My wife sells doll cloths and American Girl dolls which she refurbishes. She does this not for the money but for the joy she brings to pre-teen girls. She has three regular and two embroidery machines, plus three sergers, and blind hem machine. All of these are in a 10 X 10 room with 22 plastic totes of fabric, each weighing in excess of 50 pounds packed from floor to ceiling on one wall. Then there is the thread, patterns, and sewing nosh crap that fills the rest of the claustrophobic space. I don’t enter that room voluntarily. Getting crushed by an avalanche of flannel and cotton knits is not a way anyone should die. I also have a phobia about sewing machines brought on by a mean grandmother when I was four years old. I played with her Singer, and she punished me by threatening to sew my fingers together. Never messed with her’s or anyone else’s since.
As Judy’s devoted husband of 53 years, I am fine with her doll business, especially when she sells some as it partially offsets some of the cost of her obsession, and the fact that there are fewer doll faces to look at before my morning coffee. In the mornings I sometimes see movement as I walk past the shelf, they are on in the living room. No, they are not all in the sewing room. Like the Russian army in Ukraine, they are slowly spreading out in the living room, dining room, and even in the closets in my weight room/man cave. I have applied for NATO membership but was denied as those cowards believe they may be next if they help me.
Judy has tried to sell dolls on the internet but has had better luck selling at Christmas craft bazaars. We live on the Oregon Coast, and there are craft fairs here, but coasties are cheap bastards. Therefore, we need to travel to the Willamette Valley for the more lucrative bazars so that we don’t lose even more money. This means we camp in our travel trailer, usually at a fairground. It costs fuel to get there, and the campground is not free. We usually eat out two or three times as well. Therefore any money she makes is eaten up. I keep quiet about this. First the back of my head is already flat and after I help her set up her table, I get some alone time with old war movies and nice single malt. I used to smoke a lot of cigars as well, but I have given them up, god damn doctors!
The last bazar she attended was a doll show in Rickreall, Oregon. Just imagine an 8,000 square foot building filled to capacity with dolls of every description with the exception of the anatomically correct blow-up kind. Trust me, I looked. If you have never been to Rickreall, I cannot recommend it unless you are into farm equipment and the traffic jams they create as they move from field to field along a two lane highway. Having said this, it does have one major redeeming feature. It is in the heart of Oregon’s Pinot Noire wine growing country. There are so many of these within a few miles of the Rickreall fairgrounds that I spent a whole day tasting and tasting and tasting. Lucky for me that the last vineyard I tasted at was right across the street from my trailer, which means I could stagger rather than drive home. Just had to wait a bit for a piece of farm equipment to show up in the distance to slow traffic to ensure that I made it even if I had to crawl.
I have been drinking wine since I was a boy. Mom used to occasionally let me have a small glass at dinner on special occasions. She preferred sweet reds like Manischewitz or Mogan David (AKA Mad Dog). These are kosher wines. No wonder that Judaism is the smallest of the five major regions on this planet. If they wanted to move up to number four, they need to up their wine game. OK, Islamist don’t drink, but they used to smoke hash out of cool looking water pipes, which has some appeal. However, it is now forbidden, so much for them moving up in the race to be number one. Mom hated Jews but she liked their wine. She drank it all her life and lived to be 93, surviving cancer four times. She had cancer when she died, but that is not what killed her. I am not saying that her longevity was due to Mad Dog. More likely her longevity was due to being to mean to die, but that is another story.
The point of the above is that I started drinking wine when I was in pimples and have kept up the habit to this day. As time went on and as my pallet improved, I graduated to more sophisticated non-kosher vintages, like Boones Farm Apple, Pagan Pink Ripple, Chateau Lau Sall and ultimately Gallo Spinada. At one memorable binge drinking college party I was mixing Spinada and crème soda in what was known as a wine flip. Had a hangover for three days. I think we called them flips because for those three days I spent a lot of time flipping open the toiled seat either to puke or shit. And we called that fun.
My point is that I was in my late forties before my wine pallet was refined enough to discern a cabernet, from a merlot. I have only recently leaned to appreciate Pinot Noire. I will never have a refined enough pallet to decern which of the three soil types the Pinot grapes were grown on, nor could I tell one vintage year to the next, but the maybe because I have a 75 year olds memory and by the third glass my decerning taste bud are numb. By the fifth glass, it could be Mad Dog and would think it was the best I ever tasted.
What I can’t understand is how the barely out of high school, cheerleader type girl with the big hooters seems to have much more discerning pallet than myself. I had to drink an oil tanker worth of wine to get to my present state. How did they get so knowledgeable without having to endure Mad Dog and Ripple. Did they go to wine tasting school between trips to the tanning salon and cosmetic surgeon? Then I realized that they were not tasting the wines they were displaying next to their ample boobs. I was being conned like a horny sailor in a Bangkok trans bar. They could never tell the difference between a Syrah and a Tempranillo. Neither could I, but I admit my ignorance. But it was too late. Four bottles and a $150 later, I staggered across the highway and passed out in my trailer while watching Band of Brothers for the 15th time.
After a few hours, I woke up, hung over but wiser. I looked at the pricey wines that I bought and read their labels. How does a wine taste of blueberry, plum, and dark chocolate, or black currant, wild blackberries and vanilla? Aren’t wines made from grapes? Do they add these flavors in the chemistry lab? Wild blackberries? Are there tame blackberries? At least these flavors are edible, unlike some of the others flavors these overpriced libations claimed to have. Folks, I am not making the following up, these are actual flavors that these wines claimed to have. Are you ready? Hang on to your panty hose!
Tobacco
Smoke
Black fruits violets
Baking spice
Lush stone
Wet stone
Cracked pepper
Forest floor
Douglas fir
Douglas fir??? Really! What does Douglas fir taste like? Is it different than the taste of other coniferous trees? I get what wet stone tastes like, having slipped and face planted on it, but it is not a particular flavor that I would pay to taste, although I did. Lush stone? WTF. Forest floor? In Oregon the forest floor is covered with pine needles, dirty moss, poisonous mushrooms and slugs! They have to be making this shit up. And I can do better! Actually, I had help from my son with these. He went wine tasting with me. After a few glasses at the second vineyard we started making up wine flavors as we ogled the wine girls presenting the uncorked bottles next to their boobs. We were having a great time. His wife and designated driver er……not so much. Here are just a few of the flavors we came up with. There were many more, but it was hard to decipher my handwriting the next day.
Bubble warp
Kitty Litter
Fish tank gravel
Phiz Ed
Vinal lunch box
Bungy cord
Postage stamp
Yarn
Styrofoam cup
Wet dog collar
Unwashed socks
Warm light bulb
Tooth paste spit
Dry wall spackle
Recombinant bike sweat
Stripper thong
And finally..Pressure treated Douglas fir.
So much for Rickreall wine tasting. Can’t wait to go again. I wonder if kosher vineyards have tastings?
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