Friday, October 22, 2010

What wine goes with fried hard drives?

I'd say a nice heavily oaked Chardonnay, to match the puckered up face you're already making when your computer takes a serious dump. I bought my laptop from a neighbor friend who had babied it since it's birth in 2003. Pristine in all respects. A 17 inch aluminum Powerbook for next to nothing was too good to pass up. It does everything I need it to do, runs Photoshop, iDVD, iMovie, and burns (cough) "archival" copies of movies that I of COURSE own. The downside risk of course was the fact that Apple had some hard drive issues with these machines when they first came out and ended up replacing so many failed drives that they changed suppliers. This one had it's original drive and I figured that the only reason it'd never failed is because it'd been babied it's entire life and never put under stress. So I bought it knowing there was a possibilty it would soon fail, as I had some serious stressing planned for it. It did. So now, while waiting for a new drive to arrive after I ordered the wrong one this week, I'm forced to use my old frustratingly slow desktop or my wife's Win-Doze netbook with it's teeny tiny itty bitty very small microscopic screen and 3 year old child sized keyboard. Computer use is no longer fun and won't be until I get my new drive and get it into the Powerbook. It'll be next week before I post again I'll bet.
Anyhow, I went to Javelina Leap yesterday and met with owner/winemaker Rod Snapp, who was outside staring at the cloudy skies and fretting about his newest crush, which he had just put to fermentation. Except the yeast wasn't cooperating. It was too cool. Rod does some of his fermentation outside, his production having outgrown his indoor space for vats. He was contemplating a trip to town for heaters and tarps to up the temp on his vats a few degrees. This morning it's even cooler and still cloudy, so I'll be that yeast in those vats is still sleeping soundly, unless it's had a little fire lit under it's butt.
Rod and I had a great chat, it turns out we've some things in common. He's an ex cook too. He worked at the Oak Creek Owl a few years after I worked at Rene at Tlaquepaque. He knows the San Juan River country well, having done several trips on the lower end years ago. He spent several years cooking at the Grand Canyon too.
He's having a staff meeting this weekend and after that he'll have an idea what kind of help he's going to need, so we'll be chatting again in a week or so. He was real pleased to hear that I'd like to work two to four days a week. Apparently he's got several employees who only put in one day a week and he's not happy with that situation. Personally, seems to me like working one day a week you'd almost have to relearn how to do the job every time you came to work. Anyhow, he needs help at The Walk on Main, so I'll need to decide where I'm working that day. Choices choices....