A Good Weekend

Stu has been meaning to come up and visit since we moved up here over a year ago, so now that he’s shifting jobs and moving in the next few weeks, he was able to get some extra time for the 4.5 hour trip from Columbia to Swisher.  We time this such that Meg was in Hannibal for last week with her grandparents, then Brooke went down Friday night to get her.  Needless to say, Stu and I got into only a little bit of trouble…

Mostly, the weekend was taken up by games, BBQ and frolfing.  Lots of frolfing.  I haven’t played this much in years.

Jason joined us for Saturday’s romp around Cedar Rapids.  We hit up Jones Park first, followed by Shaver Park.  Both were 18-hole courses, where the first (picture above) had a good number of open spaces, while Shaver Park was almost entirely in thick forest.  Thankfully, we played Shaver second, as it was getting rather sunny and hot out.  On Sunday afternoon, when it was infinitely more hot and humid out, we “only” played another 18-hole course, Legion Park.  I guess you could say that Legion offered the most variety of the three courses we played this weekend, but it was so disorganized that it was probably the worst experience we had the whole time.  The signs were few and far between and the holes didn’t seem to be organized in any logical order (i.e. we played through hole 6, couldn’t find hole 7, found hole 10 after doing holes 11-14, and play hole 17 and 18 before finding 15 and 16…ug…).

Regardless, my legs are pretty tired after all that.  Good times, though.

The weather held together pretty well the whole weekend.  We BBQed Friday night while the ladies were out of town, then again on Saturday night after they returned from Hannibal.  Brooke’s thus far unnamed chicken even came over to visit while we were sitting by the grill.  This is the first weekend we’d seen the chicken venture that far from the coop, but it was nice to see her out and about.

Meg was mostly in good spirits, but she needed to “reset” her sleeping clock after a week with grandma.  She slept until around 6:15 am on Sunday morning, but made it until around 7:30 Monday morning, so it didn’t take too long to get her back on our usual schedule.  Now that she’s “toddling” much more effectively, she’s also getting in to things we don’t really want her to.  Case in point, she has discovered Brooke’s pots of dirt, and loves tossing them in the air and on herself.  I grabbed this picture above and Stu suggested a “sepia hue” to pull out the dust bowl aesthetic.  I think it worked pretty well.

Not sure how this makes her parents look, though…

Otherwise, much console gaming was had.  We really weren’t up all that late playing, which is probably just a testament to the fact we’re getting older…or the copious amounts of beer we were having…  We played through almost all of Killzone 3 in the co-op campaign, only to have the save file get corrupted at the second-to-last chapter of the game.  Grrrrr…  Otherwise, we played quite a bit of Mortal Kombat and Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, so I think we did a good job scratching the “heavy game session” itch.

In all, a pretty spectacular weekend.  Thanks for visiting, buddy.