Another year, another art fair out of the way.  Man, what a debacle.  According to the report in the KC Star, 80,000 people attended this year’s Brookside Art Fair.  Of those, I suspect fully 3/4 of them were Johnson County residents making their annual pilgrimage to “That quaint little ghetto down off 63rd.”  So, that translates into a whole lot of incompetent drivers and 240,000 cigarette butts per hour I had to endure all weekend.  Miserable.  Suffice to say I avoided that area like the plague.  Typical conversation overheard from some of the offending intruders:

“I can’t find anywhere to park, do they expect you to walk around here or something?”

“Oh just stop the car in the street, we’ll only be a few hours.  Can I get a light?”

“But we’re in the middle of the street, won’t we get a ticket?  Oh good, there’s a Price Chopper, I need another carton of Camels.”

“Oh honey please, they wouldn’t ticket a Mercedes.  Besides, I heard the police won’t even come to this area.”

And so on and so on.

Despite being banned from my regular haunts for the weekend, we still managed to stay busy.  Friday night Doni planned a fun little “date” for us; We went to the Stadium Club, where they were having a dinner and beer tasting.  The food was great.  Doni was a bit embarrassed when they had to ask me to step away from the smoked fish table, but she got over it.  Hey, they said “all you can eat,” I was pushing the limits.  We stayed there for a few hours, and then went home and watched “Mean Girls.”  Lindsay Lohan, heh heh, heh heh.  (What is she, like 25, 30?  Right?)

Saturday I took Gabe up to Kevin Brown’s to hang out and demo the new smoker.  We stayed around a few hours but didn’t make it long enough to see how the “product” turned out.  He had a brisket, a few slabs o’ ribs, a few chickens… And there was still plenty of real estate left to put more on.  The smoker was running smooth; kind of a wood-hog though.  Don’t know exactly what to do about that but we’ll cipher on it.  Might just have to feed it trees and be happy.  Yes, I took some pictures; No, I don’t have them off my camera yet.  Later, we headed back home and then went out to dinner with Ronda, Josh and Randy.  I was supposed to make dinner, as we owe them one, but I had a new recipe and didn’t think it wise to try it out on company.  So, we went to 75th Street Brewery and then down to the Brooksider for a while.  (The art fair was closed by that time.)

Sunday was kind of a mix of work, yard stuff, and walking the dog.  I’m not sure what all we did, but it wore me out.  Todd came over for dinner and I cooked the above-referenced “new recipe.”  (Todd doesn’t count as “company.”)    Basically it was a pork tenderloin stuffed and wrapped with prosciutto and pancetta.  I was quite pleased with the results; That one will have to get typed up and put out in the recipe section.  Add it to the list… 1) Post vacation pics, 2) Post smoker pics 3) Post new recipe.  Sigh.  Anyway, it wasn’t too hard to prepare, but it looked kind of “fancy.”  After dinner the weather was just right for a fire, so we started up the patio fireplace and hung outside for a few hours.  Thus ended another weekend.

Whoa, that was a pretty busy weekend.  Busy for us anyway.  It went by entirely too fast.  My latest theory is that we always need to go out Friday night, because it makes the weekend seem longer.  For instance, this past Friday we watched a half a movie and went to bed at 9:00… And sure enough this led to a remarkably short weekend.  I’ll start testing this new theory this coming weekend.

Anyway… If there was one good thing about our boring Friday, it was that we caught up on some sleep.  Everybody put in a hard 11 hours of sleep, even the pup.  After we finally got up, Gabe and I went down to Jerry’s pet store in Westport, where the rescue group was having an “adoption event.”  We had just a jolly good time, and the boy was relatively well behaved.  He was wound a little too tight though, so I took him back home for a nap while Doni and I went to lunch at Jazz.  Saturday night was almost as uneventful as Friday; I went over to Todd’s and started reloading his PC.  Poor guy hasn’t been on the Internet for months.  We’re doing away with his Windows 2000 and putting XP on.  Sort of a slow process but it’s getting there.

Sunday we woke up at 5:00 and went on our very first organized run, the Trolley Run.  We had a good time, and somehow managed to even make it the whole 4 miles.  We didn’t run the entire way, but I’d say we ran 3 of the 4 miles.  Not bad for us, especially considering we didn’t really prepare for it very much.  After the run, we went over to Kim and Ed’s for a little post-party, which lasted a lot longer than I thought it would.  I think we hung around until noon or so.  After that we took a nap, then decided it was so nice out we needed to go hang out on the deck at the Brooksider.  Took the pup with us and sat down there for a few hours, then it was back to Todd’s place to work on the PC.  Had a little Chinese food and called it a weekend.  This morning I’m so sore I can barely walk.  Exercise is over-rated.

No, we haven’t forgotten about our poor abused cat.  I just thought that was such a darn fine picture I decided to put it on the main page.  Our “family pics” should be coming in soon; hopefully some (one maybe?) came out OK.

Holy smokes, we’ve been busy.  This new “kid” is taking up all our time, or at least all of mine.  It’s alllll about the puppy.

Well, if I could summarize the entire last week, it would be the continual effort to kennel the puppy.  He defeated me every attempt at reinforcing the kennel, up until Thursday when I clipped some heavy d-rings on the door.  That little guy can weasel through some small spaces, I’ll tell you that.  I put up a webcam so I can keep an eye on him, at GABE CAM.  Looks like it got knocked askew today, I’ll fix it when I get home.  Hopefully it wasn’t knocked over by a rampaging dog…

Well let’s see… Friday night I don’t think we did anything.  Rested up for Saturday I guess.  I started off Saturday morning by taking Gabe up to the Vet.  He keeps having “accidents” in his kennel so I wanted to make sure he didn’t have an infection.  Naturally they felt it best to give him an x-ray and prescribe some antibiotics.  Heaven forbid the Kenagy’s EVER go to the Vet and they say “everything looks OK, that’ll be 7 bucks for the office visit.”  Nah, they always get us somewhere well into the 3 figures.  Sheesh.  After that, we had a trainer come over to the house.  It just so happens that the couple who fostered him for the last several months also do dog training.  Bonus!!  I think she has detected the fast-rising panic in my tone over the duration of the week and was nice enough to come give me some pointers.  I don’t know if the dog learned anything, but I learned all kinds of stuff.  He already knows quite a few things anyway, I just need to figure out how to make him do them.  After two hours of schooling, we took both Gabe and Kane up to the pet store, where they had a photographer doing “family portraits.”  That was as big of a debacle as it sounds like it would be… I won’t even go into details.  After the horror that was family picture time, we headed up to the Northlands, where one of my co-workers was getting married.  The reception was in Parkville, and we quite the fine time.  Even stayed out pretty late, probably due to the stress of the rest of the day.

Sunday, for some reason, I got kind of a late start.  After goofing around all morning I went out to Mom’s and did a few “chores.”  Work on the PC a bit, spread a little mulch around, that kinda stuff.  Gabe came with me too, and seemed to like the big yard.  I think he’s used to a little more space then we have at our house.  After that, I went back home to start getting ready for dinner; Doni or Susan or somebody had invited people over to dinner, loosely in celebration of Todd’s 40th birthday.  We had fajitas and fixin’s… good times.  The dog behaved admirably; didn’t eat anybody or their food.

More smoker status!!  It’s DONE!!  Ready for the first fire I believe.  I haven’t seen it in person, but K.B. sent me some pictures last night:

1. Pic 1


2. Pic 2


3. Pic 3

We got back from San Diego in mostly one piece.  We hit quite a few spots; Sea World on Wednesday, the Zoo on Thursday, and Doni and I took a Harbor tour on Friday.  I would recommend NOT attending Sea World and/or the Zoo with anyone under the age of 35.  Both were very cool, but my decrepit old bones are too broken down to put up with all that walking.  At a minimum, I dissolved all the cartilage in my knees.  I should have rented a scooter or something.  We got a generous dose of evening entertainment mixed in too… I’m pretty satisfied that I have now “seen San Diego.”  I’m also satisfied that I have traveled enough for a while; I think I’m gonna lay off the vacation for a few months.

In other shocking news, we are once again “dog people.”  We still have Kane of course, but now we have a real pet to go along with him.  (Heh heh.  I’ll get hit for that one.)  More details to follow as they develop; We just got him yesterday and are still getting acquainted.  So far we are getting along like peas and carrots.  The only “incident” of note is that my first attempt at kennelling him failed miserably.  It was recommended that he stay in a crate any time we’re not home, so we went and bought a nice wire crate, and sure enough he went right in it with no complaints.  Alas, when we got back home he was loose in the basement, tail wagging happily as he polished off the last of Kane’s $$$ prescription cat food.  Oh well, no harm.  I “think” I found an assembly flaw in the crate, so we’ll see how he’s doing when I go check on him this afternoon.  I’m working on a web-cam so I can keep an eye on him from work.  A name is still in the works; He goes by a few different names, both of which are under consideration, or we might just pick something new.  Here’s a couple of pics:

1. Pic 1


2. Pic 2