Zarafa (South Africa)
2007 Pinotage
$4.99 @ Trader Joe’s

Pulao and I started to frequent Trader Joe’s last fall, and we’ve waited for the wine on the cheap God-send to stock a Pinotage ever since. This past Saturday we found it.

If you’ve never had a Pinotage, get to it! Two of our friends, dbay and Duodecad, introduced Pulao and I to the Pinotage varietal a year or so back. “This red wine tastes like butter,” they said. If that doesn’t sound good to you — well, . . .

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Last week, I got my yearly performance review. Although the words in the review seemed pretty positive, the number ended up being a positively small 3%.

Don’t get me wrong! — a 3% raise is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick (don’t try that at home). But I think my company makes it hard to get the big raises on purpose. The performance review is all online, and a big part of it is a self-assessment. Check out the instructions:

1. At least one objective should be set for each scorecard category.
2. No . . .

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The Oscars are tonight, and movie talk is in the air. Last night, my friend Katie L realized that there was this pattern in film titles, and we’ve decided to turn it into a little contest. How many movie titles (of films that actually exist, not ones you think would sound awesome) can you think of that follow the pattern *Present Continuous Verb* + *Verb’s Direct Object*? One could argue that these titles end up being gerunds, but that’s neither here nor there. Sound silly? A little specific? There are actually quite a few that we could . . .

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I got a little magnet in the mail from my health insurance company the other day, with a “Nurse Line” phone number on it. I’m supposed to call the Nurse Line when I’m sick to find out if I should go to the doctor. Or, as the card says, to help decide if the “doctor’s office, emergency room, or just self-care is needed.”

Suuuuure. I’ll call my insurance to ask whether I should accrue costly hospital bills for them to pay. Or not.

I’m sure it might depend on whether I had paid my full deductible yet, but I imagine . . .

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