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Today we went wine tasting in Santa Cruz. This might come as a bit of a surprise to those of you who already know that I don’t really like wine. Still, it seemed like something local and fun that we could do to get out on the weekend and breakup the monotony.

If you know anything about American wine, you’re probably wondering, “Why did they go to Santa Cruz instead of Napa Valley? Isn’t Santa Cruz just a bunch of old hippies and surf bums?” Both good questions. To answer the second, Santa Cruz has not only hippies and surfers, but also expensive boutiques and a some wineries (quite a few, acutally). To answer the first, we were too lazy to drive all the way up to Napa. Some day we will.

The place we went to is called “Bonny Doon Winery.” Now, I should say before I go any further that Santa Cruz styles itself as the “anti-Napa,” and proudly flouts conventional wine-making wisdom. Most of this irreverence was lost on me as someone who doesn’t know any of said conventional wisdom. But in any case, we had a lot of fun. The way it’s set up is each week they pick a new selection of wines (seven or so), then you come lean on a bar and a helpful staffer walks you through each one, describing it. They started us with a pink wine that was actually very good called “vin gris de cigare” which means “gray wine of cigar” (tricky, eh?). It’s called cigar because it’s a type taken from a place in france where it’s forbidden by law to land flying saucers (“cigars”) in vineyards. Ha! Very funny, isn’t it? We then went to a sushi white wine, which I also actually liked, then through some darker red, bitter stuff that I can take or leave, eventually finishing with some dessert wines. First, some sparkling red stuff so sweet that it could have come from a coke machine; it was aptly described as “a strawberry nehi spiked with vodka.” Then a rasperry concoction (framboise) that we actually drank out of chocolate cups (themselves aptly called “snobinettes”). We ended up with a bottle each of the pink, the white, and a fancy red.

So, the past week has been brightened considerably by the presence of a temporary house guest, Philip. Phil has landed a job at vmware in Palo Alto, and is moving into a place in Sunnyvale on Tuesday. He arrived last Monday, though, and so in the meantime he’s been occupying our floor. It’s always nice to have another geek around.

Things are rolling along at work, same-old, same-old, as they say. One exciting thing this week is I’m expecting delivery tomorrow of my Dell 2001FP 21" flat panel monitor. I had previously fancied getting an Apple Cinema Display, but the price was just plain better from dell (the 25% promotion didn’t hurt), plus the monitor rotates from portrait to landscape and it’s just tough to beat the ooh-ahh of that. The technically inclined could peruse the Anandtech review.

Last weekend I had a great time in Michigan visiting Ali. Activities included the Detroit auto show, visiting the UMich campus, snowboarding, and being really tired. Head over to gallery and check them out.

I got a big kick out of this article on the nytimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/011800hth-behavior-incompetents.html

Kind of makes you stop and think about what you think you’re good at. At least it stopped me.

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Comments

leslie — 2004-01-14 23:04:13

funny stuff. shared clandestinely with my credential class while we were supposed to be paying attention in class.

i’ve got to note, sadly, that i definitely could have told you this stuff just based on observations in class. students who are out-and-out failing most often guess that they have a B.

I’ve been back in California now for a couple of days after a short but sweet trip out to Texas to visit friends and families. We left last Tuesday (23rd) and flew to Dallas. We spent a couple of days there, relaxing and eating and such. On Christmas eve we had an awesome dinner of roasted duck that Les’s mom whipped up. As always, her food is perfect and comes into being seemingly without effort.

Another interesting thing we did on the trip was get Les’s dad set up with his new computer: a 14" G4 iBook. Since I didn’t have the money lying around this calendar year to buy a mac for myself, I gave him my personal discount from Apple. He’s got all the trimmings: Airport Extreme, extra RAM, a bigger hard drive. The thing is quite sprightly. We outfitted him with all the important accessories, too, like a wireless network for their house and a shiny new digital camera. They seem to be enjoying their new toys. There are a few pictures from the events on gallery, but I also set up a little picture website for them to have. You should check it out: http://marcandsusan.overt.org.

Other highlights of Dallas include driving around to look at the elaborate displays of lights on the houses and getting a sweet duffel bag (monogrammed) and a very nice pen and set of engraved note cards from Leslie’s parents. Cameron also got me an awesome book of collected Tori singles arranged for solo piano. Not a bad haul.

We left on Christmas day to go to Austin. The afternoon was spent with my parents, opening presents and eating candy and nuts from the stockings. I scored a very nice light for the front of my bike, a questionable dancing turkey, and Metroid Prime, a video game for GameCube (which is good, since I just beat FFX-2 yesterday. Got to have a constant supply of distraction). We had an excellent turkey dinner with the stuffing that my parents make that I love so much. The turkey was also even better than usual, a fact my parents attributed to it free-rangeness (amongst a rash of inane jokes about catching the turkey).

The rest of the time in Austin was spent catching up with friends that were in town. It was awesome. There’s no doubt what I miss the most here in CA are my friends from home. And I’m not making the same kind of friends here, partially because of my geographic isolation from other people my age, and partially because I ended up working with people who are mostly 5-20 years older than me and are married/have kids/otherwise don’t want to hang with me. In any case, I’m going to do my best to hold on to my good friends until I can systematically lure them all out to the west coast.

So, now we’re back in CA. Yesterday, Clare arrived (yay more friends!) and we spent the afternoon in the city, walking down Haight and around in Golden Gate park. Today is getting off to a lazy start after a perfunctory celebration of new year’s last night (damnit, we did at least have champagne!). We’ve taken some pictures that I imagine we’ll post eventually. Stay tuned.