Man I am all out of sorts. Since I posted about Christmas last time, I feel obligated to title this one “New Years.” As I was reading somewhere the other day, the holidays will get a person all messed up. Don’t know what day it is, don’t know what is about to happen or has already happened… It’s just chaos. I cannot in good conscience post a recap my awesome NYE party though, because as far as I know it hasn’t happened. And honestly, very likely won’t. I’m holding out hope though.

As for Christmas, it was a good one. We even put up “the tree” this year, which is just about as festive as we feel compelled to get. We also hosted the “Christmas-Day-Eve” dinner at out house. We usually join in the fun at our friends the James’ holiday celebrations out here, so every now and then we try and host one of the events at our house. Always a great time, but wow do they have a big group. We ended up with 25 plates, and that doesn’t even count a few random little-uns I saw running around. A crowd that size takes just a little more preparation than I am used to, but luckily we were able to call in some help. I broke out both the briskets I cooked last weekend, and that covered the main dish, if barely. (Side note – I reheated them with my sous vide cooker; Fantabulous. That is the way to go.) We also made a huge pot of beans, and a bunch of delicious sides and appetizers showed up. And desserts… Oh my. I was all happy that nearly all the food was eaten, and then after everyone left we had an entire counter full of cookies, candy, popcorn, pies… Good grief. Let’s just say our diet hasn’t been real healthy the last several days.

Well, my website is back up. For how long, I cannot say. If you didn’t notice it was down… It was. Quite broken. It’s been kind of sketchy for some time, and after my Big Christmas Upgrade of 2019, it finally just “went away.” No errors, just a shiny white page where my years and years (hours and hours? minutes and minutes?) of work were previously displayed. A good bit of ciphering later, it came back. It seems to have something to do with rebooting my fancy web server. The optimal resolution here would seem to be “never, ever reboot,” but unfortunately that just isn’t quite practical.

And what else have we been doing, outside of learning to restore sql databases? Well, not a whole lot. Shipping out some Christmas presents, getting a few Christmas presents, the holiday norm. Saturday I got the always-exciting joy of firing up my smoker and cooking the Christmas briskets. I went with a new plan, and for once it worked out. That afternoon we joined some friends for a big-screen showing of Christmas Vacation at a nearby theater, and after that around town for some generic holiday cheer. When we got home in the early evening, I fired up the smoker, put on two briskets… And went to bed. Gasp. I am starting to get enough faith in that thing that it can be left unattended for quite some period of time. Naturally, I woke up around 3:00 in a mad panic that the holiday meal was ruined, but upon dashing outside in my shorts and bare feet found it quite steadily cooking away. Indeed, it ran just fine until around 8:30, when it finally ran out of fuel. Like magic, I tell ya’. Initial sampling of the brisket indicates positive results, I’ll be hoping for the best Wednesday at dinner.

I could have sworn I posted an update after Thanksgiving. Maybe the dogs ate it. It was a good holiday though, so I am inclined to go ahead and recap the day a week late. As is usually the case, we joined forces with our friends the James’ clan for the festivities. And quite the clan it is. I think the final count was around 25 people. The one downside was that the weather didn’t cooperate quite like it has in recent years. With a crowd that size it’s nice to have some outdoor seating options, but this year was just too chilly, not to mention wet. Eh, there was plenty of room inside. For a mob this size we went with two turkeys; One smoked, and one deep fried. We didn’t smoke the bird, we picked it up from Schwingles Meat already cooked. We’ve ordered from them several times and it’s just as good (OK likely better) than anything I could smoke up, and certainly easier. We threw in a ham for good measure too. Yeah we went a bit overboard on the meat, but it’s nice to have options. It was a fantastic meal, honestly the best I can remember. (Granted, my memory doesn’t go back too far.)

I declare that weekend to have been downright adventurous, in comparison to my normal weekend. I took off Thursday evening in the motorhome, destination Bodega Bay, to enjoy a little crabbin’. That is the proper verb, naturally, for capturing, cooking, and eating crabs. Crabs of the dungeness variety to be more specific. It was supposed to be a few weekends ago, but something happened and the season got all messed up. I started to read up on it but my short attention span kicked in before I finished. Something involving the whales, the weather, and who know what all. I am sure I’ve described the back-story before, but as a brief recap these 20-ish guys have been meeting up in Bodega Bay for this event for 30+ years. I secured an invite a few years back and it was so much fun I’ve returned since. In a small stroke of genius, I brought my friend Michael along this year, slightly upgrading my level on the Interloper Hierarchy.

So what does one do while crabbin’? Well, there is no small amount of time spent sitting around a fire and cooking. It’s a rather “primitive” campground, not much in the way of activities. Which is fine, the group seems to have little difficulty making their own. Boccie ball, seeing what all can be cooked (or not) successfully over a campfire, card games, etc. And then there are the actual boat trips out. The boat is rather smallish, so four guys go out at once. Four guys, times a 10 per person limit, and usually 40 crabs come back per trip. That sets off a flurry of activity, cleaning them, boiling them, and getting them on ice. I purchased my license ahead of time, but decided to make myself as scarce as possible when the boat went out. I actually kept up my cloak of invisibility until somebody came banging on my door Sunday morning at 7:00. Need more crew!! Rats. What that means is, they really need one more body on the boat to max out the crab limit. Fair enough, I wanted to take some crab home. Fun trip at any rate, looking forward to the next one already. And I’ve got a freezer full of fresh crab meat.

No, it is not the happiest of Mondays. There is never, ever anything happy about a Monday. That’s just my eternally optimistic outlook shining through once again. (Like most weeks, it didn’t work out for me.) But then, this generally covers the weekend, and that wasn’t too shabby at all. Friday wasn’t overly eventful. The weather has been just fantastic here, so I’ve been more than content to sit on the back porch and watch TV in the evenings. I turned on the heaters, started up the TV, and decided to watch Caravan of Souls for entertainment. I’ve been wanting to watch it for some time, as I thought it interesting that much of it was filmed in Lawrence KS. Predictably, I fell asleep about 10 minutes in and missed the majority of the movie. Keep that one on the list.

Saturday I ran down the grocery and picked up a 2.5 lb steak, and we invited another couple over for dinner. I was planning to throw it on the Traeger, but at the last moment decided to switch it up and go the sous vide route. It worked out pretty well, if I do say so my darn self. Better than the Traeger, you may ask? Well I just can’t for sure, I’ve had good luck on that too. I’ll have to do them side by side some day and have a little taste test. The problem there is you’re looking at 5-plus pounds of steak on the table. Nothing wrong with leftovers I guess.

Sunday came together very nicely. I’d really planned on firing up my new griddle out back and making brunch. I even had my menu picked out, breakfast burritos. Luckily I kept this plan to myself, as when I got up in the morning it was immediately clear I’d over-committed. Just didn’t have it in me. Instead, we met up with some friends at El Dorado Cafe. They’ve got a website but it’s pretty sketchy so I’ll skip the link. Anyway, it’s one of our favorite places, and a good breakfast is notoriously hard to find around here, so we make the 15 minute drive out to this place now and then. By the time I’d finished enjoying my delicious chicken fried steak, it was about 75 degrees and sunny outside so we dropped the top on the convertible and had a nice drive out to Amador county to visit one of our favorite wineries. We were somewhat surprised when they told us we hadn’t been there in a year, and they’d been holding four club shipments for us. Oops, sorry about that. We’re trying to cancel most of our wine clubs, we just can’t seem to track them. Afterwards as we were driving home, some friends texted us and invited us to chili on their back patio for dinner. Uh, yes please! That was a fine ending to the weekend.