The unpacking continues.  And continues, and continues, and continues.  I feel we made a sizable dent this weekend, thanks in no small part to Donette’s sister Victoria showing up and helping.  “Hey, glad you come see us, want to help unpack?”  That’s how we roll.  We have a good part of our garage back;  One (or maybe two) good trips to the recycle center to throw away boxes and the car will be back inside where it belongs.  Admittedly a large part of the stuff just went into the dining room, but at least it moved.

That took up a relatively major chunk of our weekend.  Her sister showed up Friday and we headed down to Hop House for a short happy hour, then it was home to watch the Royals.  Saturday we did some (very) light sight-seeing around the area, in a half-hearted attempt at being cordial hosts.  Didn’t want to let her out of the house too long though, there was just too much work to be done.  Sunday her sister had to move on to work in a nearby town, while Donette and I dug in and kept moving boxes.  We really got a lot done that afternoon, I was quite pleased.  Hung some shelves, moved stuff around, random organization…  All good.  I suppose it helped that the Chiefs weren’t on to distract us, although I’d have liked to see the game.  Then again, we watched the Royals game and look how that turned out;  Maybe our bad luck is filtering down to our favorite teams.  Sigh.

I have a few pics this week.  Actually, I have several pics but, alas, they aren’t where they are supposed to be.  I’m still blaming Uverse, something funky is going on.  Matter of fact, I can’t even get the ones I have to post correctly.  Sigh, check back please.

OK, so I got two whole pics to post.  Apparently it only works from Firefox for some odd reason.  Super, something else to work on.

I better make some kind of attempt at posting something I guess, although I’m still a bit put out with my Internet provider.  Apparently the mysterious people who lived in my brand new house before me called up and disconnected my service.  Sigh.  We were out for darn near a week before they finally came back out and hooked it up again.  (And acted like they were doing us a favor at that.)  The guy that came out and installed it was pretty helpful, the entire rest of the company I had the displeasure of working with were beyond pathetic.  Something tells me the whole episode isn’t quite finished yet either, I’m taking a “wait and see” stance on it.

So, Uverse aside, things have been going OK at the new house.  As of Friday, we are officially OUT of the rental house.  Geez I didn’t think we were ever going to get all our stuff moved.  I took the day off, rented a van from Uhaul, and got it over with.  My best guess in the morning was two trips at the most, and best case I was going to get it all in one trip.  Four full loads later, (and one trip to the Thrift store to give them some stuff,) the house was finally empty.  The BAD news is we don’t have anywhere to put it all.  It’s just kind of randomly piled in the dining room and garage right now, like an episode of Hoarders.  It is a sad thing when you’ve got a three-car garage and can’t put your one car in it because it’s too full of junk.  Ahhh, for a basement.  Meanwhile, the back yard project slowly continues.  A little TOO slowly for my tastes, but as long as it’s making progress I guess.  There was a guy delivering a truckload of plants when I left the house this morning, so maybe I’ll have trees when I get home.

How ’bout them Royals?  We are more than excited for the series.  Donette is a bit put out with me for not buying tickets to see a game in San Francisco, but I just can’t pull trigger.  Too rich for my blood!  We’ve got a nice new TV to watch it on, that’ll just have to do.  Got a few bets at the office on the outcome too, maybe I’ll win enough to cover the price of the tickets.  (Oh wait, none of the bets are for money…  Never mind.)

That is all.

Happy Monday.  We spent the better part of our weekend unpacking and moving, so I’m a bit lacking in any type of informative update.  Even more so than usual, that is.  We went out Friday I suppose, to the recently opened Hop House in El Dorado Hills.  It’s a nice place, I see a bit of potential for it, but it could use a few adjustments.  For starters, I could definitely suggest a few tweaks to their beer list if they asked.  (Which, remarkably, they haven’t.)  There are too many great local beers around here to be carrying some of the over-hyped big names they’ve opted for, and they don’t have that many taps to begin with.  Probably my biggest gripe is the glassware though.  They pour all their pints in Mason jars.  This may have struck someone as a quaint idea on paper, but it just doesn’t work.  They don’t pour right, they don’t drink right…  They just ain’t right.  They need to just throw those out and get some proper pints.  (Right after they throw out that gawd-awful website design.)  It’s definitely a nice place to stop by for a one-and-out though, and if you’re hungry their overpriced burgers are right on par, or better, with all the other nearby overpriced burgers.  If I hadn’t been so spoiled by the Bier Station in Waldo I’d probably be downright fond of it.

Outside of that somewhat impromptu restaurant review, I’m short on material.  We’ve managed to get most of the Royals games on TV, so that’s provided us plenty of entertainment.  We still have no blinds in the house, so that provides the neighbors with plenty of entertainment.  It’s all coming together though.  I hope.

I think we are starting to get settled into the new house, or maybe just accepting that we will never get settled in, or something along those lines.  We still have a daunting amount of stuff at the rental house, but I think we’re starting to consider just leaving it all for the next people.  (OK, not my good Staub cookware.  Or the plates. Or…  Alright maybe we better go get it all sometime.)  We didn’t really have time for moving this past weekend though, as our friends David & Jill came in from Texas.  They got the distinction of being our first house-guests in the new place, along with the associated conveniences.  “Oh yeah, sorry, we don’t have any towels yet.  Here, use my old tee-shirts.  Yeah the plates haven’t made it yet, we just sort of eat out of the skillet.  Don’t throw that McDonalds cup away, you’ll need it if you want a drink later.  Pull up a lawn chair, make yourself comfortable, the couch comes next week.”  And so on.  We made the best of it though, and at least we had a bed for them to sleep in.

The underlying reason for the visit was the Fall Music Festival at B.R. Cohn winery.  We purchased tickets for this event some time ago, and I’d been looking forward to it.  (Honestly, the ol’ music scene is just a bit lacking in the Folsom/EDH area.  I won’t claim I was thrilled to death with the lineup, but you take what you can get around here.)  It was a two-day event, but we only made it Saturday.  The drive to the winery was rather traumatic.  Some highway was closed somewhere, and I guess I-80 absorbed all the detour traffic, bringing it to a complete standstill for quite a ways.  We ended up missing the first few acts, which considering my challenges with attention span was probably for the best anyway.  We did get there just in time to catch Los Lonely Boys, which was a great way to start the afternoon.  They were easily my favorite act of the day, even having seen them before a few times.  I was, however, quickly reminded of my long-standing idea to bring ear plugs to concerts;  Their volume level was a bit punishing.  Oh well, I think I’m about 30 years to late with that scheme anyway.  They were followed by The Wallflowers, and then Melissa Etheridge closed things out with a pretty awesome solo set.  During the breaks between the sets (and sometimes during the sets,) I was entertained by the honest-to-goodness character who plopped down next to me.  (I don’t know how, but I attract said characters somehow or another.)  He looked like he’d been on the road for quite a few years, and, I must say, smelled like it too.  He had some interesting stories though, that’s for sure.  He claimed to be the son of Wavy Gravy, and had some fine tales of different music tours, picking up trash at Woodstock, etc etc.  Wavy’s page wouldn’t seem to support his stories, but I found them interesting all the same.