January 14th – February 7th, 2008
Wine tasting at Temecula wineries, evenings on the back patio by the chimenea with a wood fire, Mexican meals in great restaurants, long days at the computer doing research and finalizing our database, warm mornings enjoying the sun and good food on the patio, and long days sorting and cataloguing fuses and creating inventory worksheets – all this has kept us quite busy for the last few weeks. It’s just astonishing how much time has gone by, as we seem to have very little “down” time.
Food
Good food continues to be a key ingredient here – we have been treated to a wide variety of Mexican food; we’ve bought fresh ingredients and cooked and barbecued at home; we had one amazing evening at a restaurant called Shogun, where everything is cooked on a long grill right in front of the customers.
Shogun is huge; groups are seated around a big U shaped table, half is a table for the customers and the other half is a grill. Each U seats 20 people, with a space for the chef to come in and cook. A waiter takes the orders from each person, gets the ingredients together on trays, the chef then arrives and cooks everything on the grill.
We were quite lucky, as the chef we got was a one-man stand-up comedy show, in addition to doing some great cooking. We had filet mignon, lobster, shrimp, fried rice, and grilled vegetables, all cooked fresh in front of us.
Not only did we have the show while eating, but the bartenders compete in weekly juggling shows all over the west. They are required to create two drinks while they are juggling the bottles of liquor and drink mixer cups. Dave and Katy treated us to drinks in the bar, so we got to see the bartenders doing their show. To say it was amazing is to understate the case.
One bartender we watched has been a winner in the competitions. He was awesome…at one point he had four bottles of liquor in the air all at once, and was interspersing those with mixing cups. He gave us a DVD of a competition in Los Angeles; if we can figure out how to post it on our site, we’ll do that. It was quite an evening – talk about a lot of sensory input!
Dave loves to eat, so we’d often start the day with a great meal of some kind – we’d all pitch in and make scrambled eggs, bacon, toast from a really nice loaf of bread, and whatever else struck our fancy, accompanied by salsa. We’d prepare everything, then enjoy an hour or so on the back patio in the mellow winter sun before Dave left for work.
Dave loves golf; he would often grab a green chair pillow on these mornings, use it as a teeing off spot, and practice his golf swings.
Since Dave owns his own business his hours were flexible; he’d regularly show up in the afternoon to join us on the patio. We’d hang out and talk, often treating ourselves to a bowl of Snicker’s ice cream drizzled with chocolate sauce. We are SO going to miss this culinary oasis!
Database
Needing a quiet place to work, we set up a desk in the bedroom by pushing an end table next to a wall and using a lawn chair. It gave us a great deal of privacy and lots less distraction when one of us wanted to work. When Dave would head off to work I would frequently bring the laptop outside and work on a lounge chair the whole day; the beautiful weather was far too nice to miss any chance of experiencing it.
We continued doing a number of smaller projects, and worked on cleaning up our names database. It always feels wonderful to make progress.
Walks, bike rides and bike lights
Dave took us out on one walk near his house; he’s right at the edge of an open greens-space area. The hills were very gently rolling without much vegetation except grass and different variations of cacti. What we remember most about the walk was the amazing mud; there’d been a big rainstorm and the ground was saturated. The adobe clay mud would collect on our shoes, getting thicker and thicker and heavier and heavier till we’d finally scrape it off, then it would build again.
We did go on one bike ride with Dave – it was in his area, riding a few miles downhill then turning around and riding back up the hill. We did have a bike path so we didn’t need to hassle with the traffic, but it didn’t capture our imagination and make us want to ride it again. We were pretty impressed with Dave; he was very faithful about coming home after work and riding the same route.
Chelsea and I had bought some inexpensive battery-operated LED Christmas bike lights; we’d ordered them when we were in Santa Ynez. They arrived when we were at Dave’s – we discovered they came from Hong Kong, so we missed Christmas. The lights were terrible – the wiring was so cheap that it broke in several places just taking them out of the box.
Chelsea took over the project of getting them in working order – it took awhile, but she finally had all four strings working. Dave fell in love with the lights. We strung them up on the back patio, we hung them around ourselves, and we dressed up the bikes with the lights. After all the entertainment, we finally hung them on the patio.
Chimeneas and evenings
When Dave arrived home from work each day, he’d head for the Captain Morgan rum and a bottle of coke, fixing himself a tall cold drink. He’d get a playful gleam in his eye and announce, “the Cap’n and I are settin’ sail!”
After a few drinks he’d be ready to talk about dinner. We’d either go out to eat, order take-out, or cook something wonderful at home, often on the barbecue.
Some months earlier Dave had been given a chimenea but he’d never started it up. We urged him on; we all worked together to get it moved and set up. That started a delightful trend – nearly every night from then on we sat out back with the fire going cheerfully in the chimenea, the bicycle Christmas lights twinkling overhead, our favorite music playing, and a drink of some kind in our hands.
Wineries in Temecula
Over the course of several weeks, Dave had been telling us about the wineries in Temecula, an hour’s drive to the southeast. We’d already been admiring his “wine cellar” – a beautiful and efficient cabinet-like refrigerator that keeps the wine at whatever temperatures he sets.
Dave goes every six months or year down to Temecula, visits his favorite wineries, and stocks up on his favorite wines. He told us he was due for a restocking of his wine cellar and invited us to go.
By ten in the morning Dave fortified himself with a thirty-two oz. insulated mug of Captain Morgan rum and coke and loaded us into his truck. We headed out first for a stop at REI to buy our long-awaited camp chairs (thanks to a wonderful donation from my sister). An hour and a half later, our moods buoyed by the time in REI, with two brand new camp chairs tucked into Dave’s back seat, we were ready hit the road for Temecula and see the wineries.
Our first impression was how different the Temecula area is from the Napa Valley winery area we visited for so many years in California. It’s much drier with significantly less vegetation and virtually no trees, but the rolling hills filled with grapevines were sure familiar.
Dave had his favorite wineries, so we followed along. I’ve always loved wine-tasting, but Chelsea wasn’t old enough to taste the wines when we used to go in California; this was a fun new experience for her. We all picked out some favorites from the various wineries; Dave’s back seat was getting pretty full by the time we finished.
We had two highlights during the winery visits – one was a rest/snack break with a huge loaf of freshly baked French bread injected with a mouthwatering cheese of some kind, melting and oozing out of the loaf. It didn’t last long with three hungry wine-tasters.
The other highlight was tasting a chocolate port served in thin frozen chocolate cups. We drank the port and ate the glass… Much to our delight Dave opted to buy a bottle of the chocolate port to take home.
Surplus fuse project
Dave’s business is selling fuses to other businesses, everything from small transistor type fuses to huge two-hundred pound fuses used by hospitals. He maintains a small shop about ten miles away, with an office in front and his inventory in back. When we arrived at his home he had already started negotiations to sell his business to another company. He’d grown tired of the day-to-day hassle of being self-employed, and wanted to merge with a bigger company.
The potential buyers had recently made a visit to his shop to assess the value of his inventory. He’s got a sizeable inventory of surplus fuses, and though he hadn’t included that in his inventory to the buyers, they were concerned about it. Besides the surplus fuses inventory, he wanted his back area sorted, organized, and cleaned.
Over drinks on the patio on one of those relaxed chimenea evenings Dave became aware of the fact that I have an extensive background in organizing businesses. He also knew that we needed to earn some money for our trip.
His idea was that we would accompany him to the shop, clean and sort and organize the surplus fuses, and we could take all the profits from selling them; he would choose which fuses he wanted and which would go to us. We agreed to help him out.
It was a cold, dirty, hard next three weeks. The weather was quite cold; Dave had no heat in the back room where we were working. Rats, lizards and mice had made their homes in the boxes. We had to drag old or ruined fuses to the dumpsters (some of them were really heavy!); move all the shelving around; clean the floors and shelves; then organize and rearrange the fuses. We came home dirty and tired each night.
When everything was completely done, we then took sale-quality photos of every fuse, uploaded the photos into Picasa by category, and created a master Excel spreadsheet of each fuse (correlating to the Picasa photos), showing the manufacturer, part number, amps, volts, quantity of each, and wholesale price. We listed and took photos of over one thousand fuses; that didn’t count the number we dragged out to the dumpsters over the three weeks.
We did take before and after pictures – Dave was really pleased.
Headed for home
Meanwhile we’d been hearing some really horrible reports about the firefights going on in Mexico, much of it in Tijuana where we were headed. Even my sister was concerned; she visits Mexico frequently with her husband, and she’s not an alarmist.
The more we thought about it, the more Chelsea and I realized we weren’t ready to head out of the country for any length of time. We had loose ends back in Delray, we needed to sort a number of issues, we wanted to go back to Delray for awhile and get things sorted out.
We didn’t get paid for doing our massive project, but Dave had certainly been feeding us well, and he agreed to pay our plane fare back home. We left our bikes and some of our gear in his garage and took an early weekday flight back to West Palm Beach. We’d had an amazing month with an amazing guy.