I’ll kick off my update with my now-standard complaints about the weather. The rains continue! And continue, and continue… I’ve certainly not seen anything like this in the 3 years we’ve been out here. And to hear the talk, neither has anyone else. It’s rather obvious the infrastructure isn’t made to handle all the water. Roads are washing away, all the storm drains are at capacity and overflowing, it’s a big mess to be sure. And I think the worst part is, none of it is really doing any good. The summer water supply comes from snow melt in the Sierras, all this rain water just runs off to the ocean. I guess it has to stop sometime. (Doesn’t it?)

That was an off weekend, for the most part. The gloomy weather just isn’t conducive to getting out and enjoying yourself. We did, however, get out and about on Saturday. We headed out on a long-overdue brewery tour with a bunch of rowdy kids, and had quite a good time of it. By “kids,” I mean these hooligans were roughly half my age. (Matter of fact, I don’t think there was anything “roughly” about it.) I’m sure that to the casual observer, it appeared I had drawn the short straw and had to take my kids and their friends out for a 21rst birthday party. Oh well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. (I’m aware that last phrase makes no sense what-so-ever, I just felt I needed to work an idiom in there.)

We kicked things off mid-afternoon at New Helvetia in downtown Sacramento.  Pretty decent product, but the tasting room wasn’t really for me.  It was so loud, you couldn’t hear yourself think.  I don’t know why everybody felt the need to yell.  Maybe because the table next to them was yelling, so then they had to yell to be heard, which then made the table next to us have to yell, and so on down the line?  Geez.  Oh well, it was our first stop.  We didn’t stay long.  After that we moved on to Oak Park, a short drive away.  Again, not my style (Do I have a style?) but we were just getting warmed up.  It was more of a restaurant than a brewery, sort of like the late great 75th Street in Waldo.  I’ll say the food was better than 75th though, we had a quite tasty lunch.  After that we moved more into the central downtown area, and stopped at a place called Fieldwork.  Ahhhh, now we’re getting somewhere.  Nice tasting room with long tables, and a small outdoor seating area with heaters.  I’ve had their beers before around town, and they put out a very solid product.  I somewhat regret my choice of the afternoon, a run-of-the mill pale ale, as I’m sure I’ve had it before.  Oh well, it’s a very GOOD pale ale, I just felt I probably should have branched out a little bit.  We hung out there for a bit, then moved on to a place called Ruhstaller.  This one was the highlight of my tour, to be sure.  It was one of those places that I just haven’t been able to find out here.  I’m sure they exist elsewhere downtown, but A) we don’t go downtown much and B) it takes a lot of hunting to find them.  I was trying to find a link to their homepage, which appears to be down, and instead came across that story in the local news so I linked to it.  It struck me as sort of funny, because it doesn’t appear they learned much from their first endeavor.  This place was in a basement, and it looked like some college kid had donated his dorm furniture to the cause.  Throw in a pool table for good measure, put out some board games, and you’re open for business.  Great place.  We got a good pool tourney going while the rest of the group played board games, and ended up spending quite a bit of time there.  Even ordered some delivery pizza.  I would have called that “ending on a high note,” but we hit one more spot, called Preflite.  Not really a brewery, but we were wrapping things up and this was a nice spot to do it in.  Totally legit dive bar, I was impressed for the second time.  Maybe there are indeed suitable establishments for me around here, I’m just having trouble finding them.

I went into last night’s watch-party fully expecting a Chiefs defeat.  Given that, it probably shouldn’t bum me out at much as it did.  What a drag!  They had me thinking they were actually going to pull it out.  Sigh, turned out just like every other playoff game.  We did have a fun afternoon of it though.  We went over to a friends house and watched both games while enjoying some good food.  Well at least we made it through 1/2 of the Chiefs game…  Nobody else was interested in that one so we bailed at halftime and watched the rest at home, where we could give our undivided attention to the inevitable outcome.

I made a big ol’ pot of bbq gumbo for the game, that ate up my whole Saturday.  I only make it once a year and it always catches me off guard just how long it takes.  Between all the chopping, 1.5 hours to make the roux, 1.5 hours of simmering (after spending nearly an hour to even get that much liquid to a simmer,) and cooling it down to the point you can put it away, it’s a 1/2-day project.  Didn’t have anything else to do I guess.  My favorite part of making gumbo?  When you add the veggies to the roux.  I’m gonna say that is my favorite smell in the entire world.  They should make candles out of that smell.  Cologne maybe, it would drive the ladies crazy.  Or make them hungry anyway.

Welcome to 2017.  Hope it’s a good year, can’t get any worse!  (Jinx.)  I’m kicking things off with my customary positive outlook.  We’ve got a few exciting trips planned, the weather has been decent so far, and I think things are looking up in general.  We had a relatively solid holiday season, all things considered.  Donette did some pretty heavy travelling, and I even left our circle myself a few times.  To kick off the New Year, we flew out to Las Vegas for the weekend.  Had I read about “New Years in Vegas” before we made those plans, I most likely would not have gone.  I had it in my head that nobody else would be there, and it would be a nice semi-relaxing weekend.  I quickly found quite the opposite; It’s considered one of the largest celebrations in the nation.  Eeeesh, it was crazy.  To top it off, I was pretty sick the whole time too.  If there’s a large outbreak of flu across the nation in the near future, you’re probably looking at Patient Zero.  I’m certain I infected several hundred people on the strip on New Years Eve.  Not my fault they kept bumping into me, serves them right.  All in all I rate the trip a success though, good times.