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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Wednesday is an odd day for an update, but I’ve been in recovery mode. We traveled to Seattle for a quick weekend trip, and I’m still worn out. (Doesn’t take much these days, really.) I had a great time there and didn’t want to just skip the update altogether though, so here is it.

We took off on the trip Friday, and after a short flight and getting settled into our apartment we still had time to find some dinner. The first place that jumped out at us was a nearby Capitol Grille. We haven’t been there since moving from KC, and sure have missed it. Our friends here gave us grief for going to a “chain” while on vacation, but then they’ve never been to one. Uh yeah, it ain’t exactly Taco Bell. We had our sights set on the calamari, as it’s one of our favorites, but when we saw the Wagyu & Wine special, we couldn’t pass it up. It was fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but it was way more food than I was expecting. It effectively ended our evening; we were too stuffed. It had been a long day traveling anyway, so we turned in.

Saturday, we went on a walking “Seafood Tour” down in the famous City Markey district. This turned out to be a great time, highly recommended. It was very interesting, and we sampled lots of different seafood. (And, bonus, the best clam chowder I’ve ever had.) We tried smoked salmon, a few different pokes, oysters, shrimp, scallops, cod… I’m sure I am missing a few but those come to mind at the moment. All in all, a big success. After that tour, we decided to take a walk down to the ballpark and catch a Mariners game. Tickets were reasonable, and there were plenty available last minute. It was about a mile walk, but we made a few stops along the way, so it wasn’t too bad. It was a little rainy, so we put lots of work into finding seats under an overhang, only to get there and find it is a covered stadium. Oh well, better safe than wet. Very nice stadium. Good fans, good game, and they even pulled out a win. (Not that we had much interest if they won or not, but it did make it more exciting.)

Sunday, it was time to go back home, but we still had time to walk back to the Piers for a boat tour. On the way, we stopped at a place called Ludi’s for some breakfast. We passed it on one of our walks the day before, and they had a line out the door. Must be good, we’ll try it! Indeed, it was fantastic. Sort of a little cafe, and the owner was super nice. (All of the employees were, as a matter of fact.) We noticed several people getting their picture taken with the owner, so we did a little searching and found an article on the place. He stopped by our table and talked for a while, very interesting guy with interesting history. Actually, between his rather strong Filipino accent and my marginal hearing, I didn’t catch it all, but I got the gist. After breakfast we went on the quick one-hour boat tour and got a few more good history bits, then it was time to get back home. Great trip!

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Not a bad weekend, if perhaps a bit uneventful. Other adjectives might be unproductive, boring, tedious… Let’s stick with “uneventful” though. I really got sucked in by the start of the football season, and just didn’t quite get around to doing anything else. Probably should have done something wacky on Friday evening so I could say I at least did something, but I had to rest up for my weekend on the couch, I guess. At least I can say the games went favorably! All my favorite teams won, both college and pro, and my not-so-favorite (i.e. despised) teams all lost. **Not to include the 49ers game, which hasn’t been played yet. I can’t really say they fall on my “favorites” list anyway, but I do try and follow them.

Sunday, we did have some friends up for dinner, so at least we had one “event” over the weekend. True, I sat on the couch and stared at the football games the whole time, but then I’m not that good of company anyway. I invited them up a last week after the local butcher shop advertised that they had some SRF steaks on hand. I’ve purchased a brisket off that website before, (and it was great,) but never the steaks. Just never quite been able to pull the trigger on ordering them off the website. Regardless of whether they are “worth it” or not, it’s just a lot of money to spend on steaks, and then they ding you additional for shipping of course. So, this was my chance to try them without the shipping charge, and as an added bonus they were actually a bit cheaper than the prices on the website. Anyway, overall rating, I will definitely buy them again if I see them at the butcher shop. Wow, they were good. Super rich though, two steaks fed the four of us easily. Donette made a new potato salad also that came out really well. Had a good time!

Lacking any other real content, I shall provide a few mini-rants stemming from grave injustices I suffered recently. First up is a local grocery revelation that occurred last week. Since our move out here, my go-to store has always been Nugget Markets. Heck, I’ve even got a link to them on my page. Love(d) that store. That decade-long support came to an end last week when I signed up for the weekly email from the Fork Lift store down in Cameron Park. As soon as I got my grocery ads on Wednesday (which is a huge moment of excitement in my life,) the scam became obvious. My Nugget ad and Fork Lift ad were exactly the same flyer. Not just similar, the exact same ad with a different name at the top. The same that is, except for the prices; Every single item at Fork Lift was between $1 and $2 cheaper. Every single one! That really adds up over a full grocery cart. Added bonus, it’s half the distance from my house. To think of all the money I’ve wasted over these years, tsk tsk. Just a few examples of this treachery:

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Next up, an advertisement I saw on FaceBook for a local restaurant. Behold:

Tell me please, what exactly IS “Kansas style BBQ?” You can’t, of course, because IT DOESN’T EXIST!!! THERE IS NO SUCH THING!!!! This place is actually one of my favorites too, so it was a double whammy. I am not kidding, this actually marks the second time I have encountered this reference out here. The first was at a restaurant in EDH, which I was able to shake off as being… Well… In EDH. They don’t know any better, bless their hearts. (It was actually for “Kansas style ribs” though, which might be even more egregious.) So, now I am forced to strike my favorite steakhouse off my list of places to eat. They are dead to me.

Other random pictures:

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