Another one in the books, and not a bad one.  Rather busy actually.  Friday afternoon I got a text from a buddy I used to work with in KC, since relocated to Denver, that I hadn’t seen in many moons.  He was in town, so we headed out to lunch and then met up again for happy hour.  I didn’t see any reason to diverge from my usual schedule of events, so I recommended Hop House for the festivities.  (Which, despite my weekly patronage, continues to maintain the slowest website in the universe.  Are they running that thing over a 56k modem or something?)  We hung out there for a few hours, then as it got predictably loud and crowded we moved on to dinner at Relish.

Saturday he was scheduled to head west to visit other friends, so I tried to come up with something to do in that line of travel.  After no small amount of cipherin’, I decided on Lagunitas Brewery in (sort of) nearby Petaluma.  I’d been wanting to go there since we relocated, but it’s a bit of a stretch on the mileage.  Having company and being in need of entertainment though, it made sense to make the trip.  Well worth the drive, as I’d heard from many others.  It was definitely a popular destination, all the tables were full shortly after they opened.  (By some lack of planning on my part we showed up 45 minutes before opening time, so we didn’t have much trouble finding seats ourselves.)  They had a great outdoor seating area, tasty food, and of course fresh beer to sample.  We enjoyed the sunny afternoon for several hours, then he continued westward and we headed back up the hill.  As the day went on, I’d been having a running text conversation with my amigo back in EDH, regarding a smoker purchase.  I’ve cooked up several hunks o’ flesh since moving here, and he was easily swayed towards the KC smokin’ hobby.  As Thanksgiving nears, we’ve been discussing the logistics around getting my smoker over to his house for the turkey cook, and apparently he woke up Saturday with the wild hair to just get one himself.  He’d been doing his research and came up with the wise decision of a Weber Smokey Mountain, a solid choice in my book.  Being very free with other people’s money, I tried to steer him towards the 22.5″ model, but he settled at the midsize 18.5″.  Like any new toy, he headed directly home, fired it up, and threw on some ribs and pork butts.  I was driving down the freeway at the time, which precluded an in-depth conversation, or I would have filled him in that a 2:00 starting time on pork butts results in a roughly midnight dinner time.  Eh, no matter, his family was out of town and he was just playing around anyway.  When we got back in town we headed over for some delicious baby backs;  Didn’t stick around for the pork though.

Sunday was chore day once again.  Ah, the tribulations of home ownership.  One major (for me) undertaking was to replace the filters in the air vents.  I’d checked them a few weeks ago and they were absolutely disgusting.  Not something I really expected on a two-month old house, but it’s probably from all the construction going on in the area, as well as having the windows wide open with the air conditioner max’d out when they were building it.  I’d prepared for the project by carefully notating the sizes stamped on them, and ordering a lifetime supply of each off Amazon.  The first went fine, then when I got to the one in the bedroom upstairs, trouble struck.  No matter which way I oriented the new one, it simply would not fit.  I kept going down the ladder, getting the old one, re-installing it, verifying the size on it, then I’d go back up the ladder with the new one.  Nope, still didn’t fit.  I’m quite embarrassed to say how many times I repeated this exercise, always with the same result.  After my legs finally gave out from climbing the ladder, I resorted to my long-dormant junior high geometry skills, and was able to ascertain that a measurement of 14″x20″ would doubtlessly result in a rectangle, whereas the object I was holding in my hand was most certainly a square shape.  This baffled me so much that I actually walked all the way down to the garage and got a tape measure, took it all the way back upstairs, and checked it out.  Yep, that’s a square alright, the proof is in the tape measure.  Upon closer inspection, I finally found that some evil-minded low-rent contractor had lopped six inches off one side.  Sigh.  Anybody want to buy a huge box of 14″x20″ filters, cheap?  I guess that project lends credence to the “buy local” theory if nothing else.  Bah, nothing a pair of heavy-duty scissors and a roll of duct tape couldn’t fix.