Ah, another pseudo-holiday is upon us. Good ol’ Halloween. One of our favorites in years past, but not so much anymore. Another casualty of moving to the hills; Nobody is going to walk up a 1/4 mile of pitch-black gravel to see if that crazy old couple has any candy. And, they’d be disappointed, because we don’t. We do actually have some rather modest decorations this year, consisting of a single pumpkin somebody gave us sitting (uncarved) on the steps. Shows a little effort, I suppose.

That was a bit of a fun weekend, based on my pretty low bar of “fun” these days. Basically, leaving the house more than once is considered a wild, exciting weekend in my book. And man, did we ever tear it up these last few days! We went out not only Friday, but Saturday & Sunday as well! Surprised I’m not still in bed after all that mayhem. We actually got invited to go over to a friends’ house this evening to pass out candy, but we had to pump the brakes. Four days in a row?!?!? Yeah, I think not. To break down the details of that rather egregious exaggeration, our big night out Friday was happy hour at the place around the corner from our house. Turned out they were gearing up for a big costume party, so we only made it about 30 minutes before scurrying back to the safety of the house. The girl waiting on us was nice enough to say “It’d be a lot more fun with you guys here!” Well, thanks for the misplaced sentiment, but no, no it wouldn’t. Back at the house, we enjoyed a nice fire outside for a while, then Donette made a new pasta dish for dinner. I bought the spicy Italian sausage from Kings for the first time… Holy smokes it was, indeed, SPICY! Way too much for me. I made it through the meal with some help from a dishtowel and a handful of heartburn pills, but I think I’ll stick with the toned-down version next time.

Saturday we exercised our new-found interest in college football games once again. This is mostly the result of having nothing better to do, and it passes the time. Can’t tell you what games we watched other than Oregon, but we saw several. For dinner we traveled down to the big city and met some friends. (“Big City” being Placerville, not Sacramento.) We joined them at the Hangtown Cantina, one of our favorite dining spots when we make the journey all the way into town. (A rather daunting trip of eight miles or so.) Enjoyed some awesome Mexican food, hung out for a while, then headed back home for a few semi-scary movies.

Sunday turned out to be some fantastic weather. It’s going to turn chilly soon I imagine, so given the Chief’s bye week and limited interest in the other games, we decided to get out in the convertible for a drive. It was indeed a fantastic day for a road trip, if there is such a thing. We ended up heading to Sutter Creek, which is about a 45 minute drive down some nice winding roads. When we got there we went wine tasting at Yorba & Baiocchi wineries, kicked around the nice little town a bit, then headed back home. On the way back we took an unscheduled left turn and grabbed an early dinner at a pizza place, which was thankfully rather empty for a Sunday evening. Guess we were a little bit before the rush, but it’s usually packed anyway. We headed back home with best intentions of watching the evening football game, but I fell asleep rather quickly and missed the majority of it. Who won anyway?

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