The Weekend...

So we had guests at the Hotel Yorba. Lauren and Paul stayed with us for the weekend. It was a rough start tot the trip. Highway 29 was closed due to a mudslide. But they persevered and took an alternate route. And they missed a turn and drove an hour and a half out of their way around Lake Berryessa and right back to where they started. But they made it.

So Friday night was pretty mellow. A little conversation and then bed.

On Saturday, the girls went for a manicure. Paul and I sat around discussing this and that. And then the boys (Paul, Jake, and I) fell in to playing poker. Texas Hold 'Em, to be precise. Paul and I agreed that we would have a ten dollar buy in and that Jake would put in his own money, but we would refund it if he lost. My hope was to teach him a valuable lesson about gambling. Instead, I learned a valuable lesson about my son.

When the girls got back from their manicures, they wanted to play too. In all, we must have spent 8 hours together around my grandfather's poker table.


My step-grandfather's, actually. My Nana's second husband was, for a time, the head of the Army Corps of Civil Engineers. He was responsible for most of the dams and water control projects of the Sacramento Delta, and I guess California. I'm told that he had a weekly game, and so a lot of generals have played poker at this very table. When I found it in his house, it was in great disrepair, with faded old felt and cigarette burns. My father-in-law re-finished it with the extra felt from our pool table so it matches. Amalio Gomez was probably the smartest man I've ever known. And he's a big part of why I bothered to learn Spanish. Thank you, sir, for the table, and for the lessons you taught me. I hope you are resting in peace.

Anyway - I intended to teach Jake a lesson about gambling. Even when we told him about our agreement, and gave him back his hard earned allowance, he was still bummed. He just hates losing, period. Oh, and he loves playing - he almost never folds.

And I think I've got his tell figured out, but I'm not going to tell you about it. Brad might come play some day. And he's ruthless.

I like these pictures...




Rachel holds her own and then some.







And the dinner was good on Saturday. I used less garlic on the sauce this time, but it still tasted really spicy. Maybe it was the dill? Anyway - here's what the grill looks like when I cook for Vegetarians and the rest of us at the same time.



Notice that the tofu is on top so no meat juice drips on it. Oh, and I tried one kabob of lamb. I didn't like that at all. It smells and feels funny. And it is an expensive meat. I got a coupe of shoulder cuts and it was no fun at all trying to get decent size pieces off of the bone. And there was a lot of fat and yuck tissue. And the whole tike I was prepping I had this whole "lamb of God" thing running through my head. So I'll stick with chiken from now on, thank you very much.

We were so full from dinner that I didn't serve desert. We saved that for Sunday (and my next post).

I watched "A History of Violence" in bed while Rachel slept. Good movie and well done. But it didn't teach me anythig I didn't know already. If you start fro the premise that violence is wrong, everything else that matters follows. And if you stay up watching a movie after everyone else goes to sleep, you miss out on a lot of fun in the morning. Like this morning - Jake and Paul watched soccer, or football, depending on whether you are Jake or Paul. Liverpool won.

Throughout the weekend, Lauren did laundry. It was quite a pile - rivalling some of Rachel's and mine.

Notice the pile on the air hockey table behind Lauren.




And there was more in the front.

Anyway - they took off late this afternoon, and Rachel and I watched "Good Night and Good Luck." We dug it and will probably watch it again some time this week. There's a lot of parallels between then and now. Only there was no Fox News back then. And now that I think about it, there was no Fox News during the Vietnam War, either. Perhaps that's why we have Fox News today. Maybe some day they will figure out that half or more of Bill O'Reilly's audience is comprised of people like me who are trying to know the enemy.

I'm for bed now. Oh, after one more quick post.