We slowed things down quite a bit last weekend, mostly so I wouldn’t have to engage in a rambling, 3000 word update today.  Always thinking ahead.  But, in a huge bonus for all, I am not going to start with the usual “Friday” events, and instead jump all the way back to WEDNESDAY!!!  Oh yeah, we’re gettin’ crazy now!!!  Anyway… Wednesday I went to the DMB concert out at Verizon with Ed & Kim.  I’ve always wanted to see Dave, but I am quite a staunch Verizon-hater.  That place plain sucks.  While I’ve seen some good shows there many moons ago, everything about the whole amphitheatre experience has been crappy.  Actually, when declining the occasional concert invitations I get, my mantra has always been “I wouldn’t go see Dave Matthews & R.E.M together at that hole.”  But, Ed ended up with an extra ticket to this show, and in a possible indication of the apocalypse I went ahead and picked it up from him.  I will call the evening an overwhelming success.  I think the key was that Ed is much more show-savvy than I;  He had us in and out of that miserable parking lot death-trap with barely a slow-down.  It seems like they’ve lightened up on the rubber-glove-searches getting into the gates too.  Overall, much less painful than I remember.  And the show itself?? Nothing short of awesome.  Mind you, I have no intention of following him all over the country seeing all the other shows on the tour like Ed.  I’m more in the “OK I’ve seen my DMB show now, check that one off the list” category.  Definitely something to remember though.

Friday I don’t guess I have anything to report.  We shut down and watched movies.  At least I think we did… Honestly I don’t really remember.  Next thing I knew it was 9:00 at night and I was starving.  We fired up our hand-me-down Weber Kettle grill and cooked up some salmon and potatoes.  Man I haven’t grilled on charcoal for a long time, and I’ve missed it.  It came out rather well if I do say so my darn self.

Saturday started off with round two of Gabe’s agility class.  He did even better than last week, if that’s even possible.  Easily the star of the class, in my unbiased opinion.  Well, OK, there was that little incident where he panicked in the middle of the collapsible tunnel.  The instructor-lady has a little repair work to do on her equipment this week.  Oops.  Overall he did quite fabulously though.  After that we headed over to Mom’s for a little lunch.  My nephew Matthew has been staying with her all week, so we got to see him too.  (Sorry Carl, no pictures this time.)  After lunch it was back home to kick back and do a whole lot of nothing, save mowing the lawn.  I spent the greater part of the afternoon working on my new firewall project, which finally ended successfully.  I am now using my Linksys WRT-54G as a nifty little firewall, managed by “firewall builder” software running on a Fedora FC4 box.  Oh yeah, I’m cool.  After wasting the day in that manner, the Martins came over and joined us for a little Mexican take-out food.  I think we had plans to play cards or something like that, but we ended up just sitting on the back deck watching Gabe run around all crazy with the neighbor dog.

Sunday our big project was installing a doggie-door for Gabe.  I swear, that boy is a mess.  I would surely not be able to handle a child, I guarantee that.  Now that he is no longer welcome at his daycare place (which is a whole other story) we have got to find something to do with the boy during the day.  For the last year and a half, I’ve rushed home immediately after work to let the boy out of his kennel.  Something of an inconvenience, but tolerable with those couple of “daycare” days when I can stay at work if I need to, or stop by the Brooksider on the way home, or whatever.  Now that he’s stuck at home full time, we need some options.  We’ve tried leaving him in the house when we’re gone;  Suffice to say that did not go well.  We’ve tried leaving him in the yard, but he tears up the screens and gnaws on the fence.  So, the latest idea is to let him in and out as he pleases.  This is directly against all his training, which is that he gets told when to go in and out, but I’m ready to make some concessions.  He was howling pitifully at the back gate when I left this morning, which is not a good indicator of things to come, but we’ll see what happens.  We wrapped up that project just in time for the Martins to join us for dinner again.  I fired up the charcoal grill again and threw on some sirloins, while Martin did pork chops and tuna.  After that we watched the merciful end of the pathetic Sopranos season, and called it a weekend.

Well, look at that, I rambled into another long update anyway.  Just wordy I guess.  I turned on the “comments” thingy for these too.  Don’t ask me how to use it, I don’t even know if it works.  One spam message and it’s right back off, I can tell you that.