Another 3-day weekend, excellent.  I took Friday off and drove north to Kearney to participate in the Jesse James Day BBQ with Team Triple Fat Back.  If I was going to rate the actual BBQ competition itself, I would give it a “fair to poor.”  First of all, we got stuck in a crummy spot with barely enough room for all our toys.  Even more unforgivable, (not to mention quite inexplicable,) they had a grand total of four bathrooms set up for the nearly sixty teams out there.  Oh yeah, that was convenient.  Oh well, what can you expect from a low-rent town like Kearney.  (Probably 1/2 our team hails from said town, if that gives you some idea of the place in general.)  Logistics aside, we managed a pretty fair time of it.  Our arch-rivals Bone Deep BBQ (a.k.a. Red Glove) were set up directly behind us, affording us ample opportunity to lob insults back and forth all weekend.  We also shook up the cooking teams a bit, providing some variety.  One of Brice’s friends came up and did the turkey entry, Zim took over on ribs, and I teamed up with Martin to try and collectively revive the troubled brisket entries.  (Joe & Bob still did pork, & Ballew did chicken as usual.)  The results were quite positive, particularly in our brisket experiment, where we rocketed from a consistent “embarrassing” finish to “almost nearly just-below respectable.”  And, most importantly, we handily defeated Bone Deep for approximately the 1500th time in a row.

Despite actually getting a few hours of quality sleep up at the BBQ, I was pretty beat up when I got home Saturday.  I wiped out on the couch and slept soundly into Sunday.  When I finally recovered, I joined Donette and our friend Susan up at Chelly’s Cafe for some breakfast.  We’d never been there for breakfast, and I think everybody declared it a successful venture.  (With the exception of Susan’s french fries, but let’s just not talk about that.)  The only slight snag was that the menu was a bit limited.  We picked a Mexican restaurant with the idea of ordering some Mexican-style breakfast (or at least what we consider so;) French toast or biscuits and gravy weren’t really on our mind or we’d have just gone to Sharps.  Our choices were pretty much limited to juevos con chorizo or menudo.  We all went with the chorizo;  Menudo is a little too adventurous.  Everybody agreed it was good though!  After our late breakfast it was nearly football time, so I settled in on the couch and commenced to wasting the day.  I made it through most of the afternoon game when Donette finally insisted I try and fix our stupid computer, which in all fairness has been broken for quite some time.  For over a year now it’s run just fine as long as you never turn it off.  If it was powered off it would take somewhere between 10 and 10 million tries to get it to come back on again.  The obvious solution to this was to just never turn it off, but when I quite accidentally shut it down Thursday night it decided to be extra stubborn about coming back on.  So, when we still didn’t have a computer by Sunday, I grudgingly headed out to Microcenter to start buying random parts.  As luck would have it, I hit it on the first try this time around;  A flaky power supply.  As I told Donette, if I had any confidence that would actually fix it, I’d have bought something different, as the one I picked doesn’t really fit very well.  But, I got it crammed in the case and it’s up and running now, so I doubt I ever swap it for another one.  We celebrated this monumental event with a delicious pizza up at 75th Street, and called it a weekend.