Geez, the weather out here has been crazy! I feel like I’m back in the Midwest. Mid-seventies one day, then drops to the forties the next. And, every so often, we’re still getting rain! The rain should be done by this time of year. I haven’t even put the garden plants out because it’s still questionably cold at night. I need consistency!!

Other than crabbing about the weather, I haven’t really done anything worth mentioning. The wife is out of town, so the dogs and I have spent the days foraging for food and doing some light yard work. Speaking of which, I have to say I did a much better job of keeping up with the grass this year. So far, that is. The downside is you have to mow it much more often until it quit raining, but it sure looks a lot better than doing it just once or twice when it’s knee high. I’ve even been keeping up with the weed eating for the most part, which is not one of the more joyful tasks in life. In another major event, I finally started cutting the back yard with a push mower. The hill is far too steep to use the rider, so since we’ve moved here I’ve been knocking it down with the weed eater a few times a year. One year I even just let it go, which turned out to be a horrible idea. The dogs drug burrs into the house endlessly. They have such short hair wouldn’t really get matted in their fur, but that meant they left them on the couch, the bed, the carpet, and everything else in the house. Long summer. So yeah, anyway, I spent quite a bit of time cleaning it up this year so I could use the push mower. Lots of branches, rocks, and other general debris that I wouldn’t want to hit with the mower. And, at the end of the day, it works “pretty well.” I’m not sure it’s any easier than the weed eater but dang it, I did a lot of work so I could use the mower and I’m gonna stick to it. (This season, at least.) It’s really just too big an area for a push mower. I keep having flashbacks to push-mowing the huge yard at the house we lived at in Grandview. Every time I got sentenced to cutting it, it was a whole weekend off the books. I still wake up from bad dreams of that job. (No, really, I do.)

Otherwise, I’ve just been passing the time trying new recipes. The wife isn’t usually too fond of my experimental menus, usually with good reason. I like to try new things though, so while she’s out of town offers a perfect opportunity to exercise my creative passions. (I really don’t have any of those, which could be why the majority of the recipes are abject failures?) This week’s photo album is dedicated to a few of the recent culinary projects.

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Sigh, another lull in updates. This one can be attributed to technical challenges. I haven’t really had any to speak of, but that’s the story I’m going with. Trouble is, when I get so far behind, I can’t remember everything we’ve done over the past several weeks. Suffice to say it’s been super exciting though. (Insert eye roll here.) I did go to KC over Easter, which was great. There is a new nonstop flight from Sacramento to KC, and it gets there in just over 3 hours! That is way better than the usual 7-8 it takes bouncing around the country to get there. I went to Float Trip, visited family and friends, and enjoyed some great food. Other than that, most of our time lately has been spent trying new recipes, and mowing. Yippy.

Oh, also of note: We went to the theater yesterday and saw the 50th anniversary of The Holy Grail! What a great movie. I don’t know what was funnier, the movie itself or listening to the entire audience quote along with every line. Can’t believe it’s been around 50 years, quite the classic!

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I don’t have any material. Went nowhere, did nothing, saw nobody. Sigh. It’s a rough life up here. Grilled a few pork chops yesterday, that was exciting. No, really, it was. Been wanting to roll the grill out for a while, and the weather yesterday was a great opportunity. I really like to dry brine them overnight before grilling, but it was kind of a last minute decision so I didn’t have time. Still came out pretty good. Spent the rest of the day out back burning a big brush pile. Yeah, crazy weekend. Glad baseball is back to occupy at least a little of my time.

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Andddd we’re back from commercial break. Wow, longest downtime in the history of pkenagy.com. Long story as short as I can make it, we’ve been out of town in the RV since late February. Shortly after we left (4 days or so?) all my websites went down. (I’ll generically refer to them as websites… Most besides this page would be better described as “utilities.”) There wasn’t anything I could do about it because, well, I was gone, with no means to see what happened. Upon our return home Saturday, I looked into the issue, and it turned out to be a very simple change I’d made on the way out the door for our trip. Gee, where have I heard this story before? Ugh. I still don’t know exactly WHY it broke everything, but I guess I’m not worried about it. Just kidding, of course I am, I’ll be trying to recreate the problem until I figure it out. Or, just as likely, it never happens again. Who knows.

So, as to our big trip. We loaded up the RV back in February and headed to Salome, AZ. Took a little get-away from the cold (OK, cool) weather here in CA, see some friends, and have some fun. We did a little light house-hunting while we were there too, because hey, you just never know. We’ve got some friends who winter at an RV park there, and they were able to score us a nice spot with full hookups for free! It was, in my opinion, the best part of the trip. Hung out with friends, ate some great food, had several bonfires, took a ride in the desert on side-by-sides… Just a great time. As a nice bonus, it was in the mid-seventies for our stay. Fun times.

We were in Salome just under a week, then we packed up and headed for Cottonwood AZ, which is about 30 minutes from Sedona. Also a great stay! We did some hikes, visited a few nearby National Parks, mingled at the park clubhouse (yes, really!) and just generally relaxed. Side note on the National Park visits: When we were standing in line for tickets, there was a sign that said “free pass for veterans.” Well, what the heck, I’ve got my card with me, I shall inquire. Well, in less time than it took to fork over my $20 entrance fee, she handed me a card good for both of us, told me it was good at any National Park, and never expires! Worked out quite nicely. For our other touristy days, we visited downtown Cottonwood, Jerome, and of course Sedona. Cottonwood had a nice little old-town area, we went there more than once. A few easy hikes for us and the pups, nice shops, and great scenery. Jerome… meh. It was definitely a dedicated tourist town. Absolutely packed, difficult parking, crazy prices, and long waits for everything. And this was on a Monday, can’t imagine what it would be like on a weekend. And then Sedona, take all those descriptions X3. No thank you, although we did go on a great hike while we were there.

In the house hunting category, that was limited to the Salome area. Our realtor here in CA was nice enough to set us up with realtors in both places we visited. Salome went very well. Looked at probably half a dozen homes, and one of them is actually pretty high on the list. Heck, I’d buy it today if not for the daunting prospect of moving again. Still in the “thinking” phase of that one. (Which means we’ll procrastinate until somebody else buys it and miss out.) When we got to Cottonwood, we contacted the guy there and told him what we were looking for and laid out our budget. Never heard from the guy again, haha. OK, I can take a hint. Honestly we pretty quickly crossed it off the list anyway, after it snowed on us more than once. The weather there was not nearly as nice as Salome. The qualifying factor there is, it was March… Summertime will be another story I am told. Apparently Sedona routinely hits 115-120 during those months. Uhhh, what?!?! And people survive there?

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Well, no I’m not. After a strong start to the year (pretty close to a New Year Resolution for me,) I fell right back into my slacking ways. My domain name (pkenagy.com) is about to expire too, adding a little insult to injury. I am quite tempted to just not renew it and let it die a dignified death, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. It has a few other purposes besides this silly blog, and I really don’t want to rearrange all that stuff. And, every now and then, I feel like typing something up, so here I am. I like to keep my options open.

That was a busy weekend, as our weekends go anyway. We’ve been on a budget crack-down, which has been pretty easy considering the weather has been too miserable to leave the house. The rain and cold finally cleared up Friday though, so I went down and met some friends at Moonraker to enjoy an afternoon on their huge outdoor space. Had a nice relaxing afternoon, the sun was quite welcome. After that I headed home for our obligatory Valentine’s dinner. Neither of us are too into that particular holiday, but it did give me an excuse to pick up a nice steak from Kings. I have to say, it was one of my better efforts on a steak lately. I threw it in the sous vide at 129 degrees for about three hours, then finished it in a scorching skillet with butter. Threw a few potatoes in the air fryer, and it made for a tasty dinner.

Saturday, we got a quite unexpected text that some friends that live down in the ‘burbs were headed up our way to try out the new Burning Barrel location. It was really a shocking surprise, as they have not left the El Dorado Hills zip code since early 2011. We sure couldn’t pass up that opportunity to see them, so we took the short drive over to big downtown Placerville and hung out for a bit. We like the new place, with the exception that it is just painfully loud. They’re supposed to be installing some sound damping ceiling tiles, and I sure wish they’d hurry up with it. The noise level is just punishing, it is always hard to hear anybody talking. It seems like everybody is yelling, but I think it’s just a loud building. We had to bail after a short time in the interests of sanity, so we went around the corner to Cappelli Wine and sipped a glass in the peace and quiet. Whew.

Sunday, in the absence of football, we met some friends in Diamond Springs for a quick lunch at Solid Ground. That was one of my regular hangouts, but it got axed lately as part of our new fiscal responsibility program. It was good to visit again, I like it. Not quite patio weather that day, but the inside was tolerable and we enjoyed their semi-famous chicken sandwich for lunch. After that, we headed back to the house, and a couple came over and made us a delicious dinner. Can’t beat that, a fancy dinner without leaving the house, and we didn’t even have to cook it! We played several games of pool, then he whipped up some awesome dan dan noodles. Wow, was it great. I love me some noodle bowls, and this was top notch. The actual recipe isn’t really that complicated, but there were several rather exotic ingredients that I don’t have in my pantry for sure. Maybe I need to go hunt them down though, because I want to make it myself. It really ended our weekend on a high note.

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