Sorry, I Cannot Hear You, I'm Kinda Busy

A busy busy week.  

Then a busy busy weekend.  

Why so busy?

Well, for one, we have received significantly more fruit than we were expecting from some vineyards.  

And the recent heat wave sped up the ripening process and a lot of grapes were ready to be harvested all at once.  

Monday through Thursday we put in some solid 12 hour days but Friday was a monster day that kept us at the winery for 16 hours.  We left close to midnight, went home to sleep for a few hours and then Monster Friday was followed by a Saturday that nearly broke some members of the team.  Emotions were running high; there was some talk of quitting, several passive aggressive quips and even a few tears (which may or may not have been shed by yours truly).  

Most held strong, props to the boss and Grand Cellarmaster J for rallying the troops.  

Everyone is sleep deprived, however Saturday night I had an opportunity to see The Flaming Lips in Oakland. 

So I decided to try to put the events of the week behind me and treat myself to some hearing loss.

Firstly, The Fox in Oaktown is a lovely venue.  

And it was refreshing to spend time in a proper city with proper night life, unlike certain places I know (*cough* Napa *cough*) that shut down at 8pm.

Secondly, I passed the night with two respectable facial hair efforts.   

 Z has been sporting an honorary harvest beard, which he started at around the same time as T and C.Bear.  

It's mostly out of laziness than any true competitive motivation, but either way, it's rockin'.  Who knows, maybe an at home player will win this years.  Gotta keep those boys on their toes.

The lady in the pic is Jen, the gentleman with her is Tim and that fine specimen on his face is Sir Barclay Aldrich Esquire, the Fourth.  

Yes Jen, I agree, it is frighteningly distinguished.

*(This space reserved for some concert footage for when I find time to put it together)*

I'm glad I took the time to go to the concert, but this morning at 6am (while driving the hour back to work to spend Sunday with the winemaking team catching up on all the paperwork that has piled up over the week) my choice didn't seem so wise.

Fortunately, half way through the day we took the data entry party out of the office and down to the local watering hole to finish with beers and baseball (go Giants!).

These guys are not part of the team but they were sitting near us, I just thought it was hilarious that they were sitting on tiny chairs.  You are grown ass men, why are you sitting on tiny chairs??

'Maybe because there were not other chairs to sit on' you may reason, but no, there were plenty of other chairs for them to sit on.  

'Maybe they have small children' would also be an acceptable guess.  

But no, they did not.  Just some grown ass men on tiny chairs.

Anyway, 

I think this may have been a mistake, since T will find it difficult to go back to doing data entry unless he has 3 beers to himself.  

See how sad he is just thinking about it?

Buck up Champ!

The rest of us had beers too, but it didn't make us sad.

At the end of the day we had had enough beer and we toasted to a job well done with ice cream.

 

I'm going to sleep.

-L