OK this weekend REALLY gave me nothing to work off.  I was oncall, so that pretty much screwed up my entire block of “entertainment time.”  Friday was actually the only time I even left the house.  They had a Trick or Treat event up at Donette’s school, so we headed up to check that out.  Basically a bunch of parents decorated their cars and parked in the lot, and handed out candy to all the kids.  I assume the thought there was that they then don’t have to actually walk anywhere, the lil’ buggers can just get all the goods in one place with no effort expended on the part of either kids or parents.  Very efficient, I like it.  We brought a bunch of candy but got there too late to get parked and decorated and all that, so we just walked around and checked out the costumes and stuff.  It seemed to me that it was all a rather elaborate ploy by Donette to have an excuse to buy candy and then keep it for herself.  Hey, it worked.  After that we went home for a late dinner;  Chorizo stuffed poblanos.  If you can’t go out and have fun, I guess staying home and cooking is a reasonable substitute.

Saturday I got up and started on my super-duper Windows 7 install.  I bought it off Newegg at a pre-release price several months ago, and it showed up in the mail on Friday.  Friday night I stayed up executing my rather elaborate back-up plan, so I was ready to go first thing in the morning.  While I’m not ready to give a full review yet, the initial impression is quite positive.  My PC is probably about two years old, and everything worked right off the bat;  I didn’t even have to install a single device driver.  Can’t even say that about my beloved XP Pro.  It did do a few “weird” things…  Maybe “unexpected” is a better word.  Nothing that can’t be worked around though.  My biggest fear was restoring my 80 + gig of music to iTunes, which turned out to be a total non-issue.  That project went on for the better part of the day.  It looked so nice outside that I did get out and mow the lawn, hopefully for the last time.  It didn’t really need it, that was mostly just an excuse to enjoy the weather a bit.  Meanwhile, Donette was in Waldo renting a storage unit for our excess junk.  I don’t really enjoy speaking of this project;  It strikes me as inherently sad that two people can have so much crap that it can’t be stored in a three bedroom house.  But, I will grant that there are extenuating circumstances that make it “convenient,” such as the ongoing basement project.  The plan is to only keep it through the winter while that gets completed.  Truth be told I imagine we will have it forever, but we shall see.

I stayed up working all night Saturday, then got up just in time for the football games.  I kept 1/2 my attention on the game and the other 1/2 on restoring more PC stuff.  Maybe a little more than 1/2 was given to the PC, as the Chiefs game wasn’t exactly riveting.  Meanwhile, Donette was experimenting in the kitchen, whipping up a pot of butternut squash and carrot soup.  It came out very well, and was supposedly even healthy.  Shortly after the successful soup project, we got to work on our third effort at tamale making.  I thought this batch came out even better than last week’s;  I think we’re getting the hang of it.  We filled them with my disastrous brisket from the American Royal, which proved to be a quite fitting use for it.  (After simmering it the slow cooker for several hours.)  That’s about the whole of the weekend.  Next weekend, NEXT weekend is gonna be fun.  Oh yeah, I’m gonna blow it out next weekend.