{"id":2059,"date":"2014-11-17T11:04:08","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T19:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/?p=2059"},"modified":"2014-11-17T11:04:08","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T19:04:08","slug":"tool-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/tool-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Tool Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another one in the books, and not a bad one.\u00a0 Rather busy actually.\u00a0 Friday afternoon I got a text from a buddy I used to work with in KC, since relocated to Denver, that I hadn’t seen in many moons.\u00a0 He was in town, so we headed out to lunch and then met up again for happy hour.\u00a0 I didn’t see any reason to diverge from my usual schedule of events, so I recommended Hop House<\/a> for the festivities.\u00a0 (Which, despite my weekly patronage, continues to maintain the slowest website in the universe.\u00a0 Are they running that thing over a 56k modem or something?)\u00a0 We hung out there for a few hours, then as it got predictably loud and crowded we moved on to dinner at Relish<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Saturday he was scheduled to head west to visit other friends, so I tried to come up with something to do in that line of travel.\u00a0 After no small amount of cipherin’, I decided on Lagunitas Brewery<\/a> in (sort of) nearby Petaluma.\u00a0 I’d been wanting to go there since we relocated, but it’s a bit of a stretch on the mileage.\u00a0 Having company and being in need of entertainment though, it made sense to make the trip.\u00a0 Well worth the drive, as I’d heard from many others.\u00a0 It was definitely a popular destination, all the tables were full shortly after they opened.\u00a0 (By some lack of planning on my part we showed up 45 minutes before<\/em> opening time, so we didn’t have much trouble finding seats ourselves.)\u00a0 They had a great outdoor seating area, tasty food, and of course fresh beer to sample.\u00a0 We enjoyed the sunny afternoon for several hours, then he continued westward and we headed back up the hill.\u00a0 As the day went on, I’d been having a running text conversation with my amigo back in EDH, regarding a smoker purchase.\u00a0 I’ve cooked up several hunks o’ flesh since moving here, and he was easily swayed towards the KC smokin’ hobby.\u00a0 As Thanksgiving nears, we’ve been discussing the logistics around getting my smoker over to his house for the turkey cook, and apparently he woke up Saturday with the wild hair to just get one himself.\u00a0 He’d been doing his research and came up with the wise decision of a Weber Smokey Mountain<\/a>, a solid choice in my book.\u00a0 Being very free with other people’s money, I tried to steer him towards the 22.5″ model, but he settled at the midsize 18.5″.\u00a0 Like any new toy, he headed directly home, fired it up, and threw on some ribs and pork butts.\u00a0 I was driving down the freeway at the time, which precluded an in-depth conversation, or I would have filled him in that a 2:00 starting time on pork butts results in a roughly midnight dinner time.\u00a0 Eh, no matter, his family was out of town and he was just playing around anyway.\u00a0 When we got back in town we headed over for some delicious baby backs;\u00a0 Didn’t stick around for the pork though.<\/p>\n

Sunday was chore day once again.\u00a0 Ah, the tribulations of home ownership.\u00a0 One major (for me) undertaking was to replace the filters in the air vents.\u00a0 I’d checked them a few weeks ago and they were absolutely disgusting.\u00a0 Not something I really expected on a two-month old house, but it’s probably from all the construction going on in the area, as well as having the windows wide open with the air conditioner max’d out when they were building it.\u00a0 I’d prepared for the project by carefully notating the sizes stamped on them, and ordering a lifetime supply of each off Amazon.\u00a0 The first went fine, then when I got to the one in the bedroom upstairs, trouble struck.\u00a0 No matter which way I oriented the new one, it simply would not fit.\u00a0 I kept going down the ladder, getting the old one, re-installing it, verifying the size on it, then I’d go back up the ladder with the new one.\u00a0 Nope, still didn’t fit.\u00a0 I’m quite embarrassed to say how many times I repeated this exercise, always with the same result.\u00a0 After my legs finally gave out from climbing the ladder, I resorted to my long-dormant junior high geometry skills, and was able to ascertain that a measurement of 14″x20″ would doubtlessly result in a rectangle, whereas the object I was holding in my hand was most certainly a square shape.\u00a0 This baffled me so much that I actually walked all the way down to the garage and got a tape measure, took it all the way back upstairs, and checked it out.\u00a0 Yep, that’s a square alright, the proof is in the tape measure.\u00a0 Upon closer inspection, I finally found that some evil-minded low-rent contractor had lopped six inches off one side.\u00a0 Sigh.\u00a0 Anybody want to buy a huge box of 14″x20″ filters, cheap?\u00a0 I guess that project lends credence to the “buy local” theory if nothing else.\u00a0 Bah, nothing a pair of heavy-duty scissors and a roll of duct tape couldn’t fix.<\/p>\n\n\t\t