Dang, I shouldn’t have made that rash promise about a big holiday weekend synopsis.  I got nothing.  Or, more accurately, I am too beat to retell it.  Something like that.  It was “almost” a four day weekend, marred only by a half day of work Monday and a few little oncall interruptions.  We started strong on Friday with a little get-together at our house.  It was too hot to go anywhere else, so we just invited people over.  We threw together some chicken taco fixins, broke out the beanbag boards, and had a little mini-tournament in the back yard.  I don’t know if anyone else enjoyed it, but the most important thing is that I had fun.  Being a rather short-notice event though, I didn’t have time to think up a good prize for the winning team.  But, since that team was Chris and I, I’ll come up with something nice.  I put some photos of the event up already… rather timely posting for me.

Saturday started off bright and early with the last of Gabe’s agility classes.  There is actually one more to go, but we’ll be out of town next weekend so we have to skip that one.  These classes were a lot more fun than the obediance classes;  I plan on signing up for it again this fall.  He won a medal too, which he was very proud of!!!  OK, everybody got a medal, but Gabe’s was the biggest.  After nearly sweating to death during class, we headed over to Mom’s for a bit, then bolted back home to hide in the A/C for a while.  Larry and Sharon were in town, so they stopped by and visited with the little-un’s.  I even got pictures of the agility class and the kids up already too!!  Man, I’m on a roll.  (While these were distinctly separate events, I didn’t feel like breaking up the pictures.)  Saturday night’s entertainment was the opening of the Starlight season.  We have season tickets with the Martins again, so we met up with them and sweated through a fine performance of Riverdance.  While I take some enjoyment from exaggerating my suffering through these tedious events, I have to admit this one was pretty dang good.  Next time we have a party Chris and I are going to have a dance-off to see if we learned anything;  Bring your favorite clogging shoes and come on over.  In addition to the good show, they served all-you-can eat Jack Stack ribs for dinner, which was awesome.  They had some beans and corn and some other stuff too… whatever.  They just set that junk out as filler for the rookies I guess;  Just ribs and pickles for me.

Sunday we headed up North (gasp!!) with Ed and Kim for a day on the Martin’s boat.  That was pretty much a day-long event, and I’m not sure how much I can really write about sitting on an inflatable chair and floating around all day.  Very relaxing though, I can tell you that.  After a few hours of aimless rafting, the KB clan showed up too, so we barged up with them and floated some more.  Not a really productive afternoon, per se, but then that wasn’t the goal.  Unfortunately I managed to sunburn my backs, dang it.  Quite uncomfortable.  After spending the entire day on the floatilla, we all went to Rancho Grande for a little dinner to wrap things up.  We had an excellent dinner (at least I did) but then, in the only snafu of the day, came out to find a flat tire on Donette’s car.  Luckily Chris “Pit Crew” Martin had that fixed up in an amazing 3.75 minutes, and we were on the road back to the safety of the southlands.

Monday was a work day for me, dang it.  Had to go to work, and I was oncall.  I picked the holiday to be oncall on purpose, thinking nothing would be going on, but it didn’t work out that way.  Never does.  It wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t that good either.  We did have a little fiesta that night over at Susan’s house.  Lots of good food, and she bought some fireworks too so I got to have my 4th of July fix.  Unfortunately all the explosives fell into the “safety” category, but that doesn’t really matter to me so much anymore.  My needs are simple; I just wanna light a couple of fuses.  There was one large explosion involved, but details on that one must be withheld to protect the not-so-innocent.

Tuesday we didn’t have anything planned, and consequently did absolutely nothing.  We slept in, then hit Sharp’s for a late breakfast.  After that, I can’t thing of a single thing we did.  I worked on putting all those pictures up, and a few other unnoticable website changes, and that took up most of the afternoon.  I did make one little aethethic change and made the links black instead of blue like the rest of the text.  I don’t really like that look, but I was getting some feedback that people couldn’t see the links.  So, always on a quest to please, I went with a nice basic black.  I’ll probably change it again some day when I’m feeling a bit more creative.  (I’ve never had one of those days to date, but you never know.)  After wasting the entire holiday in this fashion, we went over to Ed and Kim’s house to work on a few projects.  Donette helped Kim with some painting, while Ed and I ran a new cable drop to his office for his cable modem.  We only drilled one extra hole in his wall;  Not too bad.  True, it is a really BIG hole, but it coulda been worse.  After we finished that stuff, they grilled up some chicken kabobs and we sat around on their porch enjoying the veritable war-zone of fireworks all around them.  Man, no respect for the law down on the Plaza.