Something's Fishy

B. went deep sea fishing with friends the past couple days - off Monterey.  They spent the night in a hotel last night and the day (today) on a boat fishing.  He just put at least 15 pounds of cod fillets in the sink - they are filleted and ready to fry and have been well iced.  J. is getting them ready to freeze (some) and we'll do a fish fry tomorrow.  Reminds me of summers in Mexico where fish fry events were a regular thing.  Most of my birthdays were celebrated with a fish fry.

There has been a serious wildfire near us - today is better but last night around this time, the wind shifted suddenly and our skies were an orangey haze.  It was a little scary - how quickly we were socked in with smoke.  It's 25% contained and is at least 2500 acres (as of this morning).  It's in the hills and canyons between Tracy and Livermore and those canyons are deep and full of brush and very dry grass.  Praying for the safety of the fire fighters.

I am psyching myself up to work this weekend - I didn't work at all last weekend so it's time to pay the piper.  I'm doing OK on the year-end stuff and hope to get even more nailed down by end of day tomorrow - and then I'll have to spend the weekend figuring out what it all means.  :-)

Made a trip to the toe doctor today and the nails are growing out well.  There still a little sore and one of them is still in need of soakings - but they are healing well.

It's Saturday!  Good morning!  The fish fry was excellent - some of the best fish I've ever had. Delicious!  B. is really into Gordon Ramsay so he looked up fish recipes and watched You Tube videos.  It was a multi-step dredging process with flour and breadcrumb coatings AND he added our own 'spin' - we marinated the fish in beer prior to dredging.  It was pretty delicious!!  Except bones. Most of the pieces were fine but a few bones were there and that just wrecks it for me - I'm immediately terrified to swallow and am not sure what to do to extract the bones.  So...I just get it all out of my mouth.  I know - it is gross.  But I just can't risk swallowing a bone.  Luckily, most of the pieces were de-boned well so it wasn't an issue.

B. is going to an A's game today - not sure what H. is up to.  J. will hold down the homestead while I head in to work for most of the day.  It must be done.

The wildfire is 75% contained now and thankfully, the smoke is blowing elsewhere.  No injuries reported and I don't think any structures were lost.  The fire was in deep canyons and it sounds like they monitored and let it burn vs. trying to stop it - it's empty ranch land so didn't make sense to spend a lot of water resources to try to put it out.

We upped our lawn watering a bit - still sticking to the odd/even schedule (we are an odd  :-) ) but water both morning and night.  Giving the grass and earth time to have the watering absorb and then doing it again on the same day.  Our grass is greening a bit - and I feel a little guilty about that but know that we are cutting back quite a bit.  The water bill shows the reduction and it's pretty seriously reduced.  Our shower buckets also help -

OK - time to get showered and head in.  The sooner I get there and get stuff done, the sooner I can come home.  More of the same tomorrow.  If I start the work week off with the 'guts' of my report done, I should be able to finish up easily by next weekend - though I do have a lot of meetings on my calendar next week, so we'll see.