Monday, February 13, 2006

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Or in our case, "oweee!" That is Leif's new thing, when he doesn't want to do something he squeals "owee!" Which invariably causes us to stop what we are doing to investigate the source of "owee". Nine times out of ten, there is no owee. Hence, the title.

Friday afternoon I left early, shortly after the review ended. Leif and I were going to the mailbox. On the way back he looked up in the sky, stopped, pointed at the moon and exclaimed "Ball!!" He could not be convinced that this was actually, the moon. Because the moon is hanging on the wall in his bedroom.

I had a very nice, albeit, very reclusive weekend. When stress gets me I become a recluse. I hide in my office dealing with the stress. Directly after the stress I hide until I can deal with the world. That was this weekend. And today I came in ready to conquer the world. I have scheduled appointments and even called Leif's first pediatrician, who is a major dimwit, to yell once again. 15 months after leaving his practice and I am still dealing with this shit. Never got his PKU results to this date, and now they are billing me for his circumcision because they never submitted it to insurance and the statute of limitations has run out. This, IMO, is their fault and I am not monetarily responsible for their lack of billing. I will pay my portion, but this one is on them. (They are threatening collections of course.)

We got a lot done on Saturday. We hauled in our pictures to be framed and "debated" colors and frames. The Aurora was a gift from Byron and we have it framed nicely. We purchased Glacier this Christmas and it needed framed. AB has one that was his graduation gift from Byron that doesn't appear to be available anymore, it is of the Anchorage skyline. Being a poor college student it was put in a plain black frame with no mat. We have now remedied that situation! I hope the pictures will look good together, we matted and framed each for the picture and not as a set because the colors of the three didn't all go together. And we may want to hang them separately someday. This doesn't sit *real* well with me, but I am trusting the artistic opinion of the framer (who seriously reminded me of some guys I knew in high school... ).

After a few hundred in frames to Michael's we headed next door to Petsmart, where I promised AB that we would not be getting another fish, no we were there for dog food. (But I said NOTHING about not getting a snail for the tank.)

We trimmed the grapevines and fruit trees. I hope we weren't too late as our fruit trees already have budded out. (Amazingly.) We went for walks, I got groceries and we cooked some good food. AB made a huge pot of rice and beans for a JA fund raiser through work. He also worked some on Sunday after doing his homework.

On Sunday afternoon we had a nice surprise... the wine fairy showed up at our house with a case of wine for us to taste. 12 different, mostly local, cabernet sauvignons from a judging this weekend. Probably $400-$500 worth of wine... had it not been opened for the judges! This is always a welcome surprise and at about 5pm AB and I started hitting the bottles. I pulled out my Wine Spectator Washington report and was pleased to see that most of the wines were listed in there. I love tasting the same varietal across different wineries. This is something that we don't often get to do, even living in wine country. When you visit a winery, they pour all their varietals from one winery, so the opposite.

We pulled out the high end wines first, 5 of them that we identified as being wines we normally would either not put out the cash for, irregardless of the taste, or just unavailable locally to the best of our knowledge. The thing that really struck us about this group was that they were all extremely different. Many had very distinguishing characteristics and were not your "classic cab". Ever tasted green beans and asparagus in wine? I hadn't. Try Koenig Winery's Cab for that one.

So I don't need to drown on here... suffice it to say that AB and I both had our list of top 5-6 cabs of the bunch and they didn't really agree. Mine started with the Dunham Cab, followed in order by Robert Karl's Reserve, Fidelitas, Barbard Griffin's Tulip label (I had the Reserve the other night and it was good), and Columbia Crest Grand Estates Cab. WS listed Columbia Winery's cab at a 92 for $29. I will revisit that one tonight. I like that price and rating.

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