I saw two bobcats out the window at the office today.  Two!  Together!  I should have taken a picture.

That’s all I got.  Best effort.  Maybe I should just shut down until after Christmas.

Humbug.  I’m slipping into a Holiday-induced slump already.  Nothing but downhill from here.  I don’t even have anything specific to complain about, just a general sense of malaise.  Actually, I didn’t have a bad weekend at all.  Actually, I didn’t have a bad week at all.  Backing all the way up to last Wednesday, I met up with a merry band of elderly gentlemen down at the Brooksider for the annual AKL Alumni Luncheon.  This event originated as a football game many years (decades) ago, but as we all aged and became increasingly incapable of exercise it slowly degenerated into a lunch event.  Much more relaxing I must say.  It was a well-attended event this year;  I believe at one point there were 21 guys around the table.

Thursday was the official holiday, as I remember.  Unfortunately, still being oncall, I was relegated to the confines of my house.  I made the best of it though.  Threw a turkey on the smoker, and made sides of green rice casserole, mashed ‘taters and gravy, and kale with smoked turkey.  It was a pretty solid meal, if slightly non-traditional in the sense we were by ourselves, and didn’t have any pie.  (Oops.  My bad.)  One of Donette’s nephews was kind enough to drive us down some deviled eggs to correct that oversight, luckily.

Friday ended up a rather unplanned day of shopping.  It began with a somewhat benign oil-change appointment, and started going south when I decided to kill some time by walking around the showroom floor.  Eventually, I ran home and got Donette and we ended up test-driving four different vehicles.  (None of which we have purchased so far.)  It was oddly entertaining;  I generally despise car salesmen, not to mention driving in general.  After that we hit a few malls, still on the hunt for the elusive dutch oven deal.  Alas, no purchases were made to that end either.  Exhausted from my thoroughly unproductive day, I spent the rest of the evening at the Brooksider with The Guys, detailing our respective holiday adventures.

Saturday and Sunday are something of a black hole;  I can’t really remember what I did.  I’m sure it was very fun, not to mention rewarding.  Or maybe it wasn’t.  Everyone will be relieved to know I did finally decide on a dutch oven.  I actually ended up ordering one directly from the Le Creuset site, after getting an email that they were running some after-Thanksgiving sales.  Don’t actually have it in my hands yet, but presumably it is somewhere over the ocean at this writing.  I see a large pot of turkey soup in my near future.

That weekend fell squarely in the category of “Making the best of a bad situation.”  I was stuck oncall, but I have to admit I managed my share of fun.  I actually had a relatively fun week overall, including a few new dining experiences, but that would broaden the base of my update outside the normal scope so I’ll leave that part out.

Come to think of it, on further reflection, the only fun I had was Saturday.  Rats, I could have sworn I did a lot.    Well, I crammed an entire weekend of fun into one day I guess.  I got up semi-early, packed up a carload of supplies, and headed up to Martin’s for a day of cooking. He was firing up his smoker for some upcoming holiday or another, and had generously offered to share grill space with others.  I ran out and picked up a fresh turkey at Trader Joe’s, and while I was at it dug through the freezer to see if we couldn’t scare up a batch of gumbo too.  I got up to the Northland around 11:00, dropped off all the stuff, then Teagan and I had to run right back to the ‘hood to attend a doggie class.  We’ve taken a few classes at the local pet store, and since graduated to a private trainer for her “special needs.”  Well, this same trainer was offering a small class at the nearby Spay – Neuter clinic, and she thought Teagan might benefit from it, so I signed us up.  It’s just a basic obedience class, but she needs to work on her socialization skills so I figured what the heck.  (Some might argue I do too, yet I don’t get sent back to kindergarten every year.   Hmmm.  Food for thought.)  It went OK I guess.  At the end of the day it’s a six-week class for less than the cost of an hour visit to my house, so if I get tired of it I figure I already got my money’s worth.  After class I took the pup back home and rolled back north to check the turkey project.  It was going just swimmingly;  There were five or six birds on the cooker, and a good crowd had gathered to enjoy the afternoon.  Martin and I got to work on the gumbo, which kept me up there quite a while after the rest of the crowd had left.  I’ll tell you what, that stuff is quite a process.  Worth the effort though, I was very pleased with the results.  I was hesitant to leave Martin in charge of dividing it up equitably, but I had to go pick up Donette downtown so I trekked back south.  I slept very fitfully that night, convinced he was sneaking an extra scoop or so into his container.  Considering the mess we all left in his kitchen I suppose he deserved a slightly heavier portion though.

Sunday I never really got around.  You know, football and all that.  It appeared to be a beautiful day outside but I didn’t take advantage of it, save a short game of fetch in the backyard.  The vast majority of the day was spent on the couch watching all the games, and researching dutch ovens.  Oh, what a sad life I lead in my old age.  I’ll share the results though, since I am sure you want to participate in this fascinating life-event, and because I literally didn’t do anything else.  I’m in the market for a 5 – 6 qt enameled model.  After an entire day of reading, I believe I’ve narrowed it down to a Le Creuset, Staub, or possibly a Kirkland.  Honestly, I’m leaning towards the Staub at this point.  There are many on the ever-so-reputable Internet who will staunchly swear that Kirkland is the same thing, even that it is made in the Staub factory, so it is still in the mix.  The question remains though, could I do without that fancy name brand stamped on the lid?

Wow, where did my 65 degree, sunny days go?  What a bummer.  Guess it’s inevitable, if a bit disappointing.  I don’t like the harsh weather swings though.  Need to ease into these things a little.

I am left, once again, with precious little to report on the entertainment front.  Friday I spent my evening on the patio at the Brooksider, if only to sneak in one more day of nice weather.  Sigh.  It was a beaut though, had a fine time.  Donette got back from another week in Chicago around 7:00, and we headed up the street to Jalapenos for a little dinner.  It was remarkably good, possibly because we got one of our favorite waiters.  All in the presentation.

Saturday we started in earnest on our long weekend of nothing.  I guess, all things considered, we actually did get a few small items accomplished.  Donette headed out early for a day with her running team, and I stayed home to tackle a few long overdue tasks in the yard.  I have an annual Fall battle with a particularly ugly shrub in our backyard, and Saturday marked the date for this monumental event.  I think this bush is something in the honeysuckle family, I’m not quite sure, but I do know it’s about two steps removed from a big weed.  Every Fall I cut it back, and before you know it, it’s grown totally out of hand.  This year it was a good twelve feet high.  Yeah, yeah, I know;  It should probably be regularly trimmed back during the year.  Add it to the long, long list of things I just don’t get around too.  Anyway, instead of getting out the ladder and trying to hack it into submission from the top, I elected to crawl under it and just start cutting at the bottom.  By the time I called it finished, I was left with a formidable pile of brush in the middle of the yard and a six-inch stump where the bush once stood.  I spent the rest of the afternoon bundling up the mess, which now occupies the better part of my patio.  I’m not sure how in the heck I’m going to get rid of it all;  That’s a problem for another day.

Sunday I woke up remarkably sore from the previous day’s chores.  Perhaps I should think about hitting the gym a bit more often.  Not sore as in a bit uncomfortable, sore as in struggling to get around the house.  I am not aging gracefully, that’s for sure.  Reduced to this state of limited mobility, I had few options but to spend the afternoon on the couch watching TV.  I’ll grant you, that’s probably what I would have done anyway, but I felt a bit more justified at least.

In lieu of an actual weekend, I got to be oncall.  Bah.  To back up all the way to Thursday though, I did get to go out that night.  Donette came home from Chicago a day early and we went out on an official “date night” before my lock-down started.  We started our evening with a nice steak dinner at the Oak Room down on the Plaza.  Never been there before, but it was quite a meal.  Can’t beat a well-cooked steak.  After dinner we headed up Broadway a short distance to see Grace Potter at the Uptown Theater.  We’ve seen her a few times before at the Mile High Music Festival in Denver, but haven’t ever caught one of her local shows.  It was a fantastic concert, and the group sounded great in the small venue.  (Quite a bit smaller than the enormous outdoor stage in Denver.)  A bit loud and a bit late for the old folks, but we made it all the way through.  (Well, close anyway;  My ever-present fear of being stuck over 5 minutes in traffic caused us to miss the encore.)

The rest of the weekend was spent (when not on conference calls) installing and testing my new copy of Windows 8.  Oh, the excitement.  I don’t even particularly like Windows, but I do like messing around with new things so I raced right out Friday and grabbed a copy from Microcenter.  I decided to use my laptop as a test platform, as we really don’t use it much anyway and definitely don’t have anything we mind losing on it.  The install went nearly perfect and very quickly. It didn’t auto-detect the video chip, but got everything else.  Given the age of the laptop, I was pretty impressed with that.  The new interface everybody is squawking about is certainly…  “new.”  I haven’t decided if I like it or not yet, I’m still trying to get used to it.  I did install an alternative start menu (pokki) to help me out while I get familiarized with the new setup.  Aside from the rather baffling aesthetic changes, I’m liking the actual functionality.  My creaky old laptop is running very smooth, much better than it ever did on Vista, even when new.  My favorite feature is that when an application is minimized it goes into a sleep mode, using very little resources;  Much different than on Windows 7.  You can check this out in the much-improved Task Manager, it’s pretty slick.  I’ll be testing it out a few more weeks, but I imagine I’ll be putting it on my other machines soon.