I gotta say, this weather just sucks the life out of me. It’s wicked hot. The evenings are “OK” I suppose, but the afternoons are very nearly unbearable. Guess it’s here for the summer, according to the extended forecast (sunny and hot, one day after another,) there won’t be a change in the near future.

The house project continues, very very slowly. We actually hung a TV finally, although it’s not actually connected to anything. The little “quirks” continue to pop up also. The A/C drain plugged and ran through the ceiling. The A/C itself is barely keeping the house cool, and at a price I don’t care to discuss. (I will say, as a little teaser, our monthly bill was TWICE our annual bill at the last house. Yes, you read that right.) The well pump tripped a breaker and left us without water for an evening until we figured it out. Probably more, I’ve just buried it in my subconscious. However, I continue to thoroughly enjoy my shooting range out back, and we’ve been wearing out the billiards room downstairs.

And now I guess I’ll just throw out a few pictures. Quite a bit of food, as usual. I guess we eat a lot. We also joined a meal service, and we’ve been enjoying that. Believe it or not, it is significantly cheaper than our grocery bill so it’s been working out pretty well.

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Well, we are still unpacking, cleaning, painting, hanging drapes & pictures, and the rest of the extreme drudgery associated with moving. Really, I am not sure there is anything worse. Maybe working while you’re trying to do it all I guess, yeah that makes it even worse. Has to get done though, I suppose. This weekend our project of choice was hanging a “proslat” wall system out in the garage. I bought this thing on a whim quite a while ago, and the large boxes sat on the garage floor of the last house ever since. How long ago? Well, my Costco order history goes back two years and I couldn’t find it. We figured we might need it here so we threw it in with the “move” pile. Sure enough, it is much needed. It took us all day Saturday and part of Sunday, but we got it done and it came out looking like the pictures; Can’t ask for more than that, especially where me and tools are involved. Also had a service guy come out and look at the dishwasher, and an electrician came to quote a generator hookup. Oh boy. Good times. We celebrated the relative victory of our proslat install with a little time on my back porch shooting range to wrap up the weekend. Now that, I must say, is a good finish to the weekend if nothing else.

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Well we are back up and running, albeit in a rather degraded manner. As feared, my new Internet service is, by no small stretch, what I am used to. For the first time since the inception of pkenagy.com way back in the Texas days, my site is remotely hosted. Not cool. It keeps me up at night. But, I guess that is just the way it is, at least until a new provider comes into the neighborhood. (And by “neighborhood,” I mean 3 houses on a gravel road. Yeah, not gonna happen.) I had no small amount of trouble getting it to work on the new host either. It seems to be geared towards creating a new website, and there was no skipping through their not-so-helpful scripts. I finally did have to create an all new site, then deleted it all and moved mine to the remaining folders. No bueno.

If the Internet was the worst thing about the move I guess I could just suck it up, but I am not sure it really is. There are considerable improvements to be made to the house itself, and the bills are mounting rapidly. A lot of big-ticket items are looming: The house needs painted, the a/c is just barely keeping up, the lawn is non-existent… What have we done. Oh there are pluses also, to be sure. It is super quiet… No more redneck cars racing up and down the street behind us. And, despite being only about 20 miles from our last house, it is noticeably cooler. I think it may just work out for the better, if not in the next week or so.

Despite the long down time, I really don’t have a lot of material to work with. Moving is just not interesting subject matter, even by my low standards. More like tortuous, actually. We did enjoy our holiday weekend over at a friends house, swimming and sunning. Everybody needs pool friends.

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A brief update before my site goes offline for our latest move folly. How long will it be down? Well, valid question. There are some good points and some bad with this move, as I suppose is always the case. The Internet service falls quite squarely in the “bad” category. I am somewhat concerned it will not accommodate my needs in the manner to which I am accustomed. After probably way too much worrying about it, it was decided that it wasn’t worth checking our new house off the possibilities list, and we’ll just make do. This approach rarely works out, maybe this will be an exception to that rule.

In lieu of actual content this week, I bring you a video of Nacho and her blanket. She gets comically upset if it is not on the couch where it belongs. This, of course, leads me to move it now and then, just to keep her guessing. As a side note, you may be able to hear the sound of quality TV programming in the background while this video was taken. I have enjoyed MeTV via an antenna feed for a few years now. For the reasonable price of free, I am able to watch all the classics. (Andy Griffith, The Rifleman, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, etc.) This also comes to a screeching halt at the new digs, as we appear to be out of antenna range. Ummm why am I moving again?

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Man, how to update a website when you don’t do anything… Puzzling indeed. I mean honestly, you can only spin “went to our friends house for dinner” so many ways. We are also in the midst of moving, which has us in quite a bit of turmoil. The house is a shambles, can’t find anything, somebody always wants you to sign a 25 page document… Ugh. I think this is about our third time moving since my adamant declaration of “I am never moving again.” Maybe we’ll get it right this time, who knows.

So the theme for this weekend was “going to a friends house for dinner.” What can ya’ do. Hey, honestly there are worse ways to relax. Friday’s menu was carne asada tacos with all the trimmings. We gorged ourselves on this great meal, then sat outside enjoying the fantastic weather around their fire pit. Is that so bad? Nah, I suppose not. Speaking of the weather, it has been very Missouri-esque around here. Last week was just wicked hot, as in 100+ for several days. Downright stifling. Then, just in time for the weekend, it dropped a good 30 degrees. Chalk that up in the “positive” column.

Saturday we headed over to another friends house for another dinner. We only have two friends out here, so you could say we just really ran the gamut this weekend. Generally this group is big on cooking dinner, and I have to say we’re pretty fair hands at it. This particular evening though, we opted for takeout. Our fare of choice was the aptly named “Yummy Dumplings” in Cameron Park. As one might guess, their featured menu item is dumplings. They have a few other options, but definitely a one-page menu. I must say, the dumplings are, as advertised, yummy. I’m confident I’ve tried every variety on the menu, and while I do have a favorite (pork and kimchi, steamed,) they are all delicious. The post-meal plan was to suit up and enjoy their recently installed hot tub. Everyone was too full to bother changing into swimsuits though, so we just sat on the side and soaked our feet. Fair enough.

Sunday, we made an honest effort at a return to our “normal routine,” such as it was. Sundays in the Spring are meant for putting the top down on the convertible and going wine tasting. It just makes for a nice day before the work week. Most, not all, wineries are back open in some fashion, and are blasting the news all over social media. Hey, we’ll bite. Well, it just didn’t work out so well. You can’t really “taste” the wines per se. You can just order a bottle for the table, and you also have to get food. That’s all well and good if those are the rules, I suppose, but it’s not really what I want to do. I like to try their different wines. (Sort of the entire point of going wine tasting, at least in my mind.) And to boot, I don’t want food, I ate lunch before leaving. Well we were out and committed, so we gave it a try. The weather was fantastic, if nothing else. We made it to three places and called it quits. That’s three different wines tried (for those concerned, no we did not drink three bottles of wine; There was a group of us,) three different sandwiches, three kinds of fries, and 1/2 a sleeve of Tums. Well, we gave it a shot. The day was still pretty young when we called no joy, but everybody was so full we just went home and hit the couch.

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