On Engagement

Look at me! Two posts with pictures in as many days!! I'm on a roll y'all... Practically a brand new woman.

Michele's and John's engagement party was this weekend. And seriously it was the most fun party I've been to probably EVER. The setting, the people, the PRIVATE DISCO?!?! Yeah. You can read more about it here.

Blogger doesn't like me and isn't letting me upload photos so my pictures are here.


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Four years ago (roughly - June of 2002) TheBoy and I went to Napa for the day to celebrate our first anniversary and to do some wine tasting. It was a momentous occasion for me in two ways. 1) I had to finally acknowledge that MAYBE this was not, in fact, a summer fling as we had lasted a year AND had just signed a lease on an apartment together. Even though we'd been "unofficially" living together for 5 months already. And 2) I was strictly a beer drinking kind of girl before TheBoy came along, with some hard stuff thrown in for good measure. I knew where I was from y'all... None of this high brow wine snobbery for me!

Anyway, we drove up for the day, with the top down, blasting tunes and getting sunburned. If I remember correctly, it was almost 100 degrees that Saturday. TheBoy took me to all of his favorite wineries and we tasted and tasted and tasted to our little hearts content. I was more than a little tipsy! We shared a picnic lunch under a shaded tree outside a winery where his cousin worked (works?) and I let him steal a few kisses in front of God and everybody. I was so embarrassed but I was so in love (and also maybe a little drunk) so I didn't care.

We also, of course, bought some wine. At one winery I absolutely fell in love with this particular bottle of wine. It was by far the best wine we'd tasted all day. And by far the most expensive. I wavered and hemmed and hawed over whether or not I should buy a bottle. In the end I joined their wine club* so I could get a discount and bought one bottle. We joked about saving it for our wedding night or other special occasion. And because I'm a girl and because it was our anniversary weekend and it seemed fitting that is how I've always thought of that wine. Every time I looked at it sitting there in our wine rack covered in dust, every time I packed it gingerly in paper when we moved, I'd think back to that first anniversary and look forward, longingly, to the night we would open that bottle.

A few weeks ago when I returned from Maui I was putting the bottles of pineapple sparkling wine that I had brought back into the wine rack when I felt my hand brush against something sticky. Sure enough there was a dark red stain across the back of my wrist. I searched for the culprit and when I realized which bottle was leaking I gingerly pulled it out, wiped it off, set it on the table and cried.


Last night we opened that bottle and poured it down the sink.** Ironic? Or maybe a sign? The wine I thought we'd use to celebrate our wedding didn't even last long enough for us to get engaged.



*I remained a member for a LONG time - until I lost my job several years later.

**Actually, TheBoy poured it down the sink after I went to bed, I started crying at the mere mention of dumping it. Seemed too... symbolic? Wrong.