Happy Monday.  We spent the better part of our weekend unpacking and moving, so I’m a bit lacking in any type of informative update.  Even more so than usual, that is.  We went out Friday I suppose, to the recently opened Hop House in El Dorado Hills.  It’s a nice place, I see a bit of potential for it, but it could use a few adjustments.  For starters, I could definitely suggest a few tweaks to their beer list if they asked.  (Which, remarkably, they haven’t.)  There are too many great local beers around here to be carrying some of the over-hyped big names they’ve opted for, and they don’t have that many taps to begin with.  Probably my biggest gripe is the glassware though.  They pour all their pints in Mason jars.  This may have struck someone as a quaint idea on paper, but it just doesn’t work.  They don’t pour right, they don’t drink right…  They just ain’t right.  They need to just throw those out and get some proper pints.  (Right after they throw out that gawd-awful website design.)  It’s definitely a nice place to stop by for a one-and-out though, and if you’re hungry their overpriced burgers are right on par, or better, with all the other nearby overpriced burgers.  If I hadn’t been so spoiled by the Bier Station in Waldo I’d probably be downright fond of it.

Outside of that somewhat impromptu restaurant review, I’m short on material.  We’ve managed to get most of the Royals games on TV, so that’s provided us plenty of entertainment.  We still have no blinds in the house, so that provides the neighbors with plenty of entertainment.  It’s all coming together though.  I hope.

I think we are starting to get settled into the new house, or maybe just accepting that we will never get settled in, or something along those lines.  We still have a daunting amount of stuff at the rental house, but I think we’re starting to consider just leaving it all for the next people.  (OK, not my good Staub cookware.  Or the plates. Or…  Alright maybe we better go get it all sometime.)  We didn’t really have time for moving this past weekend though, as our friends David & Jill came in from Texas.  They got the distinction of being our first house-guests in the new place, along with the associated conveniences.  “Oh yeah, sorry, we don’t have any towels yet.  Here, use my old tee-shirts.  Yeah the plates haven’t made it yet, we just sort of eat out of the skillet.  Don’t throw that McDonalds cup away, you’ll need it if you want a drink later.  Pull up a lawn chair, make yourself comfortable, the couch comes next week.”  And so on.  We made the best of it though, and at least we had a bed for them to sleep in.

The underlying reason for the visit was the Fall Music Festival at B.R. Cohn winery.  We purchased tickets for this event some time ago, and I’d been looking forward to it.  (Honestly, the ol’ music scene is just a bit lacking in the Folsom/EDH area.  I won’t claim I was thrilled to death with the lineup, but you take what you can get around here.)  It was a two-day event, but we only made it Saturday.  The drive to the winery was rather traumatic.  Some highway was closed somewhere, and I guess I-80 absorbed all the detour traffic, bringing it to a complete standstill for quite a ways.  We ended up missing the first few acts, which considering my challenges with attention span was probably for the best anyway.  We did get there just in time to catch Los Lonely Boys, which was a great way to start the afternoon.  They were easily my favorite act of the day, even having seen them before a few times.  I was, however, quickly reminded of my long-standing idea to bring ear plugs to concerts;  Their volume level was a bit punishing.  Oh well, I think I’m about 30 years to late with that scheme anyway.  They were followed by The Wallflowers, and then Melissa Etheridge closed things out with a pretty awesome solo set.  During the breaks between the sets (and sometimes during the sets,) I was entertained by the honest-to-goodness character who plopped down next to me.  (I don’t know how, but I attract said characters somehow or another.)  He looked like he’d been on the road for quite a few years, and, I must say, smelled like it too.  He had some interesting stories though, that’s for sure.  He claimed to be the son of Wavy Gravy, and had some fine tales of different music tours, picking up trash at Woodstock, etc etc.  Wavy’s page wouldn’t seem to support his stories, but I found them interesting all the same.

Whew, the website is back online.  That was a far more arduous process than I envisioned.  I don’t have much bad to say about uverse as far as the service goes, it’s been fine the year we’ve had it at our rental house.  Unfortunately, they also advertise the ability to quickly and painlessly move your service to a new location;  Not so much!  For over three weeks now I’ve been talking to those people every few days, with widely varying levels of civility.  They absolutely insist that there is existing service in our (brand new) house and the previous owners need to disconnect it before they can move ours.  And, you know, it’s possible, I’ll actually concede that.  The construction trailer was sitting on our lot for a long time, and they could have had service I suppose.  The builder says that has been long disconnected though, and after many conversations with both sides I tend to lean towards believing the builder.  At any rate, they finally conceded to move the service, and came out Monday.  Lo and behold, the installer says “oh, they haven’t run fiber to your house yet, we’ll have to get them out here first.”  At this point I escalated the situation to Donette, who immediately called and went Morelock on them.  Much to my surprise, the fiber trucks were onsite that very afternoon.  Wow, all good…  Until we told them to get the installer back out.  Nope, gotta reschedule, it’ll be a while.  Well, I actually had all the equipment from the rental house, so I got to thinking, “I wonder what would happen if I plugged this into this and that into that and….”  A few hours later everything was up and running.  The only pitfall was the phone line.  You had to call some automated service to “activate” it.  It told me there was a problem with the line and I needed to call 800-blah-blah to get it fixed.  I foolishly went down that path, and a full hour later finally got off the phone with the nice (if incredibly maddening) lady on the other end.  One full hour of her begging me not to hang up, she almost had it fixed, she’s working with her supervisor, there is a software issue, blah blah blah blah, while I was screaming in her ear, “THE PHONE WORKS FINE!!  WE ARE ON THE PHONE!!!  CAN YOU HEAR ME???  I CAN HEAR YOU!!!!  WE ARE TALKING ON THE PHONE!!!”  Poor lady.  She’s supposed to call me back Thursday to “fix” the problem.  (On my cell naturally, since our home phone isn’t working according to her.)  I really don’t want to talk to anybody anymore, but I am morbidly curious to see if she actually calls me back so I agreed to that.  If she does, she will be the one and only out of every other “manager, supervisor, retention specialist, etc” to actually make good on that promise.  I look forward to the end of our contract so I can dump them and get Xfinity.  (At which point the same issues will no doubt start all over again, just with a different company.)

Other than that major (in my world) issue, I can say the move has gone very smoothly.  I would then, however, be lying.  It has been quite possibly the single worst experience of my life.  That might also be a slight exaggeration.  I guess it’s just that moving stinks.  The painter took two days longer than anticipated, and we had to work around him and all his equipment.  On one hand, it was great that he could fit us in on very short notice and paint the entire inside of the house.  On the other, it was a huge pain working around all the plastic and tarps and ladders and wet walls, and all that mess.  I also somehow got the extremely naive idea in my head that Donette and I could easily handle shuttling our household the mere four miles from the rental, by ourselves.  Luckily one of my friends recognized this plan as a delusional fantasy, and took it upon himself to show up and help.  It was a longgggg two days, and we still have an imposing amount of belongings at the rental.  But, for now anyway, I have Internet service, so at least the odds of survival have increased greatly.

Ahhh, I needed a week off from the extreme rigors of updating this page.  Be prepared for a real treat, as I have fourteen entire days of excitement to regale you with.  Or, not so much.  We are in the final stages of getting our new house wrapped up, and that has been eating up a fair amount of time.  Wow, they move slowly out here.  We actually closed on the house last Tuesday.  Closed.  As in sat there with the title company and did the whole two hours of signing papers bit.  Sweet, gimme the keys!  Oh no, we have to wait an additional week to actually take possession.  It doesn’t seem there is a real reason behind the extra delay, all the title lady could offer was “Welcome to California.”  Oddly, this is the same response we’ve gotten from the DMV, the utility companies, the tax people, and various other entities.  Whatever, we’ll get it some day I suppose.  I just went on my “final, final, FINAL walk through” about an hour ago as a matter of fact, and it looks move-in ready to me.  We are supposed to get the keys tomorrow, and then everybody is cordially invited to fly out and help us move this coming weekend.  Pizza included.  (Single topping only, we’re on a strict budget.)

You’d think I would have some fascinating tales to relate after a two-week hiatus.  Alas, we’ve been hunkered down preparing for the move.  Donette did have a bunch of friends come into town a few weeks back, and they had some fun, but I wasn’t included in the festivities.  A few weeks later and we would have actually had a place for them to sleep, but they made do.  They made it up to Tahoe for a night, which sounded fun.  Other than that…  Well…  Slow times.  We went to a few local breweries with a friend yesterday, mostly just for the sake of getting out of the house.  A thrift shop sent a truck out the other day and hauled off a good part of our furniture, so the ol’ rental house isn’t exactly too comfortable at the moment.  We’ve been eating out a lot.  By this time next week, hopefully I’ll be posting pics of our furnished new house, and we’ll be out of the rental.  (Optimism springs eternal.)