I Promised To My Wife And Children, I'd Never Touch Another Drink

After all the rain and foggy mornings, the sun returned to Napa.

 

But only for a little while.

It appears we will have another wet (Halloween) weekend. 

We took advantage of the sunny day to have lunch outside.  Turns out T and GCMJ had mustard on the mind when they got dressed this morning but we didn't know it until they took their sweatshirts off at lunch.

T: "Well one of us is going to have to change."

I was bummed they didn't call me to coordinate, but then I remembered that I have my emergency mustard sweater in my locker for such a situation!

It's blurry, but that's what happens when I hand the camera over.  

I felt better, but I really needed a hat.  Then we found one.

GCMJ's chest is puffed out because he loves mustard and also because it's his birthday.

Happy Birthday to you sir!

After all that posing and wardrobe change, T and I hustled through our daily duties and we managed to get out of work before the sun went down, a feat not accomplished for several days (weeks?).  

We were running low on sanitation supplies (read: vodka), so on the way home today I stopped to pick some up.  We use vodka in a spray bottle to sanitize surfaces like the lab counter and the bungs on barrels when we sample them.

So I filled my shopping cart, and actually had to buy 2 different brands because they didn't have enough of a single kind.

 

Other times of the year (namely March thru May) my cart often looks like this:

We use this wine for our cork trials.  We soak corks we are interested in buying in this wine and then smell it 24 to 48 hours later to see if the cork imparts an off odors in the wine.  If it does, then we don't buy those corks.  More on that in March.

Anyway, part of making alcohol is buying lots and lots of alcohol.  

And I know I shouldn't but I still get embarrassed when I roll up to the cashier with a cart full of booze.

I always hope I don't run into anyone I know.  It's hard to not giggle a little when I hand my card over to pay $150 for large volumes of low quality alcohol.

However, more recently it has occurred to me that no one, not the cashier or the soccer moms in line with me ever throw any judmental glances my way.  

Which at first I found reliving.  

That is, until I found it a little insulting that they find it perfectly reasonable of me to buy 15 bottles of vodka or several boxes of boxed wine (often at 8am).  

I don't even get a casual "hey! party at your house!" remark.

I don't know, maybe it's obvious that I work at a winery and that all that alcohol is for professional purposes, because sometimes when I leave the winery my skin looks like this.

 

Unfortunately in that light it looks more like a skin disease, but I promise it's wine splatter.  And if that's how my skin looks, you can imagine my clothes.  (I've been planing a "This Is Why We Wear Black" post to illustrate the perilous destinies of harvest clothes)

So Ok, MAYBE people are picking up on the winery vibe.

 . . . . . . . . . . . . 

One last thing, 

I would like someone to tell all these birds that this is a winery and not a cemetery.

Another dead humming bird on the cellar floor.  Frankie rescued that other one last week, but this guy was not so lucky.  I don't know what it is about our place, but it seems to be the preferred resting place for several humming birds.  The lizards and frogs get trapped in the mouse traps, or stuck behind a tank so that's understandable.  But the birds have no excuse.  We don't find them caught in traps or stuck behind anything.  They float down, in open spaces (like the floor or on our forklift, see 10/8 post) and just die.

It's weird.

And unecessary.

Cut it out birds.

-L