Wine wine and more Wine

The great thing about where I live is we're in Washington "wine tasting" country. And I take full advantage of this.

I bought the wine passports from Costco and I'm determined to taste all the wineries in them. There are 42 wineries, some distilleries and some cider places. My other goal is to taste 50 new wines this year.  Piece of cake.

Today Photo Girl and the Yank met me at our first winery, Alexandria Nicole. The tasting room appeared to be like you were in a wine cellar. It was so cool. The wine was delicious. Expensive, but delicious. I like that the tasting list almost always has a couple of whites and reds. It gets me to taste white wines, which I generally don't care for.

Alexandria Nicole had a good Merlot that we tasted. Our first taste was from a bottle open yesterday. She then had us taste a bottle she just opened. The just opened bottle was so good, the day old one was way more mellow. I prefered the just opened one.

Our second winery was J&M winery. Every time we try to hit this place it's closed for a private party. Today it was open. So we went on in. It was our first passport winery of the day.

Their wine is, in my opinion, over rated. It's just ok wine and way too expensive for what you're getting. They have a big fire pit outside the tasting room and it was going. It made all the wines have this smoky smell to them even though they didn't have a smoky taste.

From there we hit Lauren Ashton winery. The wine pourer at Alexandria Nicole told us she really liked Lauren Ashton's new Rose. Thankfully it was on the tasting menu. I purchased myself a bottle. I'm not a Rose drinker ... but here I am buying a bottle. That's how good it was.

After that we hit Gorman's. His wines are spicy and delicious. Also somewhat expensive...but we got a 20% off for the passport. I bought yet another Rose and a red.

After that winery we decided we were hungry. Across the street was Village Wines which has some yummy meat and cheese trays. We were in heaven. 4 more wines there.

All in all I think I tasted 26 different type of wines. Each winery has 5-6 wines to taste. Hiccup!

The day started, though, with breakfast with the landlords for our monthly breakfast club. We went ot Voula's in Mont Lake Terrace...it was just ok. Just average food.

Yesterday I spent the day with Meg-A-Rooni. We went out to test my new camera and to get caught up. We had lunch at the Duvall Grill. Fantastic Club Sandwich! Horrible Ice Tea. After that we took a trip to Snoqualmie Falls to check it out. Meg-a-Rooni had never been there, so why not. It was pouring rain. Gave me a chance to try out the camera in the rain I guess.

Busy busy weekend. I missed just being in the house vegging, but I also miss being out and about in the world doing this living thing I hear about.

38 days...but who's counting

That's right... 38 days until Scotland. Yipee!

In an attempt to take back my life, I tried to work only "around" 40 hours last week. I just wanted to see if it could be done with the type of work load we're pulling right now.

I did my time sheets today and I was close. I logged 59.5 hours!

GAH!  I knew at about Wednesday that wasn't going to happen. It dawned on me that technically I'm doing 4 jobs.

1. Manager of the Delivery team. This takes about 15 hours a week, give or take. When I'm training new CSMs it seems to be more, but on average.

2. Localization specialist. I'm the only one on our team who knows and understands how our localization process works. And who has any idea about localization in general. I have been doing localization stuff for years - since my early days at Hotel CaliforniaSoft. (Note: Localization is basically the translation of content...in case you didn't know.) Our loc work is massive these days. Everyone...and I mean EVERYONE is getting ready for the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) that's to hit May 25th. It's an EU regulation on processing data - in it's simplest form. But because of it being international...everyone is localizing. And thus all the work. For the month of April, I had 900 development hours on the books for work for loc. That's just development. The managing and coordinating of all that is on my plate. Easily a 40 hour a week gig.

3. PM - I still have clients. And BIG ones. Most my clients are relatively quite these days, but the few that are active are very very active.

4. Professional Service Specialist - Our team is getting ready to reorg. Most the players will remain on and be Client Success Managers. Others of us, myself included, will become part of what we call Professional Services. Basically any additional paid for service a client purchases with their subscription. The CSM takes care of the client and their "subscription health" and we take care of anything else the client wants to do. So in prep of re-orging, and with the new CSMs, I've tried to put together a process for it. And in doing so have become the PS person. The new CSMs I'm not even teaching anything about the professional service portion of the job, and so ALL their work will come my way.

So technically I should be getting 4 salaries. Right?

I have no idea how to get myself out of this mess I'm in. I have been patiently waiting for something to happen and nothing has. We hired a new VP that starts on may 15th. I'm hoping he can bring some organization to my chaos.

In other news, today is the DadUnit's birthday. He would have been (**counts fingers) 84 today! I miss him a lot. He and the MomUnit have been on my brain all weekend. I found myself telling stories about them both and bringing them up in conversation. It feels good to talk about them. Makes me feel like they're here.

Yesterday was Sunday Dinner. I had a small crowd so I did RIBS! I swear each time I do these ribs they get better and better. Hah...I guess ribs were fitting since today's Dad's birthday and he was the master of ribs.

That's all. Gotta go do some more research on Scotland. I'm so excited to go. I sooo need this vacation.

Weekend Social Requirements

The older I've gotten the more I don't often feel like being social. That coupled with working ridiculous hours I like my "me" time. When a weekend comes up that has me around people both days, I start to get antsy.

It's not that I don't like these people (friends and family)...its not that at all. In fact, I love them all and enjoy spending time with them. It's just by so many social promises I don't have my "me" time and that makes "me" cranky!

This weekend though, the cranky stayed home. It was an overly joyful weekend. Celebrated a niece getting married and my BFF, Blueberry turning the big 5-0.

Getting to see so many friends and family come together to celebrate happy things like these don't seem to happen enough these days. I thought of the Parental Units frequently throughout the weekend, but not in a sad way. Sure, I missed them. But I thought about how proud they'd be of it all. And I was reminded yet again, how very thankful I am to have had such fantastic parents.

Today, officially, I'm 1/2 lb away from my first 20. Sure has taken stinkin forever. But slow and steady wins the race I think. I still want my life to not change too much and there in lies the problem. I'm still thinking of this as temporary. I figured eventually I'll get my act together and think straight...won't I?

I signed up for a scrapbooking retreat that is happening at the end of July. Which means, I gotta get my act together and get some pages staged and ready to go because I can't pack my entire scrapbook room.  I spent all day Sunday starting the process and in doing so decided to rearrange my scrapbook room.  Funny how I can always find something "else" to do...still I spent a good part of time doing what I intended.

And lastly, Scotland...it is a mere 44 days away! I've started my research and am so ready to go. I took a half day off on Friday and it sure felt good - which tells me I'm ready.

Oh Sherrie...Oh 50th

So BlueBerry's 50th birthday is quickly approaching. In January I asked her if she wants to have a party. She said yes. I figured I had, well, 4 months to plan it. Suddenly last weekend I realized I hadn't really done too much of the planning. Like the bare minimum. Thankfully, the Landlords live in an high rise apt bldg that has a community room we can rent out. That was easy. Getting the list of invitees was a challenge, but we got the invites out.

Then on Friday I realized I have just one weekend left to pull this together. Blueberry came over today and we killed the list of things to do.

We got 4 photo collages together for the party.
We bought party supplies / decorations.
We bought / ordered the food from Costco.

Side Note: I'm really unsure what part of my brain shut off when I said, "Hey let's go to Costco on a rainy Sunday." Lord the number of people there was astonishing.

Anyhow, while at Costco, Blueberry also bought a new camera...finally. She bought a smaller, less fancy version of my new camera. So we sat for 2 hours reading the manual and playing with the new camera. I think she's all set for Scotland now.

As we were putting together the photo collages, I just sat there and marveled at the idea that we'll be fifty. How did that happen? I certainly don't feel like what I thought 50 would feel like. I mean, when I was in my 20's fifty was OLD. Now it just seems like the next decade and my give a damn is less available.

Other not so interesting things going on:
If April showers bring May flowers, it's going to be one helluva blooming month. The rain over the last couple of days has been relentless.

I found another semi-conscious yellow jacket in my bathroom. That's two. I'm starting to wonder as it's warming up if there's a nest of them in the crawl space of something. I'm going to have to move if there is. I hate bees.

One of my nieces is getting married this coming weekend.  I imagine if Mom were still around, I'd be picking her up from the airport sometime this week. I miss her.

And with that, I'm going to close the laptop before the light turns off (its on a timer and shuts off about 10:10 every night).

Happy Easter every Bunny...

Hard to believe it's Easter. AND April Fool's Day. I think it would be hilarious to tell your kids you hid eggs, but didn't. Probably a good reason I didn't have kids.

Back in 1998 I rented a room in a house a good friend of mine owned. Easter day he was leaving for a 4 week trip to Norway. The night before we had all the friends over to dye eggs. We had a dozen that we kept.

The next day roommate left bright and early. He left me a note next to the empty egg carton telling me he had hid the eggs. What? So the search began.

I found 11. For 4 weeks I waited for that 12th egg to start to smell.

Roommate finally made it home late one night. The next morning I asked him about the 12th egg. He gave me a very odd look. When I reminded him what he had done he laughed and said, "Oh 1 ate one."

GRRR...

It's been a rather emotional week for me. Still not feeling great and want nothing more than to pick up the phone and whine to mom about being sick.

One of the demon cats broke a sugar bowl that was my Great Grandmothers, passed down and at 2am in the morning I'm cleaning up sugar and crying...

Funny how some object can carry so much emotion to it. I almost didn't put it out for fear of me breaking it. But decided that it was designed to be used. I'm sad it broke, but at least can find photos on the internet and tell a story about it.

When I was looking up to find a photo of the sugar and creamer set I learned this is a Hobnail design. Hobnail was designed in 1939 and became popular in the 50's. 

See the interwebs can be useful every now and then to find useless information about a sugar and creamer set that were in the family for years. Facebook folks gave me a lot of options for the pieces remaining. None of which I need to do, so the whole kit and kaboodle got trashed. And no, I didn't toss out the boy demon although I was very close to doing that.

And with that, I'm going to go get myself some coffee and spend the day up in the scrapbook room around memories and maybe, just maybe, get some of my Ireland book done.

Happy Easter everyone. I leave you with my favorite Easter joke.