I think I’m closed for the holidays.  As usual, my November-December anxiety level is increasing steadily.  It’ll peak somewhere around Christmas, slowly drop off until after New Years, then I’ll be able to return to some semblance of normalcy.  Such as my normalcy goes, anyway.  Here’s some pictures from the weekend.  It’s all I’ve got in me.

We dialed things way back this weekend.  No ocean expeditions, no camping trips, no nuthin.  Donette has a lot of travel coming up, and of course the holidays are upon us, so we just kind of laid low and rested up.  I even wasted my revered Friday night on a bunch of nothing.  I cooked up a nice ribeye for dinner…  And that was about it.

Saturday I spent the entire day on my various computers.  My antivirus expired a few weeks ago, so I decided it was time to update that.  I went with the “new purchase” option, because they charge so stinking much to renew.  And, squarely in the “nothing is easy” category, I ended up having to remove my existing install and start from scratch.  The Man, always bringing me down.  I also worked on my elaborate photo-backup scheme.  I had a drive failure a few weeks ago, and darn near lost a bunch of photos because my backups weren’t working quite like I always thought they were.  Luckily I got it figured out, but decided to implement a secondary backup plan.  After looking at a few semi-pricey options, I opted for just using Amazon Drive.  They’ve got unlimited picture storage…  I want to store pictures…  Perfect crime.  So, I got it all set up, which was a little harder than anticipated, and launched it.  After it thought for a few seconds, it came back with “Now syncing 52,000 files.”  Oh my, I didn’t know I had THAT many pictures  So, if my website seems even slower than usual, it’s because it is still syncing.  It’s about 1/2-way there, I guess it’ll finish some time this week.

Sunday I immersed myself in the football games of the day, and followed my Fantasy Football team.  We even got “lucky” enough to get to watch the Chiefs game, a rarity out here.  So, now you know why they broke their winning streak, the bad luck charms were watching.  Sigh.  It was a moderately entertaining game at least.  I also took the somewhat sad step of bringing in my TV from the back porch.  I think porch-TV season is over.  The high is in the 50’s all week, so the evenings are just a little too chilly to sit out there.  Sad day.  On the upside, I set up a sweet little room in the garage as an alternative.  I’m not sure exactly what this buys me over just sitting in the living room, but it seemed like the thing to do.  We’ll see how it works out.

This weekend was an adventurous one for sure, especially in my mundane world.  Several months ago I was out with some friends, talking about plans for the rest of the year, and a guy mentions “Hey I go on a crabbing trip in November if anybody is interested.”  I said yeah, I was, but didn’t follow up on it too well in my usual manner.  So early last week the same guy says “Well, the crab trip is this weekend, are you in?”  What the heck, yes I am.  I quickly threw together what I hoped might be enough gear to get me through a three-night camp, and we took off Thursday morning for Bodega Bay.  There was just four of us Thursday night, so we set up camp and got all the crab pots ready.  That included setting up the ropes and buoys, cutting up disgusting bait for them, and loading them in the boat.  I participated as little as possible, especially in the bait cutting.  Nasty stuff there.  There was only room for two guys on the boat with all the traps, so me and the other guy who’d never been stayed back while the other two made a run out and dropped them all.

Friday morning, we got up not-particularly-early and headed out to check the traps.  I will readily admit some trepidation at the size of the small-ish boat, which we were taking out over a mile off shore.  That’s a big ol’ ocean out there, and the water was rough.  I loaded up on Dramamine and those sea-sickness wristbands and hoped for the best.  My hopes were quickly dashed when we got out to the trap area.  We couldn’t see any shoreline, just big 10 foot swells going every which way.  All of a sudden the other newbie was chumming a little extra crab bait over the side, and I was pouring sweat and turning 3 shades of green.  Not fun.  I never got sick but I probably would have been better off if I had.  We stuck it out though, and pulled in our limit of crabs.  Then the guy driving the boat says, “Hey, you guys mind if we head out a few more miles and  do a little fishing for a while?”  Ohhhhhh nooooo.  I was sort of the odd man out on the trip, so I said, “Hey, yeah whatever, do your thing.”  My face must have said something else entirely, because he busted out laughing and said “Just jacking with you, we’ll head back.”  Picking on the new guys, real cool.

The entire rest of the weekend was spent repeating this process.  A lot more guys showed up thankfully, so I was spared more boat trips.  Every trip at least one guy would come back and head straight for his tent though.  I actually felt lucky that I recovered after the ride, some guys were out of commission for entire afternoons.  As for myself, I stuck to the crap prep and cooking teams, which was a blast.  Over the weekend we hauled in nearly 200 crabs and cooked them all up.  The veterans of the trip had been doing this for almost 20 years I guess, so they had a definite system down.  We ate crab every meal in some fashion, and still had more than plenty to divvy up and take home.  Good times!

That was a heck of a wild weekend.  Too wild for me.  That should, in theory, lead to an extensively long update, filled with all kinds of sordid details on the crazy things we did over the last few days.  Alas, instead it just left me exhausted, entirely too spent to actually type.

We started off on Friday when our friends Jill and David drove in from Texas.  Well, they didn’t actually drive in from Texas, they drove from somewhere else they’d been to, on the way to Texas, or from Texas…  I don’t know.  Sounded like a lot of driving.  They’re retired and it’s what they do.  We didn’t have much planned for Friday.  We threw some sausages on the grill and sat around on the patio catching up.

Saturday we got a late start.  We laid down a nice base with a delicious breakfast of stacked enchiladas, covered in a fiery green chile sauce they’d brought in from New Mexico.  Once I could feel my face again, we headed out for a little wine tasting in Sutter Creek.  I believe that little town has probably surpassed Amador for our local wine destination of choice.  Maybe a few minutes further on the drive, but worth it on several fronts.  One of them being the all important pizza-front…  They’ve got a great pizza place there.  Unfortunately we ate a little too much and were far too stuffed to enjoy the ribeyes we cooked when we got back home.  We made a pretty fair run at it though.

Sunday we headed the opposite direction, up to Auburn.  I wanted to take them to visit a few of my favorite local breweries;  Knee Deep and Moonraker filled that bill quite nicely. Our friends Michael & Alaina (and their new puppy) joined us there, and we had a nice afternoon.  Fine weather and a fine pint, hard to beat.  We cut that day a little short and went back to the house for Thai takeout and Sunday night football.  Whew, that’s too many activities in one weekend for the old man.

I suppose that was a fun weekend, despite an unusual amount of rainfall.  The worst part about wet weather here is listening to everybody you talk to say, “Well we really need the rain.”  Every…  Single…  Person.  And, I guess at the end of the day it’s true, but I don’t know why the ten rainy days a year always have to fall on the weekend.  Plenty of time for rain when I’m stuck in my cubical all day.  It’s not like it really ruined my weekend anyway I suppose.  I kicked things off Friday at the house.  I couldn’t get anybody to play with me, so I just sat on the patio by myself and watched the baseball game.  Perfect Fall weather;  Had the heater fired up and the patio cover kept things dry, it was really a pretty nice night out.

Saturday was the big Halloween Spooktacular at our neighborhood clubhouse.  Yes, things have to come to this.  Donette is on the social committee, so she spent a sizable amount of her day over there setting up.  The event started around 6:00, and you could tell right off it was going to get kind of crowded.  Indeed, I think they said by the end of the night nearly 500 people had showed up.  Way too many really;  I think next year they are going to pare things back a bit.  But, luckily the rain held off and it turned out to be a lot of fun.  Crazy costumes and sugar-crazed kids…  Good scene to observe from a safe distance.

Sunday we slept in a bit, then our friends Michael and Alaina had the bright idea to go out wine tasting.  It really was a bright idea as it turned out;  The rain had apparently scared everybody off and we had all the tasting rooms to ourselves.  We ending up hitting four spots, and then heading back to their house for grilling and Sopranos reruns.  Fine day of entertainment.  Tonight we’re having a few people over to hand out candy, we’ll see how that turns out.  Looks like it might rain again, leaving us in the house snacking on 10 pounds of chocolates.