Not a bad weekend, all in all. Didn’t accomplish everything we had planned, or even a significant part of it, but then again I don’t know why we would start now. Friday I hit happy hour down at the Brooksider, good and early so I could see everybody. I made the social rounds down there, then Donette picked me up for a fancy dinner out on the town. Our high-end restaurant of choice this week was the DQ at 85th & Wornall. (Yes, as in “Dairy Queen.”) They do a promotion every now and then where Donette’s school gets a percentage of the proceeds from food sales, so we were obligated to do our part. Anything for the children, that’s our motto. It was quite good as a matter of fact. I sorta like DQ’s, at least the once a year I go there. Had a very tasty burger and fries, and an obligatory strawberry shake for dessert. I didn’t want to order the biggest burger and shake on the menu, but since the children would benefit more from my gluttony I did what I had to.
Saturday was sort of a bust. Disappointing because I was looking forward to it, too. We kicked off the day judging a BBQ competition out in Blue Springs. We showed up at the judging tent at 10:30, got settled in and commenced to feeding. We did this event last year too, and it was so good we were both looking forward to it again. This year was pretty much a let-down I would say. But for one lonely pork entry, everything I tried was, to put it nicely, “not good.” Donette reported her table was no better. I don’t know what the deal was, maybe the rain storms Friday night gave everybody trouble? I have never (in my admittedly limited judging experience) given out scores that low. Blech. It wasn’t just us either, all the people at our tables were under-whelmed. We were out there until about 2:30. After that we were going to head down to the Power & Light, where the Flying Saucer was putting on a big outdoor festival. Alas, the twenty servings of sketchy bbq had left us both feeling somewhat less than festive. We rolled back home to try and nap it off, but never recovered enough to even consider going out again. Blech, it’s making me a bit queasy thinking about it still.
Sunday I woke up feeling marginally recovered, and headed out on a bike ride with Munkirs. He had the admittedly novel idea of combining our Tuesday night and Thursday night routes, which worked out very nicely. We left from my house and wound out kind of southwest, and as luck would have it we were very near his house at the half-way point. We stopped by his house to get some water, and Janine had made us some hot pancakes and PBJ sandwiches. (Or maybe it was just the water… I can’t remember.) From there we headed back to my house, ending up right at 40 miles. Good route, I hope we can remember it for future rides. After the cycling Donette and I walked around the corner to our newly opened local breakfast place. I can’t even remember the name of it. Somebody or another’s Diner. Mixed review on that place. The food, when we finally got it, was actually very good. I am going to guess conservatively we waited 45 minutes from ordering for it to show up though. It was pretty apparent that everybody in the place was in the same situation too. There’s only 15 tables in the whole place; I never really figured out what the issues were. For amusement while we waited, we watched the waitresses running around. Nobody was getting any service, but it certainly wasn’t for a lack of motion. All the staff was running around like crazy, they just didn’t really seem to be getting anything done. By the time we finally got done eating breakfast, it was time for the football games. Given the outstanding weather, I headed down to the Brooksider to watch the TV’s out on the back deck. Had a good time of it, I stayed through the 3:00 games too. By the time I got home Donette had headed out to Starlight with Kelly to watch Rain. That left me to lay on the couch and watch the last football game of the day; Fine ending to the weekend.