Guns N' Rosé

After having reached what may be the pinnacle of urban life as I know it (I got to jump in at the end of the SFC Double Dutch girls’ performance at the How Weird Street Fair!), I headed up to Dayle and Larry’s vineyard to "take in the countryside." Yeah, we’ll call it that…

While it’s always fun to kick it in Camptonville, this particular visit stepped it up a level. For starters, it was our host couple’s one-year wedding anniversary which, to be honest, had me kinda choked up. Just thinking about Dayle on her wedding day seems to do that to me. Maybe it’s the result of having traveled with this girl down the dating freeway for quite a while before she met Larry (to call it a road wouldn’t convey the amounts of adrenaline involved—even from the passenger seat). Or maybe it’s cause it felt really special, for lack of a better word, to be one of her bridemaids.

Who knows? But Dayle is not a fan of emoting so in her honor I’m stopping short before I start gushing about how happy I am for her. Instead, I'll share a little something I learned about married life en la casa de Dayle and Larry:

Not too long ago, our newlyweds were feeling kind of shameful about the fact that each of them occasionally likes to drink bottles of beer in the shower. Was that trashy? Then one day they saw an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy where a straight guy’s bathroom was being evaluated for upgrade. Apparently, a beer bottle was discovered perched in his bath rack and the show hosts were appalled. Regardless of the response elicited by said bottle, its very existence validated for my friends that they were not alone. From that day on, Dayle and Larry drank their beer with confidence between shampoo and conditioner application.

Anyway, when Mr. and Mrs. Rodenborn aren’t drinking beer in the shower, they’re busy tending to their vineyard. This sometimes means trimming vines or upgrading the irrigation system, but every once in a while it means shooting loud guns to scare away grape-eating animals. On this particular visit, Larry decided that it was high-time the rest of us (e.g. Lauren and Lisa, who's pictured above) learned how to handle one of those guns. After all, you never know when another bear might hop the fence.

In the interest of limited emoting, all I’m going to say about this experience is that kick-back is no joke. Check out my first You Tube video ever to watch that gun teach me a lesson. It took many glasses of fancy rosė just to calm down afterwards.