What We Did This Weekend

Our weekend came a little sooner than normal. Well, at least for Brookie. She works in the office during the summer but is asked to work four 10-hour days so she can take Fridays off. So this Friday she cleaned and relaxed while I was on the couch working from home. After work and a quick trip to the gym, we started looking for a place to eat. We searched websites for all of the discount cards and books we have and found a little place in historic downtown Lee's Summit called Ciao! Bella. We have our favorite Mexican restaurants, we have a Chinese take-out place that we enjoy, we found a new barbeque joint last weekend with Cameron, but we haven't really found an Italian restaurant we can call our own yet. We decided to give this place a try. And with our discount card, we were going to get one meal free anyway. 

Lee's Summit was also hosting it's Down Town Days festival, so the streets were lined with carnival rides and games, food vendors, and purveyors of all sorts of random merchandise. We found the little Italian restaurant on Main Street and went inside. It was a nice place. Good atmosphere. The entire restaurant was only about 60 feet wide; just enough for tables to line both walls and allow room for some more tables down the middle of the space. One wall was painted and the opposite wall was exposed, vintage brick. I had the Chicken Parmesan, and Brookie had some Manicotti. I, of course, ate too much and stuffed myself. It was pretty good food, and we'll probably good there again, but I don't know if it's a place we'll go very often. 

After dinner we wandered downtown Lee's Summit immersed in the sights and smells of a festival. There were funnel cakes and home-made rootbeer; deep-fried twinkies and elephant ears; pulled pork and 2/3 lb. cheeseburgers; hotdogs, corndogs, and popcorn. Brookie found a new pair of sunglasses and I found a new wallet. We usually don't buy much at these things, but it's fun to walk around and see everything. 

Saturday was quite a busy one for us. Brookie had to be in Lee's Summit at 8:30am to help make pizzas for the Young Women's Camp fundraiser. The Young Women sold pizzas and cookie dough to raise money for their camp this summer. She left me a to-do list, which I would have completed, but we ran out of gas for the lawnmower. She got back at around lunch time and she and I drove around Raytown delivering all the orders we could. When we were done, we warmed the oven for our own pizzas and I mowed the lawn. Unfortunately, the pizzas stuck to the cardboard circles they were on, so it was a little tricky to cook them, but we worked it out, and they actually tasted pretty good. 

We relaxed for the next little while, flipping between the Dodgers and Cubs and some gymnastics on TV. Before too long it was time to leave for Zeb's baseball game. Zeb is the six-year-old son of Brooke's boss, Principal Rogers (Roxana). He's in coach pitch and we're planning on attending a majority of his games this summer. It was a hoot to watch all of those little kids in their baseball uniforms. Zeb got three hits and was excited to have a small entourage cheering him on. 

We went home and watched The Rocket, a movie about the French-Canadian hockey player Maurice Richard. It wasn't too bad. It was a story about both hockey and prejudice against the French-Canadian people. The original movie was mostly in French, and we watched the English version, so it was a little bit like a kung fu flick, with the poor lip-synching and all. 

Sunday was business as usual. Although, we were invited over to the Call's for dinner. It was the first time we'd had dinner at a friend's house since the Bauman's moved back to Arizona. It was pretty fun. We weren't sure how long we should stay, and ended up leaving before too long after dinner, not wishing to wear out our welcome. Of course, with the Bauman's, we needed a pretty darn good excuse to be able to leave before 10:00pm, and that's only because they knew from experience that 10 o'clock is Brookie's limit. 

After dinner we watched The Glass Menagerie. Kind of depressing, though I'm sure there was some symbolism in there we missed. But, it was probably depressing symbolism anyway. An episode of The Cosby Show before bed, and that's what we did this weekend.