Safari West

Went with a couple of friends early this week for a "girl's getaway" to Safari West in Santa Rosa. M and I went to Tanzania last year, so D thought we wouldn't be interested, but heck we always like hanging out with wildlife so off we went. My favorite part was the newborn zebra.

We stayed at the Calistoga Inn and Spa for the most likely the last time as they are closing soon for renovation and probably will become all "chi chi" and too expensive like the rest of the places in Calistoga.
We had a fantastic lunch at the Greystone Restaurant, which is part of the California Culinary Academy in Napa. The place looks like some kind of fancy french chateau or castle. We dined on the outdoor terrace with a superb view of the vineyards. The meal was good, not really knock your socks off good, but the atmosphere was really incredible, it felt like we were in an episode of the lifestyles of the rich and famous. The young waiters were actually students and amusing in their naivete, I asked one where the Sterling Vineyard was and he didn't know, which really surprised my as 1) Sterling is quite possibly the best known tourist winery for the tram ride and 2) I would have thought one of the benefits of attending a culinary academy in Napa would be a required course in wine appreciation and the local wineries.

We wanted to visit a sparkling winery and made our way to Schramsburg only to learn to our dismay that they wanted $35 for the tour and priviledge of possibly purchasing their precious wine, yowza, NO WAY. So we admired their lovely grounds for about 2 minutes then promptly made our way to the more tourist friendly Mumm Napa winery where we thoroughly enjoyed our hour long FREE tour and then tried some very good champagne, whoops, make the "sparkling wine" as we learned that the term champagne is really reserved for wine originating in the Champagne region of France and made by a very particular method. Now since this agreement among the world's wineries was actually made while America was enjoying Prohibition, we didn't sign it, but out of respect for Mumm's parent winery in France they only use the term sparkling wine to refer to Napa's appellations. No matter what it's called, it's goooood!
We also had a unique opportunity to hear a dinner talk by Dr. Laurie Marker who is the founder and executive director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund. It is quite appalling to hear yet another version of how ALL THESE DAMN PEOPLE are ruining the earth. It is very rarely spoken directly but it seems to me the root cause of all our environmental issues is the sheer number of humans on the earth! I certainly do not have the answers, but we really do need to breed less and find ways to tread lighter on this earth.

Elephant progress

I am finally done with knitting the many pieces of the elephant. It took longer than expected, especially the weaving in of the many loose ends. Now he is getting "blocked" after which comes the final sewing together and stuffing. Looks like I am on track to get this done by the end of the month.

Harvest season is upon us

Just another day in paradise! A friend of ours is a partner in an excellent new winery, De Novo Wines, and hosted a harvest party this weekend. Oh what joy it is to live in the wine capital of America. We had the opportunity to help harvest 1000 pounds of Syrah grapes at the Apicella Vineyard. Herve and Ladd (sadly, Dana couldn't make the party this year) clearly love their work and sharing their joy with friends and family. We met at the estate, parked in the emu/donkey/llama pen, grabbed tools and buckets, walked a short, but incredibly picturesque way down to the actual vineyard where, after a short explanation of how they judge when to pick the grapes (something about Ouija boards and refractometers) we all set to work harvesting the juicy, ripe grapes. Many hands make short work and we were done in less than an hour, but even in that relatively short time, us city folk were shiny with sweat and obviously not used to "hard" labour.
Next step: measuring and crushing the grapes. The grapes were dumped into the crusher (this really looked like a re-purposed hot tub) and we all scrubbed our little feeties super clean and dipped them in a disinfecting solution, then whoopie jumping into the tub!! After a lot of laughing, stomping, drinking and more laughing the juices were literally flowing. Ladd claims all the "Joie de vivre" adds spirit to the wine and I totally believe him. All in all, this was a super duper day.

A weekend to dye for

What a lovely, and long, weekend it has been. I took Friday off as we had the company golf tournament. Now, as my friends can attest I am quite awful at the game of golf and actually woke up dreading this "fun" event. So, I gave myself (and my unknowing teammates) a gift by begging off. Initially, this posed a conundrum for me as I didn't want to make up a lie about why I wasn't going, like "my dog is sick", it didn't seem fair to the dog or my teammate, on the other hand I also didn't want to just say "hey, I hate golf, don't know what in the heck I was thinking and am just not gonna go", as that seemed a bit too blunt. So I finally settled on " I'm just not feeling up to it today", which was both vague and true.

Saturday we went to a friend's 50th birthday party. DH, being horribly allergic to cats, had the bright idea to use a gas mask in the hopes that we could stay in the house more than 60 minutes before a "total airway closure" emergency. God love him he walked into a house full of mostly strangers for a social situation (party) in a gas mask! Now, I ask you, what kind of cohones does it take for a man to do that! He is a true treasure, you must understand that he basically did this because he knew how badly I wanted to go and have him with me. I love this man.

Finally got around to creating the "sunset" backdrop for the elephant silhouettes in the African quilt. I started with 4 yards of 36" plain white muslin, dyed the entire piece a lovely shade of yellow in the washing machine, then I had to seam it to the approximate dimensions (square 52") and left is very over sized. Now the hard part, I wanted the middle to be orange and the bottom scarlet. So, I basted a couple of "guidelines" in black thread to divide the piece in thirds. Then dyed the entire lower 2/3rd orange on the stove, carefully holding the top 1/3 out of the dye bath. This turned out so well, I got excited and immediately started on the bottom 1/3 in scarlet. Well, not a total disaster, but I did learn that it's not smart to handle your lovely yellow parts with gloves stained in scarlet, damn! Anyway, I knew this was not likely to be perfect as it's the first time I attempted a complicated dye job, hopefully I can cover some of it up with the elephant silhouette. On top of the near dye disaster, I think my washing machine has developed a leak.

doggie breath, it can save your life

another amazing animal fact for your reading pleasure:

Dogs can detect if someone has cancer just by sniffing the person's breath, a new study shows.
Ordinary household dogs with only a few weeks of basic "puppy training" learned to accurately distinguish between breath samples of lung- and breast-cancer patients and healthy subjects.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0112_060112_dog_cancer.html

Now, if I can only convince Max that cancer breath = cookies, we're in business!

finally Friday

The work gym has started a weight loss program, I signed up with a few other people from work. I would like to lose about 10 pounds to get back to fighting trim. That's all well and good, but honestly I have a wicked, I mean wicked sweet tooth and the vending machine sings it's siren song very loudly in the afternoon.

One of the gals on my team, hosted a Lia Sophia jewelry party at her home tonight, it was really fun, incredibly girlie as we all tried on the pieces and told each other how cute we looked. Of course, I couldn't resist the lure of all the shiny beads and baubles, my favorite is a black/white chain that can be worn as a choker or long necklace. On a related, funny note DH was invited to a "Pleasure Party" by his fellow teachers, whew whee, he wisely decided NOT to attend : )

Next post I'll show the progress on Aidan's gift, the African quilt and how the insomnia cures are working. Till then, enjoy this great fall weather.

techie stuff

good morning, today I am looking at ways to really wipe data from an old laptop before donating to a school. So far I have learned that it is ridiculously easy for a computer savvy thief to retrieve data that has been "deleted" or even from a drive that has been re-formatted. Given enough time, money and brains (ok, I know you are thinking "most criminals are actually short on all three", but I'm not, so I am doing this research just in case) data can be recovered after almost ANY form of removal. However, there are some very, very good FREE programs available on the web to do a pretty thorough job of overwriting your hard drive with random 1's and 0's so as to foil the average bad guy. I will update on what I actually manage to do to my poor old hard drive.

As a side note, the only foolproof way to secure destroy your old hard drive is to melt it down to slag metal, truly : ). Another extreme alternative is skeet shooting, which I admit sounds like real fun, but unfortunately does not do much for getting a laptop to DH's school for cute presentations about bats on the LCD projector.