Man I’m struggling to remember what we did Friday.  Seems like we did something, but maybe not.  Guess I’ll have to skip that day.  Too bad, it might have been something really fun.  Sigh.  Then again, I might have been tired and just gone to bed.  My newly implemented weekday schedule starts off at 5:00 in the morning, so I don’t stay up too late.  This all centers around the puppy, see:  Get up at 5:00, feed the dog, and head out on a walk by 5:40.  This puts us in Brookside by 6:00, which is conveniently what time the coffee shop opens.  Get a coffee, read the paper, and by the time we get back home, voila’, it’s time to go to work.  This effectively gives the pup an extra hour before his daily kennelling, which seems to be working out well.

Saturday, I was rudely awoken at the unholy hour of 7:30 with a little work event, which drug on painfully into the afternoon.  During the time I was on the phone, however, I managed to get everything ready for an afternoon of bbq’ing.  It was the inaugural lighting of the smoker this season, and baby back ribs were on the menu.  Looking back over the span of my memory, (approximately 4 hours,) I don’t think I’ve ever done baby backs.  I really don’t like them as much as spares, but they were on sale at the grocery and for some reason they didn’t have any spares… So that pretty much made the choice.  I used my co-worker Ken’s recommended 3-2-1 method, and they came out rather famously if I do say so myself.  (I’d link to the recipe, but I just noticed it has a key typo in it… c’mon Ken, how about some proofing.)  The basic idea is that you give the ribs 3 hours of smoke, wrap them for 2 hours, then 1 more hour unwrapped.  I did one slab with sauce, and one without.  Believe it or not, the sauced ones were quite a bit better.  I say “believe it or not” because I like my ribs dry, but the sauced slab was definitely better.  That last hour crusted the sauce quite nicely, so they weren’t really sloppy or anything.  So, take a cut of meat I don’t generally like, put sauce on it which I don’t generally like, and it comes out great… What can ya’ do.  I guess that’s what experimenting is for.  I’m aiming to try again next weekend, mostly because I had some horrible heat issues with the smoker that I have to figure out.  Anyway… After eating all that food and being out in the sun all day we were worn out, so we watched “Ron Burgundy” and called it a night.

Sunday turned into kind of a “lazy day” despite all the plans I had laid out.  It happens.  I did get the lawn mowed, so there’s 40 minutes I don’t have to account for.  After that we went on a little outing, mostly on a mission to find a light for the TV room.  Failing on that mission, we instead went down and checked out the Pet Expo for a few hours.  That was a fine time; We bought several toys for the dog and cat, and talked to our MPR friends for quite a while.  That pretty much sums up the week I guess.  Come on over next Sunday if you want to stare at some ribs cooking.  Weather and interest providing, of course.

Does anybody really want to hear about a weekend spent in St. Louis working?  I didn’t think so.  I flew down there Friday, went out with the guys, and then worked until it was time to go home Sunday.  And there ya’ go.  The only news of note is that Gabe broke out of his kennel and ate a door.  You might ask “What do you mean, ate a door?”  I mean he ate the door.  Poor boy has been pooping sawdust all week.  Sigh.

Another year, another art fair out of the way.  Man, what a debacle.  According to the report in the KC Star, 80,000 people attended this year’s Brookside Art Fair.  Of those, I suspect fully 3/4 of them were Johnson County residents making their annual pilgrimage to “That quaint little ghetto down off 63rd.”  So, that translates into a whole lot of incompetent drivers and 240,000 cigarette butts per hour I had to endure all weekend.  Miserable.  Suffice to say I avoided that area like the plague.  Typical conversation overheard from some of the offending intruders:

“I can’t find anywhere to park, do they expect you to walk around here or something?”

“Oh just stop the car in the street, we’ll only be a few hours.  Can I get a light?”

“But we’re in the middle of the street, won’t we get a ticket?  Oh good, there’s a Price Chopper, I need another carton of Camels.”

“Oh honey please, they wouldn’t ticket a Mercedes.  Besides, I heard the police won’t even come to this area.”

And so on and so on.

Despite being banned from my regular haunts for the weekend, we still managed to stay busy.  Friday night Doni planned a fun little “date” for us; We went to the Stadium Club, where they were having a dinner and beer tasting.  The food was great.  Doni was a bit embarrassed when they had to ask me to step away from the smoked fish table, but she got over it.  Hey, they said “all you can eat,” I was pushing the limits.  We stayed there for a few hours, and then went home and watched “Mean Girls.”  Lindsay Lohan, heh heh, heh heh.  (What is she, like 25, 30?  Right?)

Saturday I took Gabe up to Kevin Brown’s to hang out and demo the new smoker.  We stayed around a few hours but didn’t make it long enough to see how the “product” turned out.  He had a brisket, a few slabs o’ ribs, a few chickens… And there was still plenty of real estate left to put more on.  The smoker was running smooth; kind of a wood-hog though.  Don’t know exactly what to do about that but we’ll cipher on it.  Might just have to feed it trees and be happy.  Yes, I took some pictures; No, I don’t have them off my camera yet.  Later, we headed back home and then went out to dinner with Ronda, Josh and Randy.  I was supposed to make dinner, as we owe them one, but I had a new recipe and didn’t think it wise to try it out on company.  So, we went to 75th Street Brewery and then down to the Brooksider for a while.  (The art fair was closed by that time.)

Sunday was kind of a mix of work, yard stuff, and walking the dog.  I’m not sure what all we did, but it wore me out.  Todd came over for dinner and I cooked the above-referenced “new recipe.”  (Todd doesn’t count as “company.”)    Basically it was a pork tenderloin stuffed and wrapped with prosciutto and pancetta.  I was quite pleased with the results; That one will have to get typed up and put out in the recipe section.  Add it to the list… 1) Post vacation pics, 2) Post smoker pics 3) Post new recipe.  Sigh.  Anyway, it wasn’t too hard to prepare, but it looked kind of “fancy.”  After dinner the weather was just right for a fire, so we started up the patio fireplace and hung outside for a few hours.  Thus ended another weekend.

Whoa, that was a pretty busy weekend.  Busy for us anyway.  It went by entirely too fast.  My latest theory is that we always need to go out Friday night, because it makes the weekend seem longer.  For instance, this past Friday we watched a half a movie and went to bed at 9:00… And sure enough this led to a remarkably short weekend.  I’ll start testing this new theory this coming weekend.

Anyway… If there was one good thing about our boring Friday, it was that we caught up on some sleep.  Everybody put in a hard 11 hours of sleep, even the pup.  After we finally got up, Gabe and I went down to Jerry’s pet store in Westport, where the rescue group was having an “adoption event.”  We had just a jolly good time, and the boy was relatively well behaved.  He was wound a little too tight though, so I took him back home for a nap while Doni and I went to lunch at Jazz.  Saturday night was almost as uneventful as Friday; I went over to Todd’s and started reloading his PC.  Poor guy hasn’t been on the Internet for months.  We’re doing away with his Windows 2000 and putting XP on.  Sort of a slow process but it’s getting there.

Sunday we woke up at 5:00 and went on our very first organized run, the Trolley Run.  We had a good time, and somehow managed to even make it the whole 4 miles.  We didn’t run the entire way, but I’d say we ran 3 of the 4 miles.  Not bad for us, especially considering we didn’t really prepare for it very much.  After the run, we went over to Kim and Ed’s for a little post-party, which lasted a lot longer than I thought it would.  I think we hung around until noon or so.  After that we took a nap, then decided it was so nice out we needed to go hang out on the deck at the Brooksider.  Took the pup with us and sat down there for a few hours, then it was back to Todd’s place to work on the PC.  Had a little Chinese food and called it a weekend.  This morning I’m so sore I can barely walk.  Exercise is over-rated.

No, we haven’t forgotten about our poor abused cat.  I just thought that was such a darn fine picture I decided to put it on the main page.  Our “family pics” should be coming in soon; hopefully some (one maybe?) came out OK.