Well, I managed to scam a 4-day weekend out of the holiday.  The hows and whys of the extra day are less than interesting, but somehow I ended up starting my weekend on Friday.  Hey, I ain’t complaining.  Doesn’t seem like I put the bonus day to much use though… I feel a rather brief update coming on.

For the most part, I guess I played with the dog and lounged.  Sunday afternoon we did voyage out of our regular 2-mile radius and checked out the Martin’s/Schmidt’s new water vessel.  We toured Smithville lake pretty much all afternoon, and even got in the water a few times.  Doni and I bought a summer parking pass in case we get the opportunity again.  It’s good to have “boat friends”.  Plus, I still have loose plans of taking the dog on a trial camping trip, so Smithville would be a good place for that.  If it ain’t working out I can just turn around and go back home.

On the holiday, Martin came over and we did a little ‘que practicing.  We did two slabs of spareribs and two slabs of baby backs.  “Keep practicing” was our general consensus at the end of the afternoon.  Oh well.  It was a nice day to sit around in the sun at any rate.

I’m struggling for material… I quit.

Well it turns out that publishing new pictures isn’t actually too hard.  I still don’t like doing it though.  Here’s some pictures from the first few days of our Mexico trip back in March:  Los Barrilles, Mexico

I don’t know why it says “May 05” under “March 05.”  Something it auto-generated somewhere.  Don’t worry about it.

And the Cabo pictures too!  Man I’m on a roll.

Whoa, that was quite a busy weekend, at least for us.  Non-stop action for the Kenagys.  That could result in a very lazy holiday weekend coming up… I’ll still be worn out.

Actually our weekend started on Thursday.  Doni planned a big date-night for my birthday, which was last Wednesday.  This is no lie; I can’t think of one night we’ve been out together since we got the pup.  For people who are used to going out two or three times a week this is quite an adjustment.  So, Doni hired a baby-sitter (Mike, her co-worker) for the evening and we hit the town.  She bought us tickets to The Iron Fork at the Sheriton in Overland Park.  Now that’s not exactly the most informative website I linked to there, so I’ll sum it up for you:  It was an event sponsored by The Pitch, benefiting Harvesters.  It was kind of patterned after “The Iron Chef” on Food TV.  Ten local chefs were given a bunch of (identical) ingredients and they had one hour to come up with their best dish based on these ingredients.  They had a big table full of vegetables and basic ingredients, and then they all HAD to use mangos and sea bass.  Sounds kind of silly, yeah, but it was pretty awesome to watch them work.  You didn’t get to sample any of the creations, but there were several local restaurants all around the room giving out samples.  We even stayed out rather late for us, although the baby-sitter was racking up a bill at the rather outrageous sum of 50 cents per 2 hours.  We stiffed him anyway, so what the heck.  Bill us.

Friday I went up to my boss’ house after work to try and fix his daughter’s PC.  I think we got it all up and running; the sound didn’t work and it had a few rather resilient virus’ on it, but seems to be doing OK now.  This was such a mentally and physically (had to take some screws out) taxing event that I had to go home and rest for the remainder of the evening.  We watched a movie, the name of which totally escapes me.  Sometime during this cinematic event I fell asleep on the couch, effectively ending the evening.

Saturday afternoon was spent hanging blinds in one of the spare bedrooms.  Gloom, despair, and agony on me.  I HATE hanging blinds.  It’s been brought up that I seem to hate everything relating to working around the house, but hanging blinds definitely rates higher on the list than, say, mowing the yard.  But, it had to be done, and it does look a lot nicer.  I even went the extra mile and shortened the length on them properly.  We’ve got several that have been hanging for five years now and still not been shortened, so I wanted to go ahead and do these while my momentum was up.  I even had sort of a technique down by the time I was through; Maybe I’ll knock out the others next weekend.  Or, perhaps I won’t.  After this horrible afternoon of drudgery, we went out to Mom’s for dinner.  Our birthdays were both last week, so we celebrated them by her making me dinner.  Nice how that works out, huh.  We had chicken grillers, salad, potatoes, and what I’ll call a corn casserole.  And, a strawberry pie for dessert with fresh berries from the garden.  That’s what I’m talkin’ about!!!  Sue, Dave and Rebecca came out too, which worked out great because we haven’t seen them in about way-too-long.

Sunday I got off to a rough start.  I made the dreaded mistake of turning on the TV while I was reading my paper.  I got sucked into some sorry movies, and the next thing you know it was 1:00 in the afternoon.  This kind of twerked me off because I cheated myself out of several good hours of nice weather.  So, I hooked up Gabe and we took off walking down to the Brooksider for some lunch.  I figured if we were going to waste the day, we might as well do it outside in the sun.  Alas, we got all the way down there and they were closed down for their stupid annual golf tournament.  CRAP!!!  This served to compound my twerked-off-ness quite a bit; I found myself quite baffled as to how to entertain myself.  The best idea I came up with was to put Gabe in the car and head out to Paola KS to visit Gabe’s foster family.  We actually already had plans to get together anyway, but I wasn’t supposed to be there until six.  Surprise, I’m a little early!!  Sometimes I amaze even myself with my dorkiness.  What the heck, it beat laying on the couch doing nothing all day.  They have an awesome-looking Pit Bull named Glory, and you could tell Gabe was more than a little excited to see her again.  We had a great dinner of shrimp and fish, the dogs played some more, and then we had to make the longgggg drive home.  Gabe fell asleep as soon as we left the driveway, so he wasn’t much company on the way home.

Well, I still haven’t gotten around to posting any vacation pics yet.  I rank organizing photos right up there with hanging blinds.  Here’s some pictures of Gabe playing with the neighbor dog though, just to shut you up.  The other dog is Bondai, he lives one house west of us.  Gabe and Bondai Pics

Man I’m struggling to remember what we did Friday.  Seems like we did something, but maybe not.  Guess I’ll have to skip that day.  Too bad, it might have been something really fun.  Sigh.  Then again, I might have been tired and just gone to bed.  My newly implemented weekday schedule starts off at 5:00 in the morning, so I don’t stay up too late.  This all centers around the puppy, see:  Get up at 5:00, feed the dog, and head out on a walk by 5:40.  This puts us in Brookside by 6:00, which is conveniently what time the coffee shop opens.  Get a coffee, read the paper, and by the time we get back home, voila’, it’s time to go to work.  This effectively gives the pup an extra hour before his daily kennelling, which seems to be working out well.

Saturday, I was rudely awoken at the unholy hour of 7:30 with a little work event, which drug on painfully into the afternoon.  During the time I was on the phone, however, I managed to get everything ready for an afternoon of bbq’ing.  It was the inaugural lighting of the smoker this season, and baby back ribs were on the menu.  Looking back over the span of my memory, (approximately 4 hours,) I don’t think I’ve ever done baby backs.  I really don’t like them as much as spares, but they were on sale at the grocery and for some reason they didn’t have any spares… So that pretty much made the choice.  I used my co-worker Ken’s recommended 3-2-1 method, and they came out rather famously if I do say so myself.  (I’d link to the recipe, but I just noticed it has a key typo in it… c’mon Ken, how about some proofing.)  The basic idea is that you give the ribs 3 hours of smoke, wrap them for 2 hours, then 1 more hour unwrapped.  I did one slab with sauce, and one without.  Believe it or not, the sauced ones were quite a bit better.  I say “believe it or not” because I like my ribs dry, but the sauced slab was definitely better.  That last hour crusted the sauce quite nicely, so they weren’t really sloppy or anything.  So, take a cut of meat I don’t generally like, put sauce on it which I don’t generally like, and it comes out great… What can ya’ do.  I guess that’s what experimenting is for.  I’m aiming to try again next weekend, mostly because I had some horrible heat issues with the smoker that I have to figure out.  Anyway… After eating all that food and being out in the sun all day we were worn out, so we watched “Ron Burgundy” and called it a night.

Sunday turned into kind of a “lazy day” despite all the plans I had laid out.  It happens.  I did get the lawn mowed, so there’s 40 minutes I don’t have to account for.  After that we went on a little outing, mostly on a mission to find a light for the TV room.  Failing on that mission, we instead went down and checked out the Pet Expo for a few hours.  That was a fine time; We bought several toys for the dog and cat, and talked to our MPR friends for quite a while.  That pretty much sums up the week I guess.  Come on over next Sunday if you want to stare at some ribs cooking.  Weather and interest providing, of course.

Does anybody really want to hear about a weekend spent in St. Louis working?  I didn’t think so.  I flew down there Friday, went out with the guys, and then worked until it was time to go home Sunday.  And there ya’ go.  The only news of note is that Gabe broke out of his kennel and ate a door.  You might ask “What do you mean, ate a door?”  I mean he ate the door.  Poor boy has been pooping sawdust all week.  Sigh.