Most of that weekend was eaten up by a flooring project in the house.  Even if we didn’t actually do the work, it still interrupted the flow of our weekend to some degree.  Most home-improvement projects will do that, which is why we never embark on any.  When we bought the house we just had them put the builder-grade grade carpeting in downstairs, on the thought that it would last a while and by then we would either have moved on or decided what we really wanted.  (The flooring upgrades from the builder were crazy-expensive.)  As it turned out the cheap-o carpet was complete crap, it didn’t even last two years.  So, we decided to have tile put in to match the existing kitchen floor.  Along the way we ran into a few logistical issues, like matching the pattern of the tile to the entry-way tile, and ended up deciding to put the wood-look stuff in the dining room.  The project kicked off Friday night.  As part of our somewhat cut-rate installation fee, it was on us to move all the furniture out and have it ready for them to start early Saturday.  No problem, I figured I’d just bribe a few friends to come over and help me carry things around.  At the very last moment, I remembered “wait a minute, I don’t have any friends,” which put us in a rather dire situation.  It was rather a contentious evening involving lots of mechanical engineering and arguments, but between the two of us we actually managed to move the entire first floor into the garage.  Step one accomplished.

Saturday morning three guys showed up at 7:30 ready to hit the tile.  They had the carpet ripped out and the floor prepped by 8:00, leaving me with the inevitable feeling of “Geez, I coulda done that myself.”  Whatever.  That doesn’t mean I wanted to do it.  They put the tile in at a rather impressive rate.  Unlike the carpet tear-out, I had no illusions that I could have done that part.  It would’ve take me weeks, and the end result would have been much less aesthetically pleasing.  While all that mess was going on, Donette took off on a long walk.  She went on a seven mile hike, and Teagan and I met her at the end of it.  (In the car, of course.)  We went out to lunch, kicked around the town aimlessly for a while, and when we got back to the house around 4:00 they were pretty much wrapping things up.  Although it was all down, we still couldn’t walk on it, so we were effectively relegated to the back yard for the evening.  As it happens, I spend most evenings out there anyway, so not a big inconvenience on that part.

Sunday morning got off to a quite early start.  Teagan was also banished from the first floor, and we’d had her shut up in our bedroom all night.  About 4:30 in the morning she decided she’d been cooped up long enough and it was time to go out for a while.  As it happened, I was planning to cook a brisket for my Sunday entertainment, and the sun starts coming up shortly after 5:00 anyway, so I decided to just go ahead and get the smoker rolling.  Unlike the vast majority of my decisions, this one worked out nicely.  I spent a pleasant morning on the patio tending the cooker and drinking coffee.  The tile team showed up at 7:30 again and started on the grout, and we headed down to nearby Milestone for brunch.  Although conveniently located, I really do not care for that place.  The good news is, I didn’t have any sort of even mediocre expectations going in.  On the contrary, I’d say I almost look forward to seeing what egregious culinary faux pas they will subject me to each time I go there.  I ended up ordering the biscuits and gravy.  Although I fully expected bitter disappointment, my curiosity got the better of me and I just had to find out 1) what $10 biscuits and gravy tasted like, and 2) how they would manage to screw up a national staple. As it turned out, they weren’t bad at all, easily the least bad thing I’ve ever eaten there.  (Worth ten bucks?  Not on their best day, but I’ll leave that aspect out of it.)  If I just had to make a comment about them, which of course I did, I would question the addition of onions to the gravy.  Matter of fact, I would strongly question it.  Anybody ever had onions in their country gravy?  I can’t recall the occasion if I have.  After that, our friends Michael & Alaina joined us back at the house to monitor the cooker.  Poor Michael, I think he is just too young and energetic to appreciate the sport of smoking.  He seemed a bit thrown off that the entire day consists of sitting on the patio, with an hourly trip across the yard to throw a few lumps of charcoal on the cooker.  Doni finally took the kids to the pool, and I finished up the cook with Teagan.  It came out quite well considering I don’t get much practice out here.  When everybody got back from the pool they ended up moving all the furniture back in place while I finished putting together dinner, I think out of sheer boredom.  Bonus, project completed!

My Internet is working again!  Woot woot!  Whew that was a struggle.  They finally gave me a whole different brand of modem/router and that did the trick.  After weeks and weeks of “we don’t support that setup,” they sent out a super-geek and he admitted there was no reason it shouldn’t work.  That’s it, everything is working great and I’m never touching it again.  Mmmm hmmm.

That weekend fell somewhere in the “moderate” range on the entertainment scale.  I spent no small amount of time putting my network back together after the hodge-podge nightmare I’d created over the last several weeks.  Other than that, we went to a party over at a friends house on Saturday & hit the wine-tasting trail on Sunday.  It’s already triple-digits outside so my backyard enjoyment has been somewhat limited.  It’s not even bearable until about 8:00 in the evening, which gives me a solid 15 minutes before bedtime.  I’ve even been relegated to *gasp* watching the Royals games inside!  Boring.  (For that matter the games themselves have been boring also…  C’mon boys, pick it up.)

Yeah that’s a little brief, especially for all the “material” I have to work with.  I gotta ease back into it though.

Well I guess the ol’ Uverse issues have reached a standoff.  They sent a guy out Friday night to work on it, and he predictably got nowhere.  The worst part of it all is that I spent a rather significant part of my 3-day weekend working on it.  At least I got to the point where it sorta-kinda-almost works.  Not like I want it to though.  But, at least for the time being, I’m tired of messing with it, so it’ll have to do.

That was a pretty decent weekend, aside from dorking around with my home network.  Things got off to a slow start Friday when I had to sit home and wait for the Uverse guy to come out.  In all fairness, I did tell them “Any day after 3:30.”  It didn’t really occur to me to mention “Except Friday.”  Oh well.  Donette, meanwhile, met some friends up in Cameron Park for dinner.  I find it hard to believe they had any fun without me, but it sounds like they tried.

Saturday sort of escapes me…  I do recall Donette going for a long walk in preparation for an upcoming run she wants to do.  I believe she went like 7 miles, which is about 6 miles longer than I see myself ever walking.  I played the support wagon role, by meeting her at her destination for a tasty lunch.  (In the car.)

Sunday we got adventurous and went for a motorcycle ride to Sutter Creek.  We haven’t gone for a ride on that thing for over a year.  Been thinking about selling it, as a matter of fact.  We had a nice ride though, maybe we just need to get out on it more.  We met up with a bunch of friends for a quick lunch, and then sort of walked the town a bit.  It’s a nice little Parkville-esque kind of place.  Luckily we didn’t have to worry about buying anything since we couldn’t have carried it on the bike anyway.  (OK, I bought a pair of shoes and sent them home with our friends.)

On our holiday Monday, I broke out my long unused brewing equipment.  Much like the motorcycle, that hobby is a lot funner if you actually do it.  Sort of relaxing.  It went smoothly, although it took a lot longer than anticipated.  It sort of escapes me how I managed to turn a one-hour project into four hours, but I sure did.  Too much watching baseball and not enough brewing I guess.  I wan’t particularly in a hurry though, so I guess it’s as good a way to waste an afternoon as any.  Hopefully the end product comes out well, I need to get back into that hobby.

Well that’s a rather weak update, but I ain’t feeling it.  I’m genuinely distressed about my Uverse issues.  At this point I’m reduced to just waiting for it to fix itself, which in all likelihood isn’t going to happen…

Ugh, my Uverse is still broken.  I thought they were going to come up with some miraculous fix, but by now I’m rather resigned to the fix being “wait until my contract is up and switch services.”  What a drag.  I think I MIGHT be getting close but there are still weird intermittent phone problems.  Oh well.

So today is my big birthday.  By “big” I refer to the number.  Large.  Huge.  Unfathomable.  I was having trouble coming to grips with the whole situation, but at the end of the day I guess it’s unavoidable.  At least I got some mileage out of it, in the form of a weekend-long party in KC.  Now THAT was fun.  We flew there on Thursday with another couple from CA.  By the time we got all checked in to the hotel and stuff it was pretty late, so we just kind of hung around the area we were staying in (Westport) and showed them the lay of the land, so to speak.

Friday morning we got things started with a 10:00 tour of Boulevard Brewing.  I’m not sure how many times I’ve done that tour, ten maybe?  It never gets old though, seems like there is something new every time.  This time, the biggest change wasn’t to the brewery itself, but the tour format.  You used to have to sign up online, and it was almost impossible to get in one.  They were booked nearly a year out.  Now you just queue up at 10:00 and get your tickets, first come first server.  We showed up a little early and stood in line for a while, and had no trouble getting in on the first one.  After that, we gave our friends a quick tour of the Brookside area.  After hitting a few of my favorite spots, we moved downtown to the Phoenix and caught the Lonnie McFadden show;  Always a good time there.  After a good dose of jazz trumpet, several friends from Nebraska let us know they had arrived.  We took that as our queue to go grab some food, so we moved up the street to one of the finest dining establishments in KC, The Peanut.  Can’t beat chicken wings, BLT’s and nachos for dinner.  After scarfing that down, we headed back to Westport and met up with the NE group at Kelly’s for a good round of story-telling from The Big One of ’91, as we always do when we get together, then moved on to some other spots for more of the same.  We shut down Westport, I think it was like 3:00 when we left.  Or maybe 9:30, somewhere between there.

Saturday started off with a solid lunch at Jack Stack‘s Plaza location.  I wouldn’t call it my all-time favorite, but it’s always a solid bet for sure.  At first they said they wouldn’t be able to seat our large group, but they came through and got us a huge table.  After an extreme gluttony session, we had to go back to the hotel for a nap.  For evening entertainment we headed down to the always-fun Knuckleheads to catch a Rainmakers show.  That was one of our favorite bands (way) back in our college days, so it was a fine coincidence that they just happened to be playing that night.  The only downside was they’ve opened a new enclosed building at Knuckleheads, and that’s where they played.  I much prefer the outdoor area, although I’ll admit it was pretty darn chilly out that night.  I had a great time at any rate.

Sunday the event-of-the-day was the Royals game.  Donette had rented the Hall of Fame suite, and several friends were able to join us to catch the game.  After a week of rain predictions, it turned out to be just about the ideal day to watch a baseball game.  Actually, it turned out a bit on the hot side, so it was nice to have the air conditioning to retreat to whenever we wanted.  Extra bonus, they even won, albeit in a rather drawn-out fashion.  After blowing their scant lead in the ninth, they pulled it out with a walk-off homer in the 13th.  Whew, long game!  We wrapped things up with a little food at Grinders, and then it was time to head back to good ol’ Cali.  For a quick weekend trip, I feel like we did a good job of hitting a lot of my favorite places.  Can’t get to ’em all, but maybe for my 60th.  I did an absolutely abysmal job of pictures, but I have a few.

Well good ol’ pkenagy.com is sorta-kinda-almost working.  I remain bitterly distressed that it is not working like I want it to though.  My home network is in an utter shambles, a piecemeal hodgepodge of routers, switches, and cables strung everywhere in a desperate attempt to achieve basic functionality.  Sigh.  As soon as my uverse contract is up I will likely switch providers over this.  Until then, I will most likely lay awake many nights fretting about my current situation.  This is a very stressful time in my life, as you can imagine.

As to more interesting facets of the Kenagy household?  Well, there aren’t any, I spent my whole weekend working on my network.  I would be more than happy to detail my attempted resolutions and the resulting outcomes, but the backlash from Munkirs would be more than I could bear in my current fragile state.  And as for my recently reunited spouse, well I guess you could say the honeymoon is over.  She happily abandoned me to my troubles and went out with friends, professing to not really give a flying crap what I was blithering on about;  She just wanted her phone to work.  Geez, all this stress over a stupid phone line.  Who even has home phones these days?!?!?!  Well, people with home offices I guess.

Anyway, that was not really the exact circumstances of the weekend.  While I was indeed preoccupied with my uverse service, I was also sort of stuck in the house attending to a weekend-long project at work.  Who schedules these things on Mother’s Day weekend, sheesh.  She went out with a large group to a brunch in nearby Placerville, and then they spent the rest of the day wine tasting.  Glad somebody enjoyed the wonderful weekend weather.  While they were out, I took my highly anticipated new sous vide cooker for a test outing.  Much like my home networking woes, nobody (save my Uncle Roy) seems to really share my enthusiasm for this new interest.  Fear of the unknown is a terrible thing, people.  So, while everyone was gone, I seized the opportunity for a trial cook.  The selected test subject was a 2.5 pound tri tip roast.  After probably way-too-much research, I elected to cook it at 134 degrees for 6 hours, then finished it on the gas grill.  I must say, I was quite pleased with the results.  Definitely the most tender tri tip I’ve fixed, and the marinade flavor was much more pronounced than when done solely on the grill.  That said, I’ll make a few tweaks next time.  It was just a shade too done for my taste, I’ll back it down to 132 or maybe even 130 next time.  And, I finished it for 6 minutes per side on the grill, my thought being that I like a really crunchy exterior.  That was way too long, I’d say a max of 3 minutes per side next time.  Overall I declared it a success, if only in comparison to the disastrous uverse issue.

Sadly, I have no pictures to share this week.  Actually, I DO have some to share, I just can’t get to them because of the ongoing uverse plot against me and….  Oh never mind, I’ve covered that one enough for one day I guess.