I spent part of my time Friday rewiring up my surround sound system upstairs. To test it out I watched the movie “Sid and Nancy” and then played the new Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter on the Xbox. GRAW is tougher than GR2 and I don’t like the switch from 3rd person to 1st person, but the missions are as fun as ever. Regardless, the sound system sounds great. I threw in the new King Kong DVD and skipped forward to the dinosaur battle. I had the volume turned up WAY too loud and when the sound started it was so loud it scared the crap out of me! I thought the crashes coming from the battle sounded very realistic — then I realized the first blast of bass had rattled my center channel speaker right off its shelf. Everything’s stuck down with double-sided Velcro now. I also remember to turn the volume all the way down when starting a movie and then turning it up a listenable level.

Saturday was the El Reno Onion Burger Festival, an annual event that’s kind of a tradition for my family to attend. On the first Saturday of each May, the cooks of El Reno get together to cook the world’s largest onion burger (usually it weighs in at around 850 lbs). They also have a big car show, lots of performers and lots of stuff for kids to do there. Unfortunately this year it was rainy and in the low 60’s, which meant there wasn’t a big turnout for either the cars or the people. Dad, Mason and myself drove out in my truck while Susan and Morgan stayed behind for a bit. When we got to the onion burger stand the line looked like it was going to be an hour-long wait. Dad spotted a small restaurant off Main Street that said “Pizza and Subs”, so we decided to eat there instead. When we got inside we found a hamburger and BBQ place that sold neither pizza nor subs. What terrible advertising! Food at the “Pizza and sub place that doesn’t sell pizza nor subs” was okay, but greatly overpriced. Homemade hamburgers, while good, were $4.25 — and that was just the hamburgers, not including fries or a drink. For my dad and I to have a burger, fries and a drink it was about $18 total. That’s way too much for lunch at a mom and pop diner. I won’t miss them when they go out of business. Off to the side they also had an all-you-can-eat buffet which consisted of about 4 or 5 things. They had polish sausages, fried chicken, corn, and a few other items. That was $9.99. For the record, every other buffet in town I can think of is cheaper than that, and I’m talking about places like Golden Coral, Western Sizzler, Hometown Buffet, every Chinese and Mexican buffet, etc.

After lunch we walked around the car show for a bit but there were only about 30 or so cars there so it didn’t take long. Mason spied a moonwalk-jumpy thing, so Dad and I took him over there and let him jump for a while. Next to the moonwalk was a dunk tank. Did I mention it was 60 degrees and raining? The dunk tank had two volunteers who were taking turns being dunked and freezing. Whichever one was not in the tank was around back, shivering while wrapped up in a big blanket. I hope the pneumonia was worth it. While standing there, Susan and Morgan along with Becky, Jessica, Katie and Dylan walked up. Mason wanted to go with them, so he left with them and Dad and I left. It wasn’t the most exciting Burger Day festival ever, but it was still fun.

To atone for the greasy burger I had for lunch I had two low fat ham sandwiches for dinner. The diet’s going well — I had a Slimfast shake earlier for breakfast and feel great. I’ve walked the mile around my neighborhood four nights in a row. The first night, I could barely make it and took a shortcut near the end that cuts off the steepest part of the walk. The second night, I made it around, no problem. The third night I made it around so quick and felt so good that I ended up walking another half a mile just for fun. On the fourth night I just did the one mile lap, but “jogged” the last 50 feet or so. Today (Monday) at work I’ve walked up the stairs from the basement to the first floor a few times and walked down four flights from the third floor. My back is taking the brunt of this new spell of activity, but hopefully through routine and aspirin that’ll work itself out. I’d like to get to a point where I was walking twice a day. It’s not the exercise level that’s hard, it’s the waking up at 5AM to walk in the mornings that kills me.