One “major holiday” in the books. Few more to get through. Hopefully everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving, we sure did. We ended up over a friend’s house, sponging off their family event, as we usually do out here. I’d say it was a pretty standard-issue turkey-day; Far too much food, but all of it so delicious I had to shovel it all in. Even the oven-roasted turkey came out well, if a touch tardy. OK, a lot tardy, but we’ll leave that part out. We enjoyed a smoked bird also, which was my preference anyway.

The rest of the weekend was spent in recovery mode. Our big outing was a drive down to El Dorado Hills on Saturday, to purchase the “special of the week” at my favorite grocery store. Marinated artichokes were on sale, regularly $5.50 per jar, but for two days only they were $1 per jar! WOW!!! We bought the last six jars. And yes, this is what qualifies as excitement in my life these days.

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The nice weather is still holding out in NorCal. It could stay like this all the way through winter and I’d be just fine. Not getting my hopes up for that. I took advantage of the pleasant temps by tackling a slightly overdue outdoor project, hanging some LED string lights around the porch. By “overdue,” I mean we bought these lights at the last house we lived in, and they moved up here still in the box. Hey, I like to put a lot of thought into the install process. As it turned out, and this is very rarely the case, there wasn’t much thought needed. The lights were spaced 2′ apart, and the rafters under the eave where I wanted to hang them are 2′ apart. The light strand is 48′, and from the outlet where they are plugged in to the corner of the porch is 48′. You just don’t see that work out every day in my world. Of course any project, no matter how minor, is not without difficulty for me. The big time waster in this case was the power outlet, which was conveniently located right where I wanted it. It was well located, but it didn’t have any power. Rats. Thanks to my 9 year degree in electricity, I quickly ascertained it was a GFCI outlet. Problem solved, it must have tripped. Except it wouldn’t reset. Well, that happens when they have no power, so I went through the familiar process of resetting all the breakers (and all the clocks, etc) in the house. Yeah, one day I’ll label those breakers while doing that… Another day. Anyway, after that, still no power. The GFCI must have failed, time for a trip to the hardware store. Luckily, just before leaving for the store, I made one more wild guess; The mystery light switch inside the front door that we’ve never figured out. Yep that was it. Turn the switch on, reset the outlet, and I was in business. Geez, who puts a switch on one outlet? Seems a little odd to me. I guess that was before the days of just plugging in a wifi-enabled plug and using that, which is my use case here. From there, it was just a matter of completing the tedious process of drilling pilot holes, screwing in the hooks, and hanging the lights. It would have been a relatively quick job, but it was hampered by my rather extreme aversion to heights. Each step had to be done with one hand, while the other hand remained firmly planted on the nearest structural board. No matter how unlikely, I could not shake the feeling that I was somehow going to lose my balance, tumble off the step stool, over the railing, and end up horribly disfigured on the ground 30′ below. OK, maybe more like 12′, but it looked like 30 whenever I glanced down. It probably took me 3 hours to complete the whole length, which admittedly did include frequent breaks to check the 49ers score. I was so pleased with eventual outcome that I decided to continue on with the second strand we have, down the back side of the porch. That section got interrupted by the Chief’s game, but I’ll get the rest finished soon.

Other than that home improvement project, it was an uneventful weekend. We were pup-sitting our friend Renfield, so we mostly stayed home and kept an eye on him. He and Quinn really go at it, they are quite the pair. They will be outside for so long sometimes you start to get worried about them, but invariably when you look out the window you’ll see them running circles at top speed around the back yard. Nacho, well, not so much. She just stares at them from a safe distance and wiggles in excitement. Can’t quite seem to figure out that she might have fun if she joined them. Oh, Nacho. We made a crockpot full of lentil soup to go with the Chief’s game, which was a success. (I’ll omit the lemon next time, it was overwhelming and kinda weird.) And that was about it for that weekend.

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A mediocre weekend at best, but had its upsides. The weather was quite nice, we got some things done around the house, and the Chiefs won. The wife is down with a cold or allergies or something of the sort, so she wasn’t up for too much excitement. My turn is coming, I’m sure.

Friday was sort of slow. We were supposed to go to a concert in Sacramento, but the opening act cancelled out and that’s who we really wanted to see. Luckily we were able to get a refund. I’m sure we would have still had a good time, but why risk it. Instead, we went to our regular Friday happy hour spot, Foothill Beer Temple. It was a brief stay, then we headed out to find some dinner. We ended up at the newly opened McDermott’s Pub in Placerville. It’s attached to The Italian Place we go to, but more of an Irish Pub thing than the semi-nice restaurant next door. It was pretty empty for a Friday night, I think they’ve got some advertising to work on. I’m not sure how it’s going to do really, I guess we’ll see. I think it’s a bit… “spendy” for the area. They are pretty proud of their stuff for sure. All you could get for food was pizza from The Italian Place. Nothing wrong with that, it’s what we wanted anyway. The girl brought it out in a to-go box though? Uhhhh, trying to tell me something? Little odd. I’m hoping they expand the menu to include more items from next door, then I’d be all in. It seems their big push was craft cocktails, which I have little to no use for.

Saturday I woke up semi-motivated for some yard work, so I headed up The Hill to cut some firewood. Not a bad way to spend a 65 degree afternoon. There is certainly enough up there that needs cut up, that’s for sure. I like to think I’m making a dent in it, but it’s going to be a while. I got a whole load of oak cut up and loaded in my trusty little trailer, then things started going south on me. First, I was headed down to dump the wood and ran smack into a little tree stump that I didn’t see. The worst part is, I’d stomped around for a good 20 minutes earlier trying to find it, because I’d hit it before. Guess I finally found it. It was right in the middle of the mower deck. Too steep to back up, and no way to get around it going forward. I finally had to go get poor sickly Donette and between the two of us we were able to scooch it around. In the course of trying to back up, I’d thrown 1/2 the dirt in the state up on the mower deck, so I decided to wash that off. In retrospect, I probably should have done that out in the yard. There was even more mud than I thought, and now it’s all over the driveway behind my car. For the big finish, I went to put the mower away and it had a flat tire. I aired it up and got it put back away, we’ll see if it holds. (Yeah, I already know the answer to that one.) The good news is, I had a fair amount of frustration built up by then, so I took it out on splitting the logs. Good outlet right there!

Sunday, well, it was a day of couch and football. I tried out a new recipe for dinner, chicken and rice, and it came out pretty passable. I got a little carried away with the siracha sauce perhaps, but at least I was at home so nobody had to watch me pouring sweat all over the place. Mostly I just like cooking in my super-duper new cast iron skillet, and it worked fantastic. Actually I took a picture of my skillet and forgot to take one of the actual food, oops.

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The missus has been in New York for the last week, so I was left to my own entertainment all weekend. That pretty much resulted in a lot of couch time, as usual. I did step out of the house for a bit Saturday and went to a wine tasting nearby. I took the dogs with me, I am pretty sure they enjoyed it more than I did. Lots of attention and treats, can’t go wrong there.

Sunday I rolled down the hill to a friend’s house for a day of BBQ and football games. That’s just good wholesome entertainment right there. We couldn’t get the Chiefs broadcast unfortunately, but he did have the RedZone so we made do with that. While we watched the team slog through a rather tedious victory, we had three slabs of baby backs on his smoker. I had it in my head I wanted ribs, but when I went to get them at the grocery they were $7 a pound! Geez, that’s just obscene. No thank you. Luckily he happened to have some in his freezer so I didn’t have to go without. They came out, for the most part, delicious. Right when they were finishing up, I caught him slathering them in sugar free bbq sauce. As in, bbq sauce with no sugar. I futilely tried to save the third slab from such heresy, but all I could get out was sort of a stuttering mumble. I spent the rest of the evening researching just what in the heck this stuff was and where it came from. Not surprisingly, info is scarce. I am sure it comes from either California or China, I just haven’t been able to confirm which yet. (Actually the ribs were great, I have to admit. No way I could let that one go without comment though.)

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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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