We finally took a weekend off to just sit around and do nothing.  Quite enjoyable I must say.  I might have just barely started to get bored yesterday on the holiday, but I got better.  I was anticipating watching an exciting Royal’s game on the back patio for entertainment and that didn’t really work out so well.  By the time I turned it on in the third inning it was effectively over, so I had to find alternate forms of amusement.  Luckily the grocery store had ribs on sale for just such an emergency.  I put a few slabs on the long dormant Weber and spent my afternoon watching them carefully, while watching the BBQ Pitmasters marathon for inspiration.  They came out passably;  Donette declared them “too smokey” and I suppose I’d tend to agree.  Lighten up on the hickory next time, or possibly invest in a bag of apple wood.

Other weekend entertainment included a few trips to the pool.  First time I’d used that nearby amenity, it was pretty darn nice.  We also hit Villa Toscano, mostly to take advantage of the free lunch.  I won’t claim it’s the best food in the world, but most definitely worth the price.  Nice place to hang out and eat a little free pasta.  We even got bold enough to bring Teagan along, and she behaved admirably.  As an added bonus, they gave me a “take and bake” pizza for my birthday, so we threw that on the grill later for a free dinner too!  In the “home improvement” category, I finally installed the drip lines for my raised garden and my two hop vines.  This vast undertaking ate up at least 45 minutes of my valuable Sunday, I can certainly understand why it took me so long to get around to it.  Geez I’ve probably spent three times that long standing around with a garden hose watering the darn thing.  Well, it sounded like a daunting project, as most do.

Whew, trip is over.  I was particularly happy to get back home after this voyage for some reason.  Old age perhaps.  I was out of gas, that’s for sure.  In retrospect I think I can say “good trip,” but it was time to leave the UK.  It’s not a well-kept secret that I tend to get a little anxious travelling by myself, and that was coming to a head quickly.  I swear if I had to ask one more person to repeat themselves because I couldn’t understand the combination of mumble-mouth accent and made-up words, there was going to be an international incident.  I’d list “highlights” as the architecture, the cask ales, and work went pretty well too.  On the “lowlight” side would be the food, the weather, and every single resident of the country.  I say that about half-jokingly, maybe a little more.  They were actually quite nice and very accommodating on the whole.  The fierce resistance to changing their customs to suit my day-to-day routine had me a bit put off though.

But, it’s all “last week” now, I’m semi-comfortably back home.  I say “semi” because I’m still just a bit jet-lagged.  Eight hours is a harsh time switch.  And of course I made the poor decision to go wine tasting with some friends Sunday after getting back, I don’t think that helped things.  Probably should have unwound for the day.  Oh well, why start making sound decisions now?

Either I’m so bored I’m updating my page at 2:00 in the morning, or I’m in an extremely different time zone.  The latter would be a safe bet.  Indeed, I’ve been sentenced to a week “across the pond,” with the accompanying 8-hour time difference.  I haven’t even fully adjusted to PST yet and they throw this at me?  It remains to be seen if I get any sleep at all.  Case in point, I enjoyed the entire Royals game last night (or, this morning, as was actually the case,) complete with rain delay.  I got to cheer them on to victory, and barely had enough time left to make it in to the office.  Odd feeling, I’ll tell you.

So, travelling over here (the UK, I guess I forgot to mention,) consumed the vast majority of my weekend.  I left the house at 1:00 Saturday afternoon, convinced as always that there would be some unforeseen delay at the airport which would in turn cause me to miss my flight.  And, as always, this resulted in me sitting around a terminal bored out of my mind for three hours.  Better safe than sorry I guess.  (Not really.)  From there I flew to LA, enjoyed another three hour layover, then took an overnight flight to London.

By the time I hit Heathrow, it was 4:00 in the afternoon with the time change.  After suffering through a good bit of trouble finding my driver, I finally made it to the hotel around 6:00, thoroughly exhausted but just a bit hungry.  The Google led me on a short hike to a place called The Antelope, which I was quite fond of.  I imagine I’ll find my way back there a time or two over the course of the week.  Due to some technical issues with the international service on my phone, I don’t seem to be able to upload any of the pics I took.  Guess that’ll have to wait until next week.

We branched out quite a bit on the entertainment front this weekend.  While Friday & Saturday were standard bouts of nothing, Saturday we got all wacky and bucked up for the big pay-per-view boxing match, and invited a few other couples over to watch it.  Between the baseball games, the Kentucky Derby, and the fight itself we definitely had a good day of it.  I definitely foresee getting some use out of our backyard setup.  It was just pretty fun sitting around watching TV outside, grilling up some dinner (chicken tacos,) and enjoying the awesome weather.  Yeah, it’ll get hot sooner or later, but I’m hoping for enough shade to keep it bearable.  As far as the actual fight?  Eh, waste of money.  I’ve never watched boxing before, and now I know why:  BORING!  I was left with a definite sense of, “Dang, I PAID for that?”  And due to whatever rock I’ve been living under the past half century, I honestly didn’t know about all Mayweather’s “issues,” or I probably wouldn’t have paid to watch him in the first place.  I knew he was pretty universally disliked, but never had enough interest to find out why.  Well, we had a great time at any rate, even if the tacos were infinitely better than the TV event.

Sunday, Donette left for a work convention in San Diego.  I immediately went to the grocery store and bought the biggest pack of chicken legs they had, and set about grilling.  I’m not really sure why, but every time I get left home alone I get an unnatural urge to grill chicken legs.  Oh well, there’s worse hobbies I suppose.

Rest assured, I have good intentions of posting a full update, however lame it may be.  In the meantime I wanted to share this pic I took at Costco the other day.  Now I know why Chocolate Ale is so hard to get in KC, they shipped it all to the CA Costco stores!  There were pallets and pallets of the stuff.  (Nope, didn’t get any.)

Boulevard Chocolate Ale. In May?!?!