Holidays are just way too busy for an old man like me.  I can’t hang.  That weekend was nothing short of exhausting.  We came out of the gate strong on Friday with an afternoon trip to some nearby wineries.  We haven’t made the rounds in a while, I’ll grant you that.  A few tastings were overdue at best.  We kept it pretty short though;  I think we totaled three stops.  Much more than that and my attention span starts fading rapidly.  We wrapped up the day over at our house, dancing to the Mickey Mouse Club show with the two-year-old.  Pretty sure I pulled a hammy.

Saturday we killed the better part of the day around the house, saving our energy for our friend’s annual “blind beer tasting” party that night. Our friends Michael & Alaina host this annually, and it’s a great time.  We got in on the action last year, mostly because it was held at our house.  This year it was at their house, and luckily we scored an invite again.  Grandfathered in, I guess.  I guess it grows in size every year;  I can say it was definitely bigger than last year.  I think there were like 40 people?  Way too many different beers, I can tell you that.  I had the worst case of heartburn ever.  Oh, the perils of old age.

Sunday I was about 1/2 done for.  That’s usually the case on Sundays, no big change there.  I was feeling extra worn out though.  I didn’t even cover Thanksgiving in this update, that was an event in itself.  (But, as it didn’t fall on the weekend proper, I’m technically not obligated to rehash it.  It was fun.  Done.)  Anyway, back to Sunday, I fired up the smoker and spent the afternoon watching a turkey cook.  Excellent use of a day, I must say.  I was most pleased with the results too.

Turkey Day is coming!  I’m feeling particularly thankful this year so I’m ready to feast.  So much so, in fact, that I bought two turkeys.  That’s one way to insure I get some leftovers I guess.  As far as the weekend went, well it was rather uneventful.  I was geared up for a big happy hour Friday, but nobody was buying into my plan so I ended up on my back patio as usual.  Hey, it was a nice evening out, nothing to complain about there.  I ended up with a big fat cigar and my feet kicked up on the coffee table, listening to some good tunes and enjoying the weather.  We did make it out to dinner at Selland’s a little later, which was tasty as always.  I’ll admit I go there for the very reasonable price though; Their $25 special cannot be beat, at least not around here.

Saturday I actually got outside and got a little yard work done.  My citrus trees, which I was just certain were going to produce a little bit of fruit this year, got all broken up in the neighbor’s landscaping project, so I tried to salvage them the best I could.  I think they’ll make it.  They offered to replace them but eh, no thanks.  I don’t so much mind buying new ones, I don’t want to dig the stinkin’ holes to plant them.  The so-called dirt out here is no joy to dig in, that’s for sure.  I got them all repaired, we’ll see if they heal up.  I trimmed a few of the rosemary bushes too, those things are ridiculous.  Definitely in the “drought tolerant” family.  They’ll take over your whole yard if you let them.  After I got done with that, we headed up to the AT&T store, presumably to get our monthly bill lowered a bit.  Several hours and a sizable sum of money later, we walked back out in a fog.  My head is still swimming, I don’t know what happened exactly.  Hopefully my monthly savings are enough to cover the out-of-pocket expenses over the next decade or so, but I rather doubt it.  Good grief.  Note to self:  Conduct all AT&T business online next time.

The majority of Sunday was spent on the couch, as has been the tradition as of late.  We got out to the grocery store and bought our turkeys, and that was about it.  I did spend a good deal of time fine-tuning my home automation setup that I’ve been working on.  I’m pretty happy with the door locks and lights and that generic stuff, but I was trying to program the thermostat schedules with it too.  The little voice in the back of my head kept saying “The thermostats have built-in scheduling, what’s the point?”  And the other voice would answer “Because it would be cooler to have it in your automation setup.”  Well, I woke up about 2:30 this morning and it had set the temp upstairs to 62, and downstairs to 70.  Not too bad, except I’d wanted 62 degrees on both.  Unfortunately though, the stupid thing had set the upstairs to “cool” and the downstairs to “heat.”  So yeah, the heater was rocking downstairs trying to get the house up to 70, while the air conditioner was trying to cool the upstairs to 62.  I shut it all off and turned the thermostat scheduling back on for the time being…

Well that wasn’t exactly a weekend at Tahoe but it was livable.  Friday night Donette went out with a bunch of people to happy hour.  I was pretty excited to meet some new people, so I rushed home from work and got my going-to-town clothes on.  I was warming up the car when she told me I wasn’t invited.  Again.  Sigh.  Well, fine for them, I had my own happy hour on the patio with Teagan.  Grilled some chicken and watched a movie, and played a little fetch.  And we had FUN.  More fun then her group I bet.  Yeah.

Saturday started off a little slow.  If we did anything all day long, I can’t really recall what it was.  We had a big dinner party to go to, so we spent the day resting up for it.  Donette tried to convince me I wasn’t invited to it either, but I called the host and he told me I WAS.  (Or he was caught off guard and panicked, I got to go at any rate.)  It was some sort of a Thanksgiving warm up I guess, and it was a good time.  There was a big turkey with all the trimmings, and I ate way too much in the spirit of the holiday.  It was all so good, I couldn’t help myself.  I was borderline miserable after dinner, so I hung on as long as I could then we took off.  Just in time too, I heard the board games came out shortly after we left.

Sunday held all the excitement and joy of a typical Monday.  No Sunday-Funday for this kid.  I had to go into work in the evening, and it just kind of ruined my day looking forward to that.  Indeed, I didn’t even get dressed until around 5:00.  Sucked the life right outta me.  As it turned out work wasn’t really that bad;  We got out of there in a reasonable time and still had time to watch a bit of the Sunday night football game.

We made a quick run up the hill to Tahoe last weekend, mostly because we didn’t have anything better to do.  Haven’t been there in a few months either, and it’s always good for a fun weekend.  Granted, we may have wanted to check the weather before we took off Friday afternoon;  It dropped a full 25 degrees over the 1.5 hour drive.  We arrived at the resort in our shorts and flip-flops, and were greeted by a rather crisp 40 degree temp when we got out of the car.  Oh well, we weren’t alone, there were plenty of people in the same boat.  By the time we got checked into our room and changed into more climate-suitable clothes, it was getting towards dinner time, so we headed up to the State Line area and found a table at The Lucky Beaver for some burgers.  A rather cheesy place to be sure, but man do they sling a mean burger.  I had a delicious blue cheese burger, it was over the top.  Doni went with a gut-bomb chili burger.  Both were crazy-good, but definitely night-enders;  We rolled back to the room and turned in for the day.

Saturday was a long day, in a good way.  We headed over to our standard breakfast spot, the Red Hut Cafe, but they gave us a 50 minute wait time.  That would have put us pretty close to lunch time, so we regrouped and drove over to the North side of the lake to check things out.  Indeed, by the time we changed clothes and got to the other side of the lake it was time for lunch, so we stopped in at The Beacon.  We shared a turkey club, which was a good call as it was an enormous sandwich.  After that we drove a bit further, and with no small amount of trouble found a parking spot around the Emerald Bay area.  We have wanted to hike down to the beach where the Vikingsholm house is located for a long time, and declared Saturday “the day.”  Due to our inconvenient parking spot, we actually worked in a few short, scenic hikes on the way to the Vikingsholm trail head, maybe we should have just called it a day at that point.  Nah, we decided to head on down.  It was a short walk, a little over a mile I think, and well worth it.  There were several short hikes to waterfalls and other scenic locations at the bottom too, so we took a few of those.  The only downside was, the actual house was closed to tours for the season.  Whoops, guess we should have read all those signs at the trail head a little closer.  It was still worth it, very cool.  A little tip though;  A one-mile hike down a hill is much easier than a one-mile hike back up the same hill.  Whew.  We had spent several hours there, and by the time we got back to the South side it was getting towards dinner time.  So, it was back to the State Line area, where the first order of business was to cash in Doni’s winning tickets for the Royal’s ALCS and World Series victories, woot!!!  We scurried over to a table with our cash and pondered our options:  Retire early?  Put it towards Teagan’s college tuition?  Buy a vacation home?  After much debate, we decided to just blow it all on a nice dinner.  Even that was a hard decision, but we finally agreed on Riva Grill back by our hotel.  A fine choice to be sure.  I labeled it “the best meal I’ve had out in CA,” and I’m standing by that declaration.  I opted for the 10 oz. filet mignon, and swapped out my mashed ‘taters for crab risotto.  Doni went with a massive slab of prime rib, which was the special of the evening.  Both were absolutely fantastic.  As an added bonus, we somehow scored a sweet table right by the huge fireplace, in front of the TV that was playing the Nebraska game.  A good day, all in all.

Sunday we got up early-ish and scurried back down to El Dorado Hills.  Not much news to go on for that day.  According to my step-counter watch, I racked up a record-low 1089 steps for the day.  Apparently that is how many steps it takes to get from the hotel room to the car, and the car to the couch.

Happy Halloween!  We must be hitting our stride, because the time out here is flying by.  I swear we were just at a Halloween function not too long ago.  Must have been about a year ago though.  Funny how that works.  We didn’t go to any big parties this year though.  We were pretty heavily invested in the baseball games, plus I kind of miss just sitting home and passing out candy.  We did head down to the nearby shopping center to watch our little friend Harper do some trick-or-treating, then headed back home for the big game.  We put a radio on the front porch and sat out there with Teagan passing out candy, and had just a fine time of it.  I’d guess we had about 75 kids come by, just by doing some rough math on the candy we got rid of.  Lots of interest in Teagan, not so much in the baseball game.  I’m not sure the majority of them even realized what was going on.  Not a big sports town, good ol’ El Dorado Hills.

Sunday was very fine day, at least by my standards.  I kicked it off early with the 6:00 Chiefs game;  OK that was a little weird.  First one I’ve got to watch though, so I wanted to catch it.  After that, I threw some beef ribs on the smoker, more or less just because they were on sale and I wanted to see what would happen.  As they were cooking along, lo and behold it started raining!  And rained, and rained, and rained.  I don’t think they’re going to declare the drought over but it was definitely more rain than we’ve seen all year.  It came down nice and steady all day.  Thank goodness for my nice covered patio;  I just rolled the smoker under it and kept on cooking.  Aside from a very little bit of landscape work, I spent the whole day watching games on the back patio and cooking the ribs.  Definitely one of my favorite ways to waste a day.  (The ribs came out rather marginal if you’re wondering…  Too fatty and I used too much rub, as usual.  Eh, gumbo season is upon us, they’ll get eaten.)