Sunday

Another day. Another change in weather. It's like, 60, outside today! It almost feels like an early March day when the last of the snow melts away.

Great article in Parade today about memory loss. It described the three areas of memory: 1) procedural, as in, how to walk, how to eat; 2) semantic, as in what is a key, what is a movie, what are eye glasses, and; 3) episodic, as in, I lost my keys, and who was in that movie? It is this third type of memory that seems to erode as we age. Not that defining it makes it get any better.

I also learned a new word from the paper this morning. Our Arts section each Sunday carries a small column that differentiates similar words by definition and usage. Today, the parsing was done for the words, literal and littoral. I didn't know that the word littoral existed. It refers to the shore area of an ocean, or perhaps, some shore areas of lakes or the like. I'm not sure if the word will find it's way into my daily vocabulary.

Sounds like the trip to C-town was at least moderately successful. 3 has her hands full at work. Hang in there, Kiddo.

I guess within the context of our family history, I've become a wine-snob. I went to meet a friend at Biaggi's last night for a glass of wine at 7PM. Bad timing. The bar was not only packed, the people sitting at the bar were hunkered in as they must have figured that they wouldn't be able to get served in the dining room, so that had ordered dinner at the bar. There was not going to be any rotation of those chairs for most of the evening. So we decided to go down to Centro. Another bad move. I had forgotten that Centro had closed last month.

The third choice was The Boat House on the river, toward the Village of East Davenport. We end up sitting at the bar, and they did have several bottles of wine clearly visible on the back counter. I asked for a wine list, and surprise of surprises, they actually did have a two-page wine list. The bad news, and I considered it as I made my selection, was that the most expensive glass on the list, was the cheapest per glass price at Biaggi's.

Now, a cynic might suggest that Biaggi's could be a little pricey. And in some quarters, Biaggi's is not cheap. But from my experience, I would put Biaggi's in the nice-but-not-overly-expensive category. But that's another discussion for another time.

I recognized none of the wines offered by The Boat House. I asked the bar-keep which of their red's was the driest, and he and the other guy with him opened the wine list and read the same descriptions that I had just read (that obviously weren't that descriptive). So I ordered their most expensive glass. It was served in a dinky little glass that your grandmother might have used to serve some chilled Mogan David that had sat in the refrigerator between Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. We were not tempted for a second glass.

The problem with any restaurant/bar having a good selection of wines is that open bottles really don't "keep" that well, so there's the potential for a lot of waste if the place doesn't have a good, steady trade. In our geographic region, the population density just doesn't support a large number of places with wine as a selling point. I don't think the Mega Buffet or the I-80 Truck Stop have wine lists.

OK. That pretty well beats the wine-snob discussion to death. Sorry.

Does anybody care that the BCS Championship game is tomorrow night?

I'm back on the bike (indoors) and have labeled my training as my Mt. Rose Prep (aration). It's good to have a goal. I'm guessing that we are 200 days from that little exercise. If the weekend's storm is any indication, we just might see snow up at higher elevations in the shadowed areas come July.

Have a great day.

BCOT