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.

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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.

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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.)

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Snowed in again. This winter has been… “challenging.” Last year was livable, with the very notable exception of the major storm in January. That was a few weeks of mess though. This winter has either been wicked cold, raining, snowing, or some combination of the three. Save a few very brief breaks of 60’s, it’s been too cold to leave the house for months. Heck, it’s been too cold to leave bed most days. Our mantra has been “it’ll warm up any day now,” but I am actually starting to have doubts. It might just be freezing the rest of the year. No bueno.

Nothing to relate from the weekend. Can’t leave the house. More TV. BOO! We did cook some reasonably good food along the way, which luckily we had in the freezer. I also made avocado toast for breakfast a few times, as we had a bunch of avocados approaching end-of-life. I gotta say, I just don’t get that pairing. Never have. People just rave and carry on about it, even claiming “oh, you have to go to such-and-such restaurant, they have the BEST avocado toast!!!!” Yeah… It’s OK… at the end of the day it’s a smushed up avocado spread on a piece of toast. I guess you might get a particularly great piece of toast (whatever constitutes great toast,) or a perfectly ripe avocado, but, well… It’s still a smushed avocado on toast. I’m likely showing my cheapskate side here (again,) but it also bugs me that people even order it at restaurants in the first place. Pay $15 for it, and claim it’s the best breakfast they ever had. Errrr… You know you can drop by the grocery on the way home, grab an avocado and a loaf of local bread, and have the same exact thing? Hey, whatever. Me, I’ll stick with the biscuits and gravy when I go out. (And invariably complain about that also, as it’s easy to make better at home. But at least you have to put a LITTLE effort into it.)

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I hope everyone enjoyed their President’s Day holiday! I know I didn’t, because it wasn’t a holiday for me. Woe. Despair. Oh well, I’ll get ’em next time. The worst part is, I spent the entire weekend saving my strength to have a big day, then figured out at the last minute that I didn’t get the day off at all. This leaves me with mighty scarce material to work with here. Even less than usual, if that’s possible. My apparent lack of ability to read a calendar, combined with the continuing crummy weather, made for an overall slow weekend. We did a little cooking, watched a few quite unmemorable movies, and… slept? I guess Friday we took the trash out, and then retrieved the cans post-pickup. Yeah I think I’ll call it a weekend summary at that point.

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