It’s still a bit on the warm side here.  By warm, I mean punishingly, brutally hot.  Yeah it’s nice that the humidity runs about 20%, but the sun will still wear you down.  Mostly I miss hanging out on my back patio.  Oh well, in all fairness it is the middle of summer, it’s supposed to be hot.

We didn’t have any big plans this weekend, sort of just hung out and relaxed.  I met up with a buddy Friday afternoon for some post-work-week celebration, then scurried home to watch the Royals drop another game in my moderately comfortable air conditioned living room.  I think I fell asleep about 7:30.  Another wild Friday in the books.

Saturday I got up on the early side to enjoy the cool morning air.  Hey, if I can’t have my evenings on the patio, I make it a morning hangout.  After a few cups of coffee and plenty of morning news on the TV, I was ready to get out and exercise before it heated up too much.  Never happened though.  At least I thought about it, that has to be good for a few calories.  We ended up do nothing all morning, then later in the afternoon met some friends at the newer Sentivo winery up in Fairplay.  At least I think it’s newer…  I might be making that up.  It was a very nice place at any rate, and the 45 minute drive up in elevation bought us about 10 degrees of cooler temperature.  We brought a little picnic with us and spent quite a while enjoying their grounds, I definitely wasn’t in any hurry to get back to the heat.  After that we headed to Placerville for a bit, then on back to the house.

Sunday, mostly just to keep from totally wasting another weekend day, we met up with a friend and her little ‘uns at nearby Lake Natoma for some recreation.  Seemed like a popular option, the parking lot was pretty full.  I took my inflatable kayak and we rented another there at the park, and proceeded to paddle and splash around for a few hours.  After that we headed over to a nearby restaurant and enjoyed a tasty lunch on their patio.  Somewhere between the heat of the day, all the paddling, and the heavy lunch we got knocked out for the rest of the day though.  We limped back home and spent the rest of the evening on the couch.  Again.

Whew we’ve been busy.  I haven’t forgotten about updating my website, I’ve just totally ignored it.  We’ve had two weeks of company, vacation, and fun.  Our friends Chris & Kelly came in on the 15th, and we headed down to the Napa & Sonoma area.  Donette and Kelly participated in the Napa to Sonoma 1/2 marathon, while Chris and I  did…  Other stuff.  We went to some great wineries while we were there of course, and enjoyed some fantastic meals.  That goes for Donette and I at least;  Coming from the food desert we’ve moved to, pretty much anything tastes fantastic.  After that we headed back up the hill to our house and kicked around a few days, then Chris had to go back home.  We traded him in for our friend Mary at the airport, and a “girls vacation” ensued from there.  I tried to avoid those outings for the most part, but I joined in a few trips.  Good times, if a bit warm!  I have to keep reminding myself that it’s even worse in KC, and whereas the heat index in KC is usually 15 degrees above the air temp, here it is generally about 5 degrees lower.  Doesn’t matter that much…  Even if the heat index IS a mere 98, that’s too hot for me.

I can’t remember every detail of the past two weeks, as usual.  I really need to start taking notes.  And as a matter of fact, I think I did take notes over this trip, I just can’t remember what I did with them.  Sigh.  Got a lot of pics though.  There are a ton more too, maybe I’ll throw another set up later in the week.

Ah, a fine holiday weekend.  Left me a bit battered but I’ll recover.  Said recovery tends to take a little longer than usual since I passed the 1/2-century mark, but I believe there are more factors at work there than just my advanced age.  My memory is sketchy these days too, but I’ll recount the weekend activities to the best of my ability.  Lately I’ve been given to mixing up the days during which an event occurred, much to Donette’s dismay.  Three-day weekends are particularly taxing on me.  I figure I’m doing good enough just to cover things, the time and/or day on which they occurred is secondary.

Friday, (or was that Saturday?) we kicked things off “up the hill” with our friends Michael & Alaina.  I’m not entirely clear who scheduled the events of the evening, but I don’t get too caught up in the planning phase.  I was, as they say, “along for the ride.”  The weather had cooled considerably, making for a pleasant happy hour of sorts at Chateau Davell winery.  They have a nice patio with a great view, if you can ignore the fact that you’re looking out over a highway.  We enjoyed a bottle of wine and a nice meat & cheese tray, then moved on to downtown Placerville to check the progress at Outbreak Brewing.  They’re not officially open yet, but they sell tasters one or two nights a week.  We dropped by a while back and liked the place.  It didn’t appear to me they’d made much progress on the building but they said it was coming along;  I’ll take their word for it.  After tasting a few of their new brews, we headed out for dinner at nearby Smith Flat House.  This was, we decided, our official “best dinner yet in CA.”  I’ve probably used that label a few times before, but I can assure you they’re few and far between.  This place also boasted the rare quality of an actual “atmosphere!”  It was a really cool historic building, it was a nice change to not enjoy dinner in a strip mall.

Saturday morning, Michael & Alaina joined us again for a brunch at our house.  We’ve been on something of a brunch run lately, trying the menu at several local places.  To date, we’ve been left with the general impression of “mediocre & overpriced” at all of them.  (The possible exception is The Purple Place, and it is perilously close to the latter of those two qualities…  But at least the food is good.)  So, I decided to work up a brunch menu of my own.  Honestly I was basing this entire idea on an urge to make eggs benedict using my new sous vide cooker.  I’ll admit a bit of disappointment at finding out nobody liked eggs benedict, and especially with soft-poached eggs.  The most popular menu requests were biscuits and gravy and canned corned beef hash.  Hmmm, didn’t see that one coming.  Well, I can do those I suppose.  I don’t think I’ve had canned hash since I was a kid, and I must say it was a sodium-laden delight.  (I don’t know in what alternate universe the contents of that can qualify as “corned beef hash,” but whatever it really is was pretty tasty.  I thought it best not to read the label.)

Sunday the highlight of the day was a pool party over at a friend’s house in Folsom.  We went to the same event last year and had a great time, it was definitely on our “not to be missed” list.  Matter of fact I was planning to come early and help with the pre-party bbq’ing this year, but that part didn’t work out.  It was a great party once again, if you could overlook the constant barrage of country music.  Hey, not everybody likes non-stop Dave Matthews Band I guess.  Matter of fact I don’t think anybody does, but that’s what you’re getting if you come to my house.  (Say, maybe that’s why nobody comes to my house…  I’ll take that into consideration.)  Anyway, we enjoyed the day, including the great bbq.

For the holiday, we headed up to our friends Michael & Alaina’s once again.  They are likely tiring of our company but our other friend was out of town so options were extremely limited.  They’ve got a nice neighborhood pool, and for whatever reason it is simply not used.  This was the second time we’ve been to it, and the second time we’ve had the whole pool to ourselves.  We set up a volleyball net, fired up a grill, and had a great day of it.  Both Donette & I managed to lose track of time and are now sporting some heinous sunburns, but other than that slip-up it was fine day.

Right on queue with the arrival of summer, it got very hot very quickly.  Dry heat though it may be, 105 is just plain hot.  I’m afraid the pleasant evenings watching the Royals games on the back patio may have come to a screeching halt.  It’s still tolerable to have morning coffee out there, but that’s about it.  As a matter of fact, the heat precluded any kind of Friday evening festivities.  We just sat in the dark and sweated.  Yeah, we’ve got one of those new-fangled air conditioner thingy-ma-jigs, but I hear it costs money to turn it on.

Saturday got off to a good start with a little bit of exercise.  We goofed off a little too long and it got hot out, but Donette went ahead and went on her weekend walk and I took off on a nice bike ride.  I decided to ride some hills, which certainly isn’t too difficult to accommodate around here. I headed a few miles out and climbed one of my least favorite slopes in the area, a long grueling hill about three miles long.  It’s a pretty popular route with the cyclists around here for some reason, I have no idea why.  Granted, once you reach the top you’re rewarded with a nice downhill stretch, but it’s a literal pain getting there.  I spend most of it repeating all the worthless hill-climbing tips you read in the magazines;  Breathe through your nose, enjoy the scenery, don’t clench the handlebars, stand up occasionally, and try not splash your shoes when you puke.  Oh well, I need the exercise, no debating that.  By the end of that ride it was nice and toasty outside, so we went back to hiding in the house for the afternoon.  For our evening entertainment we headed up the hill to Placerville for a nice little outdoor festival.  It was still pretty warm out, but the street was nicely shaded and we had a fine time.

Sunday we were supposed to be hosting brunch at our house, but a rather unpleasant spate of work cancelled those plans.  Matter of fact it cancelled a good part of the day.  I do take my Sunday Funday festivities pretty seriously though, so later in the day we headed to a friend’s house for some swimming.  That made for a fine way to spend the evening, we even mixed in a little pool badminton tourney to add a little exercise aspect to the fun.  After that we fired up the grill and enjoyed a nice dinner of chicken and tri tip, two of my favorites.  Made up for the rough beginning to the day quite nicely.

Well that was a “challenging” week, as my weeks go.  Which, honestly, are not really all that challenging.  All the same, it caught up with me and I didn’t do a whole lot for the weekend.  I was spent.

We did get things started off strong though, attending a fun dinner at Hart 2 Hart Vineyard on Friday night.  We went last year to the same event and had a great time, so we figured we’d give it a go again.  Had a fine time again, I label it an annual event for us.  I’d say they got lucky with the weather, that didn’t hurt things.  It’s been intermittently blazing hot and freezing cold out here;  Friday night split the difference quite nicely.  Listened to some good music, had a tasty tri-tip dinner, and yes a few glasses of their “product.”

Saturday we hunkered down for the day.  If we did anything at all, it must not have been too interesting because I can’t remember what it was.  Of course, I can’t seem to remember anything that happened over an hour ago so maybe I did the funnest thing ever and just can’t recall.  Who knows.  It was another rather pleasant day outside, so I watched the Royals game in the back yard, and then wrapped things up with The Green Inferno.  Truly a cinematic masterpiece, I suggest rounding up the kids and taking the family out to see it for some wholesome entertainment.  Or maybe sticking with Finding Dora would be a better idea.

Sunday we got out and about a little bit.  The weather was creeping up the temp scale again, so I took off medium-early on a nice road bike ride.  I’d taken my bicycle in to the shop Saturday for a re-check on a mysterious noise it was making, and wanted to get a good test ride in.  I think they got it this time, I got in 20 miles in blissful silence.  (Except for my ragged breathing and popping knees.  At least the bike was running well.)  After that solid start, we headed out for a quick bite to eat.  I must say, I seriously underestimated the size of the Father’s Day crowds.  The people out here must take the day seriously.  Or, just as likely, there aren’t that many choices so everybody goes to the same place.  I had a Hop House burger in mind myself.  Apparently so did a few hundred other people.  I wasn’t up for the crowd there, so we walked next door to Bistro 33.  It’s always a solid bet, if a bit on the spendier side.  We had a great lunch though.  Matter of fact, we’ve had a good meal twice in a row, which may be our standing record for eateries around here.  After that we did some light grocery shopping, then headed to the neighborhood pool with some friends to get out of the heat for a bit.  After a nice cool-down, we headed back to the house to fix some dinner and watch some basketball game that was on.  Another buddy called looking for advice on where to watch the game, so he came over too;  The more the merrier.  (I really had little to no interest in the game, but the locals seemed excited about it.  It was a pretty good game, I’ll give it that.)  We field-tested a new recipe on everybody, shishito peppers and shrimp.  Didn’t come out too bad at all, I can see us fixing it again in the future.  Of little to no interest, this dish marked my first use of Liquid Smoke in all my fifty years.  Still strikes me as an odd product, but it called for it so I figured what the heck.

I’m a little short on pics this week…  One from the dinner Friday night and a short video of Teagan playing in her pool.  Guess I should have take a picture of the shrimp on the grill, they were rather festive.

https://youtu.be/-1mHxuwlxVg