Greetings all, and welcome to the four-day work week. I trust everyone is well rested and prepared to give it all in their respective endeavors.
Wow, where to start. The weekend was so full of continuous exciting events that to try and recount them all here would just be impossible. Pretty much just a series of non-stop action for the Kenagy Clan. Ohhhhh yeah. Non-stop. I’ll just have to summarize as best I can.
Friday night Todd and I went to the Brooksider and hooked up with the “work crowd.” Doni and Susan met us there for a bit, but apparently they tired of the work-related banter (and rightfully so) because they snuck off to other haunts at some point. We stayed and enjoyed the relatively nice weather out on the deck for a while, but not too late.
Saturday morning marked the beginning of Gabe’s latest training class, which I had to drive all the way out to Peculiar for. I thought it would be fun to try an agility class, so he could have a little exercise without terrorizing the general public like at the dog park. Overall he did very well; he already mastered the tunnels and the tire jump, and is catching on to the hurdles. The stupid weavepoles are another story. He seems to enjoy plowing straight through them instead of around them, much to everyone’s amusement. Not quite technically correct, but it’s just for fun anyway so what the heck. Actually he’s kind of funny on the hurdles too. Since all the dogs are new to it, she had them set at like two feet. Just to be on the safe side, Gabe likes to launch himself as high as he can though, clearing them by a distance of what some might call “overkill.” He’s nothing if not enthusiastic about the whole thing. After sweating through the class for a few hours, we went home and rested up for a big fish fry. I was on hush-puppy duty, so I spent a few hours chopping and mixing and such. I elected for a recipe off foodtv, and they came out pretty well, if a bit ugly. They tasted good, but the batter was way too thin so a lot of them just broke up into little rabbit-turd-puppies. Hey, it all tastes the same, no matter the aesthetics. If anyone feels the need to try that recipe , cut back on the water, or leave it out all together. Anyway, the fish fry was a good time. Most of the crowd was comprised of the Brooksider regulars, so it was kind of like any other Saturday night except outside, with better food.
Sunday we scored an invitation to take a tour of Lake Smithville on the U.S.S. Schmartin. Somehow the planets aligned and they were able to get the Schmidt, Martin, Holst, Brown and Falstrom* clans together all at one time, sans children. (* Pending legalization.) KB and Joe brought their respective water vessels too, so we had plenty of room for all. Despite the rather intense sun, we ended up spending the entire day out on the water. We got home late in the afternoon to find that the days entertainment had come at the price of our new porch screen; some time during the day it had been mis-indentified as a chew toy by either Bondi or Gabe, with rather catastrophic results. Sigh. (I have a pretty good idea who the actual culprit was.) After that somewhat disappointing discovery, we decided it best to stay home and keep an eye on the boys, (we were dog-sitting Bondi all weekend,) so we shut down and watched movies the rest of the night. Despite an almost overwhelming backlog of DVD’s we haven’t watched yet, we decided instead to go with re-runs of Old School and Joe Dirt. Can’t go wrong with that lineup.
Monday the rain kind of threw us off. We were literally getting ready to walk out the door with the dogs, on our way to the park, when the thunderstorms started. It rained steady all day, so I ended up wasting the holiday working on the reincarnation of my old webserver. So far that project is an abysmal failure. My big plan was to build it with enough similarities to my existing one that I could easily sync the sites up between them, and flip them back and forth if I needed to mess with something on one or the other. Everything was going just hunky-dory until it got to the SQL part. I’ll spare you the gory details, as I’ve come to realize it’s not really that interesting. (OK I realized that a long time ago, I just enjoy babbling about it.) For dinner we headed up north to Ronda’s (Donette’s sister) new house. She was having a house warming party to show off her new place, and all her and Doni’s hard work painting. (I was, uh, otherwise engaged all those weekends…) After feasting on good ol’ Memorial Day BBQ fare (burgers and ‘dogs) we scurried back home to check on the dogs. Thankfully they did a little less damage than the previous day, especially since they were inside the house this time. I was pretty nervous about the situation, but other than the curious rearranging of several items of furniture, everything was generally intact. For evening entertainment, I shut down and watched quite possibly the worst movie of all time, titled Gimme an ‘F’. I have something of a fascination with bad cinema, and believe me this one ranks high on the “bad” list. I would liken it to a horrible train wreck involving Footloose, Porky’s II, and Dirty Dancing. Truly, honestly, an awful movie, and I enjoyed every moment of it.