If you didn’t happen to catch Donette’s brief Facebook posting two Fridays ago, we spent the last week in (brutally) sunny Jamaica.  Ahhhh, the beach life, can’t beat it.  It wasn’t just a random trip, we headed out there to meet five other couples whom I’d met during my brief foray into the US Army.  Full half of the group were celebrating wedding anniversaries during our stay, so we were able to have a reason to celebrate pretty much constantly.  For legal reasons, I am required to keep the description of events rather brief.  And, to be honest, as we were at a nice all-inclusive resort, the events WERE rather brief.  Eat breakfast.  Lay on beach.  Eat lunch.  Lay on beach.  (Sometimes we substituted the previous two with “Eat lunch on beach,” for variety.)  Eat dinner.  Sleep.  Repeat.  Pretty solid itinerary, really.  We mixed in a few activities, but tried to stick to the aforementioned plan as much as possible.  We went on a snorkeling trip early in the week, which degraded into an unmitigated disaster.  They took us out on a small boat, and early into the trip the wind picked up and started rocking that thing like crazy.  The inevitable result was the majority of the group getting seasick, myself right at the head of that bunch.  Wow, it was miserable.  I never actually got sick in the literal sense, but I probably would have been better off if I had.  It knocked me out of service for a good part of the afternoon.  We went out on two more boat trips during the week which were infinitely more successful, likely due to much larger boats, calmer seas, and a hefty dose of Dramamine.

I’m still trying to get reoriented to the Real Life, so that’s all I feel like posting right now.  I haven’t had the opportunity to sort through all my pictures yet, not that I really have many, but I’ve got a few to put up here.

We at least made some kind of effort to leave the house over the last few days, despite the stifling heat.  Friday wasn’t really by choice though, I had to go pick up Donette at the airport.  She was coming back from two weeks of traveling, which we (I, at least) decided was far too long.  Since we don’t get all the way to Sacramento often, we decided to eat dinner while we were down there.  Through a random google search we ended up at Fat City in the Old Sacramento district.  We had minor trouble finding a parking place, which is about par for the course every time we’ve been downtown, but once we found a spot it turned out to be a pretty fun, walkable area.  Before we went into the restaurant we strolled around for a bit, and saw several more places to put on our “to visit” list.  We had a decent dinner, if not outstanding.  The building itself was as cool as anything, and they had a way-old, elaborate wooden bar and lots of stained glass to check out while we were eating.

Saturday we headed down and checked on the house project, which appeared to be coming along just swimmingly.  We’ve got a bit of tile on the floor, cabinets in the kitchen, the solar panels are on the roof, and the interior doors are all hung.  They were in the process of putting in the sprinkler system when we were there, which looked a lot more complicated that I expected.  It’s tied into a recycled water system so there were trenches dug everywhere for that, not to mention the ground is a bit rocky out here so the trenches themselves looked pretty hard to dig.  Looks like they are on schedule for September though, I can hardly wait to pack up and move again.  (Ugggghhhhh.)  After that we did a light bit of shopping, then went over to a friend’s house for a nice pasta dinner.

Sunday we got all crazy and left El Dorado Hills for a little bit.  We spent most of the day lazing around, then in the late afternoon we drove out Hart to Hart winery for a tasting.  A friend of ours was working, and we were darn near bored out of our minds, so it seemed like a good diversion despite the 30 minute drive required to get there.  Indeed, it was a nice place to hang out for the afternoon, and most importantly it was well air-conditioned.  We spent a few hours there, then drove to nearby Cool Beerwerks for a light dinner.  Pretty nice little brew-house, although I think the best part about it was being in the town of Cool.  Every single business there was named “Cool Something-or-another.”  Kind of hard to go wrong with a name like that.  The drive back to EDH was just as arduous as the drive out, and effectively wore me out for the rest of the day.  I was relegated to the couch watching Netflix for the remainder of the evening.

Another in my lengthy stretch of lame weekends.  The wife is still out of town, carrying on with all her friends and family.  Somebody has to stay here and tend to the pets and keep up the house.  (Both of which I am doing an admittedly horrible job of.  Luckily Teagan is pretty easy-going, I can’t remember to feed the poor little girl to save my life.)

I did stop by Ruff Haus on Friday, mostly out of respect for keeping up my usual routine.  Wasn’t really feeling it though, so I didn’t stay long.  I popped in the grocery store instead, and bought a few lamb chops.  Mmmm, they came out good.  I don’t recall ever grilling lamb chops.  I did some blade chops not too long ago and they were a gamey, greasy disaster so I was pretty skeptical.  There was a world of difference in them though.  Maybe there’s something to the difference in price between the two, hmmm.

Saturday I went for a short bike ride, mostly out of sheer boredom.  Didn’t really cure it though, so I drove to Costco to kick around for a while.  As usual, it was sufficiently unnerving an experience as to send me to the couch for the rest of the day.  Man, that place is crazy.  I went last week and they had a great deal on some cat furniture (yes, I said cat furniture) that I wanted for Kane.  Well, by the time I got back there Saturday they were all gone, and after trying to navigate the aisles for a bit I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to get the rest of the items on my list.  Leaving Costco empty-handed, a rare occurrence indeed.

Sunday I got a text from good ol’ Todd down in Houston, looking for some rib-cooking tips.  (I didn’t tell him I’m about the last person to ask for rib advice…  Shoulda probably sent him to Martin.)  It got me thinking though, man ribs DO sound good.  So, I headed down to the grocery, looking for the standard two-pack of St. Louis cut spares.  Alas, they didn’t have them.  After a short discussion, the accommodating butcher DID offer to split a slab of baby backs for me though.  Well, how perfect is that!  Truthfully, the thought never crossed my mind, but after he said it, it occurred to me that one person doesn’t really need two full slabs of ribs.  Pleased with my purchase, I headed back home and fired up the Weber, put the Royals game on my iPad, and commenced to cooking.  It was a generally unremarkable cook, with the exception that it actually rained on me for a while!  I know there hasn’t been a single drop of rain here in July, and I’m pretty sure none in June either.  If there was any in May, it was scant.  It was an event, to be sure.  And, luckily, it wasn’t coming down hard enough to affect my ribs.  Quite an enjoyable way to pass the afternoon actually.  The ribs came out well, I was pretty happy with them.  I ate them up, then it was back to the couch to play Rock Band for the rest of the evening.

I’m in quite a way.  The wife has left for parts unknown, leaving me to fend for myself.  I think I started slipping into a somewhat feral state mere hours after her flight took off.  I’ve been huddled at home on the couch for three days now, subsisting on fried egg sandwiches and a bag of stale corn chips I found in the back of the pantry.  I’m down to my last dozen eggs too, things are looking grim indeed.

Honestly, that describes my weekend for the most part.  Sunday a friend took pity and invited me down to cook, always a good diversion.  He’s got a large gas grill, so we set it up for indirect cooking as best we could, threw a box of chips on it, and commenced to pseudo-smoking some pork butts.  Honestly it did a pretty fair job.  I will say I prefer a bit more smoke in my ‘que, but it was certainly an interesting experiment.  We were shooting for a batch of chile verde, so I roasted some veggies on my Weber before heading down there, and that lent a bit more smoke to the dish too.  If nothing else, the propane burners provided a much more low-maintenance day of cooking.

I like to begin my posts with an immediate excuse as to why I’m (still) boring this week.  Get it out of the way early.  So, for this week, I’ll quickly throw out the qualifier that I was oncall, so I had to sort of stay close to home base most of the time.  Friday, case in point, we did one whole lot of nothing.  And on a holiday to boot, tsk tsk.  I thought about crossing the county line and bootlegging some firecrackers in, but it seemed they were taking the ban rather seriously so I nixed that idea.  I really can’t say I saw or heard so much as a single firework go off the entire weekend.  A little eerie, honestly.  We did cruise down to check progress on the house, which seemed to be going just swimmingly.  We’ve got drywall, all taped and mudded, and one layer of stucco on the outside.  The way it’s going it doesn’t seem like it should take them two more months to finish, but I guess the slow part is coming.  That was about it for our big Fourth.  We picked up some tuna steaks at the grocery store and grilled those for dinner.  Not even a very Fourth-ish kind of meal, but it was on sale and it sounded good. (And, matter of fact, it WAS good.)

Saturday, determined to leave our circle for at least a short while, we decided to drive up the hill a bit to Placerville and visit Jodar Winery.  This was sort of a random destination, based mostly on location and the fact that they served tasty-sounding food.  It turned out to be a nice place, we killed the better part of the afternoon there.  We split an enormous gorgonzola burger and fries, had a glass of wine, and sat in the shade listening to a couple of entertaining guys play harmonica and guitar.  Cheap entertainment to be sure, which seems to be in short supply around here.  We stopped by K-Mart on the way home and picked up a kiddy pool for Teagan, and spent the rest of the scorching afternoon playing ball with her in the back yard.  (Poor girl isn’t smart enough to stop chasing the ball when she gets too hot, but she’ll cool off in the pool if it’s there.)

Sunday was roughly the same, but we headed the opposite direction on the freeway to Device Brewing.  I’d heard positive reviews from a few co-workers, and it didn’t disappoint.  Like nearly every other brewery we’ve visited here, it was located in a warehouse.  Not exactly big on “character,” but effective I guess.  We sampled some very nice brews there, and passed the time playing Jenga.  They had a food truck outside serving sausages, so we picked up a few of those for lunch.  Honestly I’d have enjoyed them a lot more if I hadn’t just got a huge cheeseburger and fries for the same price the previous day, but it was OK.  It seems the only food trucks we ever run into here serve “gourmet sausages” too;  Could we hit the taco or BBQ truck once in a while?  (Maybe they don’t exist, who knows.)