Wine coup

Several weeks ago, I got to taste a 23-year-old bottle of nebbiolo. It was the '89 Boca Le Piane, and it was delicious. All the fierce tannin of young nebbiolo had faded away, leaving just the fruit, and it was amazing.

When we got some in to the restaurant, I sold the crap out of it. But the wine manager refused to let me buy any at cost from him, since we only had a few bottles. There were wailings and lamentations at that.

Oh, but then! Last night, he discovered the very last bottle had a scuffed label--unsuitable for customers, so he told me I could finally have one.

I am now the excited and proud owner of a 23-year-old wine, and I'm going to drink the shit out of it.

Let's all pause for a moment and remember what we were doing in 1989.

I was starting high school--the worst three years of my life. (I say three, because as we all know, I skipped that last year entirely to start college early). You couldn't pay me enough to live through even one more day of high school.

Today I'm visiting some very old and dear friends from college. I may drink this wine with them (I haven't decided). I may save it for when my best friend visits next week. Either way, this wine is older than all of those friendships.

But not by much.

My first cherry tomato!

Isn't it a beauty?

It almost makes up for the hour-and-forty-five minutes it took me to get to work yesterday.

Still no definitive news one way or the other on Silicon Valley. Today my stepson arrives for a two-week stay, and on Tuesday my best friend and her now-teenage-son will join us. So I'll be hosting two teenage boys. Yay me. I'm taking some days off work; we'll spend one of them at the Cape, one of them in NYC, and one of them just hanging around the house. After they leave, we'll take stepson to Montreal for a couple of days--his first trip out of the country! Then it's back to the grindstone for me.

So, yeah, commuting to work has been particularly gruesome lately. But one of my fellow servers also works for a nonprofit farm, and brings their produce to our kitchen. I asked him if I could purchase some of his super-cheap produce, as well, and he brought me a huge bag of stuff for free. I'm going to take him some banana bread and cookies in exchange. A big bag of zucchini, two eggplants, and a big bag of green peppers, all fresh-picked!

Also, I started washing my hair again. It wasn't noticeably greasy (I don't think) after two months of no shampoo, but it just felt weirdly gummy to me. It's clean now, which means it's frizzy again.

Oh, and we're getting a roommate for the month of September! A friend of mine recently returned to Providence, and she's staying with various people until she can get settled. I'm happy to have her--we're not using that spare bedroom, and we can certainly use a little extra money in exchange.

Silicon Valley?

I owe everyone an update, I know. I've been kind of lax about blogging lately, but it's hard to feel like writing when you're working 60 hours a week on your feet and commuting another 12-15 hours on top of that. Traffic is still a nightmare and I still basically want to kill every human on the planet after I get home from work.

Fortunately I had all day yesterday and today off. A weekend day off! Two days off, in a row! The mind boggles. I'm starting to unwind a little.

Last Monday we drove back into Boston for newly-inaugurated wine class at the restaurant, and followed that up with burgers at a gastropub. The name of my restaurant came up in conversation with the bartender, which got us all kinds of unexpected freebies. I was very pleasantly surprised and happy. There's something to this being in the industry thing, after all. We met a friend of mine for a quick drink afterwards. I also found out that another friend of mine, who'd left earlier in the summer for Montana, is now returning to RI this week. Frankly, I'm not sure why, but I'll be glad to have her back in town.

Yesterday we had dinner at my former restaurant, and the cooks really went all out. They sent out wave after wave of new yumminess to us, which we washed down with a cut-rate bottle of wine. Have I mentioned I like this being an insider thing? Good to see everybody again, too.

Hubs had a promising phone interview this week, with a company in Silicon Valley. They make one of his all-time favorite games, so he's keeping his fingers crossed. Silicon Valley is expensive, but at least there are good restaurants there--I wouldn't have to commute all the way to San Fran to work. But if he gets the job and I find out I have two and a half weeks to move cross-country--AGAIN--I may have to scream. I'll worry about that after he gets the job, though. First things first.

The total incompetence of Rhode Island

From a call placed to the Rhode Island Department of Transportation this morning:

"Hi, I was wondering why 95 South was shut down completely last night, and there weren't any signs up warning people that 95 would be shut down."

"Um...what?"

"95 South was completely shut down last night. All traffic was rerouted through a ramp WITH A TRAFFIC LIGHT. I was sitting in traffic, in a dead standstill, for half an hour at 12:30 am. Why wasn't there a sign up, letting people know that 95 was going to be shut down, so that we could detour around? Also, maybe you could have disabled that traffic light."

"I don't show any record of 95 South being shut down last night. Maybe it was an accident."

"No, it was scheduled construction. I saw the construction vehicles. Why wasn't there a sign put up, a few miles ahead?"

"Maybe it was a sinkhole."

"No, it was scheduled construction."

"Our website has a list of lane closures, maybe you should check that."

"I did. There's nothing on there about 95 South being completely closed down. For that matter, there's nothing about 95 North being completely closed down in that same location, either."

"Um, then there shouldn't be any closures tonight, you should be fine."

"Great. Still doesn't answer my question about why there wasn't a sign up."

"Uh, let me check with someone on that."

(Long pause while I am placed on hold.)

"No one here knows anything about that. We don't have any records of 95 South being shut down. Are you sure it was last night?"

This is what your tax dollars are paying for, folks. 1. Total incompetence, 2. Total lack of appropriate record keeping, 3. Total lack of common sense.

How much you wanna bet I'll be stuck in that same no-sign traffic jam tonight?

The Hair Chronicles

I've had two full days off--in a row!--and I feel like a regular person again. I've almost recovered from last week's trauma, in which there were multiple highway accidents/construction incidents. On one memorable occasion, it took me two hours and ten minutes to get to work. It took me an hour and a half to get home, even in the middle of the night, thanks to lane closures/repaving on 95. By Sunday, I was ready to have a nervous breakdown.

But two days off goes a long way toward recovery.

In other news, I may have found a cure for frizzy hair.

Stay with me here.

I've stopped washing my hair.

My hair was getting super-frizzy lately. I'm not sure why; old age maybe? I noticed that when I got lazy and didn't shower for a couple of days, my hair got noticeably less frizzy, curlier, bouncier, and generally more attractive.

So I'm in the middle of an experiment, to see exactly how long I can go without washing it.

I'm still getting it wet every time I shower, and I'll usually get a good lather going on my bar of soap and then apply that to the roots. I brush it all the time, to move the oil from the roots to the ends, and once a week or so I give it a vinegar rinse.

But no shampoo and no conditioner.

It's smooth, glossy, insanely wavy, and has the most awesome bounce to it. I haven't noticed any downsides yet--no dandruff, no visible greasiness, and my husband swears my hair still smells normal.

Bonus: maybe I can stop buying shampoo and conditioner?

It's hot

Life continues apace. It's boiling hot and we don't have air conditioning. Which doesn't bother me so much, as I'm famously in love with heat, and also because I spend most of my days either in an air-conditioned car or an air-conditioned restaurant, but it does bother my hubby immensely. I don't like watching him turn white and clammy by the end of each day, and the physical misery isn't helping his mental misery at the moment.

Still unemployed, and another game studio in Austin is laying off a bunch of people. More people in the game industry unemployment line. It's getting to the point where I'm considering some sort of big radical change. I'd love to be able to say, "Fuck it," and just move someplace new and start all over, but DH will still be unemployed. Even just moving closer to my work, in Boston, would probably make him ineligible for Rhode Island unemployment any more. If this is going to be an extended bout of unemployment, I'd rather ride it out in a place I actually want to live, but I'd hate to move somewhere, have him get a job offer, and move all over again. More importantly, we're staying afloat right now only because I'm making so much, combined with his unemployment checks. Remove any of that, and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. And any attempts on my part to suggest that he get another sort of job in the meantime, any job, usually just earn me a sour look.

So he's hot and miserable, and I'm hot (and usually cranky). In better news, my container-garden cherry tomatoes are taking off, we've only spent $30 on food this month, and I'm all caught up on "Breaking Bad."

Home again, home again

The great thing about having an unemployed husband, and working in the restaurant industry, is that you can basically take a vacation whenever you want.

Granted, I'm not getting paid for that time off. But we no longer have to worry about parceling out a measly two weeks of vacation every year, or planning way in advance.

So we spent last week in Virginia with my family and friends (since the restaurant was going to be closed three days for the July 4th holiday anyway). I slept ten hours a night, I ate three meals a day--at normal times--and most importantly, I sat. A lot. I was almost completely off-grid, since I can't get a cell signal or internet at my parents' house, and the most strenuous thing I did all week was wander through the garden in triple-digit heat.

Have I mentioned lately how much I enjoy sitting?

I may have to take a week off again in a couple of months. I like not being tethered to the corporate teat.

Anyway, while I was there, I cooked a big meal for dear friends, and I caught up with another childhood friend that I hadn't seen in the better part of 20 years. I hung out with my niece, now 18 months old, read a few books, and finally got the dent banged out of the back of my car. (There's one thing to be said for country living--it's cheap. An oil change, fluid check, and dent repair for the Prius cost me all of $32. Total.)

I brought back a fair amount of my mom's garden, to feed us for the next week or so. It's back to the grindstone now--I'm working all week, and hubs is redoubling his job search efforts and applying for a lot more stuff. It may be a while before anything definitive happens on that front, so we both may have to get used to this new normal.