It’s officially summer time, yeah!  Since we’ve had triple-digit heat for weeks now, and a total of about nineteen drops of rain this year, I’d say that means about squat.  Kids are out of school I guess, but again, that’s not something that affects my day-to-day existence.  All the same, I’m always in need of a reason to celebrate, so we made a fun weekend of it.

Friday wasn’t a particularly notable day to kick things off.  I sat on the back patio and watched the Royals game, and swatted mosquitoes.  Maybe not too exciting, but it’s how I like to spend my Friday afternoons so I found it quite enjoyable.  We’d also had a handyman come over and install a new TV mount on the back of the house, so I was pretty excited to get the new TV hung and watch that.  Pretty darn cool setup if I do say so myself, I’m pumped.  It’s an awfully nice TV to put on the back porch, but we caught a great sale and that’s just sort of how things ended up.  I tossed a good old frozen pizza on the grill for dinner, which provided a fine meal to close out the day.

Saturday I spent the majority of the day fine-tuning my TV setup.  Which is to say, sitting on the couch staring at it.  I watched several mediocre westerns, a few ball games, and checked out the built-in Pandora service.  The main reason I went with a Samsung over a Vizio was the Internet apps the Samsung comes with.  We watch nearly every Royals broadcast, and rely on our mlb.com subscription for that.  For whatever reason our Vizio TV doesn’t come with it, so we have to use various other means to get it to the TV inside the house.  It’s a lot nicer to just have it built-in and click a button.  Wonderful times we live in, people.  Anyway, that effectively sums up my Saturday.  I also spent a decent amount of time stirring a pot of baked beans on the grill, which helped pass the time.  I have to say, I think it’s the only time I’ve ever fired up the charcoal grill just to cook beans.  But, they’re better with a little smoke in them, so it had to be done.

Sunday we butted in on some friend’s Fathers Day festivities.  Had to play the “oh we’re so lonely, we don’t have any family out here” card, and it worked like a champ.  We scored some ribs, brisket, and tons of other assorted tastiness.  We brought over the massive pot of beans I’d worked on the night before for our part, and a quart of imported Jack Stack sauce.  It was a good day for sure.  We mixed in an epic pool volleyball tournament to work off some of the food, which felt great on a hot day.  I got stuck on the “deep end” team, where we couldn’t touch the bottom of the pool so we spent the whole game bobbing up and down in the water.  This was as opposed to the “glaring sun” team, who had to contend with the blinding sun right in their eyes.  Hey, it made things more challenging that way.  We won, for the record.

Here’s a short video of Teagan helping me water the dead spot in the lawn, and a few weekend pics:

https://youtu.be/pDNyzLpEDEk

Whew, busy times, busy times.  Two weekends ago we took a too-brief KC pass through, which was just exhausting;  So much so that it led to the omission of an update last week.  It was a good trip I must say.  Didn’t get to do everything I wanted to, but when does that ever happen.  We ate some good food, saw as many people as time permitted, and cursed the foul weather constantly.  As usual, our trip required scheduling with a pet sitter, as no local businesses here are inclined to board a killer canine such as Teagan.  This is a somewhat ridiculous situation, but not all-together bad as I think both the dog and cat would just as soon stay home anyway.  We’ve got a friend that stops by a few times a day and gives them food and water, and of course tosses the ball for Teagan a bit.  Well, it went just fine as usual, but Kane did seem noticeably happy to see us when we got home.  He was meowing and carrying on, and following us around like his long-lost buddies.  (Generally speaking, of course, cats are perfectly content to be left in peace.)  This behavior carried on a for a few days after we returned when I noticed he hadn’t touched his food bowl.  I texted the sitter and nope, he hadn’t filled the bowl as it was already full the whole time.  Hmmmm, the little guy really IS upset, he’s on a hunger strike?!!?  As it ended up, after careful inspection, I’d accidentally filled his bowl with dog food when we left and the picky little monster wouldn’t eat it.  For SIX DAYS.  Not a bite.  We’ve had several extreme circumstances that have led to feeding cat food to the dog (i.e. we’re out of dog food and don’t want to drive two miles to the pet store) and it hasn’t caused so much as a sideways glance from Teagan.  Apparently it doesn’t work the other direction though.  All ended well.  I gave him an extra big bowl of kitty chow, he scarfed it all down, then immediately returned to his regular routine of ignoring us.

Now this past weekend, we didn’t do quite so much.  The weather here is markedly different than KC, it’s already in the triple-digits with blazing hot sun.  I was looking forward to a quiet afternoon on my back patio Friday, but the heat was so stifling it drove me to the Hop House for some a/c.  Saturday we hung out at the pool for a bit, but it was really too hot to be outside at all.  Sunday we went on an unexpected shopping spree.  I realize it is a common occurrence to go to a warehouse store (Costco, in our case,) and leave with more items than anticipated.  We really took it to the extreme this time though.  Our shopping list consisted of eggs, toothpaste, and coffee.  We left with a basket full of stuff the likes of which I have never seen, and that’s the truth.  I have to think it was our all time record Costco tab.  The big hit was a new TV.  Honestly, who goes to the store for coffee and leaves with a TV?  Maybe it’s more common than I know…  Seems odd to me.  Hey, I’m not gonna say I ain’t excited about the new toy.  In the continuation of a long-running project, we also purchased several new LED fixtures and bulbs, as we are replacing the horribly inefficient incandescent ones currently in the house.  In all actuality, I seriously doubt this project is going to save us so much as a single cent.  One of the three things I learned during my nine years studying electricity at CMSU is that light bulbs, no matter if incandescent, CFL, halogen, LED, etc, will all use exactly the same amount of wattage when they are turned off.  This then leads me to the inescapable conclusion that we aren’t going to save a whole lot of money swapping out light fixtures that we never turn on anyway.  Oh well, it makes me feel like I’m doing some kind of home improvement I guess.

Last weekend we finally got to go listen to some live music, which was long overdue.  Since it’s a rare occurrence these days, we decided to go overboard and make a whole weekend of it.  So, we got tickets to the Bottlerock Festival in (relatively) nearby Napa.  It was a three day event, Friday – Sunday, but we just hit the first two days.  Tough decision because the lineup Sunday was very good, but I knew I didn’t have three days in me.  I honestly questioned my ability to withstand two days, but it was a great time.  Remarkably my limited attention span wasn’t an issue at all, I was pretty much occupied the entire time.  My old bones, on the other hand, nearly didn’t survive.  Two long days of sitting on the ground left me a bit stove up.  Every time I tried standing up there was a bit more noise involved in the process, partly from my knees and back crackling and part from random grunts of pain.  It was all worth it though, and I expect my joints will heal up by this time next week or so.  Hopefully after nearly having to cart me out the gates on a stretcher they will rethink the “no chairs” rule for next year.

A few videos I grabbed of the shows.  I’m not a big youtube guy, hopefully these work:

https://youtu.be/nUSVK1VBoG4

https://youtu.be/OEXnfX2g8dk

And some pics:

We finally took a weekend off to just sit around and do nothing.  Quite enjoyable I must say.  I might have just barely started to get bored yesterday on the holiday, but I got better.  I was anticipating watching an exciting Royal’s game on the back patio for entertainment and that didn’t really work out so well.  By the time I turned it on in the third inning it was effectively over, so I had to find alternate forms of amusement.  Luckily the grocery store had ribs on sale for just such an emergency.  I put a few slabs on the long dormant Weber and spent my afternoon watching them carefully, while watching the BBQ Pitmasters marathon for inspiration.  They came out passably;  Donette declared them “too smokey” and I suppose I’d tend to agree.  Lighten up on the hickory next time, or possibly invest in a bag of apple wood.

Other weekend entertainment included a few trips to the pool.  First time I’d used that nearby amenity, it was pretty darn nice.  We also hit Villa Toscano, mostly to take advantage of the free lunch.  I won’t claim it’s the best food in the world, but most definitely worth the price.  Nice place to hang out and eat a little free pasta.  We even got bold enough to bring Teagan along, and she behaved admirably.  As an added bonus, they gave me a “take and bake” pizza for my birthday, so we threw that on the grill later for a free dinner too!  In the “home improvement” category, I finally installed the drip lines for my raised garden and my two hop vines.  This vast undertaking ate up at least 45 minutes of my valuable Sunday, I can certainly understand why it took me so long to get around to it.  Geez I’ve probably spent three times that long standing around with a garden hose watering the darn thing.  Well, it sounded like a daunting project, as most do.

Whew, trip is over.  I was particularly happy to get back home after this voyage for some reason.  Old age perhaps.  I was out of gas, that’s for sure.  In retrospect I think I can say “good trip,” but it was time to leave the UK.  It’s not a well-kept secret that I tend to get a little anxious travelling by myself, and that was coming to a head quickly.  I swear if I had to ask one more person to repeat themselves because I couldn’t understand the combination of mumble-mouth accent and made-up words, there was going to be an international incident.  I’d list “highlights” as the architecture, the cask ales, and work went pretty well too.  On the “lowlight” side would be the food, the weather, and every single resident of the country.  I say that about half-jokingly, maybe a little more.  They were actually quite nice and very accommodating on the whole.  The fierce resistance to changing their customs to suit my day-to-day routine had me a bit put off though.

But, it’s all “last week” now, I’m semi-comfortably back home.  I say “semi” because I’m still just a bit jet-lagged.  Eight hours is a harsh time switch.  And of course I made the poor decision to go wine tasting with some friends Sunday after getting back, I don’t think that helped things.  Probably should have unwound for the day.  Oh well, why start making sound decisions now?