Still hot out. The triple digits almost waited until July but didn’t quite make it. Had a few scorchers last week, and this week is forecast to be even worse. There are a few days down by the office where it is supposed to hit 110! That ain’t right. Even worse, we are scheduled to take the RV out for the holiday. No big deal, it has A/C? Well, yes, but there is no electricity at the campground. On the bright side we are headed uphill about 3,000 feet, so hopefully it’s significantly cooler up there.

That was a moderately entertaining weekend, at least for me. I am fairly sure nobody else will think it remotely interesting, save perhaps my friend Mike, but it’s all I have to work with, so it’ll have to do. The excitement began building on Friday when my spiffy new Synology DS224+ unit arrived. I’ve always had two similar ones running; One higher end one, and one smaller one that is just for backing up the nicer one. Every five years or so I get a new higher end one, set up the old one as my “second,” and get rid of the oldest. Well, plans changed this time. I’ve kind of fallen out of that rotation at some point, and they really both needed replaced. That is a little cost-prohibitive though. After the usual few months of thinking and over-thinking, I decided their new upper-tier one didn’t really interest me anyway, so I ended up getting a replacement for the smaller one. It was, after all, a rather shocking 11 years old and wasn’t even supported by Synology any longer. So, yeah, that’s the background. My plan was to wait until this week to set it up, so as not to burn valuable weekend hours, but of course that didn’t work out. Got too excited and started early in the morning Saturday. The process went remarkably smoothly to my surprise. I’d say about 1.5 hours and it was up and running just like the old one. That wasn’t the case last time I did the same thing, not sure what I did wrong that time. Now the plan is, since it is so much faster than the old one, I will sort of split the load between my bigger DS718+ and this one, because there is really way too much running on it.

After essentially wasting my entire morning on that project, Donette wanted to get out of the house and go to the lake. Sounded fun, although I wasn’t quite done tinkering. We loaded up and headed out though, and it was a good time. Little bit busy to put it mildly, but we found a shady spot right by the water and hung out several hours. Actually, when we got there, they had a big sign that said “Day-Use Full,” and were turning cars around, but they waved us in. Didn’t ask why but I assume our annual pass tag lets us get in anyway. We even got out her paddle board, which has set idle in the garage for a whopping eight years! Not as in we haven’t used it in eight years, but as in we bought it eight years ago and it was still in the packaging. Rather remarkable that we found all the parts actually. It worked great though; it was pretty fun. I’d like to get it and the kayak both up there, but I’m not sure we can get them in the car together. Have to give that a try I guess.

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Whoa, it got hot. Like wicked, oppressively hot. It was bound to happen though, not like it’s a surprise. Hopefully it dips back down into double digits soon though, I’m not quite ready for all a/c, all day just yet.

I have no idea what we did last weekend. I really need to start taking notes. Could be related to my advanced age, or there is also a reasonable chance we just didn’t do anything. I do actually remember Sunday a little bit… We went up to Pollock Pines and attended a fund-raising spaghetti dinner. There was a bad accident up there a little over a year ago, and a few of the children involved still haven’t fully recovered. I like the whole small-town thing… It’s great that they are still putting on these events to help out. As a matter of fact, so many people showed up that they didn’t really have room for them all, so we kind of ate and took off. Pretty good spaghetti too, hope they had enough!

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Wow, it really cooled off last weekend, which was much appreciated. After running the a/c around 8 hours per day all week, it didn’t kick on at all over the weekend. Keep those bills down! The nice break was due to the fabled “Delta Breeze,” which occurs pretty frequently and really makes things tolerable around here. Fox40.com had an article on it last week, which I tried to read but got bored about 1/2-way through. If I’d have been a little more productive, I’d have taken advantage of the low temps to take care of some yard work. Instead, I opted for hanging out in the backyard all weekend, reading and bbq’ing. Hey, maybe it’ll cool off again next weekend and I’ll get the yardwork done. (Slim chance.)

Donette’s younger sister and one of her daughters came out last week, so that was a nice little visit. The 11 grandkids came also, so that kept us quite busy. OK, there’s only two, but one moved around so much he seemed like a small crowd. On the upside, he wore Quinny into the ground playing fetch; Little guy has been asleep since they left. They also ran up to Tahoe for a day and visited the county fair. I missed out on the fun while working, but they came back to the house in the evenings for bbq and catching up. Good visit!

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Where does the time go? I guess it flies when you’re having fun, or actually even when you’re not. We’ve been reasonably busy it seems. We had our big annual music festival at the end of May, and we’ve been keeping busy in the garden… OK that’s all I can think of at the moment, but I’m sure we’ve done dozens of other fascinating activities also.

Since I can’t seem to remember any further than 3 days ago, I’ll have to limit my update to this past weekend. We started off strong on Friday night at the second meeting of our Wine Club Wine Club. This group is comprised of a small number of friends that are all in various wine clubs out here. Clever name, huh. We meet once a quarter and enjoy a nice meal, then sit around and discuss the latest varietals we’ve received lately from our favorite vineyards, and of course taste a few notable bottles. Yeah, you could say we’re pretty fancy. That is also a pretty liberal stretch on the actual meeting description, but hey, it sounds good I thought.

Saturday, we drove down to the big downtown area of our little town, to watch the annual Wagon Train coming in from Tahoe. It was a pretty fun event, if just a little on the warm side. Basically, it’s a historical recreation of the old wagon trains that rolled west during the 1800’s gold rush. They shut down the street and had lots of informational booths set up to read about the event. Then about 3:00 the wagons rolled in, which is almost the end of their multi-day trip over the mountains. Pretty fun time! This was the 75th one they’ve done, rather impressive. After that we headed down to Cameron Park and met some friends at Moonraker. Good times there also. We even got to see our friends Grandpa Josh & Grandma Jenn! Haven’t hung out with them in quite a while, as they have been busy building out a nursery in their house in preparation for the arrival of grandbaby #1.

Sunday, speaking of wine clubs, we headed up to Edio Vineyards to pick up our summer shipment of wine. They had a nice event going on; You could taste each of the wines in your shipment, and they were paired with some small bites which were quite tasty. We stayed a few hours, but it was pretty hot out, so we headed back to our house and had some friends over dinner. This was a particularly notable event, as none of our friends have visited our house since July of ’22. Excitement was in the air, let me tell you. I put a tri tip on the grill, and thought it came out quite well. Even managed to hit the group-requested medium doneness. After dinner we sat around in the a/c and somehow lapsed into a somewhat odd karaoke session… Not entirely sure what happened there. No, there were not any pictures permitted.

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Another year in the books! I swear they keep getting longer. I guess at least they keep coming. I had a good time of it this year. Seems like I’ve just kind of let the last few slip by unnoticed, but I had an actual party this year! Granted, the guests didn’t actually know it was a birthday party, but I did so that’s what is important. I had a good time of it. Fired up the smoker and threw on some meat, and we hung out playing games and enjoying the nice weather all afternoon.

So that was Saturday, then Sunday we got up and drove to Napa for a Dwight Yoakam concert. Neither of us have ever seen him, so we were pretty excited. I would give the show 2 thumbs up. Donette wasn’t a fan of the rather “subdued” venue, but I sure was. Dwight is 67 years old, and the majority of the crowd was at least 110; There was no need to be getting all stirred up. Plus, it was at the Meritage Hotel (ooohhhh, fancy,) which just isn’t the place for getting all crazy. All in all, great show!

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