The Second of Two Things :: December 21st, 2001 ::
![[this fan is a bane.]](/stufola/fan.jpg)
Six months ago, my work area was moved from one side of the office to the other. Overall it’s been pretty great. Here there there is more sunlight, generally warmer temperatures, and no rainwater dripping on me when there’s a storm. But there’s this ceiling fan that’s been spinning away since I first moved, and back in October, when it started getting cold but someone had yet to turn on the furnace, it would get quite brisk around my work area. To the point that my fingers cramped up on me a couple of times.
As well as that, someone, who thought he was being smart, shot three suction cup darts at this fan, and, as you can see from this picture, and they rotate in a very lopsided fashion. It could, admittedly, drive me to distraction, were I to let it.
But I won’t. I just wanted to share the fan.
I owe you a story.
OK, so the story goes like this. I went to a wine tasting this weekend, which was hosted by a friend/co-worker of mine. Overall it was quite fun, and I found his family to be very warm and accepting of me, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t shaved, I was wearing a Burning Airlines t-shirt, and I had been cleaning with bleach all day. Hardly my shining hour as appearances went. But I really didn’t care, and neither did anyone there.
So but, with this whole wine tasting thing, we were all handed a chart, which we had to fill out for each wine tasted (apparently there is a specific way of doing these things). We were given a small amount of wine (not much more than a mouthful) from a bottle wrapped in a towel. Going only on the taste, color, and smell of the wine, we had to make a guess of the type of wine (called the "varietal"), the vintage, and the region from which it came. After all the wines were tasted, we gave our answers, and the person with the most right won a prize (which was, believe it or not, a bottle of wine).
Now I’m no wine person, so I needn’t tell you how gloriously I failed the guessing game. (At one point my answer was "White wine. I don’t recall any specific names, however.") But luckily, there was a fourth column, in which we could rate the wine (using the scale of our choosing), and give a small bit of commentary on what we thought. What I wrote in this column may be worth remembering. A quick list:
- “Balance point between sweet and dry.”
- “There’s something interesting in this one. It tastes aged.”
- “Dry. Light”
- “Sweet, fruity, with bubbles!”
- “Dry. Underlying taste of sky.”
- “There’s a faint ‘wooden’ taste. Is this an ‘oak’ flavor?”
- “There’s a lot happening here. That pastry I just ate makes this wine hard to describe.”
- “This is the sweetest of the red. It tastes like flowers. Not that I eat flowers or anything.”
- “This tastes like warm ice.”
After that, I pretty much had to stop drinking, or else I wouldn’t have been able to drive home.
