Hows my little smartie?

As a self proclaimed gadget nerd I have some difficulty leaving the house anytime I am about to do something fun. If I am leaving the house for more than one day this just compounds the issue.

I am blessed to have the issue of wondering, well am I going to geocache? I'll need my GPS and unless I do some thoughtful planning ahead I'll need to bring my laptop. Will I need some internet access? (when wouldn't I?) I should bring my laptop. My camera comes regardless. Will we be driving in a place I've never been? Better bring the other GPS. Will I be bored for more than a couple of hours? That iPod will help.

Since we are headed to Spain soon for a couple of weeks I've been doing some thinking ahead of time, what will I need in Spain? Obviously we are going to find some Spanish Geocaches, of course I'm going to need the internet, we will be renting a car, so I'll really enjoy having that other GPS, I will be confined to a plane for 8 hours, I'll be in need of that iPod. And I'll need an archaic manual page book. To get all of them charged and functional I'll need my old/hefty/power hungry/loud/hot laptop.

So with all of these things I want to pack I thought, well how much of a vacation is this anymore, I really want to unplug unwind and just relax 100% of the time, maybe hop online to get some tickets for a tourist thing but that would be it. Here comes the savior of the week. My HTC EVO.

I've resisted, gave in and typed, then deleted an entire blog giving love to my newest gadget. My phone. All of you are familiar with the iPhone, who isn't anymore? Well to give you the short description of it, the EVO can do everything the iPhone can (pretty much) and sometimes more (rare). Suddenly I realized many of my problems were solved in one little piece of hardware. The phone has a GPS complete with a stellar Geocaching app. Built in Wi-Fi. A camera. And a hard drive I can pump full of new tunes. Oh! and a Spanish/English translator for those situations my shitty Spanish won't get me anywhere.

So my gadget pack list has been/could be reduced to one item. But as the nerd I am, some things are just better at doing their 1 job than this guy is at all of them. So what will I pack? A dedicated road GPS (with maps of Spain) for that Taxi driver we just can't get through to. My iPod, because 80 Gigabytes of music is always better than 8. My camera. And my Evo.

Heart.

Hows my little Shopper?

Last weekend Laura and I did some overdue shopping for me. As many of you know this is one of my least favorite things to do, and my wardrobe shows it. I have very few shirts under 2 years old and many over 6 years old. So I've decided I need to remedy that a bit, freshen things up if you will.

I have bought some clothes in the past few years so I'm not totally in the dark, but this weekend I had a certain goal of making sure all of the things I got fit me properly, brainless you might think but I've always just bought shirts that were XL because they covered my body and that was that. In recent years I've been buying the occasional Large size just to mix it up. Many of the shirts I got at that size they were borderline too small.

But not this weekend. Further proof of expanding America, I bought a couple of shirts at a Size MEDIUM!! that still had room to spare. I am a giant, I am not a medium sized person. What size do short skinny guys buy now? I'm not sure they make XS sizes for men, do they? I made out like a bandit though and got a some good deals and some nice threads.

One thing that sort of bugged me was, I am/was in the shorts market since some of my old pairs are, well just that, old. I don't understand the explosion of the plaid pattern everywhere. Why would someone want more than one color of plaid I don't get it. To further my shorts shopping woes most of my only other options were cargo shorts with Giant poofy pockets. So if a guy already has a pair of plaid shorts and a pair with giant poofy pocket what else can someone do for some variety? May as well buy myself a fighting cocks white hat and call myself a fratboy douche bag. Lame.

In retrospective it just might be my shopping location. In fact that probably has a huge influence on the over sized clothing and the lack of selection. I think that the only place for a guy to buy stylish clothes is Express, after that...Macy's? Its a good thing Indianapolis and Chicago are just short jaunts away.

Hows my little Purple Finger?

This weekend Laura and I jumped on the opportunity to do what most Americans would skip out on in a flash. That was to wake up early on a Saturday morning and harvest crops. For fun.

As many of you know we live about 3 miles away from a vineyard which has been a blessing here in Cornville. The place is called Sleepy Creek and we have had some grand times here, and you can bet if you visit we will take you down to check it out. After some free tastings and a bit of local art you've got a nice little place to chill out at. We've seen several concerts here including Trampled by Turtles and a striped version of Blessed Union of Souls (remember them!?)

You can imagine that Laura and I get out here pretty often, we have even befriended the owners, Joe and Dawn, who are both incredibly nice and seem to never get tired of answering questions about their wine. Since we began frequenting Sleepy Creek we had heard about the Purple Finger club, which if you volunteer your time they hook you up with a discount on their wine, amongst other things. Since we are fans of their wines we decided we need to get volunteering so that we can try and get some discounted wine. After over a year of missed opportunities we managed to line up a chance to help them out.



Next time you see Laura, tell her she has nice muscles, shes flexing.

Picking grapes is not exciting business, you can learn some gossip through the grapevine but that is about it. Other than that the goal is to not trim part of your finger off. Being the giant I am, I was a bit uncomfortable (and sore) since I had to bend over every two minutes to make sure I got everything. The breaks with food and drinks made up for this though.

I enjoyed playing fetch with Daisy into the pond on our break.

After making my own wine for the past several years it was really cool to see how the concentrate juice I buy gets made, and on Saturday we learned just that. After we picked around a ton of grapes (literally 2,000 Pounds!) We watched them get crushed and de-stemmed, which I would imagine would take hours was done in only about 20 minutes, way cool.

All the grapes the crew picked.

This was supposed to be a action shot of the crush/de-stemming process, looks more like a picture of Bill though. Notice on the bottom left (or try to) the stems in that black box, looking all pristine and grape free. Amazing!

I got to stir the crushed grapes, with excellent form.

This is the press, before pressing, that greenish exorcist looking spew is actually unpressed juice, the flavor was phenomenal and it was deliciously sweet.

The one drawback I could find with the whole day was a complete lack of naked virgins stomping the grapes into mush. In fact there was no stomping at all. Someday I'm going to find and stomp grapes for wine making, mark my words.

After that we came home and we both napped. What a day!