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Technically my holiday weekend continues today, as I have the day off. However, it's raining and I have no concrete plans until later on, so I think it's safe to say that most of the fun stuff has already happened.

On Friday evening, I got together with three friends to play board games. We were planning on playing Battlestar Galactica, but after a starter game of Condottiere (which I won!), we ended up playing a couple of rounds of Last Night on Earth instead. I played the first game as zombies and the second as humans and even though I lost both times, I definitely enjoyed zombie gameplay more. We ended the night with two more games of Condottiere, which I lost but still enjoyed.

On Saturday morning, my sister and her family invited me to go to Blue Springs Lake with them on their boat. Well actually, my sister invited me to go to "The Lake," so I ended up at the Longview Lake marina while they stood around at Blue Springs Lake wondering where I was. Fortunately, the lakes aren't too far apart and I caught up with them fairly easily.

We spent most of the trip lounging around in the water, but the kids got a chance to do some tubing toward the end.

The sky looked threatening after a while, so we called it a day and went back to my sister's for pizza.

That evening, I drove to Excelsior Springs for Banky and Thundabolt's wedding. As befitting a marriage between two bloggers/tweeters, the wedding had its own hashtag, #thundabanky, and several of us live-tweeted the ceremony.

It was a beautiful, heartfelt ceremony with a fun reception featuring some of the most delicious wedding cake I've ever tasted and music from Flannigan's Right Hook.

On Sunday morning, I drove to Unity Village to meet up with my sister and a group of her yoga students for yoga in the woods. We walked about twenty minutes down the trail until we reached a concrete bridge over a creek. We laid out our mats on the bridge and did a class enveloped by the sounds of wind through the trees, birds, and flowing water. It was very peaceful and calming.

I had most of the day free after that, so once I'd taken care of the adoptable cats at Petco, I had time to meet up with queentuffy and kipkillagin for a second breakfast. I returned home and whipped up a batch of strawberry/cream cheese/pretzel dessert (with added blueberries, which made it wonderful!) and managed to get in a brief nap.

We spent the evening at a friend's 4th of July party, chowing down on party food and drinking lemonade slushes with vodka. There were a lot of musicians there, so my husband had fun playing drums during an extended jam. For some reason, I didn't take any photos at the party even though I had my camera. You'll just have to use your imagination.

Today I'm finally going to make some sourdough bread with the starter I got a while back. Other than that, this looks like it's shaping up to be a housework day.

Do you have the day off? What are you planning?

It took me a while, but I finally managed to take a morning and sleep in before my vacation ended. Unfortunately that morning was Sunday, which meant I woke up an hour after I should have been at Petco taking care of the adoptable cats. I made up for it by letting them play for almost an hour and a half while I cleaned their cages and talked them up to interested customers.

On Saturday morning I'd gotten up really early for a pancake breakfast, also benefiting The Animal Rescue Alliance. I spent several hours serving pancakes, eggs, sausage and beverages to people who came to Applebee's to support the charity. It was a big success, but I was so over the whole pancake thing by the time it was over that I decided to forgo the meal and just go home and have cereal.

I should mention that I never worked in a restaurant earlier in life, so this was my first experience serving food and drinks outside of my own dinner parties. Man, what a lot of work! I can only imagine what it would have been like with everyone getting different food.

It's amazing what a week at home will do for your outlook on life. It was very restorative to have nine nearly agenda-free days in which to rest, read, putter around the house, revisit some inconveniently-located favorite restaurants, and generally just chill out.

As soon as I got to the office this morning I could tell I was more focused than I'd been when I left. It's a good feeling.

Of course, we have Independence Day coming up and my birthday as well, so I'll only be working three days next week. I think I can manage to fall back into the vacation groove!

Finally I'm feeling more like my regular self, so I'm taking this last vacation day to burn through a long-overdue list of errands.

I started the morning at a coffee meetup at The Filling Station. I figured there was no point in trying to get started without the proper fuel. Several people brought their dogs today, which was fun.

When I got home it was still cool and shady in our back patio area, so I immediately put on gloves and set about weeding the rose bed and another nearby flower bed. There were grassy weeds more than six inches high from all the rain we've had lately.

After I finished weeding, I made a list, gathered the necessary supplies, and set off on my round of errands.

My first stop was a local tailor shop so I could get the suit pants that @TaraCuda gave me shortened. I also dropped off my favorite pair of  Wrangler jeans to have the broken zipper replaced.

Next on the agenda was a trip to MarBeck to look into having my old vacuum cleaner repaired. A while back I made the mistake of buying a cheapo new vacuum cleaner at Target and I've hated it from day one. Fortunately, I'd hung onto my broken Hoover and the repair shop guy said it would be as good as new with $50 of parts and labor. Woohoo!

On my way back toward home I finally picked up a Father's Day gift for my dad: Aqua Teen Hunger Force Season One on DVD (yes, my 79-year-old dad loves that show, believe it or not). Then I stopped at two grocery stores, and now I've swung by home to drop off the perishables before I go to Lowe's for gravel and fill dirt to deal with the washout from the droopy guttering I had fixed the other day.

I strongly suspect that my enthusiasm for today's activities will quickly run out once I've hefted around all the heavy bags of rocks and dirt in the 90-degree heat.

What have you been up to today? Have any fun weekend plans?

If you count last weekend, today is the beginning of my sixth day off work. I have not exactly been making the most of my time.

Being sick doesn't help. It makes me averse to doing anything outdoors, which means that trips to the zoo and botanical gardens are off the list. I have also failed to get any gardening done. However, I got to sit in the air-conditioned comfort of my own office while other people repaired and cleaned my gutters and mowed my lawn yesterday, so there's that.

I did make it to one of the restaurants I wanted to go to, and A Librarian and I are hitting another one for lunch today. The only other thing left on my vacation food list is to bake some sourdough bread with my new starter.

Earlier in the week I took my sister, niece and nephew to the Dinosaurs Unearthed
exhibit at Kansas City's Union Station, thanks to
tickets provided free by their PR firm. 

They had lots of animatronic dinosaurs that moved and roared when
you triggered the motion sensors. The exhibit also showed the work that
paleontologists do to find, dig up, preserve and even mold and copy
dinosaur bones, which was interesting. For me, the highlight was the
depiction of various dinosaurs with feathers.

For years I've been reading that many dinosaurs and birds are now
thought to be closely related, but this is the first time I'd seen a
museum-type display that showed what a fuzzy baby T-Rex might have looked
like. They even showed "traditional" and updated velociraptor depictions
side by side. The new scientific view, based on fossil evidence of
feathers, suggests that they looked less like scaly lizards and more
like the huge bird of your nightmares.

My husband and I are having trouble finding the time to hang out together because his
sleep schedule is completely the opposite of mine. Last night I finally took him to see "Iron Man 2," which we both enjoyed.

I started taking the prednisone yesterday and it is already making me cranky and a pain to be around. I picked a fight about laundry last night. Seriously. And I have ten days left after today.

The good news is that it seems to be helping in that I can now take a breath without feeling the air burning through my bronchial tubes.

The hubby and I both have a reasonable amount of free time this afternoon and most of the day tomorrow, so we're going to try to make it to the Nelson-Atkins Museum and the Kemper Museum. I was also thinking this would be a good opportunity to finally visit the Steamboat Arabia Museum, but the tickets are kind of pricey so I think it'll have to wait for another time.

I guess it's time for me to go down and take my morning handful of pills (not to be confused with the ones I take midday or the ones that go with dinner).

How's your week going?

I have now been sick for 18 days. I'm on my second course of antibiotics and my doctor went absolutely bonkers with additional prescriptions, including two inhalers, nasal spray and allergy meds. She thinks that my constantly recurring bouts of bronchitis might be due to a combination of allergies and previously undiagnosed asthma, so the one other prescription she provided was for Prednisone to reduce all the bronchial inflammation.

Ordinarily I am a model patient, but I am terrified of Prednisone. My mom died of lung cancer and my mother-in-law died of pulmonary fibrosis, so I am acutely aware of the side effects: sleeplessness, irritability, weight gain, wonky blood sugar, etc., etc. When I got home from the pharmacy last Friday, I started taking all of the stuff that was supposed to make me better, but I just couldn't bring myself to take the steroids. I filled the prescription – I have the medicine – but I didn't take it.

Well, I'm still not feeling better. I'm not coughing as much as I was but when I do, my chest hurts. I'm also losing a good 4-6 hours per day napping, which is not what I'd call a sign of radiant health. I think I'm going to have to suck it up and just take the prescription. 

So tomorrow I'll start the dosing schedule in the morning. The sleeplessness side effect should eliminate those afternoon naps. I'm hoping that the knowledge that the medicine is going to make me hungry will keep me from catering too much to that side effect and maybe I won't blow up like a balloon.

I suppose I should have talked to my doctor about how freaked out I was about the Prednisone, but I doubt she picked up on the magnitude of my reservations when we were discussing it. But she's the highly trained professional in this scenario and I'm the big chicken who's afraid to gain a couple of pounds. I think she wins.

Have you ever been to a swap party? No, not that kind of swapping. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Last night I met up with eight friends and we each lugged in bags and boxes of stuff that we no longer wanted. The last time I went to one of these, we'd all just brought clothes and shoes. This time, however, there were no limitations.

I'd gotten rid of most of my unwanted clothing at the previous swap, so this time I dug a little deeper. I ended up bringing some of last year's leftover BlogHer swag, a long gown I hadn't worn since 1999, a suit that will probably never fit me again, duplicate sets of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" seasons on DVD, most of the earrings I own (my pierced ears closed up years ago) and a lot of other random stuff that's been sitting around my house for way too long.

I arrived with five bulging bags and came home with two, which I thought was a very satisfactory outcome. I scored a cute top, several necklaces, a suit that will be perfect once I get the slacks hemmed, two candle holders that will work well outdoors, and two hanging planters.

I was tempted to arm-wrestle A Librarian for the mandoline slicer that someone brought, but I decided to let her be the one to risk shaving off precious epidermis with it.

We didn't have a particularly organized method for claiming items. The bringer would hold up each item and the first person to express an interest was likely to go home with it, unless it was a clothing item that didn't fit.

Everything that went unclaimed at the end will be donated to an upcoming charity garage sale. So not only did we get the satisfaction of sharing with friends, but we'll also help a good cause. I like that.

Today you'll find me guest blogging at The 3 R's Blog while Florinda is on vacation. I was going to leave this post at that, but I figured I might as well talk about my weekend a bit while I'm here.

On Saturday morning, I went to an Intro to Sheetrocking class at K2 Workshops. There was only one other student, so it was a great learning opportunity and I am now confident that I can handle a sheetrocking project by myself. I have a basement wall in mind already.

Later in the day when my husband got up, we went and saw The A-Team. I loved that show when I was a kid, and the movie didn't disappoint. It's certainly nothing I'll be pondering at length, but it was a fun popcorn flick and an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. Best of all, I used up an AMC Theaters gift card I had in my purse and only had to pay $5 for both our tickets.

Sunday was cooking day. I'd seen this recipe for pulled pork on How to Cook Like Your Grandmother earlier in the week and purchased a 13-pound pork shoulder at Costco on Friday. After a quick grocery store trip in the morning, I had the meat in the oven by 9 a.m. It cooked for nine hours and the sandwiches were delicious! I froze a lot of the pork, but I probably need to give away some of what's in the fridge.

One little wrinkle: some of the juice from the pan spilled into the oven. I didn't think it was a big deal until I turned up the oven temperature and tried bake some French fries. Now, smoke pouring out of my oven is not that uncommon of an occurrence, but this time I saw the flicker of flames through the oven window.

I opened the oven door, dashed some baking soda onto the flames to put them out, then turned off the oven and went to McDonald's for fries. The cleanup will have to wait for another day.

Speaking of cooking, Erica Jurney has a new site called Hand Make It where she's selling sourdough starter. It's been a long time since I last played around with sourdough, so I ended up being her first customer after I heard about it on Twitter. I'm looking forward to branching out in my bread-making – without setting any fires, I hope.

I'm still waiting to recover completely from the bronchitis/sinus funk I came down with last week. It's been more than two weeks since I've slept through the night without a dose of cough medicine. I'm sure the weather isn't helping. It's either been a bazillion degrees with high humidity or thunderstorming heavily. Not good.

What did you do this weekend? Anything fun?