My new AT&T service is getting hooked up today, so my site will be down for “a while.”  I guess I could have timed that a little better, but I got caught up in the excitement of the moment and didn’t even think about it.  Three years after nearly getting Google Fiber in KC, gigabit service has come to my neighborhood here finally.  It’s been here for a while actually, but the price has been a bit exorbitant.  They finally came down to the point where it’s nearly the same price as my 18 meg service, so I made the jump.  I’m sure there’s a load of hidden fees they’ll dump on me or some mysterious thing.  It’s been proven on numerous occasions that AT&T actually has a personal vendetta against me, yet I keep giving them more and more money every month.  Shame on me I guess.

Not a bad weekend I suppose.  The rain is really getting old.  I think it’s moved past old and well into maddening.  There’s just not a whole lot to when it’s pouring outside but spend money, or so it seems.  So along those lines, we went out wine tasting once again.  Honestly I just don’t get tired of doing the wineries.  They’re fun, at least for me.  And if you keep the purchases to a minimum, it’s a relatively cheap way to spend a rainy day too.  Therein lies the problem I guess.  We usually feel obligated to pick up a few bottles in return for the tastings.  Next thing you know we have a closet full of wine that we rarely drink.  (And I mean “full” in the most literal sense.  It’s full.)  So be it I guess.  After a few wineries, the group went to Smith Flat House for dinner.  That’s definitely one of my favorites out here, I don’t pass up many chances to go there.  I had lamb shanks Saturday and they were delicious.  Can’t say I’ve ever had anything bad there.

Hey, a few days without rain!  As a matter of fact, a few very nice days of weather.  It’s not going to last if you’re to believe the weatherman, but we enjoyed a couple of days of respite from the monsoons.  Friday we had some friends over for a little steak taste test.  Very fascinating experiment, if perhaps born of sheer boredom.  I stopped by the store on the way home from work and got a tenderloin and a ribeye, as close to the same thickness as I could.  I then seasoned them identically, and grilled them to the same internal temp, over the same part of the grill.  I then sliced them up and passed them around.  Somewhat to my surprise, the tenderloin was the unanimous favorite.  My Valentine’s Day menu has been thus altered by this earth-shattering  bit of scientific polling.  Tomorrow night it shall be filet mignon and lobster, instead of our usual annual ribeye and lobster.

Well it’s hard to top that bit of steak madness, but we got out a few times more over the weekend.  Saturday night we walked over to the neighborhood clubhouse for a comedy show they were putting on.  I may have mentioned that Donette is a member of the “Social Committee.”  If I haven’t, well now I have.  Remarkable as it may seem, I am not a member of said committee.  At any rate, they had put together this fine evening of entertainment, complete with a comedian that had come in from out of town.  He was pretty darn funny, it was a good show.  He must have been good, because we stayed until the unheard of hour of 10:30, gasp.

Sunday we participated in our weekly “Sunday Funday” activities.  We kicked things off with a quick drive up the hill to a few wineries.  Sunny weather has been long overdue, and it just sounded like the thing to do.  As it happens, it usually sounds like the thing to do when it’s rainy and crummy out too, but we’ll overlook that little fact for the moment.  We hit one new spot, and one “favorite,” which was just about right for the day.  After that we headed over to a friend’s house nearby for one of his kid’s birthday parties.  He has a lot of kids, it seems we go to one over there at least once a month.  (That’s barely an exaggeration.)  I’m not even too sure which one was actually celebrating the birthday this time, I just showed up for spaghetti and meatballs, which was delicious.

Missed a Monday update.  Just when I was off to such a good start this year.  Oh well, I made it a month, I’ll call it a victory.

Friday was a no-show for us.  I was a few hours away in a class, getting all learnt up on some horrible subject matter.  After the long, slow drive home in traffic I just didn’t have anything else in me.  Actually I should say, the long, slow “ride,” I didn’t even drive.  Oh well, it was taxing all the same.

Saturday was a fine day.  We got around a little slowly, then headed out by ourselves for a little wine tasting.  It’s rather rare that we do the wine loop by ourselves, but we had a few specific stops we needed to make and didn’t want to get all caught up in the logistics of a group trip.  We started off at Scott Harvey, pretty close to our house.  They were having an “event” I wanted to go to, mostly because there was food involved.  Other than the sketchy weather, it was a good time.  They had five or six tastings, and each was paired with a food.  Don’t know why but I have fun at those.  Not to mention one of the stations was oysters, and I don’t get those very often.  I circled back to that one a few times….  “Nah I’m good on the wine thanks, I’ll take a few more of those oysters.”  There’s one in every crowd.  From there we moved on to Cooper, one of our “original” favorites.  That’s one of the first wineries we visited when we moved out here, so we like to go back there for a “ahhhh remember when…” trip.  Their wine is pretty darn good too.  For our evening entertainment, we went to a wine tasting party of all things.  Whew, the ol’ taste buds were a little shot by then but we gave it a go.  We had a great time faking the scores like we knew what we were doing.  Yeah we’re pretty fancy.

Sunday we had a Super Bowl party on the calendar, but it just didn’t come together.  Two parties in one weekend?  Madness.  Instead we invited another couple over and just did some grilling on the patio.  It was warm enough to move the TV back outside for the game, but that sounded like work so we watched it inside.  Good times all the same, and it started dumping rain once again so it was probably for the best.

Hey, it quit raining!  For a few days anyway, it’s coming back if you believe the forecast.  We made the most of the dry weather while it was here though, or at least we tried.  Things got off to a slow start on Friday because I had to work late.  Hey, it happens, and admittedly infrequently lately.  No worries.

Saturday shaped up to be a decent day out, as far as the weather goes.  I decided to take a little bike ride on the road, as the trails are still far too muddy.  Before I left, some friends asked if we’d like to join them for an afternoon wine tasting, complete with catered BBQ.  Donette quickly agreed that sounded like a fantastic idea.  I was less enthusiastic…  Yeah it was a nice day, but the winery was (sort of) far away and I held my usual grave reservations about the quality of the BBQ.  I took it into consideration as I headed out on my bike ride.  The ride was good;  My gears are a little off, due to some self-inflicted maintenance issues, but the weather was great and I enjoyed the short ride.  I got home, opened the garage door….  And the car was gone.  Huh, that’s weird.  A few texts later I gathered the unfortunate truth:  She’d gone to the winery without me!  Yeah, I know I said I didn’t want to go, but that doesn’t mean you can just leave me home alone!  Well, yeah, turns out it does.  Hmph.  What can ya’ do.  Of course they supposedly had a wonderful time, the ‘que was fantastic, blah blah.  I’m skeptical, I think they were just rubbing it in.  For my part, I sat on the patio alone and grilled some chicken legs.  And pouted.  Sniff, sniff.

Sunday I fixed a small brunch for some friends, which is code for “Come over and help us put together some prefab furniture.”  Perfect crime.  We ate some marginal biscuits and gravy (I experimented with corn starch…  semi-failure,) and did indeed get the furniture assembled.  After that the day sort of morphed into more patio time, then dinner up the hill at one of our go-to Mexican restaurants.  Not bad, not bad at all.

I was so happy it quit raining that I snapped this picture on my walk to work the other morning. Sun!!!!

I’ll kick off my update with my now-standard complaints about the weather. The rains continue! And continue, and continue… I’ve certainly not seen anything like this in the 3 years we’ve been out here. And to hear the talk, neither has anyone else. It’s rather obvious the infrastructure isn’t made to handle all the water. Roads are washing away, all the storm drains are at capacity and overflowing, it’s a big mess to be sure. And I think the worst part is, none of it is really doing any good. The summer water supply comes from snow melt in the Sierras, all this rain water just runs off to the ocean. I guess it has to stop sometime. (Doesn’t it?)

That was an off weekend, for the most part. The gloomy weather just isn’t conducive to getting out and enjoying yourself. We did, however, get out and about on Saturday. We headed out on a long-overdue brewery tour with a bunch of rowdy kids, and had quite a good time of it. By “kids,” I mean these hooligans were roughly half my age. (Matter of fact, I don’t think there was anything “roughly” about it.) I’m sure that to the casual observer, it appeared I had drawn the short straw and had to take my kids and their friends out for a 21rst birthday party. Oh well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. (I’m aware that last phrase makes no sense what-so-ever, I just felt I needed to work an idiom in there.)

We kicked things off mid-afternoon at New Helvetia in downtown Sacramento.  Pretty decent product, but the tasting room wasn’t really for me.  It was so loud, you couldn’t hear yourself think.  I don’t know why everybody felt the need to yell.  Maybe because the table next to them was yelling, so then they had to yell to be heard, which then made the table next to us have to yell, and so on down the line?  Geez.  Oh well, it was our first stop.  We didn’t stay long.  After that we moved on to Oak Park, a short drive away.  Again, not my style (Do I have a style?) but we were just getting warmed up.  It was more of a restaurant than a brewery, sort of like the late great 75th Street in Waldo.  I’ll say the food was better than 75th though, we had a quite tasty lunch.  After that we moved more into the central downtown area, and stopped at a place called Fieldwork.  Ahhhh, now we’re getting somewhere.  Nice tasting room with long tables, and a small outdoor seating area with heaters.  I’ve had their beers before around town, and they put out a very solid product.  I somewhat regret my choice of the afternoon, a run-of-the mill pale ale, as I’m sure I’ve had it before.  Oh well, it’s a very GOOD pale ale, I just felt I probably should have branched out a little bit.  We hung out there for a bit, then moved on to a place called Ruhstaller.  This one was the highlight of my tour, to be sure.  It was one of those places that I just haven’t been able to find out here.  I’m sure they exist elsewhere downtown, but A) we don’t go downtown much and B) it takes a lot of hunting to find them.  I was trying to find a link to their homepage, which appears to be down, and instead came across that story in the local news so I linked to it.  It struck me as sort of funny, because it doesn’t appear they learned much from their first endeavor.  This place was in a basement, and it looked like some college kid had donated his dorm furniture to the cause.  Throw in a pool table for good measure, put out some board games, and you’re open for business.  Great place.  We got a good pool tourney going while the rest of the group played board games, and ended up spending quite a bit of time there.  Even ordered some delivery pizza.  I would have called that “ending on a high note,” but we hit one more spot, called Preflite.  Not really a brewery, but we were wrapping things up and this was a nice spot to do it in.  Totally legit dive bar, I was impressed for the second time.  Maybe there are indeed suitable establishments for me around here, I’m just having trouble finding them.