It’s Football Season

Not a bad weekend, if perhaps a bit uneventful. Other adjectives might be unproductive, boring, tedious… Let’s stick with “uneventful” though. I really got sucked in by the start of the football season, and just didn’t quite get around to doing anything else. Probably should have done something wacky on Friday evening so I could say I at least did something, but I had to rest up for my weekend on the couch, I guess. At least I can say the games went favorably! All my favorite teams won, both college and pro, and my not-so-favorite (i.e. despised) teams all lost. **Not to include the 49ers game, which hasn’t been played yet. I can’t really say they fall on my “favorites” list anyway, but I do try and follow them.

Sunday, we did have some friends up for dinner, so at least we had one “event” over the weekend. True, I sat on the couch and stared at the football games the whole time, but then I’m not that good of company anyway. I invited them up a last week after the local butcher shop advertised that they had some SRF steaks on hand. I’ve purchased a brisket off that website before, (and it was great,) but never the steaks. Just never quite been able to pull the trigger on ordering them off the website. Regardless of whether they are “worth it” or not, it’s just a lot of money to spend on steaks, and then they ding you additional for shipping of course. So, this was my chance to try them without the shipping charge, and as an added bonus they were actually a bit cheaper than the prices on the website. Anyway, overall rating, I will definitely buy them again if I see them at the butcher shop. Wow, they were good. Super rich though, two steaks fed the four of us easily. Donette made a new potato salad also that came out really well. Had a good time!

Lacking any other real content, I shall provide a few mini-rants stemming from grave injustices I suffered recently. First up is a local grocery revelation that occurred last week. Since our move out here, my go-to store has always been Nugget Markets. Heck, I’ve even got a link to them on my page. Love(d) that store. That decade-long support came to an end last week when I signed up for the weekly email from the Fork Lift store down in Cameron Park. As soon as I got my grocery ads on Wednesday (which is a huge moment of excitement in my life,) the scam became obvious. My Nugget ad and Fork Lift ad were exactly the same flyer. Not just similar, the exact same ad with a different name at the top. The same that is, except for the prices; Every single item at Fork Lift was between $1 and $2 cheaper. Every single one! That really adds up over a full grocery cart. Added bonus, it’s half the distance from my house. To think of all the money I’ve wasted over these years, tsk tsk. Just a few examples of this treachery:

Next up, an advertisement I saw on FaceBook for a local restaurant. Behold:

Tell me please, what exactly IS “Kansas style BBQ?” You can’t, of course, because IT DOESN’T EXIST!!! THERE IS NO SUCH THING!!!! This place is actually one of my favorites too, so it was a double whammy. I am not kidding, this actually marks the second time I have encountered this reference out here. The first was at a restaurant in EDH, which I was able to shake off as being… Well… In EDH. They don’t know any better, bless their hearts. (It was actually for “Kansas style ribs” though, which might be even more egregious.) So, now I am forced to strike my favorite steakhouse off my list of places to eat. They are dead to me.

Other random pictures:

Excitement on the Mountain

Just kidding, we didn’t have any excitement. Never do, sigh. Probably wouldn’t know what to do if I did actually find some excitement, so it’s safer this way. We pretty much just hung out and enjoyed the long weekend. We had a few interesting moments, if not particularly exciting… Did a small winery tour on Saturday and tried out a couple of new recipes over the weekend.

Friday, we tried out the first food experiment; Philly Cheesesteaks. Yeah, we’ve made cheesesteaks before, but always the traditional “shave up a ribeye and griddle it” kind of thing. This time I used a cross-rib roast instead of a steak. This oddity was, as is usually the case, driven by the fact that the roast was cheap. At least 1/3 the price of a good ribeye. Only trouble is, it’s NOT a ribeye. I really have never even heard of the cut, but for five bucks a pound I decided to give it a try. I ended up dropping it in the sous vide cooker for 30 hours at 130 degrees, and it worked out well. Only thing I’d change was, we didn’t like the rolls we ended up with. Good news is, we have plenty of beef left over so we’ll just get some different ones and try again.

The other thing we tried out was a rib recipe off the Bachans bbq sauce site. I’m honestly not sure how I ended up coming across that recipe, but I thought it looked good. And, luckily, it did come out pretty good, because we had some friends over to join us for dinner. Risky! I was pretty happy with the ribs, but next time I’ll start checking the temp sooner. I let them run the two hours listed in the recipe before checking them, and when I got ready to do the foil step they were already pretty much done. Oops. I cut the last step down to 30 minutes, and they survived.

brrrr!!!

Wow, it’s cold up here!! OK, it WAS cold for a brief period of time. Friday, due to some wacky weather phenomenon I didn’t care to research, it dropped from 90+ to 60. That’s a downright midwest-esque weather swing there. It stayed cool all through the weekend, which was a very welcome break. Saturday it even rained! Can’t remember the last time it rained, but it’s been several months. Of course, when it really started coming down, I happened to be out grocery shopping. In my Jeep. With no top on it. Whoops. Yeah, it got wet, and so did I. I went across the street and had lunch to wait it out, and it came down for quite a while. You could tell it was a big deal from the number of people I saw in the parking lot taking pictures of the rain. (Or were they taking pictures of the Jeep filling up with water? Who knows.)

That night we drove up to the Knott Hole Bar & Grill to watch some friends sing. They had a brief stint of four people in the band, but now they’ve gone back to just the two of them. They sounded great, and it was fantastic weather to sit outside and watch them. They play a few other spots nearby, but we usually miss out because they play past our bedtime. (Which is admittedly rather early, but I guess that happens when you get old.)

Sunday we just laid around the house with the windows open and enjoyed the last day of the cool weather. Fired up the grill, watched some movies, and that wrapped up the weekend.

First Time Cruising!

We have returned from our long-planned trip to the frozen tundra of Alaska. Yep, “frozen tundra” is really a thing. That and “permafrost.” Anyway, this trip was my first time on a cruise ship. We took a little mini-cruise from Florida to the Bahamas many years ago, but I’ve always heard it did not really count in the cruise world. This turned out to indeed be the case, this trip was in a whole different class than that overnight boat trip.

We spent the first few days and nights on a “land tour,” starting in Anchorage and then up to Denali. This was a good way to get to see the famous Denali National Park, although I must I say I could have done without all the bus time to get there and back. Couldn’t really be avoided though, that was just how you get there. After that we took another bus ride to Seward, Alaska where we got on the Norwegian Jewel ship for the cruise part of the trip. I will admit to rather low expectations of the whole “cruise” thing, but it was really great. The port cities were fun and interesting (if quite tourist oriented,) and the ship was just right up my alley. I have admittedly low entertainment requirements, but it certainly had plenty to keep me occupied. The food was great, the crew was great, and I just generally really enjoyed it.

On the downsides? Well, we were with a large group (my family,) and Norwegian just botched up our air travel to an unimaginable degree. I honestly cannot even fathom what they were thinking, if they were at all. At the end of the day(s,) I guess we all got there and back to our respective origin cities, if not without considerable hassle and delays. Smaller quibble: The internet service on the ship was absolutely abysmal. We all signed up for it so that we would have an easy way to communicate within our group. Where we were, daily plans, dinner reservations, etc. It was so bad that the texts rarely went through though. For a little insult to injury, it was $80 per person. I would imagine we could have gotten our money back on that without too much trouble, but I was so happy with everything else I kinda just chalked it up to “lesson learned.” (They did say the ship is supposed to be getting Starlink in the near future. Didn’t help us on this trip but I imagine if we go again that will fix the issues.) Only other downside was I got sick. Not like sea-sick, but germy-boat sick. Donette did too, and some other members of the group. Sounds like that is just kind of a cruise thing. Blech, no fun. Next time I’ll pack my flu stuff along with everything else.

Full On Summer

I guess we’re in summertime now, and that means HOT. We’ve been stuck in triple digits for two weeks now. Supposed to stick around all this week too. I guess that’s what A/C is for. Given the heat, we didn’t do TOO much this weekend. Friday we just snuck out to our favorite local haunt, Bones. Haven’t been there in a while for various reasons, so it was good to see everybody again and catch up on the local news.

Saturday, we had a kiddy birthday party to attend. Well, at least that’s what I enjoyed telling anyone and everyone who happened to ask what we were doing for the weekend. The birthday boy was actually turning 31, so it’s not like I had to go to Chucky Cheese or anything. That’s a kid in my book though. I’m not really sure what area they live in; Fairplay maybe? It was way up a winding rural road. They’ve got a nice property up there, and the altitude made the heat a little more bearable than down at our house. It was a fun outdoor party, I had a great time. I did have something of a revelation while enjoying myself though; All of a sudden, I looked around and noticed that most people were playing games and acting crazy, and I was sitting in a chair with the Old Folk Group. This was a real eye-opener for me. Know what I did? I just kept right on sitting there. I was quite comfortable and enjoyed several conversations.

Sunday, we had a few places planned to visit, but none of them came together. TOO HOT!! Yeah, recurring theme there. I did run up to the grocery store and grab a pack of chicken. Despite the heat I kind of felt like grilling some bird. It was some of the best chicken I’ve ever grilled, if I do say so myself. I’ve got long-running issues with the dreaded leathery-chicken-skin, and for once it came out perfectly crispy. Grilled some passable artichokes for the first time also, so all-in-all it was just a successful cook!