Ink-ohol

Two stories about it:

1. I've got issues with Beer Karma right now. Here's how it works: You bring beer to your friend's house when you come over, they bring beer when they come over. It's important to keep the balance on this. When fortune (free beer style) smiles on you, you should put yourself in a position to enable fortune to shine upon others.

My current situation is that I feel like I've been doing a lot of receiving lately and not much giving. We've been having people over, and not going out, so that's how it goes. Tonight, however, we're going to some friends house for dinner, and I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself to bring good beer. I've been drinking free, friend-provided beer for weeks, it's only proper that someone else should have that pleasure. So, I'm going to have to search out some prized northwest microbrew to bring along tonight. That should even the scales and put me on a level beer karma footing.

2. Heather and I drank our finest (and only) bottle of wine this weekend. It was a bottle of 98 pinot noir from Tualatin Estate Vineyards, where I worked briefly after college. It was really good wine at the time, and it was supposed to age well. We were married at the vineyard, and drank this wine at the wedding. So Heather and I had been dragging it around, miraculously intact, for 7 years, and through 3 moves. We'd been putting off opening it for a "special" occasion, but everytime some special time came around, we'd either forget about it, or not feel like wine, or not think the time was "special" enough. So, saturday night, we felt like wine, and that was all we had, and we opened it up. We drank it before dinner with chocolate chips, and drank it with our burgers and beans dinner. We are so sophisticated. It was great. I wish we had another bottle we could open every week. It was also a good reminder that a random late-summer evening spent sitting on your new deck with your cute wife, nearly-potty-trained toddler, and sleeping-through-the-night infant can be as special as any event.