The b.h. and I spent all day yesterday at a big wine show in Stowe. It basically involved a beautiful drive, a two hour seminar with a hilarious and engaging Spanish importer who peppered his talk with expletives and blunt opinions (while he was walking us through a tasting of 25 delicious wines), and a walk-around tasting of a couple hundred wines. Also, there were snacks in the form of cheese and bread and olives and nuts and the like. It was fantastic.
Today I have another show just like it, this time in Essex, and unfortunately no one to accompany me. Ah well.
It has gotten brutally cold suddenly, and I wasn't entirely prepared. I did manage to get out all of the winter clothes from storage, but I'll have to hurry up with the plastic for our windows and the heavier curtains. Twenty six degrees last night. Ugh. The good news is that the dogs have been a lot more snuggly as a result.
I have been cooking a lot more these days, since the b.h. has been in class at night and I have had to fend for myself. I have perfected the roasted cauliflower recipe, made a batch of fig and cardamom ice cream (thanks to Z for the recipe), and tried my hand at baked apples, which were delicious. Have to practice different kinds of salads so I don't get bored with lettuce. Next up: lasagna. Wish me luck.
Other than that, I haven't been doing anything very exciting. Trying to get the dogs out to Hubbard park every day, and we seem to have figured out when and where to go to meet with other people and dogs. Kilgore is a social butterfly, and he loves running around with other dogs. Wyatt, on the other hand, tends to skirt around the edges or just bolt for the car. Mostly I'm with Wyatt.
Been reading Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle, still plodding through A Month of Sundays, not because I don't enjoy it but because the language is pretty thick and I have to have all of my wits about me (which doesn't happen often) in order to read it. On audiobook I've been listening to Good Omens, and I have a book of short stories by a Canadian author whose name I can't quite recall for the spare moments I have during a break at work or while I am waiting in the dentist's office.
Speaking of the dentist, I will be heading back there tomorrow to get my fancy new gold pirate caps. Fortunately the teeth are pretty far back, so I don't have to seek a career in rap just yet. For the past two weeks I have been living with a temporary wax cap fitted over both teeth. This is so that the dentist can send away the mold to get the caps made. The wax has been driving me insane. I popped it off within the first couple days, and have since been removing it every night to soak it in alcohol while I carefully brush the extremely sensitive teeth underneath. I have never looked so forward to a dentist's appointment as I am to the one tomorrow. The wax cap is going to be a lovely shade of purply black from the back to back wine tastings. I wonder what my Mormon dentist will think?
4 comments:
Oh to be in Essex! I'd volunteer for that gig!
It's very weird hearing Americans using the word "Essex". It's got particular resonances for English people. It means blank suburbia, new money, the moneyed working classes, lack of taste, hair drawn up severely on women's heads, cheap sportswear.
The last place you'd go to a wine show.
Our Essex has most of that as well. The Inn where the show was held was lovely but very expensive, and it was across a highway from an outlet mall. (If you haven't seen one of those, you don't want to know what you're missing. And they're mostly located in blank suburbia.) The thing about Vermont is that there is almost no suburbia at all, and what little there is we manage to disguise with lots of trees.
Seriously though, no trouble with blogger? I am only able to access it by signing in as a commenter on other people's blogs.
Really? I don't use blogger (apart to comment on other people's blogspot blogs) so I don't know what's going on.
I'd like the idea of concealing suburbia with trees. In parts of England you can see how the older suburbs were made to create the sense of a village. They failed, but in certain cases, made something else which I quite like to be honest, with characterful period architecture that was self-consciously modern. The newer ones that go up now tend to be private developments. The houses are tiny, cheaply built and appear to have been built by firms who haven't consulted an architectural historian.
Those last developments you refer to are what we call subdivisions, or MacNeighborhoods. Our developers hardly consult a fucking real carpenter, much less an architectural historian. The result is predictably hideous, probably more so now that half of them are being abandoned due to our economy.
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