Fun weekend out West. I cannot lie, I was a bit down on missing both Float Trip with friends, and Easter in KC with families. Usually the logistics overwhelm me a bit and I just bow out of both events, and I guess I did this year as well. But, this time around I found myself WISHING I would have made the trip. I even thought about loading up my car and driving it last minute. (A quick check of Google Maps proved that idea quite impractical; 2,000 miles and 30 hours drive time each way. Um no.) So, instead we threw together a quick trip down the hill to San Francisco to take the sting out of it. As it happened, the Royals were in town playing the Giants, so we grabbed some tickets for Saturday, a hotel room, and rolled down there. Had a great time of it! The Royals actually won in a rather exciting game, we ate some great food, and met lots of great people. (Yeah, that last one is actually serious; I talked to strangers! And enjoyed it!) We made a one night trip of it, which is about right for that city. On the way home Sunday we stopped by a friends house for an awesome Easter brunch, then picked up the pups and headed back home to recover before the work week. Soon I will start making my travel plans for NEXT Easter so it won’t sneak up on me again.

[Show slideshow]

Hey, nobody has to listen to me complain about the weather this week! Finally! Oh it’s still rainy, cold, and generally horrible out, make no mistake. I just really don’t feel like bringing it up. I’ve accepted it as a fact of life that I am never going to enjoy nice weather again. Instead of the weather, I think I’ll whine about my house for a bit. The constant repairs here are wearing thin. OK, they done WORN thin. Tired of it. We have a few “cosmetic” updates we’d like to do inside, stuff we would actually enjoy and make it feel a little more comfortable. Instead, all we do is get broken things fixed. New HVAC. New gutters. New paint. New this, new that. This time around, the bill-of-the-month was a new water softener. Ohhhh, how exciting is that! You are correct, it’s not. But, the water here stinks. Bad. It’s been an issue since we moved it, and it wasn’t getting anything but worse. After trying several DIY fixes, we finally gave up and called the water people. Predictably, this visit ended up with “Your water filter system isn’t working, it’s old, you need a new one, blah blah blah.” Same as always. I have come to believe that those who think well water is cheaper than city, have never been on a well. Yeah the water is free. All the junk required to actually use it, not so much. The good news I guess, the water doesn’t stink any more, at least for now, thanks to the fancy sulphur-removal system they also installed. How people lived here for the last 20 years without one, I do not know. Blech. And the bad news? (There’s always bad news.) The bill. They installed all this gear down in the well house at the bottom of the drive, where I park my Jeep. I mention that because they were roughly the same price. Now every time I go down there, I look at the Jeep, then at the water tanks. I dunno, I get a lot more enjoyment out of the Jeep for the same money. But, now we get to check that box off, sit back, and wait for the next thing to break.

While we watched our savings account get drained once again, we figured we might as well do a few fun things too. Saturday we went to fancy birthday party down the hill. (I guess that’s redundant… If an event is “down the hill,” it goes without saying it’s also “fancy.”) It was over at a friend’s house, and he put on quite the opulent dinner. Made me a little stressed just watching him put it all together. He pulled it off flawlessly; I am quite sure I would not have. It was really quite the meal. I couldn’t help but compare it to the rather upscale dinner we went to with them a few weeks ago; this was WAY better. I couldn’t quite pronounce all the dishes, but they sure were good. It probably would have been polite to ask whose birthday we were celebrating, but I was too busy eating.

Sunday was filled with food, basketball games, and nerdiness, not necessarily in that order. To get the nerdiness out of the way, I woke up at some unholy hour of the morning and decided it was time to switch my adblocker from Pi-Hole to AdGuard. As is usually the case with me, there was absolutely no compelling reason behind this idea. I’ve used Pi-Hole for several years, and it works great. Just felt like wasting a few hours I guess, and to that end I was very successful. The ol’ home network is now blissfully ad-free. Just like it was before I threw away several hours of my Sunday, but… errrrr… faster? Nope. Cheaper? Nope, both free. Easier? Eh, arguably. Whatever. It was sorta an interesting little project. After getting to a medium-good stopping point on that, it was breakfast time. Corned beef hash has been on the list for a while now, so I got busy on that. I went with Alton Brown’s recipe, can’t ever go wrong with him. (Minus making the corned beef part… Already had that covered.) Came out delish! I’ve been on a run of food-fails lately, so it was encouraging to get a success in the books, even if it was just hash. We spent the rest of the afternoon watching the basketball tournament, which we both enjoy. Most of the games were pretty exciting, if not quite the results we wanted. For dinner it was back to Food Network browsing, and we decided on chicken piccata. Came out half-decent also; Two successes in one day! (Three if you count the AdGuard project!)

[Show slideshow]

Hey we left the house this weekend! A few times, even! Yeah, we got pretty wet doing it, but at least we got outside a bit despite the rain. I kicked things off on Thursday when I went down to EDH and met a buddy (former co-worker) for dinner and the basketball games. We only get together every three months or so, and when we do it’s always at the same pizza place in El Dorado Hills. This is sort of a funny thing, because every single time we go there, they mess up our pizza. EVERY time. Despite this, we’ve never really considered going someplace different. Creatures of habit? Don’t want to rock the boat? Who knows. Pretty sure they have a 100% (im)perfect record though. We’ve gotten the completely wrong pizza a few times. Sometimes it just never shows up at all, at our table anyway. On the upside, we’ve also had them rather combatively argue that no, we did NOT have a pizza, and therefor they could not take money for one. Just when we thought they’d run out of ways to mess up, they pulled a new one on us. I was paying attention to the games and didn’t see the waitress set down the pizza, but I heard her say “enjoy!” and bounce off. When I glanced over, I noticed my buddy was staring at it with a confused look. I look down at it, and it is definitely missing a full slice. Yep, didn’t see that one coming! He says “Are we supposed to take a slice and pass it to the next table? What do I do?” For my part, I was laughing too hard to be any help at all. I still cannot, for the life of me, figure out what would occur to somebody to just set that pie down and cheerily move on. Did the cook get the munchies? Did a piece fall on the floor? Did they look at me and think I didn’t need too much pizza? Were they pizza-jacked on the way across the room? I guess we will never know. Three months from now we will probably be back to order another one though.

I’ll skip over Friday, when we actually went out for some St Patty’s day festivities. It was a good time, but my extremely tight schedule doesn’t allow for three days of coverage so I’ll have to move on to Saturday. For our Saturday entertainment, we actually drove all the way to downtown Sacramento and went to the NCAA tournament games. This was something of an impulse decision Friday night, so we snapped up some tickets and made the hour long trek. If I had to rate the day, I’ll go with “we had a great time.” We would have had an awesome time, but the game was so bad it definitely took away from the quality of our afternoon. There was a lot more excitement down there than I anticipated, and a lot bigger crowds. Big deal I guess. Quite a mix of fans. The second game was UCLA, and I’d say the majority were there for them. There was plenty of Missouri support though. A small handful of Princeton shirts, and of course no shortage of KU gear. (I didn’t tell them their game was in a completely different part of the country. They seemed excited and would be a shame to ruin their fun.) Anyway, good time, I’d do it again. Tickets were on the reasonable-ish side, I like going downtown now and then, and the stadium is pretty fun. The game was nothing short of a boring, punishing two-hour event, but you can’t have it all.

[Show slideshow]

Quiet weekend out this way. The majority of the time was spent staring out the window at the hammering rain storms, hoping a ton of mud doesn’t roll downhill at us. Good times. So far we’re dry, at least where we’re supposed to be. The yard may be a permanent mud pit at this point. Last night’s 40 mph wind storm didn’t appear to affect it in the least. I try to not even look at the extended forecast anymore, it’s just about more than I can take. Rain, wind, and cold. Usually some mixture of the three, with a few days of snow thrown in for fun.

Our one outing over the weekend was a trip down to Folsom for a Fancy Dinner, with the Fancy Folk. We don’t get invited on these outings much anymore since we moved to the low-rent area code, so we were pleasantly surprised to make the list. (I’m assuming somebody else couldn’t make it that night and we were fill-ins, but let’s just go with they actually wanted us to come.) Dinner was at Fourk Kitchen, which we hadn’t been to before. They serve a fixed four course dinner, and the chef comes out and tells you a little about each dish. Where they sourced the ingredients, how it’s prepared, etc. Fancy indeed. The main course of the evening was chicken piccata, which, to be honest, just isn’t one of my favorites. It’s good, sure. Can’t say I’ve ever found myself thinking, “man I’d really like chicken piccata for dinner” though. Surely not what I would order off a menu given any other choices. It was good though. Heck, I even think I’ll try it at home soon. Dessert was chocolate lava cake, which I’m 100% adverse to. No thank you. The ice cream on top was good. All in all though, a fun night, and reasonably priced. It would take a little more inviting menu lineup to get me clear down there again, but it was worth the trip.

[Show slideshow]

Well, another week, another stretch of rain and snow. In a rather welcome change of pace though, the snow was here at home, and the rain was in Maui where we were. OK, yeah, a week of rain isn’t exactly the ideal weather for a week long vacation at the beach. But, as we reminded ourselves several times, it beat the heck out of the snow and cold at home. Little disappointing, I have to admit, but we made the best of it. Lots of good food, some sight-seeing, and a few brief trips to the beach between storms. We’ll get ’em next time, maybe. In the meantime, we’re back in good ol’ CA, and the snow is STILL coming down. We couldn’t even get up the drive to the garage, had to park the car at the bottom and hike through two feet of snow in the dark. Carrying luggage. And dogs. In flip-flops. (Hot tip: It can’t be done. I’ll find that left shoe come Spring I guess.)

[Show slideshow]