Monday holidays and white table wine

I'm not the biggest fan of holidays, generally. You will never find me wearing a sweater with a christmas tree knitted or appliqued onto it, with one of those plastic santa claus pins with the nose that lights up, with an elf hat on my head and a dish of red, green and silver hershey's kisses on my desk. You are not likely to find me waving a flag at a parade on July 4th. You are also not likely to find me coloring eggs in the spring. You MIGHT find me at a New Year's Eve party or cooking a big dinner in November or wearing a costume in October. Maybe.

And then there are the Monday holidays. I swear they were put there on the calendar just to annoy me. Rarely have I ever had a job where I got the day off, or if I did I probably wasn't getting paid for it. Or maybe everyone at work but me got that day off. I think those holidays just exist so that I can show up at the bank and find out it's closed, then open my mailbox to find it empty while whatever I'm expecting from UPS or FedEx is delayed by a day...AND shows up later the next day, since the extra day seems to get them a bit backed up on packages. It means the gym may be closed or close early, and restaurants are either closed or much busier than a normal Monday.

Still, I did enjoy my three day weekend this weekend!

I've been a bit handicapped wrt creating new models or working on any vMTV stuff because I got so fed up with Comcast I canceled my service with them and have been connecting to the Internet through my bf's Verizon Hi Speed Wireless card...which is pretty good although not as fast as Comcast (WHEN AND IF Comcast is actually working, because they suck and I have found their service extremely unreliable - but hey, who wants to watch the Olympics or maybe go online to earn a living anyway?) and the card does sometimes come disconnected in the middle of the night, forcing me to do my ThereBucks sales remotely while I sleep just in case. The thing is, I can only connect one laptop to the wireless card which leaves my two desktops unconnected right now, and it's pretty difficult to do anything developer-wise on them without the connection. I've toyed with the idea of trying to connect with my desktops to the Internet THROUGH the tablet pc, but I think I'll just have to suck it up and get satellite Internet ASAP.

The good news there is that when I first moved into my building 3 1/2 years ago, we weren't allowed to have a satellite dish on our balcony, and now there are FIVE of them on my side of the building (I don't think the other side of the building gets the necessary southern exposure, poor bastards.

Okay, this is getting really long and I haven't even gushed about my weekend yet!

Sunday my bf picked me up in the morning and we went to the Santana Row farmer's market. I thought it would be bigger but it was cool, we got some peaches and olive oil and walnut bread and fresh figs. Oh, and heirloom tomatoes! And one guy had the first pomegranate juice of the season but it was pasteurized so we didn't get any...he said during the peak of the season just let him know and he keeps some unpasteurized stuff in an ice chest behind the counter for regular customers that promise not to sue him for I dunno...if their juice ferments or something (he makes it sound like fermentation is a bad thing!) After that we went to a wine bar there that was pretty good and they were sort of advertising the movie "Bottle Shock", which it turns out was playing right at the theater in Santana Row, so we decided to see it, but first we did a little shopping (although all we bought was some chocolate and some $12 a tube lip balm) and we had lunch at some asian restaurant that I don't know the name of. The service was a bit off but most of the food was pretty darn good. We had cocktails and both got headaches later...probably should have brought our own bottle of wine instead, like maybe a bottle of the Luchador Shiraz we liked.

The movie was okay, not great but it was entertaining and I would recommend it to anyone interested in California wines/wine history. Actually, I enjoyed it more than Sideways. I mean, at least it's based on a true story.

So Monday morning...it was SO GREAT that it was a holiday. Not because of MY schedule, I'm basically always working and yet almost never working at the same time, as paradoxical as that may sound. No, it was because my bf didn't have to be anywhere. So we lounged around until we decided we wanted to have peaches for breakfast. Well, that was my bf's healthful suggestion which I somehow morphed into "let's mix some orange juice and peaches together in the blender and then add them to champagne", but we didn't have any champagne so my bf started digging through his wine stash for something white...there is always something white hanging around because we prefer red. He says "how about this White Table Wine from someplace in Napa" and I'm like "sure, whatever". So he opens the bottle and I'm like "should we try just the wine by itself first?" We both tried it and OMG...this white wine, served at room temperature, was sooooooo good. Like, the best white wine EVAR!!!

So we drank all our peach/orange/white table wine with some walnut baguette and took pictures of our garden, pulled a few carrots and picked our very first tomato. I'll tell you about that tomorrow or something because my bf has to send me the pictures first. While doing all this we decided "let's go to Napa RIGHT NOW and get some more of this white table wine!" "Right now" is a little relative though, because first my bf has to do soooooo much stuff like shave and spend an hour styling his hair.

That gave me time to check my business transactions, look up the winery that has this amazing wine and have a conversation with my bf's mom about how her nurse speaks very good spanish but english is much harder to learn because you have words like "glasses" which could mean drinking glasses or eye glasses but it's confusing that the one word can mean two things. I don't think she was really listening when I pointed out that they are both made of the material "glass", but one is for "drinking" and one is for your "eyes" and the proper thing to say would be "eyeglasses" and "drinking glasses" and that means you really just need to learn three words and then you can put them together and you know at least five words...and she already knows drink and eyes. The reason I don't think she was listening is because we've actually had the same conversation before. What I was really hoping was that she'd bring up jesus christ or church or something because I recently got the book "What the Bible Says about Healthy Living" and I wanted to quote her some juicy bible passages. Oh well, I don't have them memorized yet anyway.

Anyway, back to the winery...I looked up the Van Der Heyden Vinyards website and one page listing wines available didn't show the white table wine, but an ordering page DID show it, so I gave my bf the phone number and he called and asked them if they were open and they were, so we drove to Napa! I wondered if maybe we should have asked if that wine was still available, but my bf preferred to simply go look.

He said "we're lucky we can just drive to Napa and visit a few wineries any time."

I said "yes, somos afortunados!"

Well, actually I said something more like "nosotros suertemos", but now I know that was wrong.

So anyway, we got to the winery and we walk in and the guy is like "I hope you're not here for the white table wine because we've been sold out for a month and a half." Then he relented and let us know there were exactly two magnums left of the object of our affections. My bf said we'd take one but I bruised his ribs with my elbow until he said we'd take two. We'll probably serve them for Thanksgiving or xmas, so whomever is with us on that day will be muy afortunado! The winery has some other great wines as well...we had a fabulous, fabulous amazing dessert wine that I can't remember the name of but it was $125 for a small bottle so we didn't get any :( The guy, who not only works in the tasting room of Van Der Heyden but also cuts meat at Safeway, said he was giving us a taste of it because the owner was out cleaning some vats or something so he could get away with tasting us on it without charging us $10. I think he really just did it because he thought "here are two people that will probably spend $125 on a bottle of wine." Nice try, dude.

So then we went to some other winery that wasn't as good, then to a great coffee shop right in the center of Napa that appears to supply all the coffee blends for all the best Napa restaurants, and then to "Tuscany", the restaurant we reluctantly left on another occasion because we had reservations at Ubuntu. It was a bit of a challenge eating there this time...but I'll have to leave that for a Yelp review.

Oh...oh...and then we stopped at the outlet mall which was open late because IT WAS A HOLIDAY (so another reason Monday holidays are sometimes okay) and went shopping and I came home with some cute tank tops and a bunch of undergarments that my adorable bf bought me. Thank goodness Napa is so much closer than the San Joaquin Valley, because by this time we'd had a very long day and it was just "gps take us home." Okay actually it was more like I programmed the gps and then my bf ignored everything it said to do.