My record of “Busy, Lame, Busy, Lame…” weekends has continued.  Either I am too old to physically handle two party weekends in a row, or I just don’t have that much to do.  Friday sort of set the tone;  I was going to drop by happy hour and see what was going on, but ended up just going home and hitting the couch.  Couldn’t even summon the energy to crawl across the room and pop in a DVD so I just clicked through the channels all night.

Saturday I guess we did get a bit of entertainment in.  We started off by heading out to Lucky’s out in KS for a little lunch.  That’s not really where we intended to go;  We thought there was a Barley’s out that way.  Upon our arrival, a check of the Garmin showed Barley’s wasn’t even close to there, so we scrapped that plan and just went with Lucky’s.  Good enough;  Solid hamburger and plenty of football games on.  We loitered there for a while, then headed on to our intended destination, the Price Chopper just north of there on Roe.  Why did we drive that far just to go a Price Chopper?  Well it’s a “special” Price Chopper, if there is such a thing.  They sort of cater to the Hispanic community, and as such they have all kinds of ingredients that you won’t find at, say, the Wornall location.  It was well worth the trip, just for the meat counter alone.  We were on a mission to make some carne asada, so we interrogated the meat-counter guy for a while.  As it turned out they had a sale on some flank steak that they had pre-marinaded for just such a purpose, so we picked up some of that.  We wanted to try our own marinade too though, so we got some thin-shaved sirloin as well.  Then we headed over to the deli counter to beat them up for tamale technique, and bought a dozen fresh tortillas.  All that chit-chat wore me out, so then we headed back home to lay down for a bit.  Around 7:00 or so, we rallied and went out to dinner with the Martins.  We had a gift certificate for El Patron down on Southwest Boulevard, so we decided to try it out.  Well worth the drive;  As a matter of fact I had the carne asada, just so I could have something to compare our upcoming experiment to.  As we were driving home, one of our (much younger) friends called and was headed to the Brooksider, so we veered off and went to meet her there.  Being after 9:00, of course we didn’t know anybody else there, and the doorman had the gall to try and charge us a cover.  Donette berated the poor kid with her “Do you know who we are???” speech, but he was unmoved.  Eventually we headed up to the front door where the commoners enter, and found one of the managers, who waved us on in.  We pretty much said hi to our friend, stood around for about a 1/2 hour, and then continued home.

Sunday was an afternoon of football watching from the couch.  Prepare to see that sentence copy/pasted in for the next few months, I don’t forsee a lot changing.  I did spend several hours whipping up a big pot of BBQ Gumbo, which came out rather well if I do say so my darn self.