MeadFest!!

Yeah, so I forgot my camera, so what? Wanna fight? :P

Apart from that minor snafu, I had a fantastic time. I got there at 5:30pm, met up with the Chef, paid my $35 entrance fee, got my little tasting glass, and started tasting! I have never had so much mead in my whole life all at once like that, and to be honest, trying SO many different varieties got to be a bit overwhelming. While I thoroughly enjoyed many of the meads(well, most of them actually), and certainly picked up a favorite or 2, I'd much rather just skip to hanging out in a hotel room with a few bottles of the good stuff and hanging out. I did the tasting thing for about an hour, then the Chef, myself and a few others all went down to the hotel bar to get some food, and we all got a seriously overpriced mini-buffet thing. Included was a tiny salad bar, vegetarian or meat lasagna, mozzerella sticks, linguini with red or alfredo sauce, garlic bread, and a few desserts. $14.95. Hah. Back in CT at the casino you can get a gigantor buffet for $12, in a room you could fit 4 of my apartments in. Oh well, we had to eat something! So, food ingested, we went back up to the tasting, and hung around until they shut down at 9pm.
I feel I need to plug my favorite booth of the night here... Redstone Meadery, which just happens to be quite nearby in Boulder, CO. Yay! I highly recommend this one, if you like sweeter wines. Super yummy. I'll mention my other favorite in another post, or add to this one later, since I don't have the brochure with me at work for the other company I liked. They're out of CA if I remember correctly, and they have an incredible spiced mead that just blew my socks off. Very potent. Again, more on that later. Oh, and if you're unfamiliar with mead in general, you can go to my most recent interweb addiction and read about it here.

So the festival ended at 9pm, and as I mentioned in my last post there were 2 collective rooms upstairs in the hotel. I had stopped drinking around 7:30pm, and was just fine to drive(I only had 2 little tastes after we ate anyhow), so the Chef and I hopped in the Rav to go to Target and buy him some swim trunks and then back to my place to grab my bathing suit, since some folks were planning on taking advantage of the hotel pool. Of course, by the time we got back those who did swim had already gone back to the rooms, so our efforts went unnoticed. That was super-fine with me, since I didn't have to strip down to the suit in front of other humans after all, hehehe. So we all just hung out in one or the other of the rooms, and I got to hang out with the Gypsy, the Sexy Seamstress, and another gal(I don't know her well enough yet to have an appropriate nickname, but I totally dig her!), whom I hadn't seen since the renfair, and I got to meet the Sexy Seamstress' man and his sister(whom I had also breifly met at the renfair). Not to mention another couple of the Chef's friends, who are also super-cool.

Now I've mentioned before how stressed out I am(before I've even started anything, heh)about dealing with the wedding dress situation, since I am strongly considering just having one made from scratch, and now that the invitations(for the most part) are finally done and in the mail, I have no more excuses for putting it off. I actually feel a bit better about it now, though, since talking to the Sexy Seamstress on Saturday night. She used to work for a seamstress(and is not short on skills herself, she made the Chef's costume for the renfair last year), and has agreed to help me out if I need anything, like maybe going with me to pick out fabrics and such. I hope she knows I plan on taking her up on her offer, since I am pretty lost when it comes to this sort of thing. Another cool thing is that she and her guy are considering getting married at renfair also, so I can maybe help her out and show her all the paperwork, and give her an insider view of how the whole experience goes. I'm pretty psyched about spending some time with her, and her man, they are both so smart and interesting... plus she's gorgeous, if you'll all allow me a shallow moment... *sigh* Ok, I'm done.

At any rate, things started breaking up around 1am, and that's when I took off, hopped home, and hit the sack, thinking again how nice it was that the hotel it was held in is only about 8 minutes away from my apartment.

"An Irishman is never drunk as long as
He can hold onto one blade of grass and not
Fall off the face of the earth."

It's Been Nutty

So, let's see, it's been an insane couple of weeks. Where shall I start? Oh yeah... so, anyone want me to send out some pics of the snowstorms we've had? Burn you a cd? Share some of our vast collection of videos? Well, tough. A couple of weeks ago, after defragmenting our hard drives, one of them freaked out and erased itself. ALL of the aforementioned things were on there. All of our music, picture files, *ahem* adult entertainment, and videos were on there. VERY upset. Also, brainiacs that we are, we haven't backed up our files in over a year. Grrr. And of course, it would apparantly take $600-$800 to retrieve any info on there(according to the Geek Squad). Screw that. Fortunately, we've got most of the really important bits stored elsewhere, like Photobucket, FlickR, and just about all of our music (as of a year ago, anyhow) is on the iPod, so we can get that back. Still, we're looking at many many hours of re-downloading stuff, and cruising for more pretty pictures and such.

Thank the Gods, our wedding invitations were saved on the drive that was not erased. I would have cried. A lot. When you put that many hours into a gigantic Photoshop project, losing it is like losing a limb. Ok, too dramatic.... maybe like losing a finger. One you don't use much. ;)

In other techy news, we got a new laptop! Ordered it custom off the HP website, dropped just over 2 grand on it, and then guess what? They delivered it to THE WRONG ADDRESS!!! I was looking at the tracking on FedEx, and at the point that it said it had been delivered an hour or so previous, I freaked since I didn't have it yet. Plus, it said it was signed for by someone I'd never heard of. Talk about panic! So I called our apartment complex leasing office, thinking maybe it was delivered there and someone there signed for it, only to find they don't have any employees with that name, and they had had no deliveries for us. Next panic call was to FedEx, to whom I made it abundantly clear that this was a completely unacceptable situation that needed to be fixed right fucking now. They got the point, and were quick to assure me that although our package was delivered to the wrong address(some house, maybe a few miles away), and signed for by a random person for whom the package was not intended, it hadn't been long and they would send the driver back to get it right away and make sure it was re-delivered, to me, that same day. Well, it took longer than they said it would, but it did show up. In the meantime, of course, we were both freaking out because, well, what happens if the people who signed for it opened it? What if they took some stuff? Maybe even used it? Well, thank goodness, when it finally did arrive, the package was very obviously intact. We were SO relieved!

Mr.M came home yesterday, for the first time since the laptop[finally]arrived. I didn't want to open it without him, since this was our Christmas gift to each other, and damn, it's freaking gorgeous! It's a widescreen, and has just endless amounts of nifty features. I have no idea what they are, but they're cool. We also picked up a wireless router, so we can use the internet on both computers when he's home. Of course the laptop disappeared with Mr.M when I dropped him back off at his truck this morning. *sniff* But that's ok, I get to play with it when he's home, and it's way more for his entertainment on the road right now anyway. He wasn't able to play any of his games on the old laptop, and now he can play them all(Age of Empires, Star Wars Empire at War, stuff like that)! Not to mention the fact that it's way better for playing movies! Yay!

Back to wedding crap for a minute, then I'll stop rambling. The invites took a bit longer to assemble than I thought, but they're almost done, and I hope to be able to take them to the post office for mailing on Monday. Depending on how things go on Saturday night, and how I feel on Sunday, hehehe. Oh yeah, I didn't mention that did I? I'm going to MeadFest on Saturday night with The Chef and some friends! YAY!! I don't drink much(usually not at all), but the idea of being able to try soooooo many different kinds of mead and wine, well, forget it. I'm there. You pay your $35, get a glass, and let the boozing begin! Hurrah! And Mom, don't worry, I won't overdo it, I promise. Fortunately it's at a hotel(in my town, no less!)so some of the folks are splitting the cost of a room so noone really has to drive. This is good for me, means I have plenty of time to hang out and sober up after the 'fest closes before I have to drive home. Worst case, I call a cab to get home and then convince someone to take me to get my Rav the next day. Heh. Either way, noone will be driving while hammered, or even slightly drunk. Such a good thing. I'm so glad I have friends that are insane enough to be crazy and have a good time, and responsible enough to not kill themselves/others in the process. Yay! I'll bring my little digital camera and maybe post some photos next week.