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On the recommendation of the proprietors of the Inn at Schoolhouse Creek, I hiked through Jug Handle State Reserve today. To be frank, I’m not a hugely successful hiker; I typically end up recalling little but the view of my feet trodding on a dirt path, and an occasional vista, especially when the dirt path is at Julia Pfeiffer Burns state park.
But the story of Jug Handle is intriguing and has stayed with me. The land in the Reserve has been sculpted by an unusual interplay between glacial action and weathering; the result is an “Ecological Staircase” that climbs through five distinct microclimates. At least, they’re distinct to geologists, who write the fabulous prose on this website:
http://www.mcn.org/1/mendoparks/jug.htm
That site describes the park much better than I ever could.
Topolos at Russian River Vineyards is just south of Forestville on highway 116. The thing you have to like about Topolos is the sheer number of Zinfandels they pour… about six at this visit.
Sadly, they were not pouring the ‘96 RRV California Zinfandel, which we’d enjoyed previously. Most of what we tasted this time were too sour for our liking (not that that prevented us from buying anything, natch).
My day started as do most of my travel days, with the consumption of a pizza shortly after arriving at the airport. The St. Louis airport, oddly, boasts a California Pizza Kitchen, a restaurant I’ve actually never been to. Further down the terminal hallway I spied a Pizza Hut, too, making me feel wealthy beyond any rights.
I had a half-hour to kill before boarding, so I ordered the barbecued-chicken pizza and waited while they slid the pie into a huge wood-fired oven. This seemed like an unusual feature in an airport snack bar, but then again I guess kindling won’t show up on the X-ray machine at the head of the concourse. Anyway, the pizza was quite good; I can tell because, four hours later, I can still taste it. So, I think, can the woman sitting next to me.
We hosted our soon-to-be-annual House Wine Tasting today. This is a double-blind tasting event in which every wine meets these criteria:
a) it’s red
b) a bottle costs less than five bucks
As you know, in a traditional blind tasting, the tasters do not know which wine they’re tasting. What makes this tasting “double blind,” you ask? For an accurate answer you’d have to pose that question to my ophthalmologist: his prescriptions for my contact lenses continue onto a second page.
The goal was to find an inexpensive wine that is not so vile that we couldn’t stand to drink it 3-4 nights a week.
Testing methodology
Each participant was given 3 glasses and a scoring sheet, and whatever encouragement seemed necessary at the time (“Drink faster, damnit!”) Tasters assigned points to each wine, with higher scores indicating better wines.
Spit buckets were provided and indeed saw some use — there was one merlot in particular that was absolutely foul.
After each flight, scores were tallied. Final scores appear below.
Final Scores
Cabs
Merlots
Zins
I’d bet most domain owners fantasize about the altavista.com guy or the business.com guy… folks who made a lot of money selling high-exposure domain names. For a short time I thought I’d be one of those guys.
I got an email in the Fall of 1998 from an unremarkable aol.com address, inquiring whether my domain name was for sale. Picturing an adolescent at the other end with a terrible garage band called Debris, I sent back a terse refusal and quickly resumed with my life.
Three or four months later, I received another email from the same address. Unlike before, this message was remarkable, because it mentioned a dollar figure: $3000.
Time passed, emails were exchanged, and ultimately I was offered about $7500. I believe I countered at $12000, figuring to finance a drum studio I wanted to build, but ultimately I decided that I’d rather have the domain for personal use than see it used for some commercial enterprise.
The folks who wanted the domain are still in business, although I can’t say I understand the model.
P.S. I ended up building the drum studio anyway.
