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ADVENTURES IN WINE COUNTRY

I live about an hour from Napa but I rarely go there. It involves a bridge toll that I normally am too lazy to go get cash to pay for. Plus… I do not love wine. It’s all right but not my fave. So going on wine tasting tours and whatnot is not my jam. BUT I recently made plans with an old coworker who was up for her birthday to go to a winery and do some wine tasting.

Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma, CA

We first stopped in Sonoma at the R2 wine tasting room and had a round of tasting. They were pretty good. We then headed to downtown Sonoma (the square) to check out a chocolate tasting place (Wine Country Chocolates I think) and I noticed there is a mission right there – I haven’t been to a mission in years! This one was cute. We didn’t go inside but I have made a mental note to go back and check it out.

The chocolate place was really delicious – I got a boysenberry one and a cinnamon honey one and my friend got rocky road – and everything was so good! I would definitely go back.

After that we headed into the hills to the Hess Collection Winery which was totally beautiful. They were setting up for a wedding or some kind of event. On the upper two floors of the main building was a very nice art gallery which I enjoyed viewing.

Wine barrel room at Hess
Some art and interiors
Stairs they wouldn’t let us climb
Me and Nohemi

After Hess we were all hungry so we wound up at Downtown Joe’s in the town of Napa and were seated outside. It was a beautiful day, not too hot (the previous week/weekend was like 113° so the weather in the 80s was so much nicer). At the restaurant I had chili cheese fries and they used homemade spiralized potatoes that were super delicious. I’d randomly been to this restaurant with the parentals a year or so ago and it was good then too.

Napa River view

Anyway, it was a nice day out with good people. Always good to get out of town for a bit even if it’s just a day trip.

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WATCHING / LISTENING 9.22.17

TV:

Now that Game of Thrones is over for possibly two years (NOOOO) I must find something else to watch. Hardly anything new starting this fall interests me so I’ve been looking at Netflix and saw they had the first season of Riverdale. Out of bored curiosity I thought I’d try it out and wound up really enjoying it.


It’s a “dark reimagining” (aren’t they all) of the Archie comics which was actually the reason I first ignored it. I mean, how do you update Betty, Veronica, and Jughead (lol) for a modern audience? Well, they managed it! Also I was kind of sold when Luke Perry showed up as Archie’s dad (that makes me feel old though…)

Anyway, it was totally Twin Peaks meets Dawson’s Creek and if that sounds like your jam, you’ll probably like this show. It’s only 13 eps so not a huge time commitment.

The only other thing I’m excited about for the fall season is the return of The Good Place which is about a group of four recently deceased people learning to navigate the afterlife. After the season finale I was pretty stoked to see what they would do for the second season and the first episode which aired this week did not disappoint!

Also who doesn’t love Ted Danson?? Anyway, this show is smarter than you would think and the writing is very clever. I really enjoy it. You can watch this on Hulu.

MOVIES:

Hidden Figures – loved this movie! Was a moving portrayal of the super smart black women of NASA who helped work to get mankind up into space through math, engineering, and computer programming. All the performances were stellar (hah) and it was *mostly* accurate according to Wikipedia.

La La Land – when this first came out I did NOT understand the love lavished upon this movie. And now having watched it I do NOT understand the love lavished on this movie. It is so, so mediocre and I truly believe that Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling’s singing voices should have been dubbed (I felt this way about Emma Watson’s in Beauty & the Beast, too). Full of Hollywood navel-gazing I’m not super surprised that critics liked it, but it was not worthy of all the attention. That being said, I was charmed by it by the end. So, I didn’t hate it. 😛

***

PODCASTS:

Haven’t been listening to too much lately but traffic has been absolutely abysmal in the mornings so I’ve been listening to the Nerdist Podcast which tends to run longer than some of my other choices:

  • Episode 888: Damon Lindelof – writer on Lost and the Leftovers. I still hate the ending of Lost with the fiery passion of approximately 10,000 burning suns but he was an engaging guest on the show and it was a good listen.
  • Episode 890: James Van Der Beek – what is this my second reference to Dawson’s Creek in this post? Why yes it is. Turns out JVDB is kind of an insightful dude.
  • Episode 896: Michael Cudlitz – character actor known for Southland and the Walking Dead (He’s my favorite character actor at the moment – loved his work on Southland and was excited to see him on Walking Dead). This was a fun episode to listen to because he has been in a LOT of shows.
  • Episode 899: Dominic Monaghan – everybody’s favorite hobbit
  • Episode 901: Tatiana Maslany – star of Orphan Black. She strikes me as a huge dork and that’s a compliment.
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FO: WONDER WOMAN WRAP

Hey look, I knit something! This is the Wonder Woman Wrap by Carissa Browning.

I must confess that while I have liked Wonder Woman since I was a kid, I have never been particularly interested in the comics or anything and have not seen the new movie yet. I’m also sort of tired of pop culture so knitting what is essentially a big comic book character logo is not anything I would have foreseen myself doing six months ago.

HOWEVER… I am interested in the construction of things and the construction of this baffled me as it uses short rows to do the shaping. So I wanted to knit it to see how it worked. The pattern is free and I happened to have some elderly Shibui Sock in my stash that would work (I don’t think they even make Shibui Sock anymore, that’s how long it’s been in my stash) so I impulsively cast on.

It took me about a month of just knitting on it during the weekends, but I finished last weekend, blocked it, and now it’s done. The construction is very clever for that middle yellow stripe. Those were my favorite things to knit, even though one of them is all purling.

It blocked out much bigger and is over six feet long tip to tip.



It turned out great! And it’s nice to actually finish a project for once. I haven’t been doing too much of that lately. :/