Wow, Thanksgiving is almost upon us.  The “pie” poll was surprisingly well-received, I’ll have to come up with more food-related surveys.

I was oncall last weekend, so it was a rather low-key few days.  Friday, as a matter of fact, I don’t think we did anything at all.  I was a little under the weather all last week, and I needed one more day to recover.  Plus, we had big plans for Saturday morning;  The first run of the holiday sales!!!  Yippee.  We drove out to Nebraska Furniture Mart semi-early to score our first deal of the year;  An eighteen quart roaster.  You may wonder why a household of two people would need a roaster that big?  Well I’m not really sure myself, but it was a great price and I figured it fell in the “If you ever needed one it would be nice to have” category.  (Like we don’t have an entire basement full of items in that category already…)  After escaping the NFM crowd, we made the obligitory trip next door to Cabelas (no purchases) and then had a quite tasty lunch at the Yard House.  I went with the cubano sandwich, mostly for the sake of comparing it to the one I had at the Brooksider a few weeks ago.  It was definitely a good lunch, although I’m not convinced it was twice as good as the ‘Siders.  (The price was, so that’s where I set my expectation.)  After our little shopping trip, we returned home to watch a little college ball.  We tried to hook up with some company for the MU game, but couldn’t get any takers.  Martins were busy, Munkirs were incommuncado, and our pizza-victim neighbors have quit returning our calls.  Well, fine for them, we just sat at home at watched it by ourselves.  Wasn’t a very competitive game anyway.

Sunday, still being somewhat tethered to my PC for work, I stuck around the house and worked on some odds and ends.  Perhaps my most arduous undertaking proved to be replacing the broken pull-cord on the lawnmower.  Wow, that proved to be a lot bigger challenge than anticipated.  I had to draw on every bit of my extensive military wrenching skills to accomplish this seemingly simple task.  The project was further complicated by the cat, who kept waiting until I just about had the rope in place, then would dash in and attack it.  It was kind of funny the first hundred or so times, but then it started getting a little tiresome.  Just when I was starting to think about what kind of features I needed on my brand new lawnmower though, I got it figured out and everything went back together.  Guess the clunker is good for another few years now.  After that drudgery, we went over to John & Susan’s house, west-of-wornall, to work on their PC and eat a little dinner.  I didn’t make much progress on the PC (it was just kind of an initial consultation) but we got a free dinner out of the deal.  We’re going back this evening for a follow-up assessment of the situation.  (And another free dinner.)  Should take three or four more visits before things are straightened out.