Happy Halloween all.  Hopefully everyone has their costumes ready to go for a big night of trick-or-treating.  Not us though.  We kind of gave up on Halloween;  Too much of a nuisance.  Plus, we’re still on a diet so we can’t have candy around the house, you know.  Maybe we’ll give out carrot sticks or something.  Actually, we are planning to leave the front door open and the porch light on, and then when kids ring the doorbell the dogs can rush the storm door and scare the crap out of them.  We’re going to take some snacks over to the neighbors house and watch out the window and laugh.  Come on over, it’ll be a hoot.

Well we had a pretty busy weekend again.  Friday I started things off by going to Kennedy’s with Brice and Martin, for their “grand re-opening” event.  Personally I’ve never been much on Kennedy’s anyway, and their “temporary” location doesn’t do much for me either.  But, what the heck, gotta keep the local shops open.  Supposedly they are re-building on their old location, so if that ever actually starts the construction should provide a diversion, as it’s right outside the window from their current spot.  (The sorta-historic Kennedy’s burned down last winter, if you don’t remember.)  We hung out there for a while, and then picked up a pizza (so much for the diet) and met up with the girls at home.  I spent the rest of the evening kicking everybody’s butt in dominoes.  Nobody was very sure on the rules, but since I won they must have been right.

Saturday we had some friends in from Nebraska, Army buddies of mine from “The Big One of ’91”.  Tom and Tammy come up every and then, but the last time Dan and Denise visited us was for our wedding, so they haven’t seen KC in a little while.  Since it might be another 15 years before they make it out this way I wanted to do it up right, so I decided to take them to the Brooksider.  Spare no expense, I always say.  We introduced them to everybody down there, had some delicious chicken wings and nachos for lunch, then hung out watching the Huskers get their weekly beat-down.  After that, we hopped a bus down to the Plaza so the girls could take a mercifully short shopping break.  When they were done, we took everybody on a short tour of the Plaza, showing them all my favorite spots.  Since I don’t really like anywhere on the Plaza, this made for an extremely short tour.  My recommended spots consisted of Tomfooleries and the ‘Falloon, both of which went over pretty well with the group.  Actually I had very good tenderloin sandwich at Tomfooleries;  I’d even say it was good enough to merit a trip back some day.

Sunday we spent the better part of the day cooking.  The Nebraska crew came over for breakfast, so I made a big pot of biscuits and gravy and some fried eggs.  (Yeah, the ol’ diet ain’t going so well.)  They had to start their trek home around 11:00, and after they left I went to work boiling a chicken.  It’s been said that I am easily amused, and to that end I would say that boiling chickens is one of my favorite things to do around the house.  There is just a lot of “bang for the buck” out of a boiled bird.  You get a couple of quarts of broth that you can do all sorts of amazing things with, especially with soup-weather right around the corner.  And, you get a bunch of shredded chicken meat that you can use in countless fascinating scenarios.  Case in point, the Martins came over for dinner and voila’,  chicken burritos!!!  Wow, does the fun ever end at our house?  Donette made all kinds of good stuff to go along with the burritos too;  beans, salsa, pico de gallo, etc.  We cheated and had frozen guacamole though.  OK, that’s about all the text I can stretch out of a boiled chicken, I’m done.