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.

Last weekend was the big American Royal BBQ that I’ve been looking forward to so much.  And, I must say, it lived up to my anticipation nicely.  The event was at Kemper Arena downtown, and we all headed down there Thursday night.  We got all set up and then just sat around playing cards the rest of the night, until it was time to put on our first round of food at 2:00 Friday morning.  Martin, Schmidt and I stayed down there at the site, and everybody else bailed home for a little quality sleep.

Friday is considered the big “party” day at the event.  We spent quite a bit of time getting ready, as well as trying to stay dry since it rained off and on all afternoon.  We were lucky enough to be located right under a highway overpass, so we hunkered down there when the rain got too bad.  (The overpass was good for the rain… not so good when we were sleeping.)  The party started up around 6:00, and we had a rather impressive crowd show up.  We went through 35 lbs. of brisket, a couple of slabs of ribs, several pounds of chicken wings, a pork tenderloin, and a bunch of sides in the space of about an hour.  Next year I guess we need more food.  (Well, there was ham left over, but that’s another story.  And we had a “situation” with the pork butts; they didn’t get done in time for the party.)  It was a heck of a good time but actually quite a bit of work.  The weather wasn’t very good either… It got downright COLD and the wind kicked up pretty strong.  I got my competition brisket on about 10:00 that night and then tried to “mingle” a bit, but by midnight I was falling asleep in my chair.  So, I went to bed.  The party was pretty well broken up by then anyway.

Saturday morning we got up around 6:00 and got back to work.  I was more than a little dismayed to hear that after I had gone to bed my smoker had spiked up to 350 degrees, and nobody could get it cooled down.  BUMMER!!!  For the most part I sat on a hay bale and sulked the rest of the afternoon.  My brisket for the party came out very well, if I do say so my darn self, and I was counting on this one to come out the same.  But there wasn’t much to do about it at that point but wait it out; not like you can start over.  At least the weather had taken a turn for the better; not a cloud in the sky and I’d say it was mid-60’s or so.

We had progressively placed higher and higher aspirations on our entries since the contest started, and I think everybody was starting to feel a little pressure.  Our goal when we started planning this event was to not get disqualified.  Then we raised the bar a bit and decided we didn’t want to come in last place.  By Saturday afternoon we had kicked it up yet another notch and decided we didn’t want to come in the last 10 places.  Considering there were 475 teams, it would truly take an effort to do that badly, but we were a bit nervous all the same.  As it turned out, we did fairly respectably.  My brisket did lousy, but coulda been worse.  I didn’t like it either so I couldn’t complain too much.  I would blame the smoker issue, but Joe and Bob used the same fire and did rather well with their pork.  Martin’s ribs did about as well as my brisket… coulda been better, but coulda been a lot worse too.  The best finish on our team was Todd’s chicken.  Yes, Todd, whose cooking experience consists of toaster pastries.  Toaster pastries done in the microwave, not a toaster.  What can you do, the world is not always a fair place.  Not to sound like a sore loser though; It WAS some darn good hen.

We wrapped up around 3:30, and I went home and slept for about 16 hours.  My project for the week is to somehow get the barbecue smell out of my car.  Overall, I consider the event an enormous success, and can’t wait to do it again next year.  I’ve already started researching smoker modifications to prevent a repeat of the blast-furnace situation, and I’ve got a few good ideas.  Todd, Munkirs and I met down at the Brooksider Sunday afternoon for a little post-event recap, and came up with a list of things to improve on for next year.  Mostly the list consists of more food, more smokers (or a bigger smoker,) and a few key re-configurations to our booth.  There’s a few pictures of the event posted, check ’em out.  (I don’t know how they ended up under the “vacation” section… I need to clean that up a bit.)

Whoa, that was a short weekend.  I think I’ve been cheated.  Let’s see… Friday we went down to the Brooksider for a little after-work winding down.  We left early and went to Hen House to buy a few briskets, and so ended Friday.

Saturday, Doni went up North to her parents house to try and get rid of some of our stuff in a garage sale.  She had some limited success; dumped a few things but no “big ticket” items went.  Namely, my old hunting bow and my golf clubs.  Oh well, back to the the basement for them.  Meanwhile, I was home working on my “practice” briskets, getting ready for the big BBQ contest next weekend.  Honestly we’re not too concerned with the competition itself, but we want some good grub for the party Friday night.  As long as we don’t come in dead last I’ll be content.  I’ve got my sights set on the top 75%, but that might be a bit too aggressive for first-timers.  Anyway, I did two briskets; one was about 10 lbs, and the other was 14+ lbs.  Tried out a new dry rub, and it was darn awesome.  Another new thing I tried was putting the briskets in a heavy styrofoam cooler after I pulled them off the smoker.  That worked out well, but I think I left them in the cooler too long.  They came out well, but they’re entirely too tender.  Personally I like my brisket fall-apart tender, but supposedly it needs just a little bit of “stretch” to it for the competition.  Freaks.

Sunday was kind of an “impromptu” party over at Joe F’s house.  Joe went to the Chiefs game and kindly left the house open so Todd and Bob could practice their secret recipes for the contest.  And, of course, being “head chef” and all, I had to go supervise.  And, of course, Doni wanted to come too.  Then Ed didn’t have anything going on, so he came over too.  All in all, we had a nice little fiesta in his absence.  We did an 8 lb. pork butt and 3 chickens, and all came out pretty well.  And, we watched the game on Joe’s nice big Sony while the smoker was doing it’s thing.  The game stunk of course, but we had fun.  The Martin’s came over after the football game, so we hung around and ate some of the product and played some cards.  I thoroughly enjoyed the day, but sure didn’t get much done.  I still have a bunch of wood to cut up, and clean my smoker, and put together my other “supplies.”  Gonna be a busy week.

Oh by the way, a few links to generic “stuff”:
I put up some pictures from the Katy Trail Ride.

And here is a link to an article in the KC Star about my Fantasy Football team.  They came to our party last week and did a little write-up, and took some pictures.