grape escape.

along with all the craziness, there's always fun sprinkled in.

this weekend, with the help of family and friends, i wisked my bff jamie anderson out for a bachelorette party. we decided to forgo the usual debauchery and opted for a more adventure/learning party. the first stop was to a local wine making school which was way cooler than i could have imagined.

after a lot of surfing the net and conversing with jamie's sister and finacee, it was decided to go with the wine making project. the thing was, i had found this place on the web and really couldn't be sure if it was legit or lame. the first impression was a bit sketchy since it was located in an industrial park, behind a korean church. luckily we got legit and totally cool as opposed to lame. when we arrived at the grape escape (i can't decide if that name is hip or terribly unfortunate), in dayton, nj the owner greeted us and immediately handed us the scheduled printed up on a magnet. we were there for the first set in a four part process. today's mission = crushing. after about 2 minutes of introductions and overview, we were handing some of the homemade vino which was very good. nothing like a litte wine to start out your wine class!

the crushing process was very cool; we had 756 lbs of chilean malbec grapes to crush (see pic above). they were super-sweet and a dark inky color. unfortunately, we didn't get to stomp them with our feet - i love lucy style, but they said it can be done, if you do an entire barrel full -- oh and it takes about 3 hours. we moved the grapes into the crushing machine and watched them get pumped and tranformed into a big vat of pulpy grape juice. to the right is a pic of me dropping the grapes into the crusher.

after the juice (i believe in the wine-making world it's called concentrate) was made sure that the pH levels and sugar content were up to snuff. the sugar content converts about 2:1 to the amount of alcohol content in your finished product. there were some organic solvent sort of items added to assure the best color and flavor gets pulled from the juice. we mixed some more, sipped some wine and just enjoyed the whole experience. we got a tour and a taste for the other steps to come. the process goes: crushing, pressing, racking and finally bottling and labeling. you even get to design your own labels! they also offer wine tastings and bottle your own olive oil. some other people that were there making wine mentioned that the tastings are excellent and allow you to try the same wine from different barrels to actually taste the difference.

here's a pic of us all with the future hootch!
becky, kelli, pat, jamie and myself.

overall it was a great alternative to going out for a debaucherous night on the town! after the wine making we went back to my place, had some wine and cheese and then walked up to table 8 for an amazing dinner. the culminated with an adventure that involved a shopping cart, some bachelorette party decorations and a bunch of drunk girls. somehow you can take the girls out of 'the mountain' but you can't take 'the mountain' out of the girls!! best wishes jamie and steve!!!

the 'how-to change a tire' experiment

so we called AAA and as per their protocol it would be 45 minutes before they showed up or at least thought about it. luckily, neal and matty-big-hair showed up for moral support. as we stood around at the gas station and watched the goings-on of the evening we decided that we could probably just change the tire on our own -- which we ended up doing.it was interesting to me that as independent as i am, i had no freaking idea or desire to know how to change a tire up until this point. but stranded at the exxon station, my interest was peaked. out of the three of us, only matt had changed a tire and that was once.

so here's how/what i learned are the most important steps to changing a tire:

1. first check to see if you have a: jack, spare and tire iron. this should be in your trunk. in my car, they were hidden in the trunk underneath the trunk space. that is, i had to pull up the floor of the trunk to find the tire changing goods.
2. loosen the lug nuts on the tire. we did this wrong. you are really supposed to loosen them before you jack the car up. luckily we didn't push the car off the jack by trying to loosen them while the car was mid-air. also, you are going to need to use force. we found that using our foot to apply the force on the iron worked well
   
3. use the jack to lift the tire off the ground. no real explanation needed here -- there was a diagram on the jack to show where it was supposed to go.
4. take the lug nuts completely off and pull off the tire. you may want to make sure all the lugs are in one place, those suckers roll around.
   
5. place spare where you just took the old tire off. you may have a 'donut' as i did, don't be alarmed that it looks like a tire from the short bus. just note, as almost everyone that i told about the donut retorted to me -- don't drive over 50mph with that thing!!
   
6. attach the lug nuts loosely. just enough to keep the tire on, make sure tire is on straight.
7. lower jack. make sure there is nothing/no one under the car before you do this.
8. tighten lug nuts. use force for this, you don't want to be driving around and have those bad boys fall off.
9. revel in the fact that you just changed your own tire. woo hoo!!
   

all-in-all this was not how i wanted to spend my friday night. AAA didn't make it in time for us to change the tire so we canceled them all together. it did feel pretty damn good to change it and it was good to learn. while i was waiting for the guys to show up, i witnessed a mini-van back up with the pump still in it's tank and pull the pump right off! that was funny.