Three Dozen

Today I turned three dozen. It's kind of fun to think of your age as a few sheets of cookies or cartons of eggs. And we only get to turn a dozen every 12 years, so I think that makes these birthdays kind of special.

I felt awfully lucky when Mr. W suggested (after making me bacon...mmm...and French toast for breakfast) that we go look at new couches during lunchtime. I LOVE furniture shopping. Even if I'm not buying anything. Going into home design stores is like going into candy factories (or wineries) for me. I get giddy.

Anyway, we've been cruising couch websites because of this:

And this:

And sometimes this:

Despite the fact that Mr. W has owned his couch for nine years and that some of our friends won't even come over to watch movies at our house because the couch is so tiny, the thing that finally pushed him over the purchase edge was the fact that he was getting too crowded by the cats.

So today he bought this (color has been fudged in Photoshop because the picture on the website was bright magenta):

What he doesn't realize is that even with all the space the new couch offers, the cats will likely still be right on top of us.

In the midst of our shopping, we stopped at Culver City's famous Tito's Tacos for lunch. I texted an old Yahoo! coworker to tell him I was there (it's his favorite) and he happened to be on his way there at the exact same time, so he joined us for lunch. Birthday luck.

As I sat munching on chips and salsa with post-couchal glow, I felt so happy to be having such a simple, yet wonderful birthday.

Not all the birthdays were like this. I can think of one that included sobbing in a bathtub in Carmel and another that involved a screaming match and throwing a certain present at a certain belligerent boyfriend. Those were all years before I met Mr. W, of course. Three cheers and four deep breaths for being drama-free at 36. Whew!

But something else is at play this birthday. A sort of calm mixed with excitement at the sense of possibility and openness I feel in my life right now. Last year's birthday was great, but I definitely felt stuck in a rut. Thirty-five felt heavy and confining. Likely because I was tied to the same job I'd been in for five years prior. I launched an Etsy store in an effort to spice things up.

Well, this year I wasn't exactly looking to spice things up—more so follow that sense of possibility toward something I'm really passionate about: dating and relationships. So I finally finished the book I've been tinkering with for 4 years, I self-published it and I started a new website to go with it.

Introducing The Path to Wonderful.com

I'm excited to dive into this world and hopefully make contact with some single gals (and guys!) who are anxious to learn more about dating and manifesting.

Now that I finally have the book and the site done, I'll finally be able to get back to reading all your blogs more frequently!

That's another thing that makes this birthday happy!

Rightness in the Mundane

I don't know if he always did it, but for as long as I can remember, my dad wore the same "uniform" to work almost every day. Jeans and a button-up shirt with a white t-shirt underneath. This meant that my mom seemed to be folding white undershirts every single time she did laundry. I can clearly remember helping her fold while we sat on the floor of the family room watching something like The Cosby Show or Family Ties. She never complained that my dad wasn't there folding his own t-shirts, she just took care of what needed to get done and then moved on to the next thing.

I thought of my mom this past week when I found myself creating a stack of Mr. W's undershirts. It was the middle of the day; he was at work; I could hear Barefoot Contessa making something for Jeffrey in the other room. I felt like a strangely merry housewife.

I didn't feel resentful that I was helping with his laundry—something that's become a pretty regular task since he's been working such long hours. I felt almost appreciative. Don't barf, I know it sounds strange and a bit like something a Stepford Wife would say. 

But in that moment, I recognized what might be a similarity between our relationship and my parents': a mutual desire to take care of each other and help the other one out, without expectation. That's how it worked in my house growing up. I don't ever remember my mom nagging my dad to do things or getting mad when she had to do things for him. And the same went for him. They had established a beautifully choreographed dance where they gave and received in unspoken harmony, paying back and paying forward year after year after year. They celebrated their 48th wedding anniversary in February, by the way.

The gratitude I felt while folding that stack of Hanes came from knowing Mr. W and I might hit a marker like that one day if we keep up the dance like my parents have done. And it came just from knowing that if those were my shirts in the dryer, he'd fold them for me, too. He's done it many times.

He wrapped his movie last Thursday, so (for awhile at least) he'll be home with me during the day now. I will still fold his shirts if he needs me to. And although I've given him a few honey-do's to tackle during his hiatus, I know he'd probably take care of stuff all on his own.

We might learn some new give-and-take dance steps being here together every single day. Hopefully we'll both be able to continue finding gratefulness as we go about our little lives.

What We're Making: WINE, Baby!

Last year for Mr. W's birthday, I bought him a guide to wine-making and promised that once he had chosen the best kit, I'd pay for part of it and/or the grape juice so he could finally give home wine-making a whirl. For my birthday, he bought me a toilet. But that's another story.

He finally got around to ordering the kit this past fall, and in October began the process of making 30 bottles of home-brewed Merlot. We chose Merlot because we thought it might be easier than a bigger red or pretty much any white. Here's what the kit looked like after we unpacked it:

 

Basic contents are: A bucket to mix the grape juice with various additives. A glass jug that holds the wine for aging - and bottle brush for cleaning it. Some sort of siphoning squirty thing for transferring wine from "barrel" (jug) to bottle. A corking tool and a bunch of corks.

After sterilizing everything with a special solution, Mr. W set off on his Mad Scientist adventure.

Grape juice was added to the bucket:

And a hydrometer was used to test its gravity. No idea why. Maybe so when we drank it, we wouldn't float away like that one burping scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Clearly, Mr. W should be writing this post...

Once gravitational pull (I just made that up) was established, the wine was poured back into the bucket where it was mixed with additives and yeast to help mimic the flavor and chemical reactions that occur when wine is in a barrel. As usual, the cat was extremely helpful during this entire process.

For about 8 days after this step, that bucket sat in Mr. W's bathtub doing its thing. He had to retest the gravity (which I just found out measures alcohol content) and temperature several times to determine when fermentation had stopped. At that point, the wine was ready to get "racked"—i.e. put into the glass jug to age.

In this jug, nestled among the remote-controlled helicopters, dust bunnies, and landscaping books in our guest room, the wine aged until this past Sunday.

Then it was time to be bottled.

We carefully sterilized 36 bottles in the sink, 32 of which we ended up filling with wine.

Can you tell Mr. W just got a haircut the day before? I'll tell him you said you liked it.

Once the bottles were sterilized, the siphony sucker thing was used to transfer wine from the jug into each bottle.

I'll be honest: part of me was totally jonesing to cut those bottles up and turn them into candle hurricanes for my Etsy store. But we have to reuse them when we do this again, so I will refrain...

After all the bottles were filled, it was time to cork. We realized after doing a few on the countertop that it was about a hundred times easier to force the corks in while kneeling on the floor.

We left one bottle uncorked and drank part of it with our dinner. I have to say, it was pretty good considering it was our first time. And all this only cost about $13 a bottle, which isn't horrible—especially since we can use the equipment again.

For the next batch, we think we'll try making chardonnay. I'm hoping this is just the beginning of a long career of wine making together.