Woot, I’m officially back in the swing of things. Until I’m not, anyway. The holiday season is nearly upon us, which always proves a challenge. But, I’ll keep my ever-optimistic attitude and see where it goes.
Wow, the season changed rather abruptly out here. We seem to have missed Fall, and jumped straight from summer to winter. Or perhaps it was just a very abbreviated season; Pretty much Friday & Saturday, then straight into cold. We made the most of the two nice days though. Friday after work we went over to a friends house for a bbq. Can’t ever go wrong with that plan. This was extra-exciting as it was the grand debut of his new smoker. His Traeger recently shot craps after a rather brief life, and with his refunded money he got a Recteq 590 instead. I gotta say, I have a little pellet-grill envy. (Note I didn’t bring my Cascade into that conversation; I’ll stick with it over the pellets any day.) It is decidedly better than my Traeger though. I almost wish mine would have died along with his so I could do the same trade-up. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with my current assortment of outdoor cooking apparatus. Anyway, he did a few pork butts and they came out just great. Much more smoke than a Traeger, a great app to keep an eye on it, and just overall better built. We threw on some chicken wings and sausage too, also came out great. It gets the “recommended” review.
Saturday was a truly spectacular day in the weather category. We loaded up the convertible with all the dogs and took off on a little local wine-tasting escapade. Side note: “All the dogs” as this point in time is three. Little Fabio got adopted out, and we promptly ended up with another waif. “Grey” is a roughly 3 month old dachshund mix. Yep, a puppy. Oh joy. Hey, we’ve never like the carpet in this house anyway. Anyway, back to our afternoon, we started with lunch out in Somerset, then hit a few wineries on the way back towards our house. We had three spots scheduled, but the day got away from us. Stop one was MV Winery. It is a bit lacking in “ambiance” if that’s the right word, but I’m quite a fan of their wines. Their tasting list is rather extensive though. Geez, I appreciate that you make a lot of varietals, can I try them over two or three visits instead of all at once? Add that to the fact that the girl helping us was much more interesting in playing with the dogs than pouring wine, and we ended up being there around 3 hours. Hey, it was a 75 degree sunny day, and we were sitting outside tasting great wine, can’t really complain too much. The second stop was Mira Flores, about ten minutes from our house. Now this spot is a little more in the scenic category. They’ve got a great view from their awesome patio, it’s always great hanging out there. Unfortunately we only had an hour left when we got there, but we enjoyed our short time. Our last scheduled stop was Narrow Gate, but we were out of time. The world pretty much stops at 5:00 around these parts. Oh well, it is literally in our back yard, we’ll hop over there another day.
Sunday was a down-day, full of football and food. We had a heck of time getting the Chiefs game, so that started our afternoon poorly. I don’t know what happened. We’ve never had any trouble using a combination of VPN service & various streaming sites, but the last few weeks have been busts. No matter what we tried, all we could get was the local broadcast, which was the Ravens. Once that game reached blowout status they switched over luckily, but that was well into the second half. Guess I need to work on a new scheme for getting the right game, maybe even **GASP** spend some money.
