So the first of the holidays is checked off, albeit a minor one. It used to be one of our Major Events, but seems to have faded in obscurity along with the rest of my social life. Sigh. We did celebrate it though, if a day early. (It was on Sunday? C’mon. Note to the US Social Committee, should they be reading this: Holidays should be on Friday or Saturday. Period.)

We started the weekend on Friday at our regular “Friday Happy Hour” spot, the Foothill Beer Temple in Shingle Springs. We make a little bit of an effort to get there every Friday. It’s a great place, definitely the best tap selection in the area, but mostly the owners are just great guys and we try to do our bit to support them. They got a rough draw opening right before the lockdowns, not really sure how they managed to keep it going for 1.5 years, paying rent with no business. I doubt our weekly round of pints is going to make much difference in their bottom line, but hey, it’s something. After that, we headed back to our Circle for dinner with some friends. We’ve been to The Place several times, but this was the first time since they opened their new, larger location. Unfortunately it’s now about 2 miles FURTHER from our house, almost making it outside our Circle, but since we were driving by it anyway we managed to make the sacrifice. I would say they lost a bit of “ambiance” with the new spot. The last place was super small and just sort of cool, the new place… Not so much. On the upside, they really did need more space, and the food was definitely great as always. I thought they may have added a few new menu items, but our newbie waiter was unable to confirm that. At any rate it was delicious as always. As an added bonus, they take reservations now so you don’t risk waiting a long time for a table, which was definitely an issue at the last spot. As a matter of fact the guy parked next to us was leaving as we pulled in, he said he couldn’t get seated for an hour.

Saturday night we did our Halloween thing. Some friends hosted a big party, sort of a combo Halloween & Beer Tasting event. It was the ninth annual, so it’s been going a while. It would have been the big 10th, but alas, no fun allowed in California last year. It was a good time as always. They’ve got several stations set up to sample various beers that everyone enters, and you rate each. At the end the results are tallied and a winner is announced, along with a prize for best costume. While you sample all the beers, there’s a catered taco truck serving some great food. I may like that better than the beers; Man there are some wacky entries. We actually placed second in the beer tasting, our first time in the top rankings. And, as usually happens, it was an entry with the least effort we’ve ever put in. I just grabbed a random 4-pack at happy hour on my way out the door on Friday. Nothing I’d ever even tried, it just fit my personal entry criteria of “local brewed IPA.” Lucky pick! I apparently liked it, as it was my second-highest tasting out of all 34 entries. (All the labels are removed before the tasting so you don’t know which is yours.) As for the costume contest, we weren’t so fortunate there. Matter of fact, we were so excited for the tacos that we completely forgot it was Halloween and didn’t bring our costumes. Yep, that’s just the way it happened. By my informal count, we were one of only three couples that didn’t dress up. This in no way made me in the least uncomfortable. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact. Hey, our dogs wore costumes, that’s gotta count for something. Surprised they didn’t win actually.

Sunday, despite being the actual holiday date, was just another football-on-the-couch day. I’m pretty sure I didn’t step outside all day. I didn’t even have any real interest in the games I watched, it’s just kind of the Sunday thing to do. I guess I did go outside and assemble my new firewood rack. Granted, it consisted of three parts, held together by eight bolts, but it’s still going in the “daily accomplishments” category.

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Wow, big storms out west. It was reported yesterday that we’ve received a third of our total annual rainfall over the weekend. That is pretty wild. Sure seems like it though, it’s been dumping. We lost power last night around 10:00 PM, and it just came back on. What a nuisance. I was about to hook the generator up when it finally came back on. Some day our eternally back-ordered Tesla batteries will come in and that hassle will be a thing of the past.

Other than that unwanted excitement, I guess it was sort of a down weekend. Saturday was just a bit eventful, as we took our little foster pup Grey to a “meet and greet” and some suckers (errrr, I mean “loving family”) adopted her. Actually they were a very nice couple, with a little boy. Hopefully the pup works out for them. I was just a little worried… young puppies just ain’t for everyone. Pretty sure we found a good match though when they sent us a picture of Grey in a new sweater she’d knitted her on Sunday. Then, a few hours later, another. Side note, I found it rather impressive that somebody could knit a little doggy sweater that fast. Looks complicated to me.

Sunday, blech. I have to say, I was pretty excited for the Chiefs game. What a letdown. Not even remotely entertaining. I did make a semi-tasty pot of ham and beans to sooth the sting though. They came out OK. I used a recipe off the Hursts Beans site. I’ve always wanted to try that 15 bean mix, for some inexplicable reason. Pretty solid! Tasted like… well… ham and beans. I did not, however, add the tomatoes as called for. Because this is America. And Americans don’t put tomatoes in ham and beans. I pointed this out to them in a strongly worded email, which they for some reason seemingly ignored. Either that or a SWAT team is in route to my house.

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Woot, I’m officially back in the swing of things. Until I’m not, anyway. The holiday season is nearly upon us, which always proves a challenge. But, I’ll keep my ever-optimistic attitude and see where it goes.

Wow, the season changed rather abruptly out here. We seem to have missed Fall, and jumped straight from summer to winter. Or perhaps it was just a very abbreviated season; Pretty much Friday & Saturday, then straight into cold. We made the most of the two nice days though. Friday after work we went over to a friends house for a bbq. Can’t ever go wrong with that plan. This was extra-exciting as it was the grand debut of his new smoker. His Traeger recently shot craps after a rather brief life, and with his refunded money he got a Recteq 590 instead. I gotta say, I have a little pellet-grill envy. (Note I didn’t bring my Cascade into that conversation; I’ll stick with it over the pellets any day.) It is decidedly better than my Traeger though. I almost wish mine would have died along with his so I could do the same trade-up. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with my current assortment of outdoor cooking apparatus. Anyway, he did a few pork butts and they came out just great. Much more smoke than a Traeger, a great app to keep an eye on it, and just overall better built. We threw on some chicken wings and sausage too, also came out great. It gets the “recommended” review.

Saturday was a truly spectacular day in the weather category. We loaded up the convertible with all the dogs and took off on a little local wine-tasting escapade. Side note: “All the dogs” as this point in time is three. Little Fabio got adopted out, and we promptly ended up with another waif. “Grey” is a roughly 3 month old dachshund mix. Yep, a puppy. Oh joy. Hey, we’ve never like the carpet in this house anyway. Anyway, back to our afternoon, we started with lunch out in Somerset, then hit a few wineries on the way back towards our house. We had three spots scheduled, but the day got away from us. Stop one was MV Winery. It is a bit lacking in “ambiance” if that’s the right word, but I’m quite a fan of their wines. Their tasting list is rather extensive though. Geez, I appreciate that you make a lot of varietals, can I try them over two or three visits instead of all at once? Add that to the fact that the girl helping us was much more interesting in playing with the dogs than pouring wine, and we ended up being there around 3 hours. Hey, it was a 75 degree sunny day, and we were sitting outside tasting great wine, can’t really complain too much. The second stop was Mira Flores, about ten minutes from our house. Now this spot is a little more in the scenic category. They’ve got a great view from their awesome patio, it’s always great hanging out there. Unfortunately we only had an hour left when we got there, but we enjoyed our short time. Our last scheduled stop was Narrow Gate, but we were out of time. The world pretty much stops at 5:00 around these parts. Oh well, it is literally in our back yard, we’ll hop over there another day.

Sunday was a down-day, full of football and food. We had a heck of time getting the Chiefs game, so that started our afternoon poorly. I don’t know what happened. We’ve never had any trouble using a combination of VPN service & various streaming sites, but the last few weeks have been busts. No matter what we tried, all we could get was the local broadcast, which was the Ravens. Once that game reached blowout status they switched over luckily, but that was well into the second half. Guess I need to work on a new scheme for getting the right game, maybe even **GASP** spend some money.

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After the longest downtime in the illustrious history of pkenagy.com, I am back online. What was the root cause of this extended outage, as I’m sure you have been wondering during the many sleepless nights without access to this critical content? Well, nothing really. I just didn’t feel like it, how ’bout that. I’ve been wanting to move the site back inhouse for some time, and as is the case with everything these days it turned out to be harder than expected. After weeks and weeks of online tech support meetings and troubleshooting though, the site is now being hosted out of my house where it belongs. OK, maybe it was more like a few hours of googling error messages, but even that was nearly more effort than I care to expend these days. Databases, ugh. Glad I didn’t pick that for a career.

So what have we been up to during this 1.5 months of silence? I’m sure you know the standard response to that. We did, however, work in a good trip to our hometown, KC. It was a great trip. I felt like we managed to hit a lot of my standard-issue highlights without the somewhat frantic pace of my birthday trip five years ago. See all the family and friends, check. Several favorite food and drink spots, check. Catch some live music shows, check. Crappy trip back to CA with an unexpected, unwanted stay in Phoenix, check. OK could have done without that last line item, but it’s almost expected these days.

I do have quite a stash of photos, so I guess I’ll put some of those up. Hopefully I’ll get back to my regularly scheduled updates now that I have the convenience of updating this on my own server. Truth be known, it is quite literally exactly the same as updating it on the hosting service I’ve been paying for the last 1.5 years. But, I suppose I do get some (very small) satisfaction out of managing it myself, as well as an extra $3 a month in my pocket. Still need to figure out how to allocate that unexpected windfall of cashflow.

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