Wacky Wine

So I had reinjured myself a bit at Thursday night at drinks night when someone hit me from behind in a crowded bar and I had to catch myself. As a result, I was unable to launch myself off the floor to get into a headstand, much to my chagrin. And, I had to use the heavy bands to support myself getting into the handstand position so I was forced to do long sets of handstand pushups (30, then 25). I must be quite weird, I really enjoy doing handstand pushups. But my coach started a sentence with “After seeing you train today I think you should rest – “ and I saw my life flash before my eyes as I thought he was going to say “for a week.” But luckily he said “for the weekend.”

I was quite pleased with myself that I managed to finish the workout of the day in under 5 minutes. Of course, I still managed to be late to work …

Work continued at a hectic pace as there is a lot of work to do by the end of next week! I spent much of the day working on new material, and reviewing and editing the fantastic material my coworker has been pumping out.

In the afternoon one of my coworkers did an intro session on Excel, as he is quite knowledgeable about it. The intro session didn’t really teach me much, but I did learn COUNTIF. I probably should have skipped it and just gone to the later sessions, but that’s ok.

I was a bit annoyed that one of my other coworkers had not made any progress on the franchise agreement that we need to have completed by 11am on Monday and I found this out at 4pm on Friday. C’est la vie I suppose.

A few of us went out for drinks after work at Buena Vista Social Club (yes, it’s really called that …) in Green Point just by the stadium. We had a visitor from Switzerland here for the week, so these were goodbye drinks. Pretty good mojitos, too, although they should be for the price they were charging. Yes, I know it’s like $4.50 but that’s expensive for here. I think all the prices are already jacked up for World Cup.

My friend Warric had come into town for the evening, so he and I met up and had a few beers before joining some others in my building for a few more. We eventually headed out to Long Street to a bar called The Waiting Room which has a fabulous roof deck. There we ran into a couple of my coworkers, and some friends from the building showed up. We didn’t stay too terribly long though as the bar was closing and the Flyers game was about to be on. Unfortunately my computer picked that exact time to lock up. When I restarted it Windows needed to repair the disk or something which it said could take over an hour. Eventually I got sick of waiting for it and fell asleep … but the Flyers won 4-2, tying up the series. Unfortunately they are going to need a road win in Chicago …. Hopefully that comes in the next game!

The next morning we packed up and headed onto a bus to Robertson Valley for the Wacky Wine festival. Our first stop was Van Lovering where we sampled the wines. This place has a fantastic Sauvignon Blanc for all of R35 (yes, the same price as my mojito). I’m not a white wine person at all, but I liked this one!

The group split into two; some went on a boat cruise and the rest of us did wine blending at Excelsior. Well, sort of. Someone had poured me a whole glass of wine just as we got there so I had to drink that before beginning to sample the blends … anyway at the end of that we made our own blend, bottled it up, and hit the road for Arbella winery where we had individual tents pitched up. The most fabulous thing was that the tents had mattresses in them! That was absolutely key, given my injury (which is feeling much better, by the way).

So at Arbella there was a band. And/or DJs, I’m not really sure. Wasn’t paying that much attention. So here, we continued drinking and dancing. I was kind of annoyed because some people were so drunk they were spilling wine all over me, and someone broke my wine glass (twice). After the second glass broke I figured I’d had about enough of crazy drunk people. Some of our friends were drinking tequila out in the parking lot but I wanted nothing to do with that … for some reason wine mixes particularly poorly with other liquors, for me. So a note to myself is that next time I should get out my sleeping bag while it’s still light out, because it was really hard to do in the dark with the little cell phone flashlight!

Eh, anyway woke up the next morning around dawn which was absolutely stunning. There was a coffee stand that had possibly the most fantastic latte I’ve had in a long time. Who would have thought? We basically just hung out until around 10:30 when we headed back home. A lot of people looked a bit the worse for wear, and most people slept on the way back. I was (am) extremely relieved that my tailbone is feeling much better – I was even able to jog a little bit today (over to a white horse that I wanted to pet) without feeling any pain.

I’m almost done icing myself (I bought some bags of peas at Pick n Pay on sale) so now I can get started on this work that I have to do, sigh …