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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Another weekend in the books. Another struggle to remember what the heck we did… Sigh. I actually took a few notes this week so I would have something to work with, but I don’t remember what I did with them. Another sigh. Friday, I do recall what we did, simply because it was so out of the ordinary. We drove out of our circle (just a little way) and watched our friend Harper competing in a cross country race. It was nothing like I expected, not that I had any idea what to expect in the first place. It was some kind of season finals thing, and it was absolute mayhem. I don’t guess I would put it on a par with Kauffman Stadium or anything, but there were definitely several thousand people there. Pretty sure each of them drove separately too, there was no parking to be found. I felt like I’d been in one of the races by the time we finally walked all the way to the course. It was rather exciting though, we had fun. Luckily Harper is only nine years old, so her race was early which let us beat the main traffic leaving. Sadly, she informed us that cross country is no fun and this would be the end of her illustrious career. (I’m right there with her on that; Running is a horrible sport.) After that we met up with her and her folks at a nearby restaurant for some awesome pizza.

Saturday was partially consumed with the excitement of the #10 ranked Oregon Ducks game, against #9 UCLA. We’ve become low-level Oregon fans since moving here, and this was a big game for them. Our friends had tickets to the game, and had a big party bus lined up to take everybody. Unfortunately they didn’t invite us, so this information has no bearing on my weekend whatsoever, but it sure did sound fun. While they were whooping it up with 50,000 fans, we were doing our best to share the fun from the comfort of our couch. Much safer. Oregon won the game quite decisively, so a good time was had by all.

Sunday we traveled down the hill to a friend’s house for a big brunch and football. Haven’t done that in a while, it was a great time. Great food too, although maybe too much of it. We had scrambled eggs, corned beef hash, and biscuits and gravy. That’s a heavy start to the day right there. I was barely able to keep my eyes open during the early games, but then I managed to rally a bit for the Chiefs game. It wasn’t easy to stay subdued while sitting with a bunch of San Francisco fans, but I thought we did a pretty fair job of it. It was a pretty good whipping, no need to rub it in. Besides that, I didn’t want anybody throwing leftover biscuits at me.

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One of my latest ingenious plans: I intentionally skipped updating this yesterday, and will instead get it done today. That way, my simple mind will be tricked into thinking today is Monday, and another unbearably sluggish week will be over before I know it! Solid plan, right?!?! We’ll see how that works out.

We kicked last weekend off strong with a few winery trips on Friday. We visited a few local spots; Shenandoah, Soban, and Rombauer. (I’ll skip the links, the sites aren’t too whippy anyway.) All good spots, and the weather was fantastic! Our grand plan is to make the most of the glorious Fall weather before it gets cold. OK, “cold-ish.” It ain’t KC weather, but we won’t be rolling around in the convertible in a few months either.

We may have started the weekend strong, but the rest was sort of a bust. We did have some friends up for a late lunch and the Chief’s game on Sunday, so that was sort of fun. Have to add the “sort of” qualifier, because the game itself kind of brought the whole day down. I made Pork and Black Beans for lunch, which I was fairly happy with. I’ve used that recipe a few times, kind of a good (and simple) Fall dish. Might put a little more effort into the salsa next time, the one on that recipe is pretty boring. Fascinating (not) problem on that though: If you search for “Frijol con Puerco” recipes, the results are (predictably, I guess,) in Spanish. If you search for “Pork and Beans,” you get… well… pork and bean recipes. I swear, will my life-issues ever cease?!?!?

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The hot weather is sort of hanging around out here. Not AS hot, but hot. It’s October, I want a high of 75. Doesn’t look like that is going to happen for a few weeks. At least it is cooling off nicely at night I guess.

We snuck in a stealth trip to KC last weekend, hence the missing update. The occasion was Justin (Donette’s nephew) & Jeanne’s wedding, which they finally pulled off after two years of covid-related delays. It was worth the wait! We had a great time, saw a bunch of people we haven’t seen in too long, and the ceremony clocked in at a more-than-tolerable 5 minutes. The day after the wedding, we hitched a ride with her sister Victoria to their house out near St Louis. They moved there some time ago, and we’d never seen the new place, so now we have! Just one night there, then it was back to CA. Happily, the flights home went MUCH smoother than the flights out to KC. Man, I am about ready to put Southwest on my banned list. I don’t even fly that much, but every single time I do they mess it up. We ended up in KC nearly four hours late, getting us in at an unpleasant 4:00 in the morning. Too old for that mess!

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I guess that wasn’t a BAD weekend, per se. Sort of iffy though. We had some fun for sure, but it was just a bit tempered by the abysmal football games. Just a bit though. Saturday we got up and turned on the Missouri game, (9:00 CA time,) which I genuinely thought they were going to win. Yeah, not so much. Losing is bad enough, but losing like that makes it even worse. The afternoon game was Oregon, which we are making some small effort to be fans of. It started off in a manner quite similar to the Missouri game. In fact, after halftime, we just turned it off and headed to an Oktoberfest nearby. This was a win-win for everybody; We had fun watching the German dancers and band, and without our bad luck hanging over them, the Ducks came back and won. Even got some texts while we were there: “Wow, are you watching this game? It’s crazy!” Well, no we are not, and you’re welcome.

Sunday we had some friends up for a barbecue, which I always look forward to. (We don’t get much company up here in the hills…) While the ribs were cooking, we watched the disaster that was the Chiefs. Holy smokes. I know they have a tendency to play poorly in Indianapolis, but that was ridiculous. Those are the games that fuel the “It’s all fixed” conspiracies. It honestly looked like they were trying to lose. Maybe we should have turned it off, like the Oregon game. We stuck out the whole miserable four quarters though, even when it became apparent what the inevitable conclusion would be. On the upside, I was quite happy with the ribs. I finally got to cook some spare ribs, which I prefer any day over baby backs. For whatever reason though, baby backs are usually on sale at the butcher shop, and spare ribs never are. Got lucky this time. Only problem was, I decided I needed four slabs, which ended up being way too much. I’ll be eating ribs through October, which isn’t a horrible situation. Oh, and there was a slight (self induced) problem with the smoker… After cooking on it for probably six years now, and it working perfectly every time, I decided I needed to try a few new tricks. (Insert eye roll here…) I put a few quarts of water in the bottom of it this time when I fired it up. Adds moisture, keeps the bottom clean, what could go wrong? This was despite the guy who built it telling me more than once that it didn’t need any water in it. (But then what would he know, I’m on the Triple Fat Back BBQ team!!!) Turns out, he might be more familiar with the design than me. It threw the temperature all out of whack, and I also had the lovely issue of cleaning up a bunch of greasy water later. Yeah, scratch that idea off the list. For evening entertainment, we watched our psuedo-local 49’s team, who also lost a poorly played game.

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