the birthday trip/wine tour

This weekend I went to New York for the wine tour again. It was a really busy weekend. The condensed version is that I set foot in a church twice in one weekend, ate out a lot drank an ass ton of wine, laughed at a lot of crude comments and lewd stories told on the bus, saw a Batavia, NY local stage production of "Singin' in the rain" and got to meet my adorable 9 month old cousin William. No birthday cake this year and no bus full of people singing me happy birthday, but there were brownies with peanut butter cups and lots of laughter.

My husband gave me a lot more money this year, with the directive to spend it! The answer to "how fast can vo0 spend $280" is "oh, about 6 hours." Yes. I said $280 in six hours. I was directed A. not to worry about the price of things B. to buy what I wanted and C. to get a lot more wine than last year because we had to buy extras for the party. Done, done and done. I even got you snobby assholes some drier stuff too. Actually, I was very surprised to find several things with a residual sugar of 2% or less that I actually liked. It was actually a very positive experience to try some of that stuff. Last year all the dry stuff I tried made me pucker up like a lemon. We went to a different set of wineries this year, and, overall, I liked the wines we tasted at these places better. The only disappointment was the lack of ice wine. I think the weather didn't cooperate for people to be able to make the ice wines, but there were plenty of late harvest wines, and all other manner of dessert and sweeter wines. So there was still plenty for me to be giddy about.

I learned a lot of things about religion, about how families react to marriages breaking up (William's dad is leaving his mom), and wine. But mostly I learned that my mother is getting saucy in her old age. She has a friend who is "explicit" (my mother's words) and a therapist who is open and straight forward. So now I have a mother that says things that are disturbing to hear from your mother. We shall leave it at that because, believe me, you don't want to know. Yes, *I* am opting not to put something in my blog because it's too disturbing. Think about that one for a minute.

anyways, it was fun, and I will probably be posting more specifics about some of the things that i breezed by before. Expect to see evites in the next m onth or so for the party... I think we're doing january again this year