Day to Play (the "I'm in California, there Will Be Wine" remix)

Thanks to debg and her Ripper-car, we had a lovely day in Healdsburg, up in Sonoma (even if we never did make it out to the surrounding wineries). we walked around downtown, hitting small tasting rooms and checking out wineries that don't have distribution. Yes, I blew my budget shipping bottles home. But if you know you're going to blow the budget, is it really blowing it? And for zin-girl, this was primo wine-buying territory. ( wine neep be here )

(and I didn't actually go wildly overboard. I didn't buy anything that I could get elsewhere, and I walked away from some otherwise quite nice wines because they were just overpriced. See? I can too have self-control.)

Dinner was at Dry Creek Kitchen which was totally fabulous -- I had a grilled lamb chop with some amazing sauce and sage mashed potatoes that were too rich to finish, and followed it up with a cheese board ( cheese neep )

on black bread with fig jam and honeycomb. Yum. Deb seemed to enjoy her -- salmon, I think -- equally well, based on how the plate was practically licked clean. And then she had this OMG decadent chocolate peanut butter dessert that managed to be fudgy-dense without being too heavy. Neat trick, that.

Of course, my system as told me in no uncertain terms what it thought of all this rich food and wine being dumped into my system over a four hour period, but we've sorted it all out and are on speaking terms again. *grin*

And now, off to the reading/signing at Clayton Books this afternoon....

A curiousness....

Discussion at today's signing made me wonder. So I'm asking.


[Poll #1033597]

EtA: Some of you are lying -- you met me first on-line. Of course, it was 10+ years ago....

Also, "meerkat" or "mk" seems to center around jygml. So not a shock. If you don't know what jygml is, you probably don't think of me as meerkat.

And kradical refers to me more often as "Gilman" than "Laura Anne." He seems blissfully unware of this fact, however. ;-P