The rental car I got for the class is a POS. I figured it would be some lame little American car (it's a government Cobalt) but I had no idea it would be so well used. It's got 44k miles on it, the tires are bald, it's dented to hell and the interior looks like a dozen happy meals exploded inside. I checked the tire pressure and they were at 40 PSI, which is 10 over recommended. No wonder the tread wear is so funky. I dropped it to 35 all around, should smooth the ride out just a bit and make it less skittish. Oh, and they gave it to me with zero fuel. Sigh. Now I'm sure to lose some gas money having to return it empty. The woman suggested I siphon the gas back out when I'm done. :)

On the plus side, this camelbak just keeps impressing me. It's got enough pockets to hold all the stuff I want and the straps are very well padded. I slung my rifle while wearing the pack and the rifle strap sits perfectly on the backpack strap. They did such an excellent job on designing this thing. I'm really looking forward to trying it in the class.

Two photos from the last trip, Seth's house (with the stylish rental micro van in front of it) and Chick-fil-a, the best chicken anywhere. I had to email that photo to the woman while I was on the road since she always teases me when she gets to travel and get chick-fil-a without me.

The woman just called, she's on her way back from brunch (some social gathering with the shrinks that refer patients to her so it's a big networking opportunity). When she gets back we'll go for a walk and then I'll head to sacto.

I also just booked the good old Motel 6 for the turkey hunt in April. All this moving around and doing stuff is fun.

Made really good time up to Rancho Cordova, got stuff for breakfast and lunch tomorrow and got it packed in ice, got some Taco Bell for dinner and am sitting in the room trying to pass the time. I got the handicapped room (or one of them anyway) so I'm on the ground floor and close to the parking lot. Made it easier to haul my gear in. Not a lot of people around but I still look pretty damn suspicious with all this OD green stuff. Weather report looks nasty, looks like more rain than one would hope for this time of year. Glad I brought the rain gear but a bummer I have to use it.

I have to take back a few things I said about the POS rental. It actually rolls down the road pretty well and I found the magic button that lets you scroll through the trip meters, tire pressure sensors, etc. I read the Edmund's review of the car and they said it's the worst in it's class basically. It's a nicer road car than the woman's' sentra, so perhaps government motors has learned something in the last 10 years. How to build a better car than a 10 year old Nissan.

Watching TV without a DVR is painful!

Yea! The flight home is boarding. 4-5 hours and I'll be home and, uh, can go into the office. Lots of people waiting my return.

Been at the office since 11am. Meetings and trying to play catch up and I'm down to one meeting with my boss' boss (who appears to have blow me off which is why I'm sitting here by his office typing while I wait) and then I'm done. Hopefully I can wrap up and get home before 5-ish.

I don't know if I put it in here before (grep isn't showing anything) but the NRA discount on the rental car saved me another $30 which makes the decision on renting a car for the week just that much easier. I also saw while perusing the NRA discount page that they have some sort of hearing aid insurance that gets me 60% off on hardware. That's going to help out a lot when these no longer cut it and I have to upgrade. Wish I had known that before but I guess it pays to actually look at all the stuff that comes with various memberships.

A full day at secret place, I'm glad to be done with all the stuff I needed to do and am ready to go home. I even got some time to work on that crap for the lawyers who will be waiting for their data as soon as I get back to the office.

I did make it over to Seth's new place today... Doh, now people are going to know where secret place is. Anyway, his new house is 5000 sq. ft., I thought was only 4000. Gated community, lots of green spaces and golf courses and whatnot. It's only $20k more than his Campbell house and 4x the size, crazy what CA does to prices. His dog is happy and his wife and kids are happy and now that he's got a media room (it's almost 600 sq. ft. by itself) I think he's happy.

Time to pack and try to sleep so I can get that early flight tomorrow.

I'm in the brand new SJC terminal about to fly to a secret place to do secret things for work. From the outside the terminal is really fancy, lots of concrete and glass and modern art. Inside it's just a ghetto small terminal. Crappy paint that's already dirty and ugly, crappy seats, small signs, only 1 power outlet in the entire gate area, a clock stolen from my grandma's house circa 1955, window tint film peeling from the windows, one double pain window with a bad seal and moisture trapped between the panes, etc. Basically it's no better than the 30 year old terminal. Ah well, built by the government, what do you expect? On the plus side? Free wifi, which I'm not using thanks to my sprint modem thingy. There are some cute chicks walking around here, which is very unusual for San Jose in general. Oh wait, they're from out of town! :)

I'm back from secret place on Friday, just in time to pick up my rental car on Saturday for the big trip to psycho school on Sunday. I probably should start worrying now.

Day 1 in secret place done. The employees are nice, easy to talk to and seem to be generally happy. What's more strange is the general populous. Unlike home, everyone speaks English very well. Doesn't matter if they're white, black or Asian, they're universally well spoken. Asians with no accent are pretty common, but black people (especially woman) who aren't all hoochie-momma with 3" fake nails and huge fugly hair speaking ghetto slang are not at all common back home. I still think that culturalism is a more pronounced problem than racism. Who could hate someone who sounds, acts, dresses and thinks like you just because they're a different color? Lame, but I bet it's common as dirt around here.

It is absolutely pouring outside, I can't hardly see the parking lot out the window through the driving rain. There also might be some lighting, yep, there it is. Damn, I've not seen a storm like this in a long time. Guess I'm not going for a run in the morning. Hope the power holds.

Awesome, simply awesome. I've been talking with the guide that I went rabbit hunting with about hunting leases. He put me in contact with a rancher he knows and I rode down to Parkfield today and checked out the Thomason Ranch. It's 3300+ acres of scrub and hills and is supposedly packed with rabbits (and squirrels and coyote). The rancher spent 2+ hours driving me around showing me the place and I couldn't wait to sign up. We're doing a few weekends as trials before I sign up for a year lease but considering we saw rabbits out during the day while driving around in his FJ40 I can't imagine I won't find more while out on foot in the early morning. It's obviously not free like public land, but it's cheaper than going with guides and I get the place to myself when I'm there. Low risk of being shot by some other hunter or having game chased off by dumbasses.

Here is what the place looks like, and one of the fuzzy critters we saw while driving around (and he stayed still long enough for me to get the camera out).

The actual ride down was pretty crappy though. I thought it was going to be in the 70s, but at 7am it's really damn cold. I wore my summer pants and had only 1 layer on under my jacket, and it was foggy from Morgan Hill down to King City (like 80 something miles of fog). I was freezing by the time I stopped for gas. At least it was warm on the way home, but that will teach me to ride off without backup gear. There were also at least 10 cops out. They've put a 60 zone in the middle of the 70 zone and were patrolling the crap out of it. Gotta earn that money somehow.

Saturday we went up to the Miens house for BBQ. Their daughter is back from college and interested in psych so they had us over so she could talk to the woman for a bit about what she does and how to get there. I was feeling all 'creepy old man' but it's hard to not notice that little 19 year old Allison is just all boobs and legs. Were all college girls that hot? WTF were we doing in college? Oh yea, working the lab. Man were we dumb.

On the way to Alameda we stopped by the archery shop and I showed him my collection of arrows broken off 2" behind the tip. He said that's not normal and gave me a half dozen replacements free. That's a lot better than I was expecting really. I figured he would just bitch at the manufacturer about a bad lot (these arrows are all lot numbered and the ones that are breaking are all from the same batch). Good customer service is hard to find.

Rode to Alice's for lunch today for the first time in months. It's in the high 70s out there today, I had to switch gloves and remove my jacket liner. Go spring, go!

Final cooking class was last night. Seared lamb over roasted peppers, cucumbers, eggplant and portobello mushrooms all with a demi glaze sauce with 'essence of lamb'. Creating an 'essence' sauce means taking some bones from whatever animal you want to have the essence of and pan searing them, then de-glazing the pan with red wine and adding in the demi glaze. Eventually you pull the bones and reduce everything back down to a nice sauce. We cheated by using store bought demi glaze but since he said it takes 36 hours to make the real stuff we had to make due. (do?)

Last night we also had the 2nd hamster scare. One of them started choking. You ever try to figure out what a 2" long creature is choking on? Impossible. He did it for a few hours and then finally stopped and went to sleep. He was alive this morning which is a good sign but it was taking it's toll on the woman watching him suffer. Now there are 2 that could die any minute. She needs more robust pets.

Um, hmm...

I'm doing a bunch of legal discovery crap (somehow Grant weaseled his way out of it and now I'm stuck shipping directory listing back and forth with the legal drones) and they were really close to wanting to come to my office and sit down and go through it all. They bailed out on Monday's meeting, and now their out of office message says they're at a 'legal off-site event' and won't be back until Thursday. Sweet! They'll be busy recovering from their off-site hooker and blow party to be of any use Thursday, and I'm sure they don't really work on Fridays so it will drag into next week and maybe I can punt it back over to Grant. Or they'll just forget about it like they did last time (although I still have their USB drive with all the secret data sitting on my bookshelf). Either way it's one less thing to deal with this week.

Flip a switch and suddenly we're getting into summer. The extra light on the commute home was nice (although trying to run to the gym in pitch-black pre-dawn time blows) but it's also sitting around 70F during the day. I didn't even need a jacket on my walk today. Let's hope it holds through Friday so I can ride up to Alices for the first time in many, many months.

Just got back from the Reno trip for the funeral (or memorial service, there was no body so it's probably not a funeral). Anyway, it was a drag getting up there, snow had closed the roads on Friday night and it was still a bit messy on Saturday when we went through. Douche-bags in their SUVs constantly cutting each other off while going 7 mph was getting old and not helping keep traffic moving better. Took us about 2 hours extra to get there, that's 50% longer than usual and it all happened in the last 30-40 miles.

After the service (pics on the front page) we went to the decease's house to visit with her daughter and some other random people. I didn't know any of them, but it wasn't too bad, they seemed like good people. Lots of the men were into construction in Tahoe, one was working on Larry Ellison's Incline Village 'compound'. Ellison bought 3 lots, bulldozed the houses and is building a 10 building complex. Granite walls 1" thick. Granite walls? Crazy.

This morning we got up, adjusted the clocks and got the hell out of dodge trying to avoid the ski douches. We stopped by Cabellas for a bit, I couldn't find any pants I liked (for work) nor could I find a hard bow case I liked. A good wasted hour there checking stuff out then back on the road.

The second side trip was to the Grizzly Island Wildlife Area, one of the spots I'm going to try hunting on my own this year. The place is really weird, it's right along some public fishing areas so there are a lot of people around looking at us suspiciously as we rolled by. Once there most the areas were marked closed, I'm hoping that's just the end of the previous season and not some new permanent closures like they've done down south. When we went to a few open areas the woman read the sign and said "aren't we scouting now?". Um, no, we're wildlife viewing. It's one of the allowed activities all year round. :)

The woman said, "hey, look at those guys". I said "what, the cows?". Um, those aren't cows, they're elk. Hadn't expected to see them hanging out in a field like a bunch of cows. Some of them fought a bit while we watched, but I wasn't fast with the camera.

Going back a bit, on Wednesday we went to cooking class and made seared salmon in the same sauce as last week (the woman got it right this time, didn't break!) with a cucumber dill salad. We had to make this in teams and it turned out pretty well I think. Makes a mess searing that fish on the stove top.

Not looking forward to work next week. Not sure why, I've just been sorta stressed out the last few weeks and I can't imagine it's going to be any more fun this week. At least the boss is out on vacation so there shouldn't be any random panicking.

Nice, my external backup drive at work died. I found another IDE (yea, how old school) to throw in the enclosure but it's kinda noisy, even I can hear it spinning away. I've moved it to a box under my desk, but it's still annoying. May have to just move everything to the internal.

The cooking theme is getting a bit out of hand. Today we had our 'quarterly' team building event and for it we went to a kitchen place and they taught us to make pasta, pizzas, salads and deserts. The pasta was lame (boring flour and just noodles) but the pizza was interesting. I got to mostly do prep work cutting herbs and tomatoes and I did the final assembly on the pizzas for the whole group. Should be some pictures I can snag, I saw a flash going off a lot and two people carrying cameras.

On the bad news front, one of the hamsters is, well damaged. He's walking in circles, his head is tiled and he falls over. The net knowledge says that he's either had a stroke (recoverable as long as he's eating and drinking OK which he seems to be), or has a brain tumor (death) or has an ear infection (death if not treated). The signs aren't there for the ear infection from what we can see (using a jewelers loop to look into his ear for puss is not fun) so that leaves either a recoverable situation or sudden death. Let's hope for the former. Having pets is stressful.

Sunday must be pasta day. Today's mix was venison (from Seth) and cheese. I tried a different flour combo as well, we'll see what it does to the taste. I also tried different packaging; instead of wrapping them in paper towels and putting them in freezer bags I just tossed them into the bag along with a bunch of flour. The frozen ones at the store that come in a box are heavily floured and the excess just comes off in the water so I imagine it's a good way to keep them separated. Beats trying to pick small bits of paper off each ravioli. With the left over ground venison I also made a batch of chili, so good times aplenty for work lunches next week.

Wednesday night was our first cooking class. The instructor demoed making a scallop salad in a beurre blanc sauce. It seemed easy enough and was super tasty. Today we decided to practice. I made the scallops and the woman made the sauce. We didn't have greens so we made an asparagus salad to put under it. The scallops were fair on poor (they were frozen, twice, and wet packed which is the worst way to get them) and the sauce was a total bust. She didn't take it off the heat when blending in the butter so the whole thing separated and turned into nasty sludge. Ugh.

Yesterday I went to the range to pattern the shotgun for the turkey hunt. What a painful experience, my cheek is still swollen from where the stock was pummeling my face. You don't notice the cheap ill-fitting shotgun when you're just goofing around using bird shot. With #4 shot in 3" magnum turkey loads, you notice. The swelling should be less noticeable tomorrow, and as long as I don't smile you can't see that my cheek is so puffy. I hate shotguns.

One of the hamsters appears to be having some problems. He's falling over when walking and is holding his head sideways. Either he's got some neurological problem (apparently it happens and shows up about 6 months into their life) or he got whacked in the head one too many times trying to knock one of his brothers off the wheel (which they do all the time). Hopefully he recovers, I don't want to have to deal with the woman grieving for a hamster already.

Not much else going on around the house. Not looking forward to next week, nothing special going on I just really want a break.

I thought I created an empty March page after the big update at the end of February, but apparently not. Work is pretty constantly busy now so it's hard to break away to write anything, I don't get those little breaks in the action like I used to.

I also find it interesting that I haven't done anything worth of taking a whole bunch of pictures since last November. No new camera dumps on the main page? What have I been doing??? Lots of the same old stuff I guess. We have to go to Reno for a funeral in a couple of weeks, I'll probably have pictures from that trip.