FINALLY some good barbecue weather.  Now if it can just hold out for a few weeks, I’ll buy into the calendar theory that Spring is actually here.

Things kicked off strong on Friday with a “work” happy hour.  We headed up to our new hangout of choice;  The bowling alley in Raytown.  There’s just something appealing about sitting around a bowling alley…  Perhaps the sheer un-appealing aspect of it?  At any rate, it was a nice little wind-down after the week.  When I got home, one of the neighbor girls was visiting with Donette, so we blabbed with her a while about the Jayhawks and their big tourney run.  (Nutty KU people.)  After a few hours of THAT, we headed off to a benefit auction at Donette’s school for a late dinner and some face-time with her colleagues.  That was fun, although remarkably I couldn’t find anything I was even remotely interested in bidding on.  It was catered by BB’s Lawnside BBQ though, and I’m always up for sampling some ‘que.  As far as that part of it goes, I’d say they should stick to the live music part of their business, ’cause the food isn’t going to keep them in business.  It was “OK” I guess…  The sausage was actually pretty good, but the pork and brisket were rather marginal.  After dinner we went back home, where we ran into the neighbor girl again.  We still had a little “go” left in us, so we came up with the brilliant idea to…  Go out to dinner!  Nothing like a little gluttony to start the weekend.  We headed down to Jalapenos and ordered a few dinners, which we then boxed up and took home.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Saturday morning brought my one practical use of time for the weekend;  The continuation of the failed brake replacement project from last weekend.  I drove out to Zim’s house this time, because he actually has real tools and a garage and other useful stuff like that.  The drive out there probably took longer than the work itself;  He had all four wheels done in like 45 minutes, and even threw in a tire rotation free of charge!  So, I can now reliably stop my car, which is a good thing.  By the time I made the drive back home it was around noon, so I headed over to Brice’s house to enjoy the weather.  His mantra for this ‘Que season is “Practice makes ribbons,” so he had his smoker fired up and loaded down with ribs and pork butt.  It turned into quite the event…  Several people dropped by during the afternoon to sample some food, and we played a few thousand rounds of washers to pass the time between the “courses.”  After that I headed home to watch the KU game, but it turned out to be such a blow-out that I didn’t even watch too much of it.

Sunday was a nice quiet afternoon.  Since the weather was so nice out again, I decided to fire up my own smoker.  (Practice makes ribbons, you know.)  In a rather interesting departure from standard grill-fare though, I threw on a corned beef brisket that I had left over from the St. Patty’s sales.  That pretty much ate up my entire afternoon.  Other than a trip up to Tanner’s to watch the Royals and eat some lunch, I spent the whole day sitting on the back deck listening to my iPod and tending the fire.  Unfortunately, between these two days of sun and fun, I managed to get quite a nasty sunburn on my head.  Happens every Spring, dang it…  I must be a slow learner.  And as for the corned beef?  Pretty darn good.  I shredded it up and made a sandwich with some spicy mustard and a slice of cheddar;  I’d put it on the “repeat” list.