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.