OK, my “always-optimistic” outlook on the weather has waned considerably since last week.  I have progressed from “Well at least it was a mild July” to considering a move out of country.  Nowhere particular, just as long as it’s 30 degrees cooler.  It’s so hot out I couldn’t wait for the weekend to end so I could get back to work, where they keep a nice meat-locker temperature going all day.

That was a pretty lame weekend.  I was oncall so I kept a low profile.  Friday night we went to see “West Side Story” at Starlight.  I made it through dinner, but didn’t stay for much of the show.  As in, my butt never even hit the chair, I walked straight from the air-conditioned dining room to the air-conditioned car and drove home to watch TV in the air-conditioning.  Donette and Kelly sat through it though, and said it was pretty good.  I’ll take their word for it.

Saturday didn’t bring much more in the entertainment arena.  I took the scooter out on a ride in the morning, before it got too hot.  I stopped by Scooter World to hang out with all the other cool kids, and then went to Microcenter and bought some new PC speakers.  I’ve the same set of Altec Lansings for about 12 years, they are without a doubt the oldest piece of computer equipment I still use.  They had developed a seriously annoying hum though, so I decided it was time to retire them.  So, I bought another set of Altecs.  They don’t sound nearly as good as the old set, but then again they were only $15 and they don’t hum.  That pretty well covers Saturday.  About the only other thing we did was go to Costco.  We were out of coffee, which rates as something of an emergency.  Unfortunately our car is acting up again, so we had to ride the scooter.  Boy THAT was a nice comfortable ride.  Nothing like putting on a full-face helmet and climbing on top of a burning hot motor, then zipping around in a blast furnace.  It’s not really that bad when you’re moving, believe it or not, but when you’re stopped at one of the 600 traffic lights in midtown you pretty much bake.  But, hey we got our coffee so all is good.  By the way, on the off chance that you care, we bought a bag of Parisi beans this time.  I’d never heard of them, but they are right here in KC, somewhere down by the Roasterie.  I’ll be darned, learn something every day.

Sunday, for the third time in as many weeks, I spent the day smoking a brisket.  Anybody want a sandwich?  We’ve got about 10 lbs of leftover beef in the freezer by now.  I think my technique is coming along nicely though;  I am pretty happy with the progress each week.  I also nearly threw my entry at St. Joe in the trash but did rather well with the judges, so what the heck do I know.  I think it’s a crap-shoot.  While the smoker was doing it’s thing, I sat in front of the PC and got some pictures up.  I finally got some more pictures from our big Europe trip posted, if not nearly all of them.  I put up a few from Seville, Spain, and some from Portugal.  That leaves only the New York pics still to go.  I also put up some random photos that I snapped over the last few weeks, just because.