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Wine Tasting Lunch at Castello di Gabbiano

As a wedding gift, Vidya and John got us a wine tasting lunch and cellar tour at a castle/vineyard called Castello di Gabbiano in the hills outside of Florence. After plotting out our course on the map, we got into our trusty little rental car from a good av rental company and ventured out into the Tuscan hills.

We arrived early at the castle, so we had some time to tour around ourselves before our scheduled tour of the cellars. The castle and wine cellars date back to the 12th century, although additions were made to the structure over the following centuries.

After our tour of the castle grounds and the wine cellars, we had lunch on the patio, including several courses and a wine pairing. My favorite course was the vin santo with cantucci (cookies very similar to biscotti, for dipping in the vin santo).

We were a bit tipsy after lunch, so we took a nap for about an hour on a couch inside the castle before continuing on our little car ride around Tuscany.

All in all, it was an extremely fun way to spend an afternoon in Tuscany and a great present!

When in Rome

…take 200 pictures on your first day. Well, that’s what we did, but we won’t inflict them all on the world. We had to delete a bunch after my first photo-taking rampage anyway so that we’d have enough space on the SD card to actually take pictures for the next 3 weeks of our trip. :) The Vatican was just so amazing, it was hard for me to stop myself. Of course, the best part of the Vatican – the Sistine Chapel – did not allow photography, and it’s probably a good thing or else I probably would have used my whole GB worth of storage there.

Unifying the CD Collections

On a suggestion from the KEXP blog, Kenny and I recently invested in a few sets of DiscSox CD sleeves. He came home from band practice the other night to find me snapping open all of my old jewel cases and transferring the CDs + front and back inserts into sleeves. He joined me and helped me finish my collection, and then we got out his big CD Logic books and started transferring his CDs from those as well. The sleeves (and the storage tray) are wonderful because they allow for storage of the inserts in addition to the CDs, they save enormous amounts of space, they are easy to sift through quickly, and they won’t crack like our old jewel cases did.

And now both of our CD collections are integrated into one large alphabetized library. Pretty weird. I suppose it’s one of those things we needed to do before the wedding to really feel like we were forming a union. But there were a few coincidences that worked out nicely in the unification process, e.g. I own Pablo Honey, Amnesiac, Kid A, and Hail to the Thief; Kenny owns OK Computer and The Bends; between the two of us we have a pretty good Radiohead collection (oddly, OK Computer and The Bends are my two favorite Radiohead albums, so I don’t know why I’ve owned the others and not those two all this time). There were a couple of other artists for whom we now have the complete oeuvre with no duplicates, and other nice scenarios where we did not have overlap simply because one of us had lost a CD somewhere down the line.

It all seems to bode well for the marriage thing. And I know KW will never want to call it off because he’d lose my entire Beatles collection.