A mediocre weekend at best, but had its upsides. The weather was quite nice, we got some things done around the house, and the Chiefs won. The wife is down with a cold or allergies or something of the sort, so she wasn’t up for too much excitement. My turn is coming, I’m sure.
Friday was sort of slow. We were supposed to go to a concert in Sacramento, but the opening act cancelled out and that’s who we really wanted to see. Luckily we were able to get a refund. I’m sure we would have still had a good time, but why risk it. Instead, we went to our regular Friday happy hour spot, Foothill Beer Temple. It was a brief stay, then we headed out to find some dinner. We ended up at the newly opened McDermott’s Pub in Placerville. It’s attached to The Italian Place we go to, but more of an Irish Pub thing than the semi-nice restaurant next door. It was pretty empty for a Friday night, I think they’ve got some advertising to work on. I’m not sure how it’s going to do really, I guess we’ll see. I think it’s a bit… “spendy” for the area. They are pretty proud of their stuff for sure. All you could get for food was pizza from The Italian Place. Nothing wrong with that, it’s what we wanted anyway. The girl brought it out in a to-go box though? Uhhhh, trying to tell me something? Little odd. I’m hoping they expand the menu to include more items from next door, then I’d be all in. It seems their big push was craft cocktails, which I have little to no use for.
Saturday I woke up semi-motivated for some yard work, so I headed up The Hill to cut some firewood. Not a bad way to spend a 65 degree afternoon. There is certainly enough up there that needs cut up, that’s for sure. I like to think I’m making a dent in it, but it’s going to be a while. I got a whole load of oak cut up and loaded in my trusty little trailer, then things started going south on me. First, I was headed down to dump the wood and ran smack into a little tree stump that I didn’t see. The worst part is, I’d stomped around for a good 20 minutes earlier trying to find it, because I’d hit it before. Guess I finally found it. It was right in the middle of the mower deck. Too steep to back up, and no way to get around it going forward. I finally had to go get poor sickly Donette and between the two of us we were able to scooch it around. In the course of trying to back up, I’d thrown 1/2 the dirt in the state up on the mower deck, so I decided to wash that off. In retrospect, I probably should have done that out in the yard. There was even more mud than I thought, and now it’s all over the driveway behind my car. For the big finish, I went to put the mower away and it had a flat tire. I aired it up and got it put back away, we’ll see if it holds. (Yeah, I already know the answer to that one.) The good news is, I had a fair amount of frustration built up by then, so I took it out on splitting the logs. Good outlet right there!
Sunday, well, it was a day of couch and football. I tried out a new recipe for dinner, chicken and rice, and it came out pretty passable. I got a little carried away with the siracha sauce perhaps, but at least I was at home so nobody had to watch me pouring sweat all over the place. Mostly I just like cooking in my super-duper new cast iron skillet, and it worked fantastic. Actually I took a picture of my skillet and forgot to take one of the actual food, oops.
