I am trapped at home today, unable to leave the house due to the relentless deluge of rain which has rendered my scooter useless.  I suppose, in a pinch, I could drive the car, but the resulting increase of my carbon footprint would leave me sleepless for days.  Actually I just took the day off to catch up on an ever growing to-do list.  Among the higher priority items are sorting some pictures off my camera, upgrading the code on my router, and watching the Royal’s game.  In retrospect, I probably should have just gone to work.

That wasn’t a bad weekend.  It wasn’t really a good one either, but in keeping with my naturally optimistic outlook I’ll lean towards the positive.  We warmed up on Thursday night by checking out The Drop down in the swanky Martini Corner.  One of the neighbor girls is moving out of town so they had a little “going away” gathering for her.  It was a nice place, and the food was great too;  Heck we might even make the forty-block pilgrimage up there again some day.  Or, we might not.  You know, while I’m delving back into the weeknights for material, we went out Wednesday night too.  We went to, of all places, the Brooksider for our friend Anne’s birthday party.  Apparently this little walk on the wild side knocked the wind out of us though, because Friday night we hunkered down and did nothing.  Well, I guess we did something, but we didn’t go anywhere.  As part of our current “money saving” effort, we decided to just stay home and enjoy the moderately tolerable weather on the back porch.  We grilled some fajitas, played catch with dog, listened to music, and other such homey activities.

Saturday I started the day by going out to Mom’s to work in her yard.  One of the recent storms split a big pear tree in her front yard so I headed out there to try and clean up the resulting mess.  By the time it was all cut up I could barely stand under my own power, and I’m actually still quite sore from all the manual labor.  I was a little distressed to look at my watch and see that it only took about two hours;  I figured it had been at least twelve.  It was worth the effort though;  I got lunch at the Best Burrito and a nice pile of pear wood for the smoker.  After cleaning up and knocking back a 1/2 bottle of ibuprofen, we headed down to Bo Lings for Mary’s 40th birthday party.  If there is one thing better than dinner at Bo Lings (one of our favorite restaurants,) it’s dinner at Bo Lings on Schmidt’s tab.  SCORE.  Their food is always delicious, but it tasted just a little bit better watching Scott cringe.  After dinner, the crowd all headed down to Harrah’s for gambling and socializing, but I couldn’t bring myself to contribute to that den of iniquity so I went home.  While I vacuumed the living room and mopped the kitchen, Donette pumped the better part of our retirement savings into the slot machines.

Sunday was yet another in our recent string of BBQ practice sessions.  I fired up the smoker in the early afternoon and threw on a mid-size chunk o’ beef, and that pretty much killed the day.  Between the intermittent rain and the howling wind it proved to be a rather challenging undertaking, but it came out OK.  One of the neighbors came over to taste-test and didn’t get sick (yet) so that counts as a success.  Why all the practice?  Well, next weekend we are participating in the Raytown BBQ competition.  By “we” I mean Donette and I, and Martin has agreed to moderate.  (Errrr, I mean “assist.”)  Should be interesting.  And if we’re not still married a week from now, hey, we had a good run of it.  Plus, I’ll have a good headline for next week’s update.