I believe Spring has finally arrived with some consistency.  I was able to ride assorted two-wheel vehicles all last week, and this week is looking good too.  As for our weekend entertainment, things started off rather lame on Friday with my first visit to a physical therapist, in an attempt at fixing up my bum shoulder.  My right arm has been a generally useless appendage since Martin maliciously injured it last August…  I figured it was about time to do something about it.  The Doc agreed with my assessment;  He even thought it might be just a few months overdue.  Things went very well, I was quite pleased with the results of our first session.  (Everything but the bill, that is.)  I can actually raise my arm over my head for the first time in eight months;  Remarkable!  The good Doctor did infer that I might need to work on my communication skills before our next session though, which I wasn’t entirely clear on.  Apparently he felt I wasn’t adequately expressing my discomfort levels to him, to the point that he actually seemed a bit frustrated.  OK, now I’m not the one with all the degrees hanging on the wall, but it seems reasonable to me that if you take a metal object and drive it between some muscles, it’s going to hurt.  If you grab somebody’s arm and twist it until it pops, it’s going to hurt.  Do I really have to say “yeah that hurts”?  Come on now.  I guess I’ll just sit there and chant “ow… ow… ow…” next time.  That little torture session effectively ended my day.  We stayed home for the evening, grilled up a rather tasty dinner, and then watched “Hitch,” which we actually both agreed was a pretty lousy movie.

Saturday morning looked like a good day for a motorcycle ride, so I rode up north to Barry Road and visited the Red Buffalo BBQ team.  They were entered in a small competition, so I looked over their shoulders for any free ‘Que ideas.  Hopefully I took good notes, because they did pretty well in the standings, including a fourth place finish in brisket and fifth place overall.  I enjoyed my little ride too, except it was so dang windy it tore up my license plate.  After that, we spent the rest of the day sitting on the deck at the Brooksider with Ed and Kim, enjoying the weather.  Later in the evening they went to a party, and we headed back home for another night of TV.  The dogs had been left alone all day, so we had to give them their “social time.”  Sigh.

Sunday looked to be another great day.  Although I wasn’t aware of it, Donette had declared it a “work in the yard” day though.  Apparently she had invited Ronda and Josh over to help till up the back yard, which we are trying to level out and re-seed.  Much to my dismay though, my aching shoulder prevented my from assisting in the project.  Darn the bad luck.  They made big progress though, and even managed not to tear up the sprinkler system.  Now we just have to see if we can actually get some grass to grow…  Something tells me that is going to be rather challenging with the dogs.  Watching all that work had made me rather hungry, so I made some blackened fish for dinner, which came out rather tasty.  We closed out the weekend in the usual fashion;  Watching the Sopranos and Entourage, both of which received high marks on the entertainment scale this week.