A New Wine Bar On an Interesting Side of the Tracks

Last night was the kind of night where I reflected, "When I was little and thought about being a grown up, I thought it would be just like this."

Of course, it was after a late afternoon of grumbling, "I didn't think my grown up life would come to this."

I arrived home to find my spouse working on the yard with tools that were not cooperating.  Why is it so hard to find a weedeater that will edge the lawn without destroying itself?  Or when will someone create a disposable weedeater?  It's only going to work about 10 times anyway, so let's just admit a sort of defeat so that we can move on.

I went off to get to the bank before it closed, but it had already closed.  Happily, my ATM card worked and I remembered the PIN, so I could access my money.

I got home and realized I needed to get to the library--if I'd read the message board, I could have gone there after the bank, since the bank was halfway there.  My spouse was still wrestling with the weedeater, so off I went, back to the library and CVS.  Grown up life so often consists of trudging from chore to chore.

I was happy that we had a social event planned.  A colleague from a former school has opened a wine bar crafted out of what was once a garage/storage site in an industrial part of town near the train tracks, and there was a beer tasting last night.  Off we went.

I'm amazed at what they've done with the place.  There's comfy, overstuffed furniture, along with the more prim styles that might have come from someone's grandma's house.  There's a huge circular table.

We sat in the back patio area that has a huge fountain and lots of shrubbery in metal tubs.  In all of my running around, I hadn't eaten dinner, so I ordered a cheese plate, the Smoky and Sweet (smoky blue cheese and cheese with cranberries--along with fruit and nuts, displayed on a beautiful marble plank), a great value for 9 dollars.  The beer tasting, too, was a great value, beer after beer--but I shared a bottle of wine with one of my friends who was there.

It was one of those evenings where I thought about how it would all make a great setting for a TV show.  I briefly wondered what kinds of characters we would be--we'd certainly be interesting, with our wide variety of backgrounds (the poet, the philosopher, the animator, the marine biologist, the psychologist, the environmental tour entrepreneur--and then I start thinking of other ways we could describe each other . . .)--yes, I would watch that show.  I thought about how few TV shows show a wide group of friends, and how fewer of them still show friends who are in their late 40's and early 50's and still working at specific jobs that regular people do.

It was a great way to end a hectic afternoon.  We came home and tumbled into bed, where I slept soundly for the first time in days.