To Martinborough

Saturday night was spent with some of my favourite people in honour of Becky's 25th birthday (of the Pencarrow lighthouse bike trip fame). Her and fireman hubbie have moved to Johnsonville, and we got to see their new love nest for the first time. In her (self-acclaimed) Martha Stewart style she had cooked up a storm (yes, it was her birthday, but we had been under the impression it was a pot luck tea, not a banquet of medieval monarchic proportions). According to the fireman my pizza was more suited for prehistoric caveman consumption. Then we played cranium. I have to admit after six hours at work that day reading 300 pages of submissions from a doctor for the next meeting my brain wasn't gagging for the stimulation, but my abs appreciated the workout from the unrelenting hilarity. I'm quite stoked with the fact that I have bought Jacob the kiddies version for Christmas....

Afterwards the anticipation kicked in, as I waited for the boy to arrive at my place having been in town with some workmates watching a play. I'd been losing sleep over him seeing the mopchop for the first time. And he hated it. And with all fairness to him, he didn't try to hide it and say something lame like what i've been enduring recently - it'll be good for summer. Or trying to turn it back on me - do you like it? But after I got all stroppy and we'd both had a bit of a sulk it was okay, and I realised he wasn't as shallow as I'd sold him out to be. I started feeling really good about the whole thing. like maybe it was a test..... Once it gets a little bit longer and I get some of the curl back i might even like it. Because who wants to be conventional and boring....

I went to Toast Martinborough yesterday. The bus trip was hilarious - both there and back. And i really liked the group of people we were with, who weren't the usual gang. And we bumped in to heaps of people we knew. I didn't even get that boozed, enough to get up and have a boogie with the oldies at one of the wineries, but by midafternoon the mid 20 degree heat was sizzling my bare bald little head, and I had had enough. But it was a fun day.........laughing at all the trashed people - and there was a huge cross section of trashed society. The upper echelons, middle aged men overweight and wearing over-sized hats, and their women too thin and too tanned with short highlighted hair and white capris and too much gold jewellery, blending in surprisingly fluidly with all the young tarted up things who could have been transported straight from one of the bars on Courtenay Place on a Saturday night.

My favourite wines were the 2004 Te Muna Road Vineyard Pinot Noir and the Claddagh vineyards 2003 Merlot.