So that weekend was mostly ate up by a catastrophic pc failure.  Really now, is there any other kind of pc failure?  Nope, they’re pretty much all catastrophic.  I came into the (home) office Friday morning to a blinking black screen, informing me that no boot disk could be found.  Bummer.  Not a good start to the weekend.  I hopped on amazon and ordered a new drive with same day shipping, and when I got home from work that afternoon it was waiting on the porch for me.  Pretty slick.  A few things were learned over the course of this latest disaster.  My pc backup software (Acronis True Image) is generally worthless.  I’ve used it since 2010, faithfully upgrading to the latest version every year.  It’s really the only software I’ve ever purchased, outside of Microsoft Windows & Office, and my anti-virus.  Over all those years, I’ve never really used it.  So this was the big test:  I booted my new drive up to the rescue disk, clicked “restore image” and went to eat dinner.  I came back to a screen not unlike the one I’d woken up to that morning.  Fail.  Guess I won’t be buying the next version.  So, I spent the rest of my weekend building Windows install disks, hunting all over the house for various serial numbers, blah blah blah.  So lame.  Good news is I don’t think I really lost anything, as all my music, pictures, and documents are stored on another device.  And as an added bonus, my new drive is faster than snot.  Really fast snot, however fast that is.

Notable events over the weekend included a trip to the dog park, and a cookout involving a really large steak.  In chronological order, the steak came first on Saturday evening.  We had friends over and I headed down to the grocery and bought a steak for us all to share.  One steak for two couples?  Cheaping out again there, Phil?  Well, the one steak weighed in at a not unimpressive 3.8 lbs.  Now THAT is a steak.  Somewhere between a steak and a roast I’d say, actually.  It took me over an hour to get that thing up to medium rare on the Weber, making dinner a bit late.  It was worth it though, it came out very tasty.  Then Sunday morning, we took Quinn to the dog park here in El Dorado Hills.  Really not such a big event, but it was fun.  We took his friend Renfield this time, in case there were no other puppies there to play, which was indeed the case.  There was one other big goofy something-a-doodle, but Quinn was terrified of him.  Little intimidated by the size difference I guess.  He had fun though, and slept soundly beside us while we enjoyed lunch afterwards.

We kind of mailed it in on that weekend.  Just a bit worn out from the previous work week, and not a lot going on around town to get us out and about.  We did start strong with a nice little happy hour over at our hour on Friday.  I fired up the smoker and threw on some ribs, and our friends Michael & Alaina came over and ate with us.  Threw a few games of bags, listened to some fine music (of my choosing) and watched a few episodes of The Sopranos.  Fine evening in my book.

Saturday we took Quinn to the local dog park for some exercise.  Poor lil’ guy does get bored with our sedentary lifestyle I’m afraid.  Unfortunately, the dog park wasn’t much of an outing for him, this time at least.  It was a great park for what that was worth.  Nice and clean, and plenty of room to run around.  On the downside, there were no dogs for him to play with.  He did seem pretty fascinated watching the nearby soccer game through the fence, but didn’t get much exercise in.  We stuck it out for 45 minutes or so, then just went back home for the good ol’ standby of fetch in the back yard.  Later that evening we went over to a friend’s house for his daughters 16th birthday party.  I would say it was more of a party with our friends because his daughter was having a birthday, but she did stick it out with us old folk for 30 minutes or so.  Hey, we had a good time of it and it was nice of her to provide us with an occasion.

Sunday, as is usually the case, we did a whole lot of nothing.  Well, that goes for me anyway.  Donette went over to the clubhouse and helped out with a big community event they were having.  It sounded like fun, but more kid-oriented than I cared for, and I needed to kick back on the patio and watch my fantasy football suffer another humiliating defeat.  They did have one attraction of note;  A local food truck that I always see driving around.  I wandered over and got a taco plate but didn’t stick around long after that.

Hey, at least it’s an effort.  A weak effort, but an effort all the same.  If I don’t post these I’ll miss another week, and that would just be embarrassing.

I think I’ll just focus on Sunday from that weekend.  For one thing I spent the rest of the weekend working, and for another I think I have enough material from Sunday to whip up a sizable paragraph.  Our Sunday Funday began rather early, when we took off in a westward direction for Sonoma.  One of our favorite wineries there was having an “event,” and we decided we just might as well attend.  So we headed down I-80, destination Walt Wines.   We generally stay the night when we head down to the Napa/Sonoma area, but it’s really close enough to day-trip and we didn’t want to take vacation and all that mess.  An hour and a half later, we were walking in the door for some wine tasting.  They also provided free food for everybody, catered by Rebel Dog, and that was worth the trip in itself.  (Well…  Nothing in life is free, as they say.  They got their money.)  It was a great afternoon, I bet we stayed three hours or so.  After we got bored (or they ran out of tamales) we loaded up and headed back home.  On the drive we got to cipherin’, and decided it seemed something of a shame to drive all that way and just go to one spot.  As we came to this inescapable conclusion we happened to be coming up on Cuvaison winery, so we made the quick call to make that our second destination of the day.  It worked out quite well for us, we were very fond of the spot.  Their wines were very good, and the tasting room was quite nice also.  It was on the whole much more… errrr… “affordable” than Walt.  Much as we like Walt, I don’t think they really fall into the “value brand” category.  Gotta mix things up a little I guess.  We hung out there for quite a while, and then continued our drive back up the hill to the homestead.  We got home around five, much to Quinn’s delight.  Poor lil’ fella doesn’t care to be left all alone so much.  Matter of fact he was so wound up we got on the phone and made some quick dinner plans with his bestest buddy Rennfield up in Cameron Park, and took him up there.  While he ran around the yard like a wild, feral animal, we enjoyed a wonderful tri tip dinner courtesy of Rennfields owners.  Can’t beat that deal!  The pups showed no sign of slowing down after dinner, so we hung out and played a few games of cards too.  Whew, full day.

Well that was an….  interesting weekend.  It kicked off Friday with a light after-work function at Hop House.  Met a vendor down there with a few other guys, didn’t stay too long.  After that I rolled home and fixed something-or-another for dinner….  The details escape me.  Seems like I had fun.

Saturday was something of an adventure, I suppose.  We met up with our friends Michael and Alaina and went to a costume party at one of their friends house.  Really.  I’m not kidding.  It was an Austin Powers theme party, and I suppose it was fun.  I suppose.  Donette put some amount of work into both our costumes so I was obligated to go and play along.  We went as Dr. Evil and Frau Farbissina from the jail scene in Austin Powers 3.  Not bad get-ups, especially Donette’s hair.  Now of course I did have some reservations about the entire concept.  First and probably most important:  Why the theme?  Why not just have people over and talk and have fun?  I have trouble enough with that part;  Add in dressing up like a dork and it makes it even more difficult.  I just don’t grasp the “fun” part of the theme parties.  Never will.  I’m against them.  Second, it was 90 flippin’ degrees, and I’m standing around in jeans and a long sleeve shirt pouring sweat.  Yeah, that took a little away from it too.  If I ever have a party I’m going to call it a “no theme” party.  Yeah.  That’ll show ’em.  I’ll probably do that in a week or two.

Sunday was more my speed.  We went to brunch at El Dorado Saloon with Quinn.  The morning was quite pleasant on their patio, even if service was a bit spotty.  I think everyone was enjoying the slight break in the heat, they were pretty overwhelmed.  It was easily overlooked though, and once Quinn got his tri tip breakfast bowl he had not a care in the world.  After that we sort of rambled all over the place, literally.  We went to another spot in El Dorado Hills, then back to the house for a bit of work, then up to Placerville, then right back to dinner in El Dorado Hills.  Sunday-Funday, indeed.