I’m officially sick of the rainy, cold weather.  And, much like before I was officially sick of it, my opinion doesn’t seem to make much difference.  Geez what a year.  I don’t know if it’s ever going to warm up.  Actually what I imagine will happen is, it’s suddenly 105 out every day and there will be no stretch of 70 & sunny I look forward to every year.  Guess that’s the way it goes.

My weekend entertainment was severely hampered by said weather conditions.  We had friends over Friday and tried to watch TV on the patio, but the driving rain hammering against our aluminum cover made it impossible to hear anything.  We stuck it out though, at least until the heater ran out of propane.  That was the final straw, we called it an evening.

Saturday we never really got out of the gate.  The rain continued, and just made everything a mess.  Can’t take the dog out, can’t watch baseball on the patio, can’t go cycling…  WOE!!!  We did go out to a birthday party that night in Old Folsom, which provided some much-needed entertainment.  It only improved slightly on Sunday.  I did go out for a ride around 10:00, but cut it short because I was freezing.  Just couldn’t get warmed up.  I told myself a short ride is better than no ride;  Hopefully that’s the case.  After that we tried to watch the debacle that was the Royals game.  My mlb.com subscription is off to a rough start this year.  The video quality is so choppy it’s nearly unwatchable.  I did catch the last inning though, which effectively ruined my entire day.  After that we rolled over to a friend’s house for dinner and a little doggie play date.  Once again it was freezing out, cutting into my patio enjoyment.  (I may have exacerbated the situation by wearing shorts…)  But, dinner was delicious and the puppy got worn out so I call the evening a success.

Well that was actually a busy weekend.  As a matter of fact, I took off Thursday & Friday and stretched it out into a 4-day.  This was triggered by a visit from my ol’ buddy James from KC, AKA Munkirs, who flew up for Thursday & Friday.  It’s been so long since I’ve seen him we actually had things to talk about.  Maybe not two whole days worth, but if we rationed the subject matter and kept the chatter to a minimum, we stretched things out pretty well.  He actually rolled into town on Wednesday night, which allowed for a nice early start on Thursday.  We started off with a solid hike up in Auburn, at Hidden Falls Park.  (Random side note:  I’d originally planned on Horsetail Falls as a destination.  On a whim I checked the forecast:  30 degrees and heavy snow.  Time for plan B.  If you’ve seen one Falls you’ve seen ’em all.)  I’ve been to Hidden Falls, but only on my mountain bike.  There is, I found, a reason for this.  Hiking is slow and hard.  Hills that are challenging on my bicycle are downright torturous on foot.  Oh well, the scenery was nice and they didn’t have to fly me out in the medevac.  After our hike we dropped by Mt Vernon winery, where I had a club pickup to make.  Hey, it’s a long drive out there, gotta make the rounds.  We then wound over to Auburn Ale House for a quite passable lunch on their patio.  Not quite done yet, we made the somewhat long drive to Folsom, and visited the Folsom Prison Museum.  It’s small but interesting, I usually take visitors by there.  After a quick stop by the house to clean up, THEN we drove up to Shingle Springs and met some friends at the recently opened Breakroom.  We’ve been there quite a few times and it’s growing on me.  If that sounds like more activity than I usually have in a given day, well, it is.  Heck it’s more activity than I have in a given week.  Guess I need house guests more often.

Friday we huddled up over a delicious breakfast of boiled eggs to plot the itinerary for the new day.  His first suggestion was “Work out and bike ride.”  The conjunction in the phrase threw me off.  I’m assuming you meant “Work out or bike ride.”  Alas, my hearing was correct the first time.  So we got ready and took the walk over to the gym at the neighborhood clubhouse.  Full disclosure, I badged us in the door, waited until he got started, and walked right the heck back home.  That’s just too much exercise for one day.  By the time he finished up, I’d enjoyed my umpteenth cup of coffee and was ready to go riding.  So, we loaded up and drove to the nearby American River bike trail.  It’s a nice paved trail that follows, not remarkably, the American River.  We rode for quite some distance.  Not sure how far, let’s just go with “Farther than most normal human beings are able to travel on a self-powered two-wheel vehicle.”  Yeah, that far.  In addition, we were bucking a 20 mph wind.  Not sure where THAT came from, but it was rather defeating.  Luckily that finished my physical torture for the day.  We finished the day back at the house, on the patio grilling a tri tip.  Much more my speed.

Nice and quiet weekend out here in the west.  I’m not necessarily sure I mean that in a good way either.  I don’t mind a slow couple of days, but sometimes we get a little extreme.  Oh we had a little bit of fun I guess.  Friday, as a matter of fact, was quite fun.  The weather was sort of crummy but we had friends over and grilled some nice lamb chops for dinner.  OK that might not sound super exciting, but it was for me.  I cannot count the times I’ve been at the store and thought “Man I sure would like to get those nice looking lamb chops.”  And then I buy a steak or chicken or whatever else might catch my eye.  This cycle has been going on for years, if not decades.  Well, some time ago, (Thanksgiving, as it happens,) we were out wine tasting at one my favorite places and ended up purchasing a rather special bottle, or at least as our wine collection goes.  We asked the owner what would pair well with it, and he said “lamb chops.”  Boom, it’s been stuck in my head ever since.  Lamb showed up in the weekly grocery ad last week and it was game on.  I must say, I was really happy with the dinner.  I followed this recipe pretty closely, pesto and all, and I thought it came out great.  And, by the way, it DID pair very nicely with the wine.  After that we broke out the long-dormant Rock Band game for a while.  I was having fun until I got kicked out the band for sucking at guitar.  In my own house.  Tsk.

Saturday, the highlight was probably Costco.  Yeah, one of those kind of days.  As a general rule of thumb it’s a bad idea to go to Costco (or Folsom on the whole) on Saturday, and this day was no exception.  But, I had a MAJOR PURCHASE to make, and got caught up in the excitement.  I was in the market for a new soundbar (for the living room TV) and they’ve usually got some nice ones for good prices.  Indeed, after a good bit of staring and reading online, I made my choice.  Unfortunately, as is too often the case, when I got home I found it just didn’t quite work the way I wanted it to.  I was right on the verge of boxing it up and taking it back, as it was by no means the cheapest option available, but decided to keep it a bit and see if I can make it work.  How do you make it work?  Well, you spend even more money.  I’ve got some more parts showing up from Amazon this week and we’ll see what happens.

Sunday was once again pretty quiet.  I’m on a medium-to-large project to set up our home automation, and spent probably way too much time on that.  Not sure why…  It’s kinda fun I guess.  Spent no small amount of time working with the puppy too, as was the case the other days also.  He’s….  “a handful.”  I like to tell myself he’s making progress though, and for that matter it’s only been a week.  A long, frustrating week, but a week.  For evening entertainment, we went to a friends house for their kids birthday party.  Not “kid’s” but “kids,” they’re twins.  For some reason every year it surprises me that their birthdays are on the same day.  Sort of slow that way I guess.

Another weekend, more wine tasting.  Geez as I re-read last week’s post it doesn’t even sound like I particularly care for wine tasting any more.  What can you do, it’s fun and cheap.  And, as usual, we really didn’t have anything else to do.  We had plenty of other fun activities over the weekend too.  We kicked it off on Friday with a light Saint Patrick’s Day celebration.  By “light” I mean they just don’t really get into the day around here, one in a long list of things I just can’t grasp about this place.  We did, however, find a local place that actually had events going on, 36 Handles.  And, to their credit, they did it up pretty well.  They had a great buffet set up, tents in the parking lot, music, the whole deal.  We didn’t stay long, just wanted to say we did “something.”  Had a great lunch and called it a holiday.

Saturday was a big day for us.  As part of Donette’s neighborhood social committee activities, she was helping organize a 5k run in the neighborhood.  Proceeds were to go to one of the local animal shelters, who were also on site with volunteers and puppies.  Uh oh.  I meandered over there sometime in the early afternoon to save Donette from herself.  But the bad news is, I’m quite likely an even bigger sucker than she is.  We’d been very lightly discussing another dog for a while, and I guess our free time at home has run out on us.  We actually made it through the entire event successfully.  Then, through some twist of luck, it turned out people had donated a lot of large items such as crates and things, and nobody with the rescue had room to transport it all.  Well, as it happens, we also have a lot of things we had decided to donate, so we just loaded it all in our car and headed up to Foot Hill Dog Rescue.  Several hours later we were rolling back down the hill with 6.5 pounds of wiggly 14-week-old puppy in our laps.  What the heck happened.

Sunday, despite all the of things I SHOULD have been doing, we ended up going out wine tasting.  The weather was pretty fair, and wine tasting is one of those outings we could include our new addition on.  (Yep, we’re “those” people now I guess.)  We had a great day of it too.  We went to four places in all, three of which we had never visited before.  Always good to check out some different places, keeps things interesting.  After that enjoyable afternoon, the group all headed to a restaurant in Cameron Park.  Oops not us, we have a puppy with us so we have to go home and do nothing.  And so it begins.

Well we’re back from our week-long tour of nearby wine country.  In summary?  One week is too long.  Long weekend perhaps.  There’s a few issues that led us to this decision.  For one thing, honestly you can only taste so much wine.  By day three we were pretty much like “Yep, that’s more wine.  Great.  Next.”  We tried to mix in a few other activities, like hiking and biking, but at the end of the day, it’s a wine-centric area.  The other problem was, the prices are insanely exorbitant.  You hit three or four wineries a day, plus food and gas, your wallet is going to take an absolute beating.  Donette couldn’t seem to quit drawing the parallel that we could have easily stayed in Hawaii for the same money.  Yeah thanks for pointing that out.  This is not to say we didn’t have a good time.  We’ll just cut it a little shorter next time.  Live and learn, as they say.

Another “interesting” feature of our vacation was we stayed in a “tiny home.”  Some may use the term “single wide” but tiny home sounds so much hipper.  We’ve 1/2-jokingly thought of moving into a tiny home some day, so this was kind of our test run.  Four hundred square feet of luxury living.  It was OK.  One big drawback, apparently tiny homes have tiny beds.  We quickly decided our full-size bed days are well behind us.  We’re big proponents of the “sprawl” type of sleeping, and this little cot wasn’t about to accommodate that.  We were relatively sleepless the whole week.  Again:  Live and learn.

As anticipated, I have a bunch of pictures if nothing else.  Heck I might even post more later in the week.