Martinborough wines, Old Friends and musings on work

A bit of time has passed since the last blog and we put that down on our work schedule. When we are here and short staffed and on for the weekend, work pretty much occupies our time. And for you Northern hemisphere folks, remember our days are quite short in Mid autumn, so no after work bike ride or hike. But to complain about my hours is silly, I see men and women at the fish processing plant work 70 hours a week and the people up at the Mine work tough 7 days on and 7 off schedules. We have it good, though our recent visit to see Duncan, a friend from our freshman dorm at Stanford, raised the work issue as well. And not just because David Beckham

I

is retiring at age 38 but because Duncan has now a nifty lifestyle farm in the Greytown Carterton area north of Wellington with his partner Jan

SO Duncan has now traded his academic hat for a pick and shovel and an infinite number for projects around the farm. And though I am tempted to post a picture of Meatloaf here as that is one of the cows name, the fat Meatloaf's drunken support embarrassed Romney and totally eliminated the 1.3% chance that Nate Silver predicted he had of winning the election, and I do not want to popularize him again to the 4 readers of the blog.
Actually I was thinking of Kurt Vonnegut and Cat's Cradle and the tenet of the fictional religion ( is there a non-fictional one/) Bokononism called Karass.  A karass is a group of people who lack the common socially acknowledged ties like Cheeseheads, Rotarians, meadows club members, Boy Scouts, Boulderites, etc but actually seem to have an undefinable close tie. That's how it felt visit Duncan and Jan, though we have  only visited Duncan now three times in thirty 34 years or so, it was immediately familiar and warm. And that was not just the Wine talking

Though the Pinot Noir at Ata Rangi was excellent. I hope we can get together more often in the next 30 years, though I do not know if retiring to a lifestyle farm is really retiring or not.
And speaking of close friends, our returning flight to Westport was cancelled due to a giant storm that shut down the Wellington airport and Mark and Linda Baxter came to the rescue with  their hospitality and provided us with an excellent dinner, bed to sleep in and great company. All the more reinforcing the Karass tenent.