Not a bad weekend, not bad at all.  Friday we started off by going out with our friend David, who was visiting from New Mexico.  He was making a quick pass through town and had time to swing by and go out with us.  Ed and Kim came over and babysat the puppy, affording us the luxury of taking him out and hittin’ the town.  As a little aside here, I want everyone to immediately cease making fun of me for getting babysitters for my dog.  The boy just so happens to suffer from extreme separation anxiety.  I cannot, in good conscience, leave him home by himself after he’s already been alone all day.  The potential for mental anguish and/or property damage is just too great.  So there.  So, anyway, we started the evening off down at the Brooksider.  All the regular crowd was there.  Nothing too noteworthy, other than one of the few remaining familiar waitresses was putting in her last shift before quitting.  Sigh.  Another one going off into the cruel world to work a “real job.”  Before you know it, there aren’t going to be any waitresses left that know us.  We’ll have to actually interact with them, telling them what we want and stuff.  Wholly unacceptable.  After hanging out there for a while, we headed over to Jalapenos for some burritos.  A good meal is usually the “coup de’ grace” on the evening, but for some reason this time it actually revitalized us, so we headed up the street to see who was at Bobby Bakers.  Much like the Brooksider, it was pretty much the same crowd as always, which isn’t a bad thing.  We were having a good time catching up with David, making vacation plans and stuff, and we actually ended up staying out rather late.  We may have damaged our babysitting privileges for the future… We didn’t make it back until well after 10:00.  (Ed says it was after midnight but I just can’t grasp that idea… I’m not buying it.)

Saturday I started off the day by taking Gabe to his puppy class.  Needless to say, he is the star pupil at school.  This week was leash walking though, which isn’t exactly his strong point.  Poor boy gets easily distracted, it’s not his fault.  He did pretty well though; we’ll have to practice a lot this week.  He seemed a little distressed after school, possibly as a result of his mediocre performance, so I drove him out to Dressler’s and Petsmart in KCK to do some shopping.  Got him a few toys, a few bones, and a new leash and collar set.  Plus, Gabe’s “Foster Mom” works at the Petsmart so we visited with her for a while too.  All that shopping pretty well killed the afternoon, so we went home and made some dinner.  Doni has started some crazy diet, so cooking has been something of a challenge lately.  The biggest limitation is no salt… How do you cook anything without salt?  I ended up with grilled salmon with mustard and dill.  Rather creative I thought, especially for me.  Prepared mustard has salt in it, so I whipped some up from dried mustard.  The fish didn’t come out bad… Needed salt.  We finished up the evening watching “Reservoir Dogs,” which wasn’t nearly as good as I’d hoped.

Sunday was the our usual “take it easy” day.  I did make it to the gym, for the first time in a month.  I’m going to try and make another run at getting there on a regular basis; We’ll have to see how it goes.  It would work out better for me if they’d take the dog in their day care center… I’ll have to ask about that.  Something tells me they are going to frown on the idea, but it never hurts to ask.  After a pretty good workout, I took the dog down to the Brooksider and hung out on the deck for a few hours with Todd.  Whew, nice day out yesterday.  We had a little lunch and just kind of took in the sun.  Around 4:00 we headed out with all of Doni’s family to watch the T-Bones game.  (And yes, we did get a babysitter again; Mike came over and stayed with the boy.)  Doug, Jackie and kids were in town from Houston, so we had a veritable mob.  That’s some good entertainment there, if you haven’t made it out to one of these games.  Tickets were a bit pricey at $14, but that was for top-notch seats.  We were about 4-5 rows back right behind home plate.  Aside from the rather miserable drive to get out there, I give it two thumbs up.  I expect we’ll go back soon, maybe take a grill with us.  As an added bonus, they won both games of the double-header, although we didn’t make it all the way ’til the end of the second game.

Man this week is off to a rough start.  Despite the generally reliable prediction of an average day by my horoscope, everything is going remarkably crappy.

1. My super-duper headblade hit the floor and broke.  Now I’m going to be running around like some kind of long-hair hippie until my new one comes in.


2. Doni put me on a diet.  Again.


3. The vending machine is out of Cheetos.  I had to eat fritos for lunch.  REGULAR fritos.

Well, I managed to scam a 4-day weekend out of the holiday.  The hows and whys of the extra day are less than interesting, but somehow I ended up starting my weekend on Friday.  Hey, I ain’t complaining.  Doesn’t seem like I put the bonus day to much use though… I feel a rather brief update coming on.

For the most part, I guess I played with the dog and lounged.  Sunday afternoon we did voyage out of our regular 2-mile radius and checked out the Martin’s/Schmidt’s new water vessel.  We toured Smithville lake pretty much all afternoon, and even got in the water a few times.  Doni and I bought a summer parking pass in case we get the opportunity again.  It’s good to have “boat friends”.  Plus, I still have loose plans of taking the dog on a trial camping trip, so Smithville would be a good place for that.  If it ain’t working out I can just turn around and go back home.

On the holiday, Martin came over and we did a little ‘que practicing.  We did two slabs of spareribs and two slabs of baby backs.  “Keep practicing” was our general consensus at the end of the afternoon.  Oh well.  It was a nice day to sit around in the sun at any rate.

I’m struggling for material… I quit.

Well it turns out that publishing new pictures isn’t actually too hard.  I still don’t like doing it though.  Here’s some pictures from the first few days of our Mexico trip back in March:  Los Barrilles, Mexico

I don’t know why it says “May 05” under “March 05.”  Something it auto-generated somewhere.  Don’t worry about it.

And the Cabo pictures too!  Man I’m on a roll.

Whoa, that was quite a busy weekend, at least for us.  Non-stop action for the Kenagys.  That could result in a very lazy holiday weekend coming up… I’ll still be worn out.

Actually our weekend started on Thursday.  Doni planned a big date-night for my birthday, which was last Wednesday.  This is no lie; I can’t think of one night we’ve been out together since we got the pup.  For people who are used to going out two or three times a week this is quite an adjustment.  So, Doni hired a baby-sitter (Mike, her co-worker) for the evening and we hit the town.  She bought us tickets to The Iron Fork at the Sheriton in Overland Park.  Now that’s not exactly the most informative website I linked to there, so I’ll sum it up for you:  It was an event sponsored by The Pitch, benefiting Harvesters.  It was kind of patterned after “The Iron Chef” on Food TV.  Ten local chefs were given a bunch of (identical) ingredients and they had one hour to come up with their best dish based on these ingredients.  They had a big table full of vegetables and basic ingredients, and then they all HAD to use mangos and sea bass.  Sounds kind of silly, yeah, but it was pretty awesome to watch them work.  You didn’t get to sample any of the creations, but there were several local restaurants all around the room giving out samples.  We even stayed out rather late for us, although the baby-sitter was racking up a bill at the rather outrageous sum of 50 cents per 2 hours.  We stiffed him anyway, so what the heck.  Bill us.

Friday I went up to my boss’ house after work to try and fix his daughter’s PC.  I think we got it all up and running; the sound didn’t work and it had a few rather resilient virus’ on it, but seems to be doing OK now.  This was such a mentally and physically (had to take some screws out) taxing event that I had to go home and rest for the remainder of the evening.  We watched a movie, the name of which totally escapes me.  Sometime during this cinematic event I fell asleep on the couch, effectively ending the evening.

Saturday afternoon was spent hanging blinds in one of the spare bedrooms.  Gloom, despair, and agony on me.  I HATE hanging blinds.  It’s been brought up that I seem to hate everything relating to working around the house, but hanging blinds definitely rates higher on the list than, say, mowing the yard.  But, it had to be done, and it does look a lot nicer.  I even went the extra mile and shortened the length on them properly.  We’ve got several that have been hanging for five years now and still not been shortened, so I wanted to go ahead and do these while my momentum was up.  I even had sort of a technique down by the time I was through; Maybe I’ll knock out the others next weekend.  Or, perhaps I won’t.  After this horrible afternoon of drudgery, we went out to Mom’s for dinner.  Our birthdays were both last week, so we celebrated them by her making me dinner.  Nice how that works out, huh.  We had chicken grillers, salad, potatoes, and what I’ll call a corn casserole.  And, a strawberry pie for dessert with fresh berries from the garden.  That’s what I’m talkin’ about!!!  Sue, Dave and Rebecca came out too, which worked out great because we haven’t seen them in about way-too-long.

Sunday I got off to a rough start.  I made the dreaded mistake of turning on the TV while I was reading my paper.  I got sucked into some sorry movies, and the next thing you know it was 1:00 in the afternoon.  This kind of twerked me off because I cheated myself out of several good hours of nice weather.  So, I hooked up Gabe and we took off walking down to the Brooksider for some lunch.  I figured if we were going to waste the day, we might as well do it outside in the sun.  Alas, we got all the way down there and they were closed down for their stupid annual golf tournament.  CRAP!!!  This served to compound my twerked-off-ness quite a bit; I found myself quite baffled as to how to entertain myself.  The best idea I came up with was to put Gabe in the car and head out to Paola KS to visit Gabe’s foster family.  We actually already had plans to get together anyway, but I wasn’t supposed to be there until six.  Surprise, I’m a little early!!  Sometimes I amaze even myself with my dorkiness.  What the heck, it beat laying on the couch doing nothing all day.  They have an awesome-looking Pit Bull named Glory, and you could tell Gabe was more than a little excited to see her again.  We had a great dinner of shrimp and fish, the dogs played some more, and then we had to make the longgggg drive home.  Gabe fell asleep as soon as we left the driveway, so he wasn’t much company on the way home.

Well, I still haven’t gotten around to posting any vacation pics yet.  I rank organizing photos right up there with hanging blinds.  Here’s some pictures of Gabe playing with the neighbor dog though, just to shut you up.  The other dog is Bondai, he lives one house west of us.  Gabe and Bondai Pics