Thoughts on Commissioning

I have been spending a lot of time working on my home lately.  It has been very rewarding work, and opened my eyes to how simple it is to do a lot of the things yourself that would otherwise cost you a fortune.  All you really need is some can-do attitude, a bit of mechanical aptitude, and access to the internet :).  Seriously, how did people do it before the internet? Youtube has become a part of my toolbox, right next to the cordless drill.

I recently completed the shop commissioning of the massive new drill rig project I designed.  It was, as always, a great learning experience in addition to being very rewarding.  Some of the recurring truisms from the commissioning:

• You just have to try some things.  A few minutes of real world testing is worth weeks of time in front of the computer in some cases.  Now not all cases!  Thank you Finite Element Analysis!  But software, for example, almost cannot be tried soon enough in the development process.
• Its never the problem you expect.  This one is rather obvious, but rears its head frequently.  Fact is, if it was a problem you expected and didn't do anything about, you are kind of an idiot, right?  Well, not exactly.  Engineering can be an iterative process, and there is a degree of uncertainty with any new creation.  As engineers, we try to think of all the things that could go wrong, and I would bet that 90% of the time what actually goes wrong is not on that list.  This is likely due to the fact that if you are able to anticipate a certain type of problem, you eliminate it from your design the best you can.  If you are creating something new though, expect a few of these "gotchas".
• Sometimes, entropy wins.  Sure, there are a few problems you run into and think: "yeah, this happens all the time".  A leaky hose for example.  Some problems, however, are almost impossible to track down and are completely unique.  Like a faulty bus bar from a manufacture with a tiny piece of plastic covering the conductor in one of several hundred terminals.  Yeah, $2 part, 4 hours tracking it down.  Entropy 1, Engineer 0.
• Running a new piece of equipment can bring the hind-sight engineering specialists out of the woodwork.  "Why didn't you do this?" or "Why wasn't that considered in the design?".  The fact is, when building a prototype, some things are going to get missed.  Don't let it bother you, instead try to create a culture of jumping in and fixing problems rather than just pointing them out.  Remember that a toddler can spot an oil leak, it takes an adult to fix it.
• Nine women cannot have a baby in one month. I think this is a German saying.  It may be my favorite thing to remind managers who want to solve a technical issue by pulling in more resources.
• Perspective can be a big blessing.  After spending about 25 days straight working on something, that thing can pretty easily creep steadily higher on your shit list.  Every problem you encounter can seam insurmountable because it gets jammed into your crowded brain with all problems fixed and outstanding.  Get someone new involved when this starts to happen!  For my project, I called in a drilling supervisor to see what he thought of the rig.  He reminded us that we are doing stuff that has never been done before and SUCCEEDING.  All of a sudden building a small step to change a filter seams like the minute task it is.  
• Telling people what they want to hear when it comes to timing is a mistake.  This one is easy to fall victim to if you are a people pleaser (a terminal problem I deal with, along with Irish guilt).  If someone asks you when it will be done, give your honest estimate.  And don't forget to double it.  Adding time to your estimate is NOT unscientific, it is what experienced professionals do (see entropy).  It is always better to take the heat for the timeline now and be a hero if all the stars align and by some miracle you complete your project early.  
• Beer is good.  Having a beer with your team after a hard days work is good for everyone.
• Lists rule.  keep one running punch list.  ONE.  That is the key.  Maintaining multiple lists is impractical and causes things to get missed.  Don't get too hung up on categorizing your list either.  Just write it down.  You can always organize it later! 
• Things seam easier when they are done.  Don't forget all the heart-ache you poured into your creation.  People will look at it and it will appear simple to them.  Remember that it is easy to make a convoluted and complex mechanism to do a function unreliably.  To create something simple and reliable is the pinnacle of engineering achievement.  And when someone looks at it and says "duh, of course that is how that is done", remind yourself that if it was really that obvious, people would already be doing it that way.  You have created something simple and innovative (prepare to be copied thanklessly :) )

I am so excited to be at this phase of the project.  My team, which was pulled together from Australia, Canada, and the US, worked very well together!   Lots of exciting new developments and innovations.  I will post a link as soon as the info goes public!

Amy has done an amazing job documenting our family life!  Let me know if you want access to that blog, as it is set to private.  I will just say here that having a baby has been by far the greatest thing to happen to me.  I couldn't be happier with my family, career, or home.  Life is good.  Cheers, friends.

Music:  I am digging the new Queens of the Stone Age album "...Like Clockwork"
Reading: I am reading "Dune Heretics"...  Frank Herbert awesomeness.

Hello From Mountain Country

Hello All, it has been too long again.

Amy and I are doing very well. We are adjusting to the Salt Lake area nicely and finding it full of nice surprises. I am stoked to be attending two concerts this month: The Airborne Toxic Event and The Arctic Monkeys. Both are at the top of my iPod not only due to alphabetical order, but also musical preference. These shows are going to be incredible!

I have been playing softball on Monday nights. Slow-pitch softball is great fun, even for a former hardballer. Fielding the ball is the same after all, and the short base paths make for a pretty fast paced game when you have skilled players. You get the occasional guy who takes it way too serious… Come on Beergutsky, get "Glory Days" out of your head and stop yelling at the umpire who is paid like an indentured servant. It is for FUN! That doesn't mean I don’t get competitive, because I do, it just means that a dose of reality could be beneficial for these people. Those are cub scouts in the stands, not Cubs' scouts.

Work has been great! I am working on a very big project that I get to make my own. For this reason I love spending time on it. I think I was born with an entrepreneurial (thank you spell-check) mind that really enjoys a degree of independence. Lots of structural engineering and FEA to do on this job. ANSYS is the software I am using primarily; it is pretty stellar I must say.

SLC area is pretty great. We have been up skiing a few times and the resorts here are exceptional. It is so cool to be close to all these great mountains. I think I may go this Sunday, yes, that is right, Sunday May 29th. The mountains also double as a great backdrop for the city. I am still mesmerized by them, something I hope doesn’t go away. This is a great place to live. Amy has been substitute teaching and has found some very impressive schools.

On a more serious note, there are some really good breweries down here. Epic brewing is probably my favorite, with Uinta a close second. Epic's IPAs are fantastic, and Uinta's barley wine is exceptional.

We miss all of our friends and family! Come see us!

Did you hear some wack-job thinks the world is going to end this weekend? I think Bruce Willis will save us… (cue Aerosmith)

Safety

Last week I went through training for MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration). The course I went through was well taught and very thorough. It got me thinking about safety…

I am sure a lot of you reading this have gone through some sort of safety training, or even first aid training. I am usually struck with how important safety feels while participating in these classes. You don't want anyone to get hurt and the dangers of the job feel very real. The challenge is getting people to carry this feeling with them when they leave.

Safety is very important for engineers in a number of ways. Most engineers in heavy industry spend a lot of time in the field. Safety is perfected with practice. Going into the field with limited repetition and visiting many different sites/machines makes safety more complex. Add to this the fact that engineers are often testing automated machinery in a bypass/manual mode for commissioning and you have a perfect storm for an accident.

Also, operators are experts on their equipment. As an equipment designer I have often thought that, even if I spend a year on a design, give an operator three months and his working knowledge will dwarf mine. My point is: don't assume you're an expert on your own design… assumptions foreshadow accidents.

On a personal level, engineers are responsible for designing safety into their equipment. It is truly the first line of defense from an accident. Thankfully, the US has made a lot of progress in requiring machine guarding [sometimes struggling to find the practical limit]. We must continue to improve our designs to keep everyone safe. Bottom line is: it effects the bottom line. Stay safe!

SLC & Apple

Pretty big news for Amy and me: we are moving to Salt Lake City!

I accepted an engineering position in SLC with a company in mining and construction. Although I will miss everyone I worked with here in Vancouver and all the great friends we made up here, I am thrilled with the opportunity I have been presented in Utah!

Needless to say, Amy and I have been busy. Last weekend we did a quick trip (flying early Saturday and returning late Sunday) down to look for a place to live. We found a townhome we are very excited about in West Jordan.

One of the most appealing aspects of this new job is that I will be doing more mechanical design. Although I enjoy project management, which is what I have done exclusively for the past six months, I miss my original passion of machine design. The art of combining multiple disciplines into a functioning product was my motivation for starting this career, and it continues to get me to work every day. The field uses big equipment of course, which has always been my preference.

We have been very impressed with the Salt Lake area from our visits. It is very clean, has beautiful surroundings, and they actually have some good local beers (very important). West Jordan has a lot of new construction. We are excited to ski some of the area’s legendary snow!

We made sure to get a place that would allow us to welcome plenty of visitors, so come see us!

In unrelated news, I recently purchased an iMac. So far, I am very impressed! It was wicked easy to set up, and clearly very powerful. Ours has the i5 processor, which so far does not disappoint. This is my first Mac and it is too soon to say for sure, but I may be hooked.

Kool-Aid = Consumed

Next week, we visit Josh and Jenn in Okinawa!

Worky Worky

As I sat here in my office last night at 6:30pm, putting the cap on another 12 hour day, I was thankful that I enjoy engineering. I often talk to people who not only dislike their JOB, but also their WORK. This is what I was born to do: Build... From Lego bricks to structural steel, I have always loved creating things. Cheers to liking your work! (even for those who don't love their job)

Watch Your Unit(s)

Warning: Ranting and Sarcasm Ahead

As a kid I wondered why anyone would want to switch to the metric system. What is a meter anyway? A foot is easy to visualize; most of us have two after all. Now that I make my living doing, amongst other things, heat transfer and thermo calculations I have grown to love the metric system. I wonder how many engineers there are who run all their calculations in metric and convert the answer to English units like I do. I don’t have time to figure out whether I need to divide/multiply my answer by 32.2 or what a ft*lbforce is in BTU (This one, incidentally, is a breeze to remember, 778.1693 ft*lbforce/BTU).

Some units on my poo-list are: slugs, lbmass, BTU/hr, and inH2O just to name a few

I wouldn’t be surprised if English units for power can be properly reported as campfires/fortnight. Does my lack of love for English units mean I am not patriotic? NO. It means I am sick of using a unit system that is less user friendly than photo-editing in DOS. Sure, the first time I ordered a meter-long at subway might be a little embarrassing, but we would all be figuring out the new system together (and possibly sharing a sandwich).

Building to Maintaining

Please note that I am in no way an expert in, well, anything. These are just my observations from watching the news and talking with friends in the engineering field. Also, these items do not reflect the opinions of any company I do currently work or have worked for in the past. Also, I am not an economist or an accountant, just an engineer.

When I graduated from college, the economy was already starting to slip. One of the first things to get cut from a lot of bloated corporate budgets was capital (project) spending. A lot of companies changed their policy on project paybacks down to fractions of a year for full payback. This cut down the engineering workload for these companies to where, in some cases, layoffs were necessary. This has resulted in an unrecoverable loss of industry knowledge for many companies.

In the past, engineering has been so tightly bound to project work that this loss of jobs and, as a result, knowledge would always be tied to a decrease in project funding. I don’t know what the experts would say, but to me it seems like the tough times are the WORSE times to lose your experts. A lot of company structures however, are not flexible enough to reallocate this knowledge in times of minimal capital spending.

The reason, in my opinion, that a lot of corporations cannot reallocate their knowledge is simple: for the past half century they have been in a “building” life cycle. When things are good and you are building capacity there is a certain momentum that can carry a company through small dips in revenue. What is different now? A lot…

Customers are smarter now. They are also bigger. The days of selling to small distributors or direct are dead for a lot of companies. If you make widgets, ten other companies do too and they are all trying to get Boxmart’s business, just like you. Oh yeah, and Boxmart has one person, Dr. Widget, dedicated to buying widgets. This person, as a result, is a widget nerd. He will compare your product to everything on the market and pick it apart with an expert eye. This is not the same person who came into the local hardware store and picked the cheapest widget off the shelf. Now you have to convince Dr. Widget that you deserve to even be on his shelf. So, when things are slow, what does this mean for Dr. Widget? It means he has even more time to shop around. In slow times, you need your experts there to refine your widget so Boxmart decides you are the widget that sits on their shelf.

This is not a matter of building capacity (maybe it leads to that) but rather maintaining your product line. A company must look at all its processes and control its quality. It must get better at what it “does” and not dedicate all its time looking at what it “could do”. This is, believe it or not, a new thing for a lot of companies. Bean counters call this type of spending overhead, operating costs, probably a lot other things. I call it “Maintenance”. It is fundamentally different from capital costs, or “Building”. A lot of engineering firms/divisions within these companies are literally set up to be paid out of capital funding only, meaning they are handcuffed when the company might need them the most! A lot of companies are willing to fork over plenty of operating costs even in a tough time like right now. It makes sense to me to roll some of the expertise into this cost group to save a company’s knowledge base!

I am thankful to have been employed by two great companies since graduating. Many of the engineers I know, all quite bright, have not been so lucky. A lot of America’s best are sidelined right now due to an old-school, inflexible engineering/accounting approach. They can get by for a while that way, but pretty soon I fear a company who has embraced a company “maintenance” mentality will have all of Boxmarts shelf space. Hopefully for the sake of our economy and well-being, that company has a “Made in USA” sticker on the bottom of its widgets.

Coastal Tidings

Amy and I took a short trip to Newport Oregon this last weekend where we met up with my parents. Our hotel allowed dogs, so we brought Ruger and Riley along with us. This was the first time we had taken dogs with us to a hotel, and as we are weird dog people now, we really enjoyed that. The weather was great, a real rarity for the Oregon coast. With only a few shots of that famous coastal rain and a large share of sunshine, we were able to enjoy quality views of the rugged coast line. The dogs enjoyed the sand and let their humans enjoy some sweet barley nectar.

Speaking of barley nectar, you didn’t think I would go to Newport without visiting one of the world’s top breweries, did you? Well, I didn’t miss this opportunity. We toured the Rogue brewery on Sunday. The tour wasn’t the greatest, pretty quick and dirty, but I guess not everyone in the group was an engineer wanting to climb in to tanks and discuss their material handling. The beer we bought from their store however, was top shelf. My mom bought a Mom hefeweizen, dad bought some John John beer aged in a bourbon barrel, and I had some of their mocha porter as well as some Double Dead Guy Ale. I think I might have succeeded in turning my parents into beer snobs! Well, they have at least passed “Intro to Brew Snobbery”.

Touring Rogue brewery made me think a little bit about engineering philosophy. This brewery was not high tech, using a lot of repurposed equipment and in some cases insulating tanks with non-clad foam. The plant layout appeared to have been given little thought. Despite all of this, they produce some of the finest, award-winningest beer around. This focus on product quality is something I think some of the biggest companies have lost. Product quality is your public face, and regardless of how good you are at making a bad product it is still a bad product. Now, couple this quality with solid manufacturing technique and you really have something.

Another stop on our trip was the Oregon Coast Aquarium. Being the nerd that I am, I was uber-stoked to walk amongst some of the strange creatures of the ocean. This is the closest I will ever get to these animals though. SCUBA is not for me, something that is reinforced with every episode of Shark Week and every visit to an aquarium. You can tell me odds all day for getting attacked/bothered by a sea creature, but I prefer land. Humans swimming was obviously a design afterthought, added at the last minute. Probably at the last human design review someone said “oh, and we should probably give them some way to get back into the boats they will build” with the lead designer saying something along the lines of “web their hands a little bit and call it good”. The best among us, Michael Phelps, would become a nice treat for a fat, full, and lazy shark.

Engineering seems to be integrating more with architecture at a crazy pace. Lately it has been a hot topic here at work. Has anyone else in the field experienced this? BIM, Integrated Project Delivery, AIC, other three letter acronyms. Anyone digging into this stuff? I wonder…

Ms. Alaynious

Well here at Engineering, Film, Music, Books, and Brew it has mostly been engineering and a little film for the past month. I am enjoying my new job and I am thankful to be in an environment that is pushing me to learn new things and practice a little outside of the usual for me. Most of my experience over the past five+ years has been in machine design. Granted, I have ventured into some process design and evaluation, but the majority of my work has been in machine design and automation. For my new position, that is just part of the job. In my first few months I have done heat transfer, building ventilation and temperature control, Air duct sizing for pressure drop at elevated temperatures, thermal expansion analysis, AISC Structural Design, and more. It has been a nerd’s delight. A career in engineering, it would seem, is anything but predictable.

Vancouver/PDX area has been great for Amy and me. We have enjoyed downtown Portland on the weekends, hitting the Pearl for some brew and dining at some killer spots. We went to a great brewpub in East Portland called Hopworks, which has arguably the best black IPA around. For some reason, all I want to drink now is IPA. Maybe it’s just is a phase.

There is a theater in Vancouver, Cinetopia, which has theaters for adults only (wow, that sounds really bad. It is adults only because they serve alcohol there… perverts). This place is awesome! The chairs are comfortable, the screens are the latest and greatest, they have ottomans to put your feet up, and a pretty good beer selection. My favorite feature though, is the theater is 21 and over. I realize and embrace the fact that I am turning into a crotchety elder (I am 25 this coming week after all), but the theater was not filled with people texting and whispering to one another. There was, of course, the staple “Johnny Commentary” as I call people with brilliant in-movie color commentary such as: That was funny, Oh no!, Did you see that?, Oh jeeze!, etc. The length of the cord connecting their brain to the mouth must be short and filterless.

Beer at a theater seems out of place (well it does when it is not snuck in), but it is awesome! Rather spendy though, I didn’t think they could sell something that makes theater popcorn seem like a bargain; they pulled it off.

Movie Reviews:
Amy and I watch a ton of movies, especially lately. The more movies we watch, the crappier most of them seem. It has made it something special when a good one comes along. This last month, we watched two memorable movies: Up in the Air and 500 Days of Summer. When reading below, bear in mind that I am NOT a movie critic; just wanted to mention these.

Up in the Air was a great find. We ended up seeing this in the theater simply because it was playing at the right time and was in a 21+ theater. This is the best acting I have ever seen from George Clooney. I liked him in Burn after Reading, but this performance trumped. Basic story is a middle-aged man, portrayed by George, is a professional hatchet-man flying about the country firing people for companies lacking stomach for the task. This part of the story lands because of the economic sitch, but it is just part of the stories framework. Clooney’s character is a professional business traveler, and is written so perfectly I could not help but think of the three people I know who behave the same way. With these people it’s all about flyer miles, knowing which airline to fly with, which airport to fly into, which rewards program you are on, etc. This is spot on stuff. The story is excellent and I won’t go into detail in case you want to see it. I recommend this movie.

500 Days of Summer: I had no idea what to expect when I got this movie in the mail. Amy had wisely moved it to the top of our queue, and I sat down to watch it with no idea what it was about. This movie is a keeper. It doesn’t ever feel predictable or formulaic. If you feel like watching something entertaining that will draw you in, check this one out. The leading man, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, should be a star. I really liked the writing, sort of bizarre and doesn’t cram romantic garbage down your throat.

We went to Bend last weekend and visited G-man. Good time had by all. What did we do? Not a whole lot; and it ruled. Movies, beer, food, repeat. (Order varies)

New category for EFMBB is titled OOK, short for Oregon Outside of Klamath.
OOK:

The Costco up here had tables full of designer jeans. I found this hilarious.

In downtown Portland, you either need to ride an awesome new bike or the crappiest, most bizarre bike you can find. The middle ground is unacceptable.

If you do not wear a funny hat in downtown Portland, you do yourself, in fact, look funny.

Hope all is well with everyone. We miss you all (well, most of you (you know who you are)).

Northern Exposure

I have started my new job, and have been at it for three weeks now. I am thrilled with how things are going; it has been quite the ride!  Amy and I have been apart for this stretch as she finished out her contract in Klamath.   I have been putting in some solid hours at work and doing my best to get up to speed on all there is to know about my new field.  I am thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to expand my knowledge.  So much fun, but it has been exhausting too!

Tomorrow I will be moving all of our stuff out of a storage unit and into the house Amy and I are renting.  It is a really cool, old house located redonkulously close to work (seven minute walk (like old guy walking, not jazzersize powerwalk or anything)).  I cannot wait to live so close to work.  I am going to enjoy the proximity and visiting Amy and the dogs at lunch.

The PDX area is incredibly fun.  I am learning how to get around quickly – well at least around Vancouver.  I have only been lost in downtown Portland once since I have been here… not bad when you consider I have gone down there a grand total of one time.  Three things from back home that are not true up here:

1. Back home, when you drive on train tracks, it is a bad thing and something to be remedied as quickly as possible.  In downtown Portland, it is apparently normal.
2. Back home, when you see a sign that points to a Freeway, that means that you can get to the freeway and go either direction on it.  Not so in downtown PDX.  These signs apparently arbitrarily point towards a single on-ramp that, depending on your magic 8-ball, will take you one direction.  In my case, I went South when I wanted to go North.  I got off the freeway ASAP and made a highly legal (unlikely) u-turn.
3. Back home, there are basically two types of lanes: those going one way and those going the other.  Here they have bike lanes, carpool lanes, train lanes, lanes you can sometimes park in, etc..  They are so specific on lane type that I am continuously looking for the ‘93 single-cab GMC lane.

Other than coming up to speed on these must-knows, it has been a great experience.  There is an absolute ton to do up here.  I have had meals on the river several times, enjoyed a number of fine beverages, and met some great people.  My coworkers are great!  I am very thankful for this.

Amy and I attended the company Christmas party this last weekend.  It took place at the Heathman Lodge here in Vancouver.  The food was top notch and it was nice to meet more people from the company; and for Amy to be able to put some faces to names.  A good time was had by all!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Software Blues and Fantasy News

Sometimes I really don’t like deploying software. It has been my experience that software tends toward the dishonest. As an example let’s examine status bars. They used to fill up gradually, allowing the users excitement to build until finally, when the bar was full, the task/install was complete! Now, the bar fills countless times, only to start over again. I get the feeling it is Microsoft’s attempt to please a society that needs constant stimulation and enjoys an empty bar cycling to full at an obnoxious rate of 30 times a minute. Sorry for that rant, but when you delve into software to the extent I have been, it starts to change your concept of reality. I need a break from this sort of thing before I move into my parents’ basement, lose all remnants of a sun tan and eat cheetoes while having web debates with people about the superiority of .net to VB.

Thankfully, I have been doing more than just software deployments. Amy and I (mostly Amy truthfully) finished painting the bedroom and the bathroom. It is amazing to me what a real difference paint can make. I should have known though because as we say in machine design, paint covers a multitude of errors.

Life and work have been more eclectic than a Beck song lately. At work my duties have been ranging from developing new CAD standards to some pretty intense product modeling. Product design is something I rarely get into as most of my functions here are as a machine designer. This project has been given “priority one” status, so I have been given resources (people and software) to get the job done. Also, I have been given freedom to set up the project and file structure how I see fit, which has resulted in a system that is easy to administer, manage releases, and manage resources. I really have enjoyed it; it is a new and unique experience. I don’t mean to ramble on about my job, but I have been putting in a lot of hours lately and I also wanted to clear things up for people who thought I was a train driver.

It is fantasy football season! I hopped on this bandwagon last year and I am hooked. Our league includes work buddies and some randoms. It has some top-notch smack talk, and my skills on the digital gridiron are legendary (in my head).

Amy and I have turned off our cable TV. This bold move is in response to the ever-increasing amount of programming available on the internet and the quality of Netflix service as well as the rising price of cable TV. Netflix on demand is great and, working through the Xbox, provides an easy way to view programming including TV shows, movies, and specials on your TV. Also, the Media Center extender allows us to view torrents on our TV through our Xbox. This hooks your computers media library to your living room, so it also includes all of our music, pictures, and home videos. So far, the only thing I miss is Sports Center in the morning, but I can roll with the free podcasts. I just have to be better at downloading them. Also, I am going to consider mlb.tv next year. This is all sort of an experiment, so I will be posting updates under the heading “Cut the Cable”.

Listening to: My iPod on random. There is just nothing like going from Queens of the Stone Age to Queen. It is a bit of a change of pace going from Homme’s growl to Mercury’s howl. When I haven’t been on random, I have been revisiting Stadium Arcadium by RHCP. This two disc set has some serious grooves, jams, and some of the only songs I have ever heard by Anthony that are not in some way making reference to his self-proclaimed bedroom prowess. Check it out, Stadium Arcadium that is. You can’t have my iPod. Sorry.

Gadgets: For an early anniversary present, Amy got me the Bose in-ear headphones. These things are BA. I don’t know how much of a true Audiophile I am, but I listen to my headphones an average of 6 hrs a day and my ears never get tired of these ergonomic headphones. They are keepers, and so is the purchaser.

Thanks for the comments everyone! If you comment in the box titled “Lambastings”, be sure to sign your name or something that would ID you to me (unless you want to do it all covert-like), because anyone can comment there and unless you are a follower your name appears as Unknown. Unless someone following named Unknown has been commenting, then I apologize and acknowledge the legitimacy of the name.

Coming up: I am attending more nuptials this weekend, this time at a winery in Gold Hill known as Del Rio. This winery is really beautiful and has some delicious varietals. I am not going to drink any F’ing Merlot though (see Sideways, I am not just going off here)! Most of the time I just drink wine at a wedding, but I applaud this couple for going right to the source and cutting out the middle man. I am as stoked as that guy in Undone (The Sweater Song). It will be a great time. Our friends are more fun than ping pong.