Twenty-Five Reasons Why I Dislike Young Children***

1)  They are boring; the younger they are, the more boring they are.

2)  It's always me, me, me with them.

3)  They don't follow directions.

4)  Give them an opportunity, and it's whine, whine, whine.

5)  Picky eaters are the norm.

6)  They have to be cleaned and dressed.

7)  You have to tie shoes, zip zippers, and button buttons  for A LONG TIME.

8)  They can't cut up their own food.

9)  Voice modulation is a mystery to them.

10)  They calculate when your food is the most hot and delicious then demand both your hands to do something for THEM.

11)  They take naps at inconvenient times.

12)  They have short legs and no stamina when traveling.

13)  They insist on putting sticky, dirty fingers as well as drool mixed with food on your best clothes.

14)  They drag around disgusting objects which you have to keep track of. 

15)  They wake you up in the middle of the night to look under their beds.

16)  They throw tantrums in public to cause you maximum discomfort.

17)  They interrupt your sex life.

18)  They expect to always open the first present.

19)  You have to clean up disgusting substances they've created.

20)  They bring home diseases and spread them around.

21)  You have to take them trick or treating instead of going to your own party.

22)  You're expected to attend school pageants and photograph them.

23)  They don't understand the concept 'white lie'.

24)  Your embarrassment is their weapon.

25)   They stay up too late and then refuse to sleep through the night.



***Fortunately, my own child wasn't nearly as disgusting as other children.  I don't understand how these other parents put up with their nasty offspring.

Oregon Wine Tourist

When we drove from Portland to Seal Rock, we were amazed at the wineries along Oregon State Highway 99W.  There are hundreds of small vineyards along a one hundred mile route.  There's no way to see them all in a weekend or even perhaps even in a month.  Some of the smaller wineries only make a few hundred cases of wine in a good year.  Even in the biggest and best distributed wineries, there are several varieties made that can only be purchased at the winery.  

I discovered Oregon has a 'state soil'. It's called Jory, and I've been standing on it all day long.  Apparently, this type of soil is mineral rich, iron heavy and eight feet deep particularly around Dundee.  This special soil on the sloped hills in this part of Oregon makes superb Pinot Noir wine.  Even more incredible, identical varieties of grapes have different flavors based on what side of the hill they grow on.  An excellent winery can produce different tasting Pinot Noirs based on the exact location where the grapes have been grown.

My favorite story comes from Erath Winery.  They make several different Pinot Noir varieties.  One of them is called "Leland".  Several years ago, a couple retired to this area, and the guy decided he needed a retirement hobby. He planted his four acres in grapes, and over the years, taught himself how to grow grapes.  Now, Erath buys his entire crop every year and makes "Leland", which sells only at the winery for $50 a bottle.  That points out another wrinkle in Oregon wine country.  There are several vineyards that are NOT wineries.  Some grow grapes and sell them to local wineries.  Grapes with 'reputation', such as Mr. Leland's, are sought after.  Wineries try to lock in their selected growers and build reputations for wine made from grapes they don't even grow.     

We saw every variety of tasting room.  The most lavish was a super contemporary tasting room on top of what passes for a 'mountain' here.  Some were little rooms carved out of the winery floor.  Others were refurbished farm houses.  Wine labels are meant to be distinctive.  My favorite label was the Four Graces Winery.  Its name refers to the four daughters of the owner, and their names are written in beautiful script around the edge of the neck label on each bottle.  Another winery owner loves poetry and calligraphy, so one of their specialized wines is in a bottle that has an original poem written by the owner in calligraphy and then silk screened onto the bottle.  Drake's souvenir of this trip is a hat from a certain winery. Their logo has a pair of meadowlarks, the Oregon state bird, sitting on an Oregon grape branch, not a vine, but a stunted evergreen shrub that is the state plant.  Sadly, the logo was better than the wine. 

A small winery called "Twelve" is owned by an older couple who threw caution to the wind, took the plunge late in their lives and started a winery.  The wife runs the tasting room while her husband handles the vines.  It was revealing how much esoteric knowledge it takes to make great wine.    It doesn't seem to be an exact science.  Each year produces a different quality of wine depending on how wet, how dry, how cool, and a bunch of other factors that are so nuanced it takes years to figure them all out and compensate for them.  Apparently, 2008 was the perfect year for the grapes, and if your wine was bad in 2008...well, as the owner of Twelve said, "Time to find another career".  I also learned today that wine is stored in French oak casks.  Baffled, I asked, "Why not American oak?"  Turns out to have something to do with open/closed wood.  Who knew?  

To my untutored eye, it seemed that the Oregon wine business was mature, but compared to California, it's in elementary school. Since it's a statewide economic advantage for the Oregon wine industry to succeed, it's still collaborative to a certain extent.  The Twelve owner opined that they wouldn't have been able to make it in California because the other California owners wouldn't have been as willing to help them learn. The Twelve Winery make small amounts of wine not yet widely distributed, but it's lovely.      

We managed to see a double digit number of wineries helped by dry weather the first day.  We devised a system to help us decide what we liked.  The supermarkets here naturally carry a big selection of Oregon wine, and I'm hoping our system I recorded on my Iphone is going to help us with future purchases. The weather isn't going to be so cooperative on our second day - an incoming 'rain event' is being referred to as A SOAKER.  Haven't seen one of those here.  It should be interesting.  Even this big event won't deliver constant rain.  It will be intermittent, but when raining, it's going to be heavy showers.  I know we won't be driving all the dirt roads we did today.  Shouldn't be a problem; there are wineries and wine tasting rooms lining the main state highway and scattered throughout the towns of the region.

McMinnville, Oregon is the biggest town with 35,000 people smack dab in the middle of this part of Oregon wine country.  It looks like a fun place to spend a couple of months, drink a lot of really good boutique wine that's never distributed anywhere outside the winery, eat some inventive cuisine which compliments the wine, and access an area of Oregon that looks like it has a lot to offer.

I think we are now heading into the next season - the rainy one.  The weather forecasts are showing only rain for the next several days, then a flicker of sunshine followed by more days of rain.  I wish I could just store some of these and trot them out in Arizona.  On the second day of this little trip, I can see to be constantly wet, bedraggled, and struggling to get rain wear on and off everywhere you go would become very tiresome indeed.