I left work at 2 on wednsday and spent the time relaxing and winding down. Not too much to report there that’s terribly interesting.

Christmas Eve I wandered over to my parents house to help prepare for all of the food items my mom was making for the family gathering later that day. Once that was done around noonish, it was mostly relaxing until my sister got finished with work and came over for the opening of the presents.

You know you’re getting older when getting clothes on Christmas is actually a good thing. This year shall be known as the year of the sock (which is good because I needed more socks). My parents got my sister and her husband a new vacuum cleaner and individually wrapped a lot of the attachments and various bits and pieces of it. And my sister got my mom a game of quit-opoly which is a quilt themed monopoly type game. It came damaged so my sister wrapped each individual part in a seperate pacakge. So they both did it to each other.

As for me, I’m sporting the new 6″ kindle and a Razer Naga mouse. Along with an x-rite i1 display lt for color calibrating my monitors which is really handy, although I haven’t used it on my main LCD yet.

After the present opening we had a little downtime before the rest of the family arrived. My grandma and grandpa were there, as well as one of my aunts and uncles and a cousin which is about as many people as we could fit in my parents house. We ate, played some games (apples to apples) before my sister and grandma and grandpa left when we switched over to a couple of games of pitch.

Christmas day I went back over to my parents to hang out a bit more. Got to watch the mandatory showing of A Christmas Story in two parts because I came in on the middle of the first showing. After which we played some quilt-opoly (my dad won) and hung out some more.

Sunday I went with my roommates to see a couple of houses that they were looking at. The first one we saw (well the second, the first first one was delayed since their selling agent never actually told them we were coming, so they had to clean up and clear out for a little while) was a ranch type house but the bedrooms were tiny which killed it entirely from considering.

Back to the first house in Oneida and it was really nice. The downstairs was really well set up and the kitchen was probably the best laid out kitchen of all the houses they’ve looked at. Nice big bedrooms, big back yard, only small problem was the neighborhood was a bit less than ideal (neighbors were a bit close) but not insurmountable.

Then we went off to a house in Sherrill which was really nice looking but a little too big for them and the taxes were pretty high which would make the financials a little rocky. They decided after talking about it for a bit to go back to their agent’s office and put in an offer on the house in Oneida. So hopefully that goes well. They’ve got until Tuesday night at 5pm to respond to the offer, so we shall see.

And now…back to work.

Related posts:

1. It's A Penguin Christmas
2. Christmas: Begin!
3. My Christmas 2008

I’m happy to report that I have, indeed, won. I finished my wordcount while I was over visiting with Kris and Marcy in Boston Thanksgiving weekend. The book isn’t finished yet as I need to actually write the ending, one flashback scene and then rewrite the beginning to match up with the ending. But I’m planning on finishing it. I’m taking a little writing breather break. After spending that many days in a row writing so much, I need a little time off.

So, hrm, what happened last month. Not much to speak of other than writing really. At least not that I can remember. Time to pull out my Facebook status updates.

My roommates who were searching for a house to buy found one that they really liked and put in an offer at the beginning of the month which was accepted. Unfortunately things have been going pretty slowly ever since thing with various things. The lawyer found a potential issue with a possible buried oil tank on the property but the eventual environmental inspection revealed that they hit solid concrete when they went down to inspect it so it looks like if there was a tank there, it was taken care of properly. The next delay ended up being with the roofer. The roof needs replacing in several spots on the house and the roofer my roommates got took weeks (and counting) to get back to them with the final report so they could request repairs. The seller finally got another roofer to look at it, but things are kinda in limbo at the moment. The projected close was the end of this month but that’s probably not happening at this point with the delays.

(UPDATE: It looks like my roommates are backing out of the house. The environmental inspection ended up not being done how they asked and everything is kinda falling apart. So it looks like this house is officially 100% dead. Blargh.)

Moving on…

There’s been no change with my work situation sadly, and it’s really bumming me out. At the beginning of the year I promised myself I would make something happen to get myself in a better situation (ie, out of this job) but nothing has panned out and it doesn’t look like anything is going to any time soon. I don’t know what to do really. It kinda sucks feeling stuck. I’ve just been feeling kinda blah in general over the past week or so realizing exactly how little has changed over the past year.

I am still continuing with classes though. I’m finishing up the basic photography course this week and next semester I’m enrolled in General Drawing. Wish I could take some of the Graphic Design theory courses but they’re all at times I absolutely cannot take right now :-/

Heading in a totally different direction now though, as I mentioned before I went out to Boston again to visit with Kris and Marcy. This time no big concert drew me there, just plain old visitation. I had a lot of fun, hung out, played Rock Band, found an awesome little tea shop that I’ll be ordering some stuff from in the near future. Kris had some car issues which cast a shadow over the visit but overall, I enjoyed it a lot and I’m looking forward to the next time I can visit in that direction.

I never thought I’d say this about the Boston area (even the outskirts) but I’m starting to really like the general area. It’s become one of the few places on my list of areas that I might end up living someday. No plans to leave the state now or anything, but down the road, maybe it’ll happen.

Hmm, I think that’s pretty much it as far as personal activities. Just marching onwards to December and hoping 2011 is better. In my 50 in 365 challenge, I’ve read books 30-35 since I last posted a book update. I’ll be combining those into one big huge update coming up next just to get it out of the way. I’m a good chunk into book 36. Looking like I’ll be missing the 50 book deadline but 36+ ain’t bad.

Related posts:

1. A Long Overdue Update
2. RICHARRRRD!
3. Looking Forward and Back

Like I’ve been mentioning, I went out to Boston this weekend to meet up with my friends Kris and Marcy, hang out for a while and go see Roger Waters perform The Wall live at the TD Garden.

Saturday

I drove up Saturday morning and got there just after 11am. Saturday was going to be a day of mostly running around as they had to do some shopping and I needed to grab some landscape type photographs for my photography class assignment.

One of the first stops we went to was The Container Store as Marcy needed some….well…containers. And apparently they run demos of their closet organization system and at the end raffle off a $25 gift card. Well…we figured we were the only people who were interested so we had a pretty good shot of getting the gift card for standing around for 5 minutes listening to somebody talk. That is until Richard showed up. At the very last minute him and his (I presume) wife hopped on the bandwagon. And I know his name because he won the gift card in the random drawing. RICHARD!!! *shakes fist* This has developed into a running gag between the three of us now for whenever somebody gets screwed.

Other things I discovered on saturday:

• There is a furniture store chain (Jordan’s) that has an IMAX theater built inside of it.
• If you go into a men’s clothing store to look for a sports jacket to wear over a tshirt (a pokemon shirt in this instance) and jeans for a comic book convention, and tell the salesman who’s helping you such, he will give you a very funny look and ask several times if you’re sure that’s what you’re going to be wearing it with.
• Costume store employees who dress up as Master Chief from Halo enjoy dancing crazily on street corners until you manage to get your camera out to take a video.

We also visited a couple of scenic spots so I could get some landscape photos in considering there was actual sun this weekend. We hit a state park that was nice looking but only marginally useful for landscape photography as it turned out. But then Marcy and I took a walk down the road from their apartment (while Kris napped) and headed over to the Charles River which passes nearby which turned out to be great with the lighting of the sun just starting to go down. I took this picture which I like a lot (even though there’s some technical issues with the composition…namely the horizon being a bit too centered). As usual click to get a bigger view on Flickr.

We grabbed lunch from Domenic’s where I had the best tuna fish sandwich ever and hung out and chatted outside of Starbucks while enjoying some coffee beverages. Dinner was sushi at Shogun which was awesome. We sat at the sushi bar and got to see all of the prepwork that went into all the dishes they prepared. The sushi was great even though I ended up totally stuffed.

The night ended with with some Beatles: Rock Band and reading of comic books until I fell asleep on their very comfy couch.

Sunday

Sunday was more laid back. Woke up and grabbed breakfast at this awesome place called In A Pickle, where I had one of the best omelette’s that I’ve ever had (are you detecting a theme here?). Then we went back to their place and hung out for the remainder of the morning and afternoon, watching football. I took the time to adjust some of the photos I had taken for my class and get some work in on Kris’ book.

The Wall

Then we headed off for some Mexican and then headed into the city to visit the TD Garden and settle in to see Roger Waters. Our seats were on the left hand back corner, two rows from the very top of the balcony seating area. So pretty much almost as far as we could get:

Awful Phone Picture Of The Wall

Once the show got going though, we were in a pretty darn good spot to watch the production and video…so it ended up being a pretty good situation. The show started in a blaze of fireworks and pyro (which, as it turned out, were intended to make the arena smoky so the lighting effects would work). The end of In The Flesh? was amazing, with swirling spotlights from the ceiling lighting up the crowd to an airplane flying down from the top back of the arena into an explosion of pyrotechnics and then we were off.

The Wall which was being built brick by brick as the first half of the show progressed doubled as a gigantic video screen. As the workers laid bricks into the wall the video expanded to play on the bricks that were just put in. Gigantic puppets of the Teacher and Mother made their appearances. Eventually the band was totally seperated from the audience by the wall aside from a few small holes which, during The Last Few Bricks were stealthily covered up so you wouldn’t even notice they were gone. And then there was one brick left for Goodbye Cruel World…and then it was covered and the intermission started.

Marcy and I spent pretty much the entire intermission discussing the first half of the show (Kris kinda didn’t want to be there, he just came along to watch the show which was spoiled for him by a radio DJ a couple days before). The video show, the production…the music…everything was amazing. Especially Don’t Leave Me Now which is a track I tended to not like as much on the album but live, hearing Roger belt it out with all of the emotion in his voice…it really connected. My appreciation of the album and what it meant was growing by the second.

The second half of the show started with the band playing “Hey You” totally hidden by the wall which was surreal. It’s not something you DO in a live show. For the second half the traditional lighting you expect at a concert was mostly replaced by the video show on the gigantic wall. Comfortably Numb was a HUGE highlight with awesome guitar solos and the video show….wow. My favorite moment of the concert was during the second guitar solo, Roger (who was out in front of the wall at this point as the only band member visible) was acting like he was exploring the wall, eventually, with his back turned to the audience made as if to pound his fist on it and a gigantic crack appeared and the wall exploded “virtually” with him at the center, revealing a brightly colored landscape with the video bricks spiraling away.

Eventually the band reappeared on the outside of the wall as “the surrogate band”, with a completely different setup of instruments that just suddenly appeared ( I later realized they came out of the floor of the section in front of the wall) and they did the concert section of the album in character.

The Trial was amazing, with the iconic animations playing full across the entire wall, synced up with the lyrics and music. And with the chant of “Tear down the wall!” from the audience the gigantic wall crumbled and fell, and the band came back on with acoustic instruments to perform “Outside The Wall” and with that the show was over.

It was an amazing experience which I can’t fully duplicate through words. I’m still digesting what I saw and the more I think about it, the greater my appreciation for the album.

After the show we headed out to Spike’s Junkyard Dogs for a late night hot dog and drink which was also really good. Then back to their apartment for sleep.

Monday

Sadly, I had to return home on Monday, but not before breakfast from the local bakery (which was…well…you know) and some hanging out and Rock Band before I left.

The drive back was similarly uneventful to the drive out except I stopped at a couple more rest stops along the way making the drive more like 5 hours long.

So I’m left with an amazingly awesome weekend, spending time with some great people chatting about comics and music and life in general. I’ve determined to find an excuse go visiting again. I’ll be up there again for Boston Comic Con for sure and I’m considering hitting up PAX East this year (have to see if Jonathan Coulton is going to be performing this year or not. Probably he will.)

Unfortunately, it’s now time to get back to reality. Bah.

Related posts:

1. Friends and Dream Theater in Massachusetts
2. Looking Forward and Back
3. RUSH!

That about sums up my feelings right now. I had kinda a mixed bag weekend, but I’ve decided to split it up into two posts so I’ll get to the second, more personal one later. First the fun recapy stuff.

Saturday and Sunday I went out with my roommates on their quest to find a good house. The first one we saw was simply awesome and if they had the finances ready for the down payment and we didn’t have our lease to consider right now, I think they would have put in an offer right there. Totally updated, more than enough space, great location. Probably the only reason it hasn’t sold is that the bedrooms were a tad small but not insurmountable. The basement more than made up for it with a great almost finished area (all it needs is some kind of flooring) which could work out perfectly for a living area/tv room or something like that.

The second house…had character. The lot was right next to a busy road which didn’t leave the best first impression. Then we got inside. The entry had the lowest ceilings ever. I almost had to duck. The low ceilings continued through about half the house. The other half was really outdated and needed a TON of work, especially with the wiring only a handful of 3 prong outlets in the entire place. My favorite part though, was the two staircases to get upstairs. The first one we came across was off the kitchen when investigating what we thought was the first full bathroom. A door in the back of the bathroom though had stairs which lead up to what I presume was being used for the master bedroom. So any time anybody was using that bathroom you’re either stuck in the bedroom or unable to get  to the bedroom from the kitchen. Well…unless you’re real friendly with the occupant of the bathroom. The awfulness continues upstairs with seemingly random placement of power outlets and random room layout. I know it’s an older house, but…geeze.

So that got crossed off the list and we headed home until Sunday when we went out to Ilion to check out a couple of houses there. The first one was pretty good. Good layout, pretty good bedroom sizes for an older house. Nothing that really stuck out as totally awesome but also nothing that was a major negative either. Well, until we tried leaving. It has a shared driveway with the house next door that’s very windy and cramped. When backing out we had several close calls with hitting various objects. If the next door neighbors ever have a party or something that lines their side of the driveway, that would make it even worse. It’s not a good situation for people who have multiple cars.

The second house we went to on Sunday didn’t leave a great first impression. It was a huge older house that needed a TON of work on the exterior. Some of the windows were cracked, the porch was going to need some significant repairs. but the inside was totally awesome. They must have spent all of their money fixing up the interior because it was neat. It was worth the trip just to be able to walk through it. It even had a servants quarters type situation in the loft/attic area, with an intercom system and a servant’s stairway. Big bedrooms, really cool dining area…just perfect. Well, except for the required exterior repairs. The windows were all original too which would be…costly to update if one was trying to make the place as energy efficient as possible. The exterior repairs also made it not eligible for a FHA loan which puts it out of my friends consideration as they can’t really take on a conventional mortgage.

So then onward to the rest of my activities this weekend. I played a lot of Baldur’s Gate. I bought this game back in 1998 when it first came out and never got even halfway through it. I think it was the difficulty level that did me in, but I’ve recently borrowed it from my sister (she got a copy of BG and BG2 on DVD and I think I’m missing a CD at this point from mine…) and installed it. I’m using 2 mods, EasyTutu which basically takes the original game and transplants it into the Baldur’s Gate 2 engine. Same game, better interface and a bunch of other small bug fixes that Bioware never got around to fixing. I’m also using a widescreen mod so I can play the game at 1440×900 instead of the default 640×480 (or 800×600 in BG2). So far so good. I am using a walkthrough because the game is freaking hard and I want to find all the hidden stuff. But it’s brought back a ton of memories of playing though the first part of the game over and over and over again.

I just got into chapter 3 and I’m working through side quests before I head up into the bandit camp to advance the story. It’s further than I thought I was going to get. My other productive plans for this weekend ended up falling through. But I’ll get to that in another post.

Related posts:

1. The OMGWTFBBQ (And Other Weekend Activities)
2. Geeky Weekend
3. Upcoming Activities

The weekend was, in a word, awesome.

Earlier in the week we had started to get worried because it was looking like pretty heavy rain for saturday, the day of the show, and we were going to have to wait for about 2ish hours outdoors in line to get in and get the spot that we wanted. And right on schedule, a cold front moved slowly into the area, bringing with it a ton of rain. So we left Saturday morning with umbrellas and the expectation we were going to get soaked, an expectation that was further backed up by the fact that we drove through torrential downpours pretty much as soon as we got out of Albany. We outran the rain just as we got to Worcester and checked into the hotel.

The awesome started earlier than the show since after we checked into the hotel, we headed next door to the Starbucks where we were to meet up with a couple of friends who live on the outskirts of Boston. Kris and Marcy (Bayani and Planet Girl from City of Heroes respectively) arrived a little late (had some issues finding the starbucks we were in, but it was an unfamiliar area for both parties so it was no big deal), bearing lunch from Domenic’s (which was AWESOME) and we proceeded to spend the next 2-2.5 hours talking and hanging out. It was super fun and felt really natural, despite only having met them over the internet.

Sadly, we had to part ways eventually so we could finish prepping and head over to the venue to wait. During our meeting the cold front rumbled on through, but by the time we had finished it was mostly rained out so that worked out really nicely. We walked over to the Palladium and got in line, but as soon as we got there Wassy realized she forgot her earplugs and walked back to the hotel while I held our place. And as soon as she got back, I realized I had pulled the tickets out of my pocket when checking if I had the room key and left them on the bed (!!) So thankfully I noticed before the doors opened and I ran back to the hotel to grab them and return.

All the comings and goings sorted out, we began the 2 hour wait. We got to hear a little bit of Dream Theater’s sound check as we were standing outside, but eventually we were squished up towards the front of the line to make room for more people and lost our stage door location. Thankfully, we had a step to sit on, so we weren’t standing around for 2 hours. Eventually we got into the venue and headed to find a spot. We were aiming for standing somewhere on the tiered seating area, near the bar, but we ended up sitting much closer, on the wall at the back of the pit. Great sight line to the stage, and best of all we could rock while still sitting down.

First thing I’d like to mention is that it got HOT in there. The cooling system of The Palladium consists of opening the venue doors and hoping some of the heat escapes which is only marginally successful. I would have to guess the place was sold out or close to it. The floor was packed in front of us by the time Dream Theater came on and the heat just kept getting more and more oppressive. But it was hard not to get into it with the crowd that was there. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The opener was Charred Walls of The Damned who were very 80s metal inspired. They started out by having a comedian(?) come out and tell some jokes. He was ok… parts of his bit were really hilarious and other parts not so much. The opener was all right. 80s metal isn’t my thing really so it felt a little dated. The sound quality for them was pretty awful until they actually turned up the lead guitarist’s guitar so we could hear him. Not much more to say about them really.

The wait for Dream Theater to set up is always longer than you think it’s going to be, but eventually they came on and it was GLORIOUS. Dream Theater usually plays the theme to the movie Psycho over the PA before they come on and you could tell it was going to be a good show even during this part as the crowd revealed itself to be energetic and totally into it.

It was just the fans and the band, no massive light shows or video screens, just an old fashioned club kind of concert. It was pretty cool for me too, since this is the place where I saw my first concert ever, also Dream Theater in a similar situation (1 off headlining show during a tour where they were opening) and it was neat coming back to the same place again.

The crowd was rowdy, the band had fun and the setlist was awesome. The highlights to me were Home, The Mirror, Lie and the Warped version of Pull Me Under where they sped the middle section waaaaay up. The rest of the set was awesome too, but those were the standouts. I had been bad and looked at what they were playing before the show, so I knew they were going to do Home and The Mirror. It was a very difficult thing for me to not mention this to Wassy who had just told me that Home, The Mirror and Lie were on top of her “songs I want to hear live” list. After they finished playing Home she turned to me and said “That’s it…I can die happy now”. And I told her “Not yet you can’t.” to which she replied “Seriously???”. And a couple songs later they played The Mirror.

The band seemed to be feeding off the energy of the crowd and Mike Portnoy didn’t need to prod us into getting into it very often, if at all since we were already clapping and fist pumping. A mosh pit opened up right in front of where we were sitting which was weird(so far back from the sage) and a bit annoying (I think moshing is stupid) but we were in a spot where we didn’t really need to worry about getting injured.

After the show I was dehydrated and tired with a budding headache, but Wassy convinced me to wait for a bit by the tour busses and see if any of the members of Dream Theater came out. After a guy walked by offering to sell us crack and we heard a sound that was either a car backfiring twice or somebody firing a gun (We’re  going to assume it was a car) James LaBrie (the vocalist for those unfamiliar) came out much more quickly than I had thought he would and signed a bunch of stuff. I got my ticket stub signed and Wassy got to tell him how awesome the show was.

We walked back to the hotel and chugged some of the bottles of water that I had brought with us because I knew we would need them, relaxed for a bit and then eventually went to sleep.

I woke up at 6:00ish, feeling warm and noticing that the AC had turned off during the night in the hotel room. I tried getting it to come back on but I couldn’t figure out what the problem was until I went down to the front desk and asked. They then informed me that there was a sensor above the door and one on the AC and if there was anything in the room blocking line of sight between them the AC wouldn’t work. Like the desk chair they put right in that area. Move the chair and all was well. Sigh.

We got up and moving (in some degree of pain) and decided we were well enough to make the 30 minute drive over to the edge of Boston to meet up with Kris and Marcy again at their apartment. We hung out some more and talked about all sorts of stuff, grabbing lunch at this really great mexican place. It was quite awesome. Then on the way back to their place we swung by the local comic store which was very, very good. I ended up buying the first volume of Atomic Robo (thumbs up on Atomic Robo by the way) Sadly, again, we had part ways since we wanted to get home at a decent hour. I’m looking forward to going back over there in October for the weekend to hang out some more and go to the Roger Waters concert in Boston. We definitely need to meet up again.

The drive home was long and uneventful, basically taking I-90 back all the way, stopping at a couple of rest stops for various things but a ton of I-90. We arrived home around 5pm and collapsed from there.

So, in conclusion good friends + awesome show = amazing weekend.

Related posts:

1. [Plinky] An Introduction To Dream Theater
2. New Dream Theater Day!
3. Mini Review of Dream Theater – Score

So, time to catch up. First up, I got my bonus money on Thursday and it ended up being a bit more than I was anticipating it would be. So I went out searching for a new desk chair for my office. At Staples, after selecting the chair I wanted, purchasing it and getting it home…it ended up not being the chair I picked. However, after sitting it it…it ended up being more comfy than the chair I was interested in to begin with, so…a happy accident. I ended up with the Tillman Leather Executive Chair. It’s very comfy.

Friday was the official last day of the semester, so my friends and I celebrated by heading out to Tom Cavallo’s for their excellent chicken wings and the fact that they have Newcastle on tap for a bit of a celebratory dinner. Their wings are…out of this world. Their pizza is pretty bad, but they totally make up for it with the wings.

This weekend, aside from getting myself a haircut, I spent the time mostly relaxing due to the stressful work week that I had last week. Urgh. Basically if something could have gone wrong, it did.

I’m getting more interested in playing City of Heroes again after a discussion with Wassy where we figured out really neat story arc idea involving 2 of my characters and one of hers. We need to wait for the expansion pack to come out (sometime next year hopefully) in order to fully explore it, but it’s gotten me back interested in the characters again. I’m currently compiling a sort of story bible on my main characters in an attempt to define them better and work on some backstory stuff that I might be able to turn into in game story arcs.

Related posts:

1. Yet Another Weekend Update
2. A Long Overdue Update
3. End of Semester Crush: An Update

As per usual, I woke up bright and early to head over to my parents house for our traditional putting up of the christmas tree and such. This year, I helped with thanksgiving dinner again (assembling the lasagna and making the lemon meringue pie were my tasks). Unlike last year though, we didn’t do turkey. But that was perfectly fine with me.

My mom had a migrane headache the day before so she was running a little bit late with preparations so we ended up starting doing the tree after the Macy’s parade started. But it seems like everyone was running late (since they changed the parade route this year) so it worked out. The christmas tree has seen better days. Some branches are a bit droopy this year and some parts of the top are being held on by zip ties. The thought was that it’s going to have to be replaced soon. Dah. Especially since all the trees out there are pre-lit which seem to break more often.

The afternoon lead to some Madden with my Dad. I finally broke my horrific losing streak and we *almost* got our franchise mode game up to the playoffs. One more play and we’ll be there, but it’s harder to organize now that I live further away than I used to.

Dinner time arrived and with it came my roommates (along with the Strawberry Shortcake Cake that Wassy made to bring over. Mmmm) and my sister and her husband. The rest of the evening was thoroughly enjoyable, I thought. Dinner was tasty and fun and after we broke out Apples to Apples and played a game which ended up being a really really fun time.

As per usual, I know I left out a bunch of stuff, but the most important bit was that it was a great start to vacation. Lots of fun hanging out with my friends and family.

Related posts:

1. QotW: Thanksgiving Tradition
2. Vox Hunt: Thanksgiving Traditions
3. QotD: Tasty Thanksgiving Treat

As per tradition, I’ll be heading over to my parents house early on. This year to help prep the lemon meringue pie and the lasagna (we’re having a non traditional thanksgiving dinner this year. No turkey) and put up the christmas tree like we do every year. New this year though my roommates are going to be joining my family for dinner later on (and bringing a tasty strawberry shortcake cake for desert. Mmmmm).

As far as what I’ll be doing in the meantime, I’ve been feeling the itch to start working again on some of my personal web design type projects that have been floating around in limbo for a while. I opened up the work that I was doing on my mom’s website last night and I’m not really sure I like where it’s going anymore. Sigh. This project is becoming epic.

Related posts:

1. Thanksgiving Summary
2. QotD: Sweet Summer Treat
3. QotD: Sweet Summer Treat

Bully Hill

Ahh… I REALLY needed that. Despite all of the illnesses starting to fly around in our apartment here, my friends and I managed to get out to the Wine Country for the day yesterday. And man, was it awesome.

The particular wine country region we visited was around Keuka Lake. Although we only visited one of the wineries on the trail this time around. My friends went up for a little getaway in the summer and upon hearing how awesome it was out there (and that Bully Hill is one of my favorite wineries) we determined that we would have to go out as a group to explore a bit.

We seemed to pick the perfect weekend to go. The area was beautiful (look below for pictures) with the fall leaves in the valley with the lake situated at the bottom. Of course that also meant there were a lot of people around, but it really was worth waiting.

The directions to Bully Hill that the winery provided (the GPS is really fruity in the area down there) took us past Heron Hill first, so we stopped there. Heron Hill is home to the best bottle of wine my friends have ever tasted, and we visited there hoping that they would have some left (It was a very limited harvest).

The first thing you notice about Heron Hill is the spectacular view from the tasting room.

View From Heron Hill

Another View From Heron Hill

There was a ton of people there, so we had to wait a bit to do our tasting, but…as you can see, this wasn’t really much of an issue.

First thing to note about the tasting, our guy had a name tag on it that said “Dave!” and he was quite the character. He kept us pretty well entertained and informed about the wine, so two thumbs up to Dave!. We did the 6 wines for $5 tasting option, including the bottle of the special harvest linked above. Much like them when they first tried it, I had originally thought that I’d see what all the hype was about and then buy a couple of bottles of cheaper wine. But…when the time came that flew out the window and I had to spent my entire wine purchasing budget for the trip on a single $45 bottle of wine. It is the absolute best wine I have ever had, ever. And considering the conditions that created it was once in a lifetime…I had to have a bottle.

There were a couple of other wines that were interesting there too, especially the other desert wine, the 2007 Late Harvest Vidal Blanc. Very sweet and tasty. Perfect for after dinner. Another standout was the 2007 Blaufrankisch Reserve, which was an awesome red wine. And I don’t really like red wine.

The trip continued after Heron Hill with a visit over to the Keuka Brewing Company. Jay is really more a beer drinker than a wine drinker, so this was his destination of choice. And we were worried as soon as we arrived since the place looked more like a shack in the woods, giving off a serious serial killer type vibe. But once we got in it was really nice and the tasting was good. I liked pretty much all of the beers they had availible, except the IPA. That one was a bit…weird. But I even liked the stout and I am not a fan of stouts. Their Wheat beer was the best of the bunch to my taste buds though. My friends ended up getting a growler of the wheat beer to take home.

The Grapes at Bully Hill

After the brewery, we left for our final destination of the day, Bully Hill. We had plans to take a tour of the vineyards and walk through the museum before having dinner at the restaurant on site. My friends had lunch there when they came up before, but this time we were trying out dinner.

The tour situation was a little weird since we couldn’t figure out exactly where they started, so we hopped on one that was already going and missed part of the story of the winery. But the basic plot is, the Taylor family always had a Winery in the area. Walter S. Taylor ended up being fired from his own winery when he became outspoken that wines from New York should have labels on them showing where the grapes came from (You can (or could, dunno if this changed) label a wine as a New York Wine despite the fact that up to 25% of the grapes came from out of state). The established winery community were not fond of this idea, so they fired Walter. So he started up his own winery, Bully Hill.

A few years later, the Taylor Wine company (the one Walter was fired from) was bought by Coca-Cola. Owning the rights to the name Taylor when attached to Wine, Coke sued Walter to prevent him from using his last name anywhere on the bottles of wine he was selling. Coke, unbelievably, won the case and forced Walter to blank out his name on the labels. Additionally, the court case prevented Walter from ever mentioning the history of the Bully Hill Winery, such as where they came from and who they were. Walter used this setback to vault Bully Hill into popularity.

After we took the tour, which was really neat (I didn’t realize that every year all the leaves from the grape vines need to be cut down individually by hand…now that’s a crappy job) we settled down to enjoy the view over the lake for a little while until it was time for our dinner reservation to arrive.

And oh my. That dinner was probably the absolute best meal I’ve ever had. I settled on having the Sauteed Chicken Breast (with a light Traminette and fresh herb cream sauce; served over pasta (from the menu)). Wassy had the 8oz, Center Cut Filet Mignon (served with pepercorn demi-glace, sauteed mushrooms and onion rings) and Jay had the Bully Hill Crabcake with Day Boat Scallops (Maryland-style crabcake served on a grilled portabella mushroom cap). And we grabbed a bottle of Bully Hill Spring White to go with the meal.

I cannot say enough good things about this meal. We each sampled each others dishes and they were all awesomeness. But Jay won with the crabcake. That was probably the best crabcake I have ever tasted in my entire life. It even beat out the crabcakes I had IN Maryland. The Fillet Mignon was done perfectly, so tender and juicy and my chicken was great as well. The sauce was excellent and they actually prepared mushrooms in a way such that I found them tasty. Then the deserts (I had peanut butter pie, wassy had the apple crisp and jay had the carrot cake) just topped the meal off.

At one point the chef came by to ask how our meal was and Jay had to shake his hand. It was that good.

Sunset Over Bully Hill

An excellent time was had by all, and we went home full and feeling satisfied. I’m definitely going to try to go next year again. As we were leaving, we had a really awesome sunset as well. And the view over the lake at night was really cool.

Two thumbs up for this trip. Would go again. And again. And again.

Related posts:

1. Counting Down The Days
2. Moving Day!
3. The Precipice

So, first up, we’ve discovered we have a mouse in our apartment. My roommates cat has been stalking our dishwasher for the past few weeks and last night, Jay found her with a mouse in her mouth, looking totally confused as to what she should be doing now.

She dropped it, which lead to a merry chase as we tried to capture it. It escaped into one of the electrical baseboard heaters in the downstairs bathroom and the cat seems to have given up the hunt. So I’m not sure if it’s gone or lost or what. I’ll update if the saga continues.

Other than that, things have been, as mentioned, uneventful. I’m mostly just playing persona 4 at the moment and working on my mom’s website design off and on. I’m trying to draw up a spool of thread in Adobe Illustrator that I can use in the header as it needs something. Hoping to get that done today so I can also use it in my Digital Typography class tomorrow when I’m making up an envelope design for her too. Figured might as well combine projects!

The big thing I’m waiting for now is Saturday, where my friends and I are going to head down to, among other places, Bully Hill Vineyards in the finger lakes wine country for some wine tasting, hopefully touring and dinner. We’re also going to try to hit a couple other places in the area, including a micro-brewery. But we’re concentrating mostly on Bully Hill as far as time spent goes. Should be a good time I think.

Related posts:

1. A Good Day
2. School Stuffs
3. The Precipice