Andddd we’re back from commercial break. Wow, longest downtime in the history of pkenagy.com. Long story as short as I can make it, we’ve been out of town in the RV since late February. Shortly after we left (4 days or so?) all my websites went down. (I’ll generically refer to them as websites… Most besides this page would be better described as “utilities.”) There wasn’t anything I could do about it because, well, I was gone, with no means to see what happened. Upon our return home Saturday, I looked into the issue, and it turned out to be a very simple change I’d made on the way out the door for our trip. Gee, where have I heard this story before? Ugh. I still don’t know exactly WHY it broke everything, but I guess I’m not worried about it. Just kidding, of course I am, I’ll be trying to recreate the problem until I figure it out. Or, just as likely, it never happens again. Who knows.

So, as to our big trip. We loaded up the RV back in February and headed to Salome, AZ. Took a little get-away from the cold (OK, cool) weather here in CA, see some friends, and have some fun. We did a little light house-hunting while we were there too, because hey, you just never know. We’ve got some friends who winter at an RV park there, and they were able to score us a nice spot with full hookups for free! It was, in my opinion, the best part of the trip. Hung out with friends, ate some great food, had several bonfires, took a ride in the desert on side-by-sides… Just a great time. As a nice bonus, it was in the mid-seventies for our stay. Fun times.

We were in Salome just under a week, then we packed up and headed for Cottonwood AZ, which is about 30 minutes from Sedona. Also a great stay! We did some hikes, visited a few nearby National Parks, mingled at the park clubhouse (yes, really!) and just generally relaxed. Side note on the National Park visits: When we were standing in line for tickets, there was a sign that said “free pass for veterans.” Well, what the heck, I’ve got my card with me, I shall inquire. Well, in less time than it took to fork over my $20 entrance fee, she handed me a card good for both of us, told me it was good at any National Park, and never expires! Worked out quite nicely. For our other touristy days, we visited downtown Cottonwood, Jerome, and of course Sedona. Cottonwood had a nice little old-town area, we went there more than once. A few easy hikes for us and the pups, nice shops, and great scenery. Jerome… meh. It was definitely a dedicated tourist town. Absolutely packed, difficult parking, crazy prices, and long waits for everything. And this was on a Monday, can’t imagine what it would be like on a weekend. And then Sedona, take all those descriptions X3. No thank you, although we did go on a great hike while we were there.

In the house hunting category, that was limited to the Salome area. Our realtor here in CA was nice enough to set us up with realtors in both places we visited. Salome went very well. Looked at probably half a dozen homes, and one of them is actually pretty high on the list. Heck, I’d buy it today if not for the daunting prospect of moving again. Still in the “thinking” phase of that one. (Which means we’ll procrastinate until somebody else buys it and miss out.) When we got to Cottonwood, we contacted the guy there and told him what we were looking for and laid out our budget. Never heard from the guy again, haha. OK, I can take a hint. Honestly we pretty quickly crossed it off the list anyway, after it snowed on us more than once. The weather there was not nearly as nice as Salome. The qualifying factor there is, it was March… Summertime will be another story I am told. Apparently Sedona routinely hits 115-120 during those months. Uhhh, what?!?! And people survive there?

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Well, no I’m not. After a strong start to the year (pretty close to a New Year Resolution for me,) I fell right back into my slacking ways. My domain name (pkenagy.com) is about to expire too, adding a little insult to injury. I am quite tempted to just not renew it and let it die a dignified death, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. It has a few other purposes besides this silly blog, and I really don’t want to rearrange all that stuff. And, every now and then, I feel like typing something up, so here I am. I like to keep my options open.

That was a busy weekend, as our weekends go anyway. We’ve been on a budget crack-down, which has been pretty easy considering the weather has been too miserable to leave the house. The rain and cold finally cleared up Friday though, so I went down and met some friends at Moonraker to enjoy an afternoon on their huge outdoor space. Had a nice relaxing afternoon, the sun was quite welcome. After that I headed home for our obligatory Valentine’s dinner. Neither of us are too into that particular holiday, but it did give me an excuse to pick up a nice steak from Kings. I have to say, it was one of my better efforts on a steak lately. I threw it in the sous vide at 129 degrees for about three hours, then finished it in a scorching skillet with butter. Threw a few potatoes in the air fryer, and it made for a tasty dinner.

Saturday, we got a quite unexpected text that some friends that live down in the ‘burbs were headed up our way to try out the new Burning Barrel location. It was really a shocking surprise, as they have not left the El Dorado Hills zip code since early 2011. We sure couldn’t pass up that opportunity to see them, so we took the short drive over to big downtown Placerville and hung out for a bit. We like the new place, with the exception that it is just painfully loud. They’re supposed to be installing some sound damping ceiling tiles, and I sure wish they’d hurry up with it. The noise level is just punishing, it is always hard to hear anybody talking. It seems like everybody is yelling, but I think it’s just a loud building. We had to bail after a short time in the interests of sanity, so we went around the corner to Cappelli Wine and sipped a glass in the peace and quiet. Whew.

Sunday, in the absence of football, we met some friends in Diamond Springs for a quick lunch at Solid Ground. That was one of my regular hangouts, but it got axed lately as part of our new fiscal responsibility program. It was good to visit again, I like it. Not quite patio weather that day, but the inside was tolerable and we enjoyed their semi-famous chicken sandwich for lunch. After that, we headed back to the house, and a couple came over and made us a delicious dinner. Can’t beat that, a fancy dinner without leaving the house, and we didn’t even have to cook it! We played several games of pool, then he whipped up some awesome dan dan noodles. Wow, was it great. I love me some noodle bowls, and this was top notch. The actual recipe isn’t really that complicated, but there were several rather exotic ingredients that I don’t have in my pantry for sure. Maybe I need to go hunt them down though, because I want to make it myself. It really ended our weekend on a high note.

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Happy New Year! Wow, we’ve really been ringing it in right. Just tearing up the town. OK, that is not exactly true. We did stay up and watch the NYE celebrations, but from the safety of our couch. I didn’t quite make it until the New Year in my local time zone (which, incidentally, I’ve never really adjusted to,) but I came darn close. I did get in the EST, CST & MST countdowns though, so I figure 3 outta 4 ain’t bad. Since that admittedly fun evening, we’ve done one whole lot of nothing at all. The couch is reasonably comfy, and we just haven’t had a very good reason to move from it. We’ve been watching football. Game, after game, after game. I can say in all confidence that I have never watched so much football, in one season, in my entire life. NFL games, college games, we saw them all. It didn’t even seem to matter who was playing; If there was a game on, we were watching it. I have to say, the short break this week is somewhat welcome. Guess I better enjoy it, because it looks like it starts up again Thursday!

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Whoa. Yeah that is by far the longest stretch of silence on this website in the last 20+ years. Consider it my little Christmas gift to you. But now, as the year ends, I’ll throw a quick batch of pictures out here and a short update on the CA Kenagys.

Probably the biggest update, if the least interesting, is that I am no longer gainfully employed. Wait, what? Yeah, fact. (If you are either one of my regular readers, you probably already know this, but I’ll throw it out there anyway, just in case.) After four arduous years of being at my latest company (which I never asked to be part of in the first place,) I was unceremoniously kicked to the curb. If I said I was upset about this, I would be less than truthful. So, currently, we’re just kind of winging it. I am applying for new positions, but it’s a rough world out there! That seems to be double-true for someone who has not looked for a job in 35 years. I’m a little… “out of the loop,” shall we say, on the whole job hunt process. I guess I can always just monetize this website! There’s another 35-cents a month in my pocket!

As far as “regular” events: We took a quick trip to Vegas the second week of December. On the upside, several of our friends were there, and it was great hanging out with everybody. On the downside, I absolutely abhor Vegas. I go there so rarely that, without fail, I always forget how much I dislike that place. Horrible. I cannot imagine ever going there again; But I’m sure I said that the last few times also, and look what happened. Maybe the highlight of the trip (for me,) was Donette’s “big hit” gambling. She likes to belly up to the bar at casinos and pump $20 in the video poker machine. If you put money in the machine, they give you a free beer. Upon receipt of said beer, she promptly cashes out and walks away. I suppose it is debatable if this is in the spirit of The System, but it surely doesn’t bother me. Charging $13 for a crappy bottle of beer is certainly against all standards of common decency too. Anyway, she was following this questionable strategy one afternoon, and gave the game a spin before taking her $20 back. One pull and she won $200! While not the big numbers some of our group scored on the trip, it was a fine win for somebody who wasn’t even really playing. Bonus!

Other than that week-long trip, we have been celebrating the holidays. We had a fantastic Thanksgiving this year, the food was top-notch. I even feel like we put in a pretty solid effort at “Christmas Spirit.” We put up decorations, went to a nice Christmas party… Downright festive! I have to admit though, being now faced with the prospect of taking all that junk back down, my elation has waned considerably. I am trying to decide if I even HAVE to take anything down. There is (at least) an 80% chance that it will be Christmas ’25 before anybody visits us, so it might just be worth a try…

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Not too wacky of a weekend. I did leave the house Saturday afternoon to meet some friends for lunch, but that’s about it. The rest of the weekend was spent working on my trusty webserver. Oh no, it broke, you ask? Well not exactly; I broke it. It’s just what I do. I use a Synology server, which is commonly known for being “easy.” Set it up, get it working, and leave it alone. Seems it’s that last part I have issues with. I’ve been using the same system for at least 15 years. I’ve upgraded them, moved to new hardware a few times, and replaced a few things. This is all, as advertised, “easy.” Everything has always run fine for the most part, except when I decide to “fix” something. This is one of those cases again. Some years ago (10-ish maybe?) Synology came out with support for the BTRFS file system. And every day since, my thoughts have been consumed with how I can switch to it from my EXT4 format. Why? Because I don’t have it, I guess. I don’t even really know what it is, or if/how it would benefit me. But, switching over does not fall into the “easy” category like everything else. You have to delete everything and start from scratch. That’s a little disconcerting. That’s this website, 20+ years of pictures and documents, all kinds of handy little utilities I use every day… it’s actually very disconcerting. Well, after years and years of thinking on it, (again, for no good reason,) I decided to work on it this weekend. The wife is out of town, it’s still too hot to be outside… Time to dive in. I thought I came up with a plan where I could move everything instead of outright deleting it. So that’s how I spent my weekend. Moving huge amounts of files, waiting for it to finish, and then figuring out what was broken. Oh, and things did break. Hopefully they all got fixed, because things are harder to fix as time goes by and I can’t really remember exactly what I did. Now I’m at the point where I actually delete everything remaining and hope for the best. Just couldn’t quite pull the trigger on that part yet. It’s coming though. Should you happen to stop by here in the next few weeks and my website is down, it didn’t go well.

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