entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

As demanded by rbarclay, and really, six months is too long, or something.
 

2017 bullets:

• Started working part-time on Feb 1, full-time Mar 1.  Went to Portland office in late March and again in late July.  Started working in Oakland office 2 days a week in August.  Work is good.
• I had ditched the wheelchair in Dec 2016; i stopped using the walker full-time in April, and altogether by June.  I was finally able to jog a tiny bit in November.  I still can't do a single sit-up, but i did 6 pushups a couple of days ago.  I had a small relapse in February after a cold which caused numbness in my feet, which has not cleared (and my hands are still numb).
• In late 2016, we'd gotten an accessible plot at the community garden to accommodate me, but i was well enough in November to get kicked out of it and into a regular (and larger) plot.

I got up at 05:10 on Saturday to go to Los Altos Hills and pick grapes for Hallcrest, along with eight high schoolers who were raising money for their soccer academy.  We harvested about 2 tons of chardonnay and a half-ton of pinot noir.  After a midday break, i headed to the winery to experience the first crush of the season.  The chardonnay fruit was dumped straight into the press, and while that was being processed, the pinot noir fruit was crushed and destemmed, then packed away with a CO₂ blanket.  I was exhausted by the end of the day, and a full night's sleep wasn't enough to restore me.

On Sunday, after going to the garden and picking about a bajillion tomatoes, 2wanda, her mom, and i headed to Hollister to buy our pinot noir for this year's wine.  We bought it from the same folks from whom we bought it last year.  After that, we headed down the road to taste at DeRose, whose wine is notably higher in alcohol than average, but you wouldn't know it from its flavor.  I've been a fan of their négrette, but their late harvest viognier was a revelation; it was subtle and far from the sweetness you'd expect in a dessert wine.

My lovely wife shows off a head of cabbage, freshly harvested from our community garden plot.

Sunday's garlic harvest

Remember when you envied our asparagus and i said we didn't have any?  Turns out i was wrong, because two days after that...

... we went to the garden and found these.  And they were tasty!  Mmmmm-mmm.

Kim stands in our community garden next to a plot that had a variety of corn that grew extremely tall; the tallest stalk seems to be about 14 feet tall.  Oddly, it didn't seem to generate any ears of corn until very late in the season.  Kim's mom said that it was some sort of Mexican corn, but i don't know what variety it is with certainty.

Freshly harvested asparagus.  I ate the purple ones!  Well, the green ones, too.  The Victorinox is there to provide scale.

( bonus picture )

(Zoom in on the location and select Satellite, and the arrow will be pointing exactly at my mother-in-law's garden plot.)

(and don't i look oh-so-smarmy in my new icon?)

On Thursday, after a short interview at EDD to make sure my unemployement benefits were all kosher, my mother-in-law and i went to weed our grapevines at her property in San Martin.  They were fraught with unwanted vegetation, but we eradicated a significant portion and reduced the rest after a few hours of work.  Photographic evidence: a young grape cluster; a maturing grapevine; a young charbono grapevine amidst a forest of weeds

On Friday, eqe and i met for the first time over Amici's.  We talked about mutual acquaintances, the Net and its culture (he wore an RTFM T-shirt, i wore my OSI 9-layer model T-shirt), and our professional milieux.  And he paid for lunch!  What a guy.  Thanks, man.

On Saturday, Kim and i dropped by her mom's and we bottled our grape wine.  I don't intend to open our limited supply until at least Hmas, but we tasted it at bottling and, well, it's quite good.

Today, we went to Thai Pepper in Campbell for their Mother's Day buffet brunch.  I ate a lot of shrimp.  We had a bottle of Weingut Köfererhof `04 Kerner which allannah gifted us, which she had during her dinner at the French Laundry.  It was really good on its own, with a complexity that's rare in a white wine, and it accompanied the Thai food well.  I shall repay her gift by getting a hold of some Txomin Etxaniz `04 Txakoli.

I've meant to put up these links for you for a long time now:

• Near San Francisco
• In California
• Across the country

The missus and i spent the morning at the community garden.  Observe my flawless shovel technique.