I leave for Senegal on Tuesday and you’d think that today I’d be frantically running around in last minute trip prep.  You’d be wrong.

I’m currently comfortably installed at the Hotel Daniel (aka Jill & Ian’s house) where the bathtub is as big as the one at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami and the Hermes toiletries, so they say, are imported from the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong.  I should have moved here weeks ago!

I’ve given myself the day off, because this past week, I did two of my least favorite things in the world, moving and taxes.  They say that people’s #1 fear is public speaking.  I don’t know what that’s about.  I’d rather speak to 1000 people, unprepared, on a monthly basis than move.  While don’t disagree with Sartre’s assessment that hell is other people — at least some other people — I’d say that moving ranks right up there.

So I’m done with that, and damn it, I deserve a break.  So today I slept ’til eleven and for dinner, we broke out a bottle of terrific South African wine that I’ve been hauling around with me since 2000.  That’s the year I went to South Africa and returned with a case and a half of wine.  Yes, I brought 18 bottles back with me on the plane — a case in checked luggage, and six bottles as a carry-on.  Those were the days. (I even declared them all at customs, and wasn’t charged a cent!)

So there are a few bottles of wine I’ve been carrying around to drink someday when the occasion warranted, and this was one of them.  It’s not even a super high-class wine, but it’s better than what I normally drink and in any case, I’ve been holding onto it for a while.  When we visited the Rupert & Rothschild vineyard near Capetown, they recommended cellaring the wine for 10-15 years.  I’m not sure if my closet, my friend’s garage, and Public Storage in Santa Clara counts as cellaring, but in any case, it survived the abuse and today was a fine time to drink the ’98 Baron Edmond.

Here’s to making “someday” today!

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