Vers l'absurde

Du vin, du vin!

After a week where I blew off stress from studying (qualifying doctoral exams in less than a month!), I ended each day with either going to flamenco or pilates. By the time Friday rolled around and I had my weekly tennis game with one of my friends, my arms - no, verily, my entire body was protesting the unusual amount of physical activity it had seen of late. It just did Not Want To Engage In Any More Physical Exertion. I could feel my muscles being all, why are you making us move? We do not want to contract and expand anymore. We want you to stop moving. And all I wanted was to do drink a lot of orange juice. Is this how people who regularly work out feel like? Because, dude, it sucks.

(Also, I realised that the additional soreness might have been due to the fact that at the childcare center where I volunteer Friday mornings, I had spent the whole time holding this one very cute but very-liking-to-be-carried-all-the-damn-time child.)

So, when we went to the bar afterwards (yes, we play tennis and then go drinking), I got a nice big glass of orange juice along with my drinks. Because there's no denying a craving like that.


Anyways, there was one other trip I made right before starting school anew. After I got back from Nashville, I was home just long enough to sleep and half unpack my suitcase before I headed out again, this time to Santa Barbara. There was some neurotrauma conference there, which I wasn't initially going to go to, but then given that they were going to pay for my lodging, and that the conference was free - well, hell, there's really no reason not to go. So I convinced one of my friends that hey, didn't she want to stay in a free hotel room?

Of course, me being me, I went to approximately 10% of the actual conference before I got bored of listening to people talk (being hungover for the 2nd day might have had something to do with my intolerance of lecturers), and we went up to wine country to do some wine tasting. Nothing like hitting the bottle at 10am.

It's interesting how Sideways (which I still haven't seen, primarily on my own personal principle that when an indie movie has been raved about from here to kingdom come, I won't see it because I know that I invaribly won't like it) has had in terms of influence upon the area. When we asked the concierge where to go, she whipped out a bright green map that listed where the movie characters had gone. But we didn't want what was in the movie, we really just wanted good wine. At our first stop, the woman at the tasting room pooh-poohed the map, and directed us to some really good finds. The concierge, on the other hand, sent us to a place where seriously, I couldn't even finish my tastes, the wine was that bad. Lesson of the story: do not always trust the concierge.


I have to say, of the four places we went to, the standouts were definitely Curtis and Rusack. I don't know how hard it is to find this wine outside of Southern California, but if you come across a bottle from either of these wineries, I'd definitely give them a try.