So in the interest of pursuing one of my other hobbies, I blew off hunting on the last of my available weekends of deer season to go spend it with the new guy on his last weekend in California. I have my priorities, and the weather is too warm for the hunting to be very good anyway. In a perfect world, he would have been able to come up and go to the mountains with me, but without transportation on his end, that wasn’t going to happen.

So the mountain went to Mohammed, and we enjoyed each other for a last couple of days. He wanted to see San Francisco, so we took the BART (commuter train) over on Saturday and spent the whole day either being tourists or laughing at tourists, which is always fun. I had wanted to expose this East Coast boy to the wonder that is Dungeness crab, but they are out of season, and while you can still get them you have to fork over an arm and at least an ankle for them. Since I can get them for $3.99 a pound in the grocery store during season, I wasn’t willing to do that, especially for one that had been frozen. If we’re that close to the docks, I won’t eat them unless they’re fresh (but if I can ever drag him out here in the winter, I’m taking him to Half Moon Bay, where we will indeed buy them live off the docks, and cook them up right there.)

We did some of the usual touristy things, although all of the Alcatraz tours were booked up through Monday. We did take a tour of a submarine, which was very interesting. And cramped—wow, those submariners must have been small men. I fit OK, but he had to really squish to get through the hatches.

Then on to buying things for all of the kids back home (and hey! Cheap fleece, and mine need a couple of those anyway. Score!) and some clam chowder since that wasn’t horrendously overpriced.

You know, I really enjoy this guy’s company and I’m going to miss him when he’s gone later this week. I can’t blame him for going; I would have too, but I’m a little sad about it. He sure was a nice surprise to find on a job site. The timing works out OK for me though; had he stayed much longer, I would have become too attached to him and his leaving would have hurt. At this point, I’m just glad I got to know him. He’s been good for me.

I couldn’t see not going deer hunting at all this year, so on Sunday evening after I got home, I was a bad, bad girl. I dragged that trailer up to the mountains and blew off working on Monday. I’ve never ever called in sick for a mental health day, but I did yesterday and nobody missed me. Jeff pulled into camp about five minutes behind me, but it was too dark to hunt. We had dinner and then each hit our own sacks to get up way too early in the morning. Poor Jeff, I forgot what time the sun comes up this time of year, and we had to kill about an hour standing around looking at the moon.

But we did a little road hunting and met Dennis up at Five Corners. The three of us went almost all the way back into the park, but the Forest Service was burning up on the road with the good view. It ended up being a long day of seeing absolutely nothing, but I was still glad to be there.

Dennis and I did a little quail hunting in the middle of the day. Well, Dennis did some, and I was distracted by shiny objects at an old Indian grinding rock. He’s found a bunch of arrowheads around those rocks, so I went looking. I found lots of chips of flint and other sharp stones, but no actual arrowheads. It was fun anyway; I enjoy looking for tiny things that other people have missed. Meanwhile, Dennis had reached the end of the road he was walking and was waiting for me to come get him with the truck, but I was bent in half digging around a rock. He laughed when he saw me.

The only things of note I saw on the whole day were a nice lion print that Dennis pointed out to me and a fox and a bobcat that I jumped in the road on my way out, but a poor day of hunting is still better than a good day of working.

Karma bit me in the ass on the way home though. I stopped at the water tower to change the chlorine, and noticed that my leak-proof diesel can was leaning over. I tipped it back upright and snugged down my bungee cords and went home. By the time I got home though, the can had fallen all the way over and I’d lost a couple of gallons of diesel all over the back of the truck. And the first clue I had of that was when the dog jumped out and splashed. So yeah, I had to give the dog a bath at nine o’clock at night after a long weekend, and we both still reek. Poor dog!