“Red, red wine, Stay close to me”

Here are five things to remember when you go on a wine tasting tour with your girlfriends (or guy friends, it does not matter)

1) Pack snacks. Everyone knows that food and wine were made for each other and nothing starts a day of early alcohol consumption better than a delicious pic-nick lunch

2) Have a designated driver! No matter how many of those snacks you consume and how stingy the pours may be, no one who has gone through 6 flights of wine should be behind the steering wheel of anything bigger than a Tonka truck.  Actually, I take that back…you should avoid Tonka trucks as well.  You never know.

3) Do not try anything that starts with the following introduction: “don’t think of this as a wine, think of it as a drink”.  Why?  Because wine should taste like wine, like dried cherries or Hungarian oak, like steel barrels or apricots,  but it should never, ever, under any circumstances taste like Hawaiian tropic tanning oil.  Blah.  (to both actually)

4) It is hard to determine exactly when you should stop visiting wineries or stop tasting wine.  I suggest stopping when you can no longer tell the difference from a pinot gris and a pinot noir or when you think “leather on the nose” is hilarious. 

5) When you find a bottle of petite sirah that you love and happens to be offered at a discount, don’t buy all that you can carry.  Buy more.  You will figure out a way to get it home.  Or,your sober driver will figure out a way to get it home.  I love sober drivers. 

Thank you C,E,G and M for an amazing Sunday.

La Petite Fabulous

This past weekend I was out near La petite belle and we were able to get together for the afternoon.  Here are five things you may or may not know about her from reading her blog.

1) She is beautiful.  For the most part, you can get a sense of this from the pictures she posts.  But in real life,  she is the type of beautiful that prompts waiters to offer to run out to the store to get her coke zero when she discovers they don’t have any at the restaurants.  She is also the type of beautiful that is not shocked by this offer, “oh, they are so nice here, I bet that do that for everyone”, she says.  Um… I am going to have to go with nope on that one.

2) Her laugh is infectious.  If you read some of the same blogs she does and see her comments they are flecked with ‘Ha Ha’s’ all over the place.  This is because in real life; she laughs frequently and honestly.  

3) She speaks with the kind of openess that makes her amazingly easy to talk to.  Twenty minutes into lunch we laughed like old friends and I found myself finishing sentences with, “oh my gosh, I have never told anyone that before”.  

4) She has great taste.  Again, this is something you can probably see from the pictures she posts, but after lunch we popped into a store and found ourselves gushing…”oh, cute” at the exact same moment.  So, maybe her taste is just similar to mine.   

5) She eats like a bird.  To be fair, she fesses up to this immediately but halfway through lunch I had plowed through most of my salad and she had barely touched her meal.  Maybe this is how she stays so la petite? 

Thank you LPB for a wonderful afternoon.

Way better than a co-pay

I mean no offense to head-shrinkers everywhere, but here are 5 reasons I think friends are WAY better than therapists.

1) Therapists do not call you on your way to your appointment to find out what you are drinking so it can be waiting for you when you arrive.

2) Therapists to not place a hand on your shoulder or on the small of your back when you confess how crazy and out of control you have felt (and behaved) and therapists certainly do not hug you when you finish.

3) Therapists do not hear your story and tell you that contrary to what you may believe and others may tell you… there is not a thing wrong with you.

4) Therapists do not confirm this by telling you that it is everyone else in your life that is crazy and/or wrong and has forced you to behave so badly.

5) Therapists do not bring up stories of their old boyfriends or disasters with blue eyeshadow that went way above their natural brow line because they know it will make you laugh until you cry.  Because… therapists do not know that the one thing you need more than anything, is a good laugh, a good cry and a good friend, or three. 

Thank you to C,G & M for Friday night… it was EXACTLY what I needed.

Trying not to loose sight of the difference

Last week I received a phone call from D and my friend’s fiance.  When I answered she was full of tears and told me that she had called off their wedding.   All of her reasons were valid and while we were talking she confided in me that as the process moved along, she felt like people were tying the marriage up into the wedding and she had begun to loose sight of the difference.  I think she is by far, one of the bravest women I know and I hope with all my heart that some day I get a phone call saying that they just got back from city hall but for now, I think she making the best decision.  So, in honor of her, here are five differences between a wedding and a marriage, as I see them.  I am by no means an expert. 

1- a wedding is a day/ a marriage is a lifetime

2- a wedding is public/ a marriage is private

3- a wedding focus on all the little details/ a marriage is about the big picture

4- a wedding is a celebration/ a marriage is a commitment

5- a wedding starts your life together/ a marriage is your life together

Questions for my friends

Will you hold my hand, when I loose someone or something I love?

Will you be there for me, regardless of the bad choices I make or how many times I make them?

Will you tell me, when my clothes are unflattering, my hair needs to be dyed or I have something in my teeth?

Will you forgive me, if at times I am not as good of a friend to you as you have been to me or if my needs overwhelm you?

Will you believe me, when I tell you I love you and I need you and my life would not be the same without you?

A Wonderful Weekend

This weekend my three college girl friends and I got together for a little girls weekend. For various reasons, we are only able to all get together about three times a year. which makes it even more special. Here are my five favorite things about the weekend.

1) The laughter -the easy joking, banter and giggles that come from years of friendship.

2) The updates- filling everyone in on what has been going on in our lives in great detail. Asking, and actually caring, about each others spouses, partners, in-laws, out-laws, family and friends.

3) The tears- It has been a tough year for all of us. We have changed jobs, changed addresses, made difficult decisions, ended and begun relationships and dealt with family members in pain. When we look back on what we have been through, and speak about how we have been there for each other, the tears fall easily. Not the emotional outburst that comes from a break up or an argument, but the slow release of emotion that comes like a sigh of relief when you are with people you truly love and trust.

4) The routine- No matter how long we are apart, as soon as we get together, we fall into the same comfortable routine. The same jokes are funny, the same symptoms cause concern, the same wallets are lost, keys are forgotten and we are all running around trying on clothes and asking opinions before we rip off any tags. I don’t know how I buy anything with out these women telling me it looks ok.

5) The confession- For the first time, this weekend I told my friends about my blog. I was not intending to keep it from them, but I think I wanted to give myself time to figure out what I wanted to write about before I started sharing it with some of the most important people in my life. When I first came out and said it, my only hope was that they would not laugh at me. True to form, my girlfriends love and support blew me away. They laughed with me and cried with me as I read some of my favorite posts and when it was all over, they said the one thing I had never dared to hope for. They told me they were proud of me, and they loved hearing what I had to say.