Wine, Angels and Song

Although yesterday started out routinely, by late afternoon it was looking significantly more interesting. The Wife asked me to join a meeting with some folks who were in town doing a site visit in preparation for an upcoming Psychiatry convention, and for reasons I don't really understand she thought I could provide some useful insight from the "local" perspective on some of the "activities" that they were considering. I might have backed out of such a meeting except that the meeting was going to be at the Wyndham hotel and there was likely to be wine involved. So I skipped out a little early and by 4:00 was sitting at a table sipping a glass of Merlot and talking about cemetery tours and funky restaurants. It was kind of fun, actually.

I admit I was a little bit surprised that they were definitely planning on organizing a group to take the "Katrina disaster" bus tour. In fact, I guess I was even a little surprised that they were still being done. As it turns out, though, they are still going strong and are popular with visitors. Like everyone, I have mixed feelings about things like that. On the one hand, you want to put the disaster behind you and move on, while on the other you realize that most people can't really comprehend the whole thing unless they actually see it. The mere fact that there is still more than enough damage over two years later to support these tours is a little troubling all by itself.

So anyway, we had to finish up the meeting by 5:00 so that we could rush home and meet a few friends in time to go out to City Park for the "Reds, Whites, and the Blues" evening, which is a benefit consisting mainly of a big wine-tasting with food from a bunch of local restaurants and a local jazz/blues singer. We were determined not to be too late this year because by the time we'd arrived last year much of the food was already gone! This year's event was quite nice despite the rain-soaked grounds, and we did a copious amount of "tasting," eventually accumulating more wine glasses than our little table out in the garden could handle. I was surprised to find a girl with angel wings that looked a lot like the ones that the Specialized angel wears. She was with a table that was promoting some kind of vodka (the Bloody Mary was merely OK and if you can tell the difference between brands of vodka in a bloody mary, you're a whole lot better than I). The event wrapped up around 9 pm, so we all headed back to the house where we sat out on the front porch and went through a couple of bottles of wine, this time with full glasses. By 11 I was pretty well zonked out and ready for either bed or dancing, and since there was no dancing to be had, I called it a night.

This morning the weather was 100% better. A little cool front had come through overnight, lowering both the temperature and humidity. Apparently the nice early morning weather wasn't enough to get folks out to the levee, though. I didn't see any of the regular riders out there the whole time I was riding. Oh well, I guess that's OK for a Friday in October.