7 Kids, 2 grandkids, 1 on-the-way, 2 cats, Mom, and Dad

Old World vs. New World or What does that mean when talking about wine?

Old World wines come from France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. New World wines are from the United States, Canada, and the Southern Hemisphere meaning Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia.

New World wines tend to be fruitier and aggressive in the style and taste. Old World wines make you think of leather and smoke and are more subtle.

It is the difference between a biker chick flashing her breasts in Laconia and the woman with a parasol in a Monet painting.

I want to do a better job of appreciating Monet, but I'm still drawn to the flash. I think it is a matter of educating my palette so that I can appreciate what is subtle.

Dinner and a great wine or The dojo was closed so I decided to relax.

Sensei's nephew, and a fellow karate student, graduated from high school yesterday so the dojo was closed.

I diced a shallot, a few cloves of garlic, and a jalapeno and sauteed it all in some EVOO (extra virgin olive oil) with some arborio rice. After a few minutes I started adding in beef broth until it evaporated and then kept adding more and letting it summer while the rest of the dinner cooked.

Beautiful wife diced some center cut pork chops and lightly browned them in a pan with some EVOO. I then seasoned them with some black and red pepper before adding a couple cans of diced tomatoes with a marinara flavoring.

I opened up a bottle of 2001 Penfold's Koonunga Hill Shiraz Cabernet blend. It was inky dark purple and had a slightly fruity but spicy bouquet. The wine had enough body to stand up to all the spiciness and was an almost seamless pairing. The bottle said it could handle some mid-term cellaring but I think it was opened at just the right time for the food we ate. I slightly chilled it before opening which helped to enhance the whole experience.

That was uncomfortable or Commercials you don't want to watch with your kids.

Personally, I find it bad enough to deal with tampon and pad commercials. The ones that encourage men to "talk with their doctor" are vague enough that you could well imagine it is to do with male pattern baldness.

The commercial for KY Warming Liquid wasn't as subtle. I saw it while sitting there watching TV with Youngest Daughter. The only thing that would have made it any more obvious is if they had an announcer at the end say, "They're going to do IT!"

Then, we watched "Two and a Half Men" which was about Charlie having a prior lover call with a pregnancy scare, the choice of condoms while shopping, and the aborted process of getting a vasectomy. Before getting the vasectomy he was trying to "produce" some sperm to save for the future, just in case he decided to have kids.

Wow, what an entry or It's a wonder I don't Ocho de Mayo more!

I read my previous entry and it's a wonder I don't end up like I did after the Ocho de Mayo party last week more often! :-)

I never grieved or My father has been dead for six years.

When he died Beautiful Wife waited for me to grieve and I never really did. I think I slowly grieved and let him go over the years growing up and especially after I got out of the Army and moved back to NH with my young family. His physical departure matched what had already happened emotionally.

His friends, the newest woman in his life, and his life at the American Legion always took precedence over his family. We'd maybe see him once every six months or so and then only for a short period of time. Many times the only reason I'd hear from him was because he needed something.

I tried to be more involved with his life but nothing I did really seemed to matter. He actually told me once that I should leave Youngest Son at home when I visited him because I needed a break from my kids. I explained to him that I didn't see them much during the week and that I looked forward to spending time with them on the weekend. He never got that.

Once I realized that all my efforts didn't really matter to him the idea of guilt and grief ceased to exist.

There are some good memories about him, but I don't imagine I'll break down anytime soon.

What brought this up? My grandfather just got out of the hospital after being treated for five days for pneumonia. He actually told me once that I couldn't visit him while on a business trip because he had some friends coming over for a poker game and was going to Atlantic City the next day on a senior center trip. He had already paid $5 for the ticket. It is always a watershed moment when you realize the worth of your company. It appears the apple didn't fall far from the tree. I'll be sad when he dies but the grieving has already happened over many years and I don't think I have that much more to go.

My hope is that I'll be a better father and grandfather to my kids and theirs.

Had an ice cream or When did jimmies become sprinkles?

Beautiful Wife and I had an ice cream last night on our way home from her office's summer party. We had a good time there though we only stayed around 1.5 hours. People were starting to leave and we headed out before the numbers dwindled to the point that made it awkward to leave.

I had Sweet Cream Almond and it was delicious. I like it that this place dips the cone in the jimmies rather than trying to drizzle them from a spoon hoping that some will stick.

Tell me one good thing or And then what happened next.

Over at Everyday News she wrote about the one-liners that she gets in her mind and would love to put in a book some day but never gets around to doing it.

I liked the line so much that I decided to spontaneously flesh out the one-liner a little...

"Tell me one good thing about the human race that isn't a fluke. " Sophia muttered around the stale cigar she held in her mouth.

Harry rolled his eyes knowing that this was just the beginning of her tirade. Sophia was known among her circle of friends for her quirky sense of humor and slightly cynical outlook on life.

"What's eating at you?" Harry tossed in her direction while leaning back in his office chair to get comfortable. "You've been muttering to yourself like that ever since you got to the office and saw that strange vehicle in the driveway."

"Hey! If you drove into work with the sounds of helicoptors overhead and then someone was parked in the middle of the driveway blocking your way in here you'd be upset too!" Sophia fired back at him.

I love razzberries or Before I knew how to spell it I loved them.

My Aunt Millie lived in Berlin, NH. She had a plot that was about 10x10 that had cultivated raspberry bushes. The raspberries were huge and I loved nothing more than picking them and putting them on my cereal. We started visiting there from Philadelphia when I was around 5 years old.

Right down the street from my childhood home in Hampton the people at one point had planted raspberry bushes. They grew wild over time and extended over the Dirt Road that ran behind the houses. We considered anything past their stone wall public domain.

I used to wake up and the first thing I did was walk down the road and pick a big bowl of raspberries. Once I got home I would put a layer of raspberries in a bowl, a big layer of Cheerios, and then another layer of raspberries. My goal was to have at least one berry with every bite.

I would do this with blackberries, blueberries, and strawberries. The only fruit that didn't grow "wild" in large quantities in our immediate area was the strawberries.

How do you like my lawn or I'm having one of my childhood flashbacks.

I used to mow and rake our lawn. Sometimes my dad would do the mowing but that was usually after he'd ask me to do it on Friday night and be pissed because it was all of 8am on Saturday and uncompleted. The scene played out with me running out the front door after hurriedly getting dressed and begging to take over and finish the job. As I got older, I dressed slower and ceased to beg.

Our home in Hampton had a couple of HUGE pine trees in the front yard and several slightly smaller ones on one side. We did not have leaves to rake but had to scrape a ton of pine needles from the lawn. We moved into the house in November so did not do much in the yard until that spring. We started to rake the side yard and about 10 feet from the house we realized that our lawn was not level but was in fact years of accumulated pine needle growth to the tune of about 2 feet! We uncovered "rocks" that were easily 2-3 feet in diameter too that were likely left over from when the house was built.

I was around 13 when my dad decided that we should cut down all the trees in the side yard, move the rocks, and fill in the area that started 10 feet from the house and extended to the stone wall 25 feet away. My job was to move the rocks, by hand. I am still not sure how I managed to rock, roll, pivot, and drag those rocks out of the yard. My dad then had yards of fill delivered.

I spread that entire amount of fill by hand. Menial labor was my birthright as the only boy in the family. I used a shovel and a rake to distribute and evenly spread the fill. After I was done with spreading the fill, he had loam delivered and I did the same thing with that. Since screened fill and loam cost more I was the screener too which meant I had to bend over frequently to pick out rocks and sticks as I moved and spread the piles.

After doing all of that work, I helped seed, water, and then mow the new patch of lawn in our yard. You cannot imagine the feelings I had when someone would come over to visit and my dad would ask them how they liked "his" yard...

Don't it make my brown eyes blue or I saw Crystal Gayle in concert.

Beautiful Wife snagged four tickets at work to see Crystal Gayle at the Whittemore Center on Saturday night. We went with her parents, the head outlaws, and had a great time. It was oppressively hot in there which was kind of ironic since it is the same arena that is the home for the UNH Wildcats ice hockey team.

Crystal Gale has hair down to her ankles and beautiful blue eyes and a nice singing voice. She crossed over from country to pop in the late 70s and had a couple of hits. One of her sisters is Loretta Lynn, another famous country star.

Home Ownership's Spring Season or Time to buy a lawn mower.

We've never had much of a yard before and always managed to get buy without actually owning a lawn mower. We definitely need one for our new home and during this last week the grass grew an incredible amount.

I bought a lawn mower that has self-propelled front wheels and a grass catcher. The back yard definitely has an up and down hill part of it and the self-propelled feature made going uphill not so much a chore. The grass catcher was something that I insisted on having since I spent my youth mowing lawns for pocket money.

I used to like nothing more than to finish mowing the lawn and then going around to rake up the piles of grass rather than having a nice glass of lemonade. I emptied the bag six times which was way better than raking it into piles and then carrying them into the woods.

The lawnmower came in the box and I worried some about the "some assembly required." I need not have worried about it because it went together easily. Basically, you opened the top of the box and took out the extra stuff. You cut the sides in front of it, lowered the side, and rolled it out on to your lawn. The handle lifted up and needed to be screwed in on each side but could be done by hand. Even putting in the oil was easy because they ship it empty but include the oil in the box. The required amount of oil is 20 oz and that was exactly the size of the bottle...how cool was that?

Cutting a bagel or How to get three stitches.

I was cutting a bagel this morning and it was a little tough going right until my thumb got in the way and then that sharp knife went through the bagel and my thumb like they were butter.

The plus side is that it hit my nail and that kept it from cutting off the end of my thumb. The down side is that it was hard to stitch because the cut went right up to my nail. Novacain under the thumbnail hurts like hell.

Ocho de Mayo or My don't drink any more switch was broken.

Well, now I know what it is like to get so hammered doing shots that you can't see or walk straight.

I know I had a great time and probably helped to make the lost limes situation worse.

Some wine lists or I better start pulling some corks.

I've started to compile a spreadsheet of the wines I have, how much I paid for them, when they should be ready to drink, and any scores that I know they've received. Now that I have a working list I'll be better about adding new wines in and noting things like whether they were a gift or not. If the wine didn't have a price on the bottle I went buy what I could find for it online.

I also have a document that I made of the 2000 Bordeaux Wines I purchased with their WS notes, and how much I paid for them which was substantially less than the list prices in some cases.

Many of them are ready to drink now. Then I have a smattering of wines that can be opened over the next six years. The Bordeauxs are still pretty much infants 10-15 years from now.

I'm going to go through my wine fridge and my dessert wine rack and add those to the spreadsheet too.

Went for a run at lunch or Perfect day, light breeze, no bugs.

I went out at lunch time and did a 1.5 mile jog. My house sits at the top of a small hill so whether you go left or right out of the driveway, the home stretch is going to be uphill.

You know what else? You really don't notice hills much when you're driving a car but that all changes when you lace on your sneakers.

I can actually remember jogging for fun and not having to take any advil after I was done.

Cute Fizban thing for today? She's laying on the top of my high-backed office chair purring away.

He's so friendly or That isn't a wave he's swatting at black flies.

I think my favorite Spring ever happened a couple of years ago when we had a serious drought. The silver lining in all of that was an almost complete lack of any black flies.

Training at home or Listening to a speaker phone all day.

It is a beautiful day here in Madbury, NH. A gentle breeze lightly ruffles the leaves that have suddenly appeared on the trees. The tulips that were planted in the fall by Beautiful Wife are doing a multi-colored dance in that same breeze.

I can hear birds, see squirrels and chickmunks (Youngest Daughter's cute way of saying it), and wish I was out there too.

What keeps me inside? I'm attending training via WebEx and a conference bridge. I'm one of the lucky ones that can do this from home instead of having to drive to Concord, MA all this week.

Flicking water kind of works or Oh! How considerate! I am thirsty!

I haven't gotten around to getting a spray bottle to enhance Fizban's training. I found that flicking some water in her face while making a psst sound did the trick and she no longer gets on the table, while we are around anyway.

She's fascinated by watching me work. She loves to watch me type and when the cursor moves, she gets a front row seat on my lap. She tries to get on the keyboard but I've stopped her enough so that she only tentatively puts out a paw before I put my hand in front of her nose and she stops.

She discovered the velcro wrap for my laptop's power cord yesterday and wouldn't leave it alone. I flicked water, I made the sound, I moved her, I picked her up by the scruff of her neck and nothing would dissuade her from going after it. Her little face was soaked from me flicking the water. She came up on my chest, touched her nose to mine, and then went over to drink the water from the cup!

Then she went over to get some sun in order to dry off.

Si and Gracias or All the Spanish you need for a trip to Spain!

Oldest Daughter returned from Spain on Friday evening. Middle Daughter and I drove down to Logan Airport to get her because he flight had been delayed for four hours while in Amsterdam and I thought she might appreciate not having to get on a bus after finally getting to Boston.

She went into a wine ship while she was there and asked them for their best red wine. The owner gave her a wine from the area that he said was really good. Even though you have to be 18 to purchase alcohol, my 16-year-old daughter was able to purchase it and bring it home for me.

I've done some initial research and can find absolutely nothing about this wine. I'll probably pick a special occassion to drink and hope that I didn't drink it too early or wait too long.

Here is the front and back of the bottle. They are a little blurry but I think you can read them.