Well I don’t have a whole lot to report, but for the sake of consistency I suppose I should type something up anyway.  Let’s see:

Friday night we went to Chuck E. Cheese pizza place in Olathe KS, for my nephew’s 7th birthday.  While this deviated quite a bit from my “normal” Friday evening surroundings, it was a pleasant dinner.  I will admit deriving some amount of entertainment from watching kids “have fun.”  I particularly like the little movie camera thing, where they can dance around in front of it and it shows them up on the wall.  All of them have that incredulous expression of “this is absolutely the coolest thing on the planet.”  Little do they know that in a mere 15-20 years, they’ll be tethered to a chair in a 6×6 cubicle, arguing vehemently about insignificant issues via email and telephone, eating microwave hotdogs out of a vending machine for lunch, clock-watching until 5:00 finally comes so they can rush home and watch some horrible reality television show until it’s time to go to sleep, so they can get up and go BACK to the same chair and… uhhhhh, I digress.  Never mind.  Good pizza.

Saturday was such nice weather out, I decided to do a little “home maintenance.”  I took the front door off, carried it out to the front yard, sanded it down and put a new coat of finish on it.  It came out pretty well… A little glossier than I would have preferred.  Doni, meanwhile, worked on “the room” project.  She got a coat of primer on the walls and ceiling, and a pretty good coat in her hair too.  Some day it will be finished.  I also worked on the ol’ Civic a bit.  It’s been blowing fuses for several months, so I finally dug in and looked for the problem.  I found that there were 8 wires running up to the hatchback, and all 8 of them were cut.  Kind of “smashed” really.  So, drawing heavily on my 9 year education in Electronics, I bought a little wire-splicing kit and hooked them all back together.  Evidently my CMSU education was worth the time; I now have functioning brake lights, rear defrost, and the “hatch open” light stays off.  For another few weeks anyway.

Sunday we had people over to watch the football game on the back porch.  It seemed like a good idea when we checked the weather reports, but actually it was a little on the chilly side.  But, considering the time of year, it could’ve been a lot chillier.  After the unspeakable horror that was the Chiefs game, we went over to Susan’s and watched a few old episodes of “The Sopranos.”  Then I went to bed to await the dawn of another Monday morn’, so I could go in and sit in my chair in my 6×6 cubicle and… whoops, I digress again, sorry.

OK, I shall grudgingly attempt to be a bit more descriptive in this weeks summary.  Friday night we kicked off the weekend with a big ol’ fat round of “sit and home and do nothing”.  Not sure what happened there, we just couldn’t get any motivation.  Doni watched bad TV all night, and I made another half-hearted attempt at loading Linux on one of my PC’s.  First I tried Red Hat, and that was an abysmal failure.  Each attempt to boot up would end in a rather spectacular crash.  Then I tried Mandrake 9 for a while… It would at least boot up, but I couldn’t get it to connect to the Internet.  I maintain my stance of “over-rated” at this point.  I’m sure a little reading and a few more hours effort would get me up and running, but what’s the point.  I can have Windows fully functional with no effort at all, so it still gets my vote so far.

Saturday we had something of a “date night”.  After a full day of absolutely nothing, we went to the Imax theatre and saw Spiderman 2.  It was pretty darn intense on the big screen.  On the downside, it was also “Boo in the Zoo” night, so there were about 200 little kids there.  Oh well, I guess they can watch the movie too.  After the movie we went downtown to a restaurant called “The Bulldog” for dinner.  It’s at about 17th and Main, down by the SoHo South lofts.  The grub wasn’t too bad at all.  I had salmon and Doni had some pasta.  Maybe a little overpriced for what it was, but not bad.

Sunday was all football and Halloween stuff.  We watched the games on TV, and then headed over to one of our neighbor’s houses for a Halloween party.  We had a good time, but the weather kind of brought down the festivities.  Must have cut into the trick-or-treat crowd too; only 10 kids or so came by.

Not a lot planned this week; maybe a trip or two to the gym, maybe a Monday night football fiesta this evening.  We shall see.

I played some cards with a bunch of people Friday.

I went to the Nora Jones concert Saturday.

I watched football Sunday.

And that’s all I got to say about that.

Yes my update is late.  That’s because I’m oncall.  Few things in life are worse than being oncall.  It’s a young man’s game, I’ll tell you that.  Oh well, I made it through the weekend, only 4 more nights to go.

A brief summary of the weekend…  Friday night we went to the Brooksider.  It seems like we did something a little more interesting than that, but I can’t remember what, so I’ll just leave it at that.  I know we stayed late (for us) and then as soon as I got home I got stuck on a phone call for the rest of the night.  Boo hoo.

Saturday morning I got up and went to the American Royal Parade with Mom.  This was a little bit tough getting started, because I’d been on the phone until 4:00 that morning.  But, Mom had a few things going for her;  I like parades, and she had donuts.  So, I poured a few pots of coffee down my gullet and off we went.  I’ll give the parade a 9.4 on a scale of 10.  Parking was good, (after a few miscues on my part) the crowd was about right, and it was great weather.  They could’ve used a few more motorcycle entries, a few more dogs, and they were going too slow.  Good stuff, all the same.  After the parade, a smarter person would have gone back home and gone to bed.  But, myself, I went out to lunch at the Blue Moose to meet Doni, James, and Todd.  We had a tasty, leisurely lunch.  After lunch, a smarter person would have gone home and gone to bed.  Alas, Todd and I went down to the Brooksider and watched the MU game.  After the MU game, we hooked back up with James and Doni, and went to the Wizards game.  I was definitely winding down by this point, but couldn’t blame anybody but myself unfortunately.  The soccer game was good I guess… General consensus was that soccer just isn’t a spectator sport.  We made the most of it though.  They are the division champs if you didn’t know.

Sunday, being a beautiful day, we decided to just hang out on our back porch and watch the football game.  So we dragged out our little 19″ TV, fired up the outdoor fireplace, and commenced to enjoy ourselves.  Somewhere during this celebration of life, Todd came over and presented me with one of his fine, high-dollar cigars, no doubt with the noble intention of making my day even more enjoyable.  For some reason, at the time, this sounded like a grand idea.  Oh yeah, I was hanging out in the sun, watching the Chiefs lose, smoking a big ol’ cigar.  This went well for about an hour and a half, until I got the bright idea to stand up.  My cigar, which was previously so tasty (I just keep telling myself that,) suddenly wasn’t sitting too well.  Despite the nip in the air, I was sweating profusely, having trouble focusing, and experiencing general misery.  Long story short, my day came to an early close.  I was D-O-N-E DONE.  Not a good thing.  I spent the rest of the lovely afternoon huddled under a blanket on the couch, while Doni repeatedly reprimanded me for wasting her good chili she made for lunch.  (Don’t think too hard about that last sentence.)  Phil has smoked his last see-gar I believe.

By the way I posted a few more pictures.  I don’t have the return links and stuff done yet, but the “content” is there at least.  These are the pictures Martin took at the American Royal BBQ.  Martin’s Pics

Another weekend gone, WHOOSH!!!  At least it was a little calmer than the last few.  Almost relaxing, even.

Friday night we wanted to go out with the Munkirs.  They still have that newly-wed aura about them, and we just wanted to bask in it for a while.  It’s healthy, you know.  Alas, they had “other plans,” so we had to default to the Martins.  See, that’s the downside of the Munkirs union…  Imagine, James having plans on a Friday night.  It never even crossed our minds.  I guess we will have to start planning a bit earlier in order to get on his (their) schedule.  Anyway, we headed up North to get a little dinner and throw some cards with the Martins.  When we got there, we ended up going over to one of his neighbor’s houses to see their new baby.  We were there so long, fascinated by the beauty of new life, that by the time we left it was too late to go to dinner.  (OK, actually the guys sat out on the back deck and talked about BBQ for three hours…)  So, instead of going out, we just hunkered down at the Martin residence, ordered some pizza and played cards.  The boys won, just for the record.

Saturday, as sort of a “make up” for declining us the night before, Munkirs met us at Microcenter for a little geek browsing.  Remarkably, I couldn’t find a single thing I “needed.”  Munkirs, on the other hand, picked up a nice new home wireless setup, immediately drawing just a bit of jealousy.  My setup is pretty last-year in that respect.  I have begun counter-shopping…  After that, we hung out at On The Border for about an hour, going through 4 baskets of chips and salsa and about 2 pitchers of iced tea.  Best deal in town.  For dinner, Doni’s sister Ronda and her boyfriend had us up to his house in the Northlands.  Man, we had some good stuff.  Big thick-cut pork chops on the grill, portabello mushrooms, garlic bread, homemade apple pie…  Dinners like that make me want to take up cooking at home again.  Of course, it’s even better if somebody else cooks it I guess.

Sunday we didn’t do a whole lot.  I worked in the yard a bit (!!) and Doni went to Tanners with me for lunch.  After Tanners, I went down to the Brooksider to watch the football games, and ended up playing some cards.  Joe, Bob, Chris and I played some spades, which I previously considered a darn fine, and generally straightforward, card game.  Unfortunately, the entire event was somewhat marred by Joe and Bob’s unsportsmanlike conduct.  They tried quite persistently to change the rules of the game as it progressed, in such a fashion as to accommodate their combined poor bidding skills.  In the spirit of the friendly game, Chris and I tried to humor them as much as possible, but eventually we had to put ’em down.  The situation was really rather embarrassing, but they finally admitted their fault, albeit not particularly graciously.  Buoyed by our convincing victory, we headed over to Susan’s house to watch a few old episodes of “The Sopranos” and called it a weekend.