Wine Country

Karen, you may recall, was my best friend back in Madison. We met 'way back when in graduate school, dated briefly, and then remained friends. Unlike myself, she stuck it out long enough to get her Ph.D., and now she's a professor.

We drove back to my apartment and set things up for her. Guests sleep on my futon, which I have been told is pretty comfortable. (I slept on it myself when I first bought it, but after eight months I started having back kinks, so I bought my bed.) Karen's allergic to cats (among many other things), but seems to do okay with my guys. We throw clean sheets over the futon and I give her as much cat-free bedding as I can (for some reason I own, like, five pillows I don't use), and she takes some drugs to knock her out.

The cats, naturally, eyed her cautiously, and checked out her stuff thoroughly.

It was after 8:00 pm by this point, and it was time to get dinner. I presented the option of burger-type stuff (thinking of the Peninsula Creamery in Palo Alto), or ethnic food in Mountain View. Thinking for a moment, Karen said, "Italian" (she has a mild wheat allergy, too, so hamburger buns aren't too good). So off we went to Mountain View, where we went to the more upscale Italian restaurant there (whose name I can never remember). I find it's a nice change from the "more, more, more!" approach of Frankie, Johnny and Luigi's, and the food is definitely of higher quality. They also have a wider selection of dishes, I find.

After that we went down the street to the Gelato place that John and his team introduced me to when we went to lunch a week and a half ago. Gelato (which I might be spelling incorrectly) is a sort of Italian ice cream, mainly notable for being not entirely solid. Oh, and rich. Did I mention that it's rich? Very tasty.

We went home and Karen conked out almost immediately. I was still puttering around in the kitchen and she was unconscious under my spare comforter before I was done. She'd recently come back from Europe and I think was still suffering from jet lag.

I stumbled out of bed around 9:00 on Saturday. Karen was still zonked out, so I fed the cats, put my lenses in, and sat in bed reading. Which, truth to tell, is what I do most Saturday mornings, guest or no.

Karen roused herself sometime after 10:00, and we both showered and got dressed. (I told her that she's the first person to use the wash cloth in my front bathroom; I replaced all of my wash cloths recently, and reserve the blue towels and cloth for guests.) Again, I offered her a choice of lunch-type food, or brunch type food. She chose 'brunch', so off we went to Hobees. I had the pasta pesto (which was better than usual!), she got some hash browns, and we both got their "famous" coffee cake. "You didn't tell me is was going to be a giant slice of coffee cake!" said Karen! Uh, that's true. Guess it didn't occur to me! She also found the fact that it's served with butter on top a bit weird, but good. (I mean, from a taste standpoint, when it butter ever bad?)

I'd also offered a variety of things we could do today: We could go down to Santa Cruz, drive along the coast, go to San Francisco, go to Berkeley, shop on the peninsula, etc. etc. Like me, Karen's a water maven, so she wanted to go by the ocean. So, we drove up to Half Moon Bay. We walked along the beach right by Route 1, and then went to the Moss Beach tide pools.

We hit the tide pools just at low tide, which meant we actually glimpsed some anemones and a couple of large starfish (as well as a bunch of hermit crabs whose shells, for reasons I don't grok, were bright orange). We also looked at the tidal schedule for the month, and I learned that low tides there vary by as much as five feet over the course of a month! That explains why when I visited California two years ago John and I got to walk much farther out and see the sea urchin beds. I'll have to keep this in mind for next time I take someone there!

Then we took my favorite scenic drive up Route 1 into the city. As I often do, I blew the turnoff to get to the Great Highway, but managed to find my way into Golden Gate Park, where we stopped and walked for a while. Golden Gate Park is really a lovely park, right in the middle of this dense city, and it's worth a trip. If I lived up there, I'd love to live near the park.

We wrapped up the afternoon by going to Ghirardelli Square where we consumed some monstrous sundaes and bought some chocolate. By this time I was feeling pretty tired, although it was only about 6:00, so we drove home and collapsed.

Actually, Karen was kind of interested in going to see a movie, though there wasn't much out there that caught out eye. High Fidelity was playing at a second-run theatre, but not this late. Karen eventually admitted that she was surprisingly tired too, so instead we sat around watching a couple of old Avengers episodes (isn't it amazing how much worse than the Diana Rigg episodes the Linda Thorson episodes are? And it's not so much Thorson as it is the writing), and I picked up some Chinese food from nearby which we ate.

(Can you believe it? I called a nearby pizza place and they said they don't deliver as late as 9:30 in the evening! What a gyp!)

We talked at various times about how we're doing in our new locales. In a way, I think we have opposite issues: I have lots of friends whom I hang out with regularly, but I'm frustrated with my apartment, the housing market, and my ability to make it here long-term. Karen has an apartment right near her downtown, is paying a fairly reasonable rent, but feels cut off from her friends and hasn't plugged into a social circle there.

I wonder which of us is better off? Just at the moment, I have a suspicion that it might be me.

Karen was sitting in my papasan, the down comforter wrapped around her, the lights out, reading one of my Dykes to Watch Out For cartoon collections. "Comfortable?" I asked, and she laughed and said, "Yes, actually!" I turned on the light behind her. She'd gotten up earlier than me because she hadn't taken her sleeping pill the night before. But she slept okay, she said.

The plan today was to drive out to Livermore to spend the day with a friend of hers, John, and his SO Debbie. We got a late start, but got there a little early. The drive out is rather pretty, although I find this time of year a little depressing because all the plants have turned from bright golden to dead brown. I can't wait for the rainy season to start.

John owns a condo in Livermore, though he and Debbie are having a house built for them. I imagine real estate is somewhat less expensive there, but not that much. It's at least an hour's drive to any of the points in the Bay Area that I frequent (I can't imagine how hellacious it would be at rush hour). John's condo is very nice and modern - only about six years old. It reminded me a lot of my apartment in Madison.

John struck me as a fairly typical geek type: He's tall and thin and goatee'd, and has a wry sense of humor. He's a bit on the quiet side. Debbie has bright blonde hair and is more outgoing. I suspect that she's the one who's more-or-less 'in charge' of the relationship. But they were nice folks.

The agenda was to have lunch and then go wine tasting. Lunch was actually at a restaurant at the first winery, which was very good. The prices were reasonable, and the lamb sausage was delicious. The polenta - which I'd never had before - was also pretty good.

Here's what I learned about wine tasting today:

• John and Debbie say that the rule of thumb is that wine tastings in Napa Valley are $5.00 and up apiece, while in Sonoma and Livermore they're generally free. We were driving around the Livermore area, and only paid for one of the tastings. Another one was $2.00 apiece unless you bought a bottle.
• You can usually try anywhere from five to nine types of wine at a stop.
• There are slop buckets on the counters where the tastings occur, so that people who are driving can taste the wine and then spit it into the bucket. Yep, you have to be careful not to dribble it on your chin! We were driving in two cars since our last stops were heading in the direction we'd be leaving in, so I didn't actually consume all that much wine.
• Karen says she only started feeling tipsy after the fifth and last stop.
• I generally prefer sweeter wines. Dry cabernet souvignons in particular don't do it for me. And I find chardonnay a bit bland.
• Terms used to describe wine flavor are very pretentious. No doubt many articles satirizing the language have been written.
• For the most part, I don't know what I'd do with a bottle of wine. I don't often drink it, and seem rarely to have cause to bring some to parties.
• Some of the land out towards Livermore is beautiful, and I must remember to go back there when everything is green.

I had a good time doing the wine tastings, although I felt dead on my feet at the end of the afternoon. I don't think I'd feel comfortable doing it without someone who felt more comfortable at them, though.

We wrapped up the afternoon by stopping in a small town (which had all the earmarks of being the remnants of a gold rush town) for drinks. We sat at a picnic table and chatted for a bit as the sun slowly sank towards the horizon. It's so rare that you really see a rural area in the Bay Area; I liked it.

We drove back and I dropped Karen off at the airport so she could catch her flight home. I think she had a good time. I know I did!

I went up to Keplers Books for the monthly SF book discussion, were we discussed Doomsday Book. Everyone else liked it more than I did, although I didn't dislike it. But the weakness of the plotting undercut a lot of the thematic and lingual strengths for me. I gave it three stars, which basically means, "If someone asked me if it's worth reading, I'd say yes, but I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it to anyone."

The discussion group is a mixed bag: A few SF readers, a few former SF readers, and several non-SF readers who show up intermittently. We got into a discussion of what "hard SF" is, which is always tricky, since everyone has different opinions. My opinion is that there are two kinds of hard SF: The kind where the writer enjoys explaining how his novel ideas work (often with a lot of scientific or technical justification), and the kind where the writer drops his novel ideas into a setting and explores to a greater or lesser extent how those ideas affect everyone in the setting (the key point being that the ideas are the driving force behind the story; plot or character can be important, but without the ideas there's no story). I generally prefer the latter type of hard SF, and feel Vernor Vinge is a fine example of this variety.

Forum: What do you think?