfest in Ohio.  But, as the date drew closer, I realized the drive up there was just a bit too daunting for me, so I bailed.  Then a few weeks ago, I got a wedding invitation for some friends in Nebraska.  So I made some hasty plans to go to that event, seeing as I already had vacation and all.  But, no, couldn’t make that drive either.  Not as far as the Ohio event, but it still exceeded my 10 mile radius of safety by several hours.  So, in the end, I just sat home with Gabe and watched bad movies.  Met Martin for lunch at the Brooksider, called it a day.  When Doni got home we went to the wine tasting around the corner, then headed back home and watched a few movies.

Saturday was roughly as unproductive as Friday.  Munkirs came down and joined Gabe and I at the Brooksider for lunch, then Todd, Doni and Christy came down.  I had to take Gabe home when it started pouring on us, then I went right back down there.  We hunkered down inside, waiting for the storm to pass.  Since it never did, we ended up staying all day.  When we finally tired of the ‘Sider, we went up to Bobby Bakers to exercise the jukebox for a while, then went around the corner to 75th Street Brewery for dinner.  All-in-all, a good day.

Sunday I fired up the smoker to put on some ribs.  I’d intended to do them Friday while the rest of the world worked, but the rain screwed that plan up.  Turned out OK though, because nobody could come over Friday anyway, and the weather was perfect on Sunday.  I put 3 slabs of baby back ribs on around noon, and settled in to enjoy the weather.  I did leave them unattended for a little while so Doni and I could go play tennis with Christy and Todd.  Gotta mix some exercise in the weekend somewhere, you know.  Todd came over after tennis and tossed some chicken on the smoker, and it was back to sitting around doing nothing.  The Martin’s joined us for dinner, and Susan came over too; Turned into a regular get-together.  Watched a little HBO, then called it a weekend.

The rekindled home-cooking project is coming along nicely.  Besides the ribs and chicken on Sunday, I grilled some shrimp on Tuesday and made mahi-mahi fajitas on Thursday.  I was kind of partial to the shrimp; I put that recipe up in the cooking section.  The fish fajitas were pretty interesting too… That was Doni’s creative thinking at work there.  Tonight:  Lambchops in garlic with new potatoes.