Monday

I'm feeling pretty good, really. I'm so ready to be gone. The news is good, bad, good, bad...but I'm just done and I don't really care anymore. Well, I mean, I do, because, no matter what the bigwigs think, what you're talking about are real people. They'd probably use a term like collateral damage or something like that, but everything comes down to a person. I think they (there it is again, that ubiquitous they) forget that.

So, just working on trying to get everything documented that I do.

Last night we went to Roy's with Vanessa and Herman. Good meal. Went a little crazy, but hey, it was Tony's birthday and soon we won't be able to really do that anymore. Had a $173 bottle of Sauterne. A Chateau Yquem...

Yquem is a Sauterne, but classifying it as such is akin to calling a vintage Bugatti an old car. It is the finest of the Sauternes because every grape is literally picked by hand, having succumbed to la pourriture noble, the noble rot, a parasitic fungus that dramatically alters the chemistry of the grape, consuming one-third of its sugars and five-sixths of its acids. It is this change in chemistry that begets the unforgettable color, texture, and flavor of the finished wine. It is the most rare — not only of Sauternes, but also of all wines — because only 240 acres are under cultivation, limiting production to roughly 66,000 bottles per year. It is the most expensive because every step in the arduous processes of pruning, grafting, picking, selecting, fermenting, bottling, and shipping is done by hand, and done in the same time-consuming, fastidious manner practiced over generations.

Found that on a web site. It was very good. More mellow than I expected it to be, but very, very nice.

I had ostrich and Monchongo ? Something like that. A Hawaiian fish. Everything was very good. Tony had two different Hawaiian fish. The other one started with an N and looked vaguely like Nairobi. It was impossible to pronounce.

My goals this week...

• Finish the darn Clive Barker interview. Up to almost 2,000 words typed and still like 40 minutes of interview to go. Egad.
• Re-do my resume.
• Send a reminder e-mail to Richard.
• Call that one magazine I sent the Wine Shop article to.
• Send recently posted review copies to the publishers.

And that's probably enough. There's a bunch of other stuff to do, but I can only tackle so much at one time. Pottery class on Tuesday. Dinner on Thursday. Etc., Etc. There's never enough time. But soon, soon, I'll have more time than I know what to do with. And I already know what's going to happen...there will never be enough time. That's just the way it goes. It's like the stuff in your house...it expands to fill whatever available space there is.