So far this week I have been suffering from the wrath of drinking too much wine. I think I have some form of flu that has kept me hankering for liquids more than solids to ease the pain of swallowing. Maybe it was the airplane, but I think that the people at The Wine Gallery are to blame. On Saturday night I went to grab a couple of bottles of wine to drink with Sarah and Matt B. and discovered the new automated wine tasting jukebox. They give you a smart card with 12 credits on it to select the wines you would like to taste. The card unlocks sets of eight wines and when you select a wine it deducts credits depending on the quality of the selection. The bottles are all attached to sippers that look like the type of stuff used to make complex automated chemical synthesis like DNA oligos for PCR. The sipper sucks down an ounce or so of wine and releases it into your glass with a bubble at the end. I have gotten better at estimating an ounce from feeding Madeline from the bottle, NOT a wine bottle though.

So I used 11 out of the 12 credits on my card by not deigning to drink the 1 credit wine. I then proceeded to purchase four bottles of wine, two of which I had tasted, and the other two in an attempt to meet Sarah’s request for a Castlerock Chianti. When I arrived home it was time to make dinner with Matt and Sarah. He had brought asparagus and porterhouse steaks. This is when I discovered that we don’t have our own supply of tin foil. Every time someone comes over they look at us cross-eyed because we don’t have our own tin foil. Matt actually brought his own tin foil. I also discovered once again how crappy our oven is. When we turned on the broiler the burners at the top were mainly useful for putting out flames. Since the pilot lights and the electric clicker built into the stove don’t work I was using the bic long tailgating lighter. The lighter kept going out whenever it approached the burner and then after letting the burner build some gas the burner formed what looked something like a blue version of the horsehead nebulae and then died out. Later once the steaks and asparagus had been cooked the broiler decided that it would make it nearly impossible for me to turn the knob so I spent five minutes wondering whether I would have to shut the gas off on the stove.

To cope with this gas problem and because we were hanging out with a more professional drinker than myself we drank three bottles of wine between the three of us in less than four hours. This wouldn’t be too impressive, or the cause of this awful sore throat if Sarah wasn’t breast-feeding and only drinking a glass of wine. So I may have drank somewhere between one and two bottles of wine on my own and I was plenty lucid as we were chatting about whether Dick had ever posted a blog about his travels. Apparently he did but I still don’t have the URL for it.

So I was just getting over my Saturday night hangover and Madeline care taking activities on Sunday morning when I went to Foxboro to watch the Patriots try to trounce the Saints. I do feel empathy for the folks who were made homeless by the hurricane but I didn’t feel any pity or empathy for the Saints. I just wanted to see the Patriots get a clear and decisive win. That didn’t happen although the Pats were winning and in control until they worked hard to let the Saints nearly tie the game on the last play after having been up by three scores (two touchdowns and a field goal). We had a beer at the game and then a burger at the Funway. I couldn’t really drink my beer at the Funway as we watched the Bengals and the Colts play. The Colts look very difficult to beat this year. Hopefully we can meet them again in the playoffs and ruin their hopes for a Superbowl again. The Superbowl is nice but beating the Colts is like beating the Yankees. It means more than the Superbowl itself to me because I know them so well as the enemy.

So when I got home we had another little meat and drinking party. This time it was to crack open the 1996 champagne that we had gotten for our wedding from Jeff and Meredith and were waiting to drink all summer. Jeff and M had brought a thick stack of filets from Whole Foods that once again were cooked in the broiler from hell along with the leftover asparagus that we hadn’t cooked on Saturday night. We drank the champagne, two bottles of white wine, and two bottles of red wine. The steak was a great cut and I ate mine about as close to raw as you can before risking death.

So I awoke on Monday morning feeling like crap and still feel like crap despite drinking lots of fluids, OJ, earl grey tea, hot chocolate, coconut milk soup from the Thai place, whatever. I just feel like someone took some sandpaper to my throat. I did manage to buy Earl Grey tea, which Ami noted we never have, and tin foil at the Stop and Shop last night!