Not too much to report for that weekend.  Doni’s Grandmother passed away last Wednesday night, so we weren’t able to attend Float Trip.  Pretty much all we did over the weekend was drive back and forth to Iowa.  Initial reports back from Float Trip were positive though; sounds like a good time.

There is another training ride Thursday night at 5:30, at 107th and Lee Blvd.  Bring your mountain bikes and come on out.  In other news, Doni will be out of town until Wednesday.  So if you want to, let’s say, come over and help me with a few projects around the house, just give me a call.  Wink wink, nudge nudge.

OK, I will make an effort to get back to Monday updates.  There’s usually too much going on Monday morning to be typing on this thing, but today looks pretty mellow.

All-in-all, I’m going to label that a “good weekend”.  I am not sure what the exact qualifiers are for one of those, but it met them whatever they are.  Friday night I left work a bit early and went to the Brooksider.  That turned out to be a good move; I think it was the last of the cool weather we are going to see.  Not too much else to say there… sat on the deck until it was time to go home.

Saturday morning, I woke up bright and early to go help Mark start building a fence around “Smith Farms” in Lathrop.  You’ve probably heard of the place; it is a large cattle ranch in Lathrop that raises Black Angus.  I was kind of excited to see the cattle… I’m thinking about buying one of the calves so I got to see them and take a few pictures.  Anyway, four of us were on hand for the hole-digging party.  I think it served as a very suitable reminder to us all that our Mon-Fri jobs ain’t all that bad.  Manual labor is very, very over-rated.  Mark had rented a big two-man auger, which was pretty much a 5 hp motor stuck on top of a 10″ wide, 3′ tall corkscrew.  Sort of a medieval torture device with handles.  At the end of the day though, we had completed our mission; 50 holes in one day.  Whew.  After I poured myself back home, Doni and I went out to dinner at Strouds.  For some reason fried chicken and mashed potatoes just sounded good after a day on the farm.  And, as a matter of fact, it was.

Sunday we did the “regular stuff”.  Went to the gym for a while, sat out at the pool for a while, and then went over to Susan’s to watch a few old episodes of The Sopranos.  Susan sold her house so those events are coming to a close pretty quickly, gotta enjoy it while it lasts.  I worked on my picture section a little bit too.  Posted a few pictures of the fence building event and of the nieces and nephews.

On the plate for this week: The preparations for the big Katy Trail ride are kicking up.  Remarkably, I have yet to actually ride my bike, which is probably not a good thing since the ride is only a month and a half away.  But, I am taking spinning classes twice a week so I’m counting on that to help me survive.  I definitely need to get some real ride time in though.  Our first “training ride” was scheduled last Thursday but I ended up working late and missing it.  Bummer.  I’m also working on reloading my mp3 player… the current songs are getting a little old.  Haven’t decided on a general “genre” yet.  You got your “spinning music” and your “workout music“, both of which are about equally annoying.  (Right-click those and choose “save target as” if you really want to hear them.  Don’t play them around your kiddies though; I have no idea what they are saying but I’d bet it isn’t good.)

Well, the good news is my site is fixed.  Stupid firewalls are overrated.  The bad news is I didn’t get to go biking this evening.  So I am bitter.  Bitterer, whatever.

This is just kind of a test post.  If it’s out here on the site, then my problems are over.  All is well.

Training has begun for the big “Katy Trail” ride.  Four fit fellas will attempt to traverse the wilds of Missouri, from Sedalia to St. Charles, in a mere 3 days.  Training rides are on Thursday if anyone would like to join in the fun.  We’ll be riding the Corporate Woods trail most of the time, and riding mountain bikes.  Fat tires only welcome, don’t be showing up with your 8 lb. road bike with the 4 cm. tires, we have no need for you.

Not much to relate this week… I would have posted yesterday but the site experienced an unscheduled outage all day due to a failure at KCPL.  Apparently my UPS downstairs doesn’t have much run-time to it.

As far as weekend activities, I’d say Saturday was the “busiest” of days.  I started off the day with a nice 45 minute spinning session at the “racquet club” at 9:30.  Then we went to the ball game at noon with the Martins; the Royals lost as usual but it was still a great time.  Any time you get an afternoon game that’s in the low 80’s in the middle of July, you gotta love it.  Plus, it was free tee-shirt day, woo hoo!!!  After the game we hooked up with the Scottens, Browns, Munkirs, and of course Todd, and went to The Thai Place for dinner.  That’s a pretty big group for dinner, so we were plagued with the dreaded screwed-up-order and screwed-up-bill issues, but minorly so.  Sure couldn’t complain about the grub, that place is awesome.  After dinner we went to Harpo’s and hung out on the deck, where we actually lasted until past the midnight hour; quite remarkable considering we don’t exactly go out of our way to frequent Westport establishments.  I will grudgingly admit that their deck is considerably nicer than the Brooksider’s… But, the extra 4 miles makes it totally unacceptable for a regular hang-out.

Sunday we did “Kenagy Family Day” all afternoon.  After surviving the arduous trek to Peculiar, we were rewarded with a feast of ribs, dogs, and burgers, complimented by a bevy of sides.  We met the latest little ‘un in the bunch, young Faith Finley visiting from the wilds of northern Nebraska.  I took a grand total of 129 pictures, which are queued up to be posted after the other gazillion I’ve taken since my PC crashed.  (I am still in the process of loading software… Don’t have my “photo album” stuff loaded yet.)