So that weekend was mostly ate up by a catastrophic pc failure.  Really now, is there any other kind of pc failure?  Nope, they’re pretty much all catastrophic.  I came into the (home) office Friday morning to a blinking black screen, informing me that no boot disk could be found.  Bummer.  Not a good start to the weekend.  I hopped on amazon and ordered a new drive with same day shipping, and when I got home from work that afternoon it was waiting on the porch for me.  Pretty slick.  A few things were learned over the course of this latest disaster.  My pc backup software (Acronis True Image) is generally worthless.  I’ve used it since 2010, faithfully upgrading to the latest version every year.  It’s really the only software I’ve ever purchased, outside of Microsoft Windows & Office, and my anti-virus.  Over all those years, I’ve never really used it.  So this was the big test:  I booted my new drive up to the rescue disk, clicked “restore image” and went to eat dinner.  I came back to a screen not unlike the one I’d woken up to that morning.  Fail.  Guess I won’t be buying the next version.  So, I spent the rest of my weekend building Windows install disks, hunting all over the house for various serial numbers, blah blah blah.  So lame.  Good news is I don’t think I really lost anything, as all my music, pictures, and documents are stored on another device.  And as an added bonus, my new drive is faster than snot.  Really fast snot, however fast that is.

Notable events over the weekend included a trip to the dog park, and a cookout involving a really large steak.  In chronological order, the steak came first on Saturday evening.  We had friends over and I headed down to the grocery and bought a steak for us all to share.  One steak for two couples?  Cheaping out again there, Phil?  Well, the one steak weighed in at a not unimpressive 3.8 lbs.  Now THAT is a steak.  Somewhere between a steak and a roast I’d say, actually.  It took me over an hour to get that thing up to medium rare on the Weber, making dinner a bit late.  It was worth it though, it came out very tasty.  Then Sunday morning, we took Quinn to the dog park here in El Dorado Hills.  Really not such a big event, but it was fun.  We took his friend Renfield this time, in case there were no other puppies there to play, which was indeed the case.  There was one other big goofy something-a-doodle, but Quinn was terrified of him.  Little intimidated by the size difference I guess.  He had fun though, and slept soundly beside us while we enjoyed lunch afterwards.