Another in my lengthy stretch of lame weekends.  The wife is still out of town, carrying on with all her friends and family.  Somebody has to stay here and tend to the pets and keep up the house.  (Both of which I am doing an admittedly horrible job of.  Luckily Teagan is pretty easy-going, I can’t remember to feed the poor little girl to save my life.)

I did stop by Ruff Haus on Friday, mostly out of respect for keeping up my usual routine.  Wasn’t really feeling it though, so I didn’t stay long.  I popped in the grocery store instead, and bought a few lamb chops.  Mmmm, they came out good.  I don’t recall ever grilling lamb chops.  I did some blade chops not too long ago and they were a gamey, greasy disaster so I was pretty skeptical.  There was a world of difference in them though.  Maybe there’s something to the difference in price between the two, hmmm.

Saturday I went for a short bike ride, mostly out of sheer boredom.  Didn’t really cure it though, so I drove to Costco to kick around for a while.  As usual, it was sufficiently unnerving an experience as to send me to the couch for the rest of the day.  Man, that place is crazy.  I went last week and they had a great deal on some cat furniture (yes, I said cat furniture) that I wanted for Kane.  Well, by the time I got back there Saturday they were all gone, and after trying to navigate the aisles for a bit I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to get the rest of the items on my list.  Leaving Costco empty-handed, a rare occurrence indeed.

Sunday I got a text from good ol’ Todd down in Houston, looking for some rib-cooking tips.  (I didn’t tell him I’m about the last person to ask for rib advice…  Shoulda probably sent him to Martin.)  It got me thinking though, man ribs DO sound good.  So, I headed down to the grocery, looking for the standard two-pack of St. Louis cut spares.  Alas, they didn’t have them.  After a short discussion, the accommodating butcher DID offer to split a slab of baby backs for me though.  Well, how perfect is that!  Truthfully, the thought never crossed my mind, but after he said it, it occurred to me that one person doesn’t really need two full slabs of ribs.  Pleased with my purchase, I headed back home and fired up the Weber, put the Royals game on my iPad, and commenced to cooking.  It was a generally unremarkable cook, with the exception that it actually rained on me for a while!  I know there hasn’t been a single drop of rain here in July, and I’m pretty sure none in June either.  If there was any in May, it was scant.  It was an event, to be sure.  And, luckily, it wasn’t coming down hard enough to affect my ribs.  Quite an enjoyable way to pass the afternoon actually.  The ribs came out well, I was pretty happy with them.  I ate them up, then it was back to the couch to play Rock Band for the rest of the evening.

I’m in quite a way.  The wife has left for parts unknown, leaving me to fend for myself.  I think I started slipping into a somewhat feral state mere hours after her flight took off.  I’ve been huddled at home on the couch for three days now, subsisting on fried egg sandwiches and a bag of stale corn chips I found in the back of the pantry.  I’m down to my last dozen eggs too, things are looking grim indeed.

Honestly, that describes my weekend for the most part.  Sunday a friend took pity and invited me down to cook, always a good diversion.  He’s got a large gas grill, so we set it up for indirect cooking as best we could, threw a box of chips on it, and commenced to pseudo-smoking some pork butts.  Honestly it did a pretty fair job.  I will say I prefer a bit more smoke in my ‘que, but it was certainly an interesting experiment.  We were shooting for a batch of chile verde, so I roasted some veggies on my Weber before heading down there, and that lent a bit more smoke to the dish too.  If nothing else, the propane burners provided a much more low-maintenance day of cooking.

I like to begin my posts with an immediate excuse as to why I’m (still) boring this week.  Get it out of the way early.  So, for this week, I’ll quickly throw out the qualifier that I was oncall, so I had to sort of stay close to home base most of the time.  Friday, case in point, we did one whole lot of nothing.  And on a holiday to boot, tsk tsk.  I thought about crossing the county line and bootlegging some firecrackers in, but it seemed they were taking the ban rather seriously so I nixed that idea.  I really can’t say I saw or heard so much as a single firework go off the entire weekend.  A little eerie, honestly.  We did cruise down to check progress on the house, which seemed to be going just swimmingly.  We’ve got drywall, all taped and mudded, and one layer of stucco on the outside.  The way it’s going it doesn’t seem like it should take them two more months to finish, but I guess the slow part is coming.  That was about it for our big Fourth.  We picked up some tuna steaks at the grocery store and grilled those for dinner.  Not even a very Fourth-ish kind of meal, but it was on sale and it sounded good. (And, matter of fact, it WAS good.)

Saturday, determined to leave our circle for at least a short while, we decided to drive up the hill a bit to Placerville and visit Jodar Winery.  This was sort of a random destination, based mostly on location and the fact that they served tasty-sounding food.  It turned out to be a nice place, we killed the better part of the afternoon there.  We split an enormous gorgonzola burger and fries, had a glass of wine, and sat in the shade listening to a couple of entertaining guys play harmonica and guitar.  Cheap entertainment to be sure, which seems to be in short supply around here.  We stopped by K-Mart on the way home and picked up a kiddy pool for Teagan, and spent the rest of the scorching afternoon playing ball with her in the back yard.  (Poor girl isn’t smart enough to stop chasing the ball when she gets too hot, but she’ll cool off in the pool if it’s there.)

Sunday was roughly the same, but we headed the opposite direction on the freeway to Device Brewing.  I’d heard positive reviews from a few co-workers, and it didn’t disappoint.  Like nearly every other brewery we’ve visited here, it was located in a warehouse.  Not exactly big on “character,” but effective I guess.  We sampled some very nice brews there, and passed the time playing Jenga.  They had a food truck outside serving sausages, so we picked up a few of those for lunch.  Honestly I’d have enjoyed them a lot more if I hadn’t just got a huge cheeseburger and fries for the same price the previous day, but it was OK.  It seems the only food trucks we ever run into here serve “gourmet sausages” too;  Could we hit the taco or BBQ truck once in a while?  (Maybe they don’t exist, who knows.)

Wow, the forecast today is calling for 107 degrees.  That’s just flat kooky.  And don’t give me the “dry heat” qualifier either, that’s just hot.  Bone-melting, gasping, stay inside all day, HOT.  I guess it could be worse.  I don’t know how exactly, but I’m sure it could be.  (I could be mowing lawns?  Striping parking lots?  Digging a ditch?  All kinds of ways, now that I think about it.)  Anyway, the weather over the weekend was quite a bit nicer than today, and we got some good use out of it.  Maybe not so much Friday, but we had a little fun that day too.  I had to work a bit later than expected, so we ended up just heading to the weekly wine tasting at the good ol’ grocery store.  If nothing else, the sheer lameness of going to the grocery store for entertainment on a Friday night amuses me.  And, it’s sorta fun too.  They have a decent band, usually throw out some good pizza, and you get to taste a few new wines;  Good stuff!  We hung out there for an hour or so, then picked up a few groceries and went home to cook up a tasty shrimp pasta.

Saturday started off a bit slow.  We spent a decent amount of time out looking for new patio furniture.  Wow, that was a shock, or disappointment, or something along those lines.  I had a few numbers floating around in my head for a budget, and I don’t think they covered the umbrella stand on most sets we found.  Good grief, when did outdoor furniture start costing more than good living room furniture?  I might well just be sitting in my Cabela’s folding chairs on the back porch, ’cause I ain’t paying that much.  After that waste of an afternoon, we headed “up the hill” to Placerville, to attend the 14th annual Bell Tower Brewfest.  We’d heard good things about it from a few people, and indeed it was a fine event.  It was a bit different than the usual setup, in that the different distributors were located inside several shops along the town’s main street.  It was pretty cool;  You could check out the shops and sample some good local brews at the same time.  It was also in the evening, so it was considerably cooler than the recent one we attended in Folsom.  Good event, I’m sure we’ll return next year.

Sunday was moderately productive.  We again headed up the hill, even further to Tahoe this time.  It’s really not a bad drive, and has the added benefit of dropping 10-15 degrees in temp.  We timed our trip for a lunch stop, and had our spot all picked out, but when we got there we found it was inside a day-use area and they wanted $8 to park.  For lunch?  No thanks.  We headed over to the south side, which we’re a bit more familiar with anyway, and ended up at a place called Steamers.  In something of a rarity, it worked out well for us, it was a solid lunch.  Their menu was just what we were in the mood for (sandwiches) and it was remarkably inexpensive too.  Donette got a turkey melt, which was great, and I let the waitress talk me into the taco special.  The tacos were…. “different.”  Like several other dishes around here, if you can get past the fact that they call it a “taco,” they were really pretty good.  The corn tortillas were coated in parmesan cheese and lightly fried…  weird.  Yet tasty.  Hmmm.  They also had about three heads of iceberg lettuce shredded up on them, which I’m not particularly fond of, but the spicy shredded chicken under that made up for it.  After lunch we headed to our favorite fine art gallery to pick up the painting we’d purchased several weeks ago.  Our first piece of “fine art,” how exciting.  I was a little excited, honestly, I’m rather fond of it.  In an added bonus, the artist was there doing a show, so we got to meet him.  I’ll admit he wasn’t exactly what I expected.  (Just like the tacos.)  Let’s see, 1) goes by one name, and 2) artist; just those two qualifiers pretty much scream “WEIRDO” to me.  On the contrary, he was really an interesting guy, quite personable.  If I was the least bit personable myself I’m sure we would have had a great conversation.  We hung out there for quite a while, mingling with all our new art collector friends, then headed back home and went to a friend’s house for dinner.  All-in-all, a fine weekend.

I got nothing from this weekend.  In an unfortunate twist to my usual revelry, I had to work all day Saturday, which in turn left me too worn out to do anything Sunday.  I guess we did leave the house briefly Sunday.  We drove to Fry’s, the geek mecca of the west, to pick up a few necessities.  Since we made the long drive we hit a few other spots too, namely Harbor Freight, Office Depot, and Yard House for lunch.  Anddddd that’s my weekend.  I have to hope our next one is slightly more entertaining.