Busy Weekend

Wow! Where to start. How about Saturday?
Saturday was some prep work for the dog show Saturday evening, and a quick trip by Circuit City for me to pick up a new memory card for my show filming. I did not realize it, but I was still using a 128MB card! No wonder I could barely fit 2 Rally runs in. For a mere $14 I picked up a 2GB (yes that's an order of magnitude and a factor of 2 better) card. I think I can now record over 80 minutes. Very embarrassing for a geek. At this point, I figured they were cheap enough, I'd pick another one up for going on travel so I wouldn't have to offload pictures at all until I got home, AND I could mix in some video without worrying about space. We'll see how that works out in RI next month.

Then there was the actual dog show itself, but I'll let Da Wife prattle on about that.

We had a lot scheduled for Sunday. First off, our county (well the city we live in) was holding a "Bring out your dead" err... trash day. They haul in about 8-10 huge dumpsters to the nearby park, and you can bring yard waste or large items (old furniture, we saw an old mattress, etc.) of trash. So we loaded up some old pallets I had (nice ones, just found other objects to use for their original intent), old vanity parts from the bathroom remodel (Yep we even took a sink!), leftover bits of tile and scrap from the flooring job, other random pieces of bad wood, an abused trashcan that was "modified" for k9 training purposes, and various other stray bits. Also in the back was the vanity (that we didn't like) for the bathroom remodel. After dropping the debris off at the dumpsters, we took the old vanity that we didn't like back to Lowes. Subsequently we filled my ride up with a big load of wall stones. The cart in the store was so heavy I could barely get it moving. Hopefully Da Wife will enjoy constructing a gravel retaining wall 1 brick high in the back yard under the deck. (The small test section she did looked pretty good, so confidence is high.)

After unloading all the stones (I think it was 46 all told) into the backyard, we gathered up the remaining big trash items to put in the car. Including an old landscape timber, 4 old and busted particle board and glue shelving units, 2 old and busted camp chairs (got new dog show chairs - they may be a post all by themselves), and more miscellaneous stuff. Although the shelving units provided a few minutes of fun to demolish, carrying the resulting multitude of planks proved not to be.

I was glad to see the dumpster attendants under a gazebo watching the game when we returned with the second car full (they had brought a generator and a TV so they could watch - hey I was amused.) After dropping off the second round of junk we headed out to Home Depot(you can do it, they can help.... point out what to buy, it's not like they come to your house for free... Geez.) to pick up the new vanity we wanted for the bathroom. I like this one much better, now to install it. But not today...

All that running around and work built up an appetite, so I decided that I wanted risotto, even though I had never made it before. Quick bit of reading, I chopped up the mushrooms we'd had on hand already, and also an onion and some garlic. Then it was off to the grocery store! We picked up the Arborio rice and some stock (can't believe we ran out! I wasn't watching when I used the last of it!) and a few other items we needed. Once we got home, I resumed my preparations and while also preparing to grill some sausages AND making turkey burgers all at the same time. Without Da Wife's help, many things would have gone very wrong. But in the end the dish turned out perfectly and the turkey burgers were fantastic to boot. A culinary delight, and I was just happy the risotto came out correctly. Here's what it looked like (took the picture after we were done eating dinner that is...).


A long and busy weekend, with good results most of the way around. The house has much more room with all that trash gone, as does the yard (well... aside from all the bricks that is). It will be a good leftovers week too with risotto, natural hot dogs (grilled those too), and turkey burgers (YUM!). Da Wife has even suggested she might take the sausages I grilled and turn them into a delightful soup. I can't wait.