Mellow Mother Nature; Wine Dreams and Random Funnies: Random Tuesday Thoughts

Mother Nature finally shelved her April Fool’s tricks and kept snow out of the equation last week, thankfully. We did get our fair share of ‘typical’ rain, with some crazy hail moments as well. Apparently the sound of hail on the roof made Reddington a bit nervous – he was hiding in corners and keeping an eye on my location like he does when we get the rare thunder. Poor guy!

My new laptop did arrive last Monday afternoon, so by the end of Tuesday, I had most of my software installed on it that I use on the regular. I’m very happy with the performance so far, I suspect my old one might have been a lemon but I had chalked up the quirks to our horrible internet connection. 

After I wiped it and restored it to factory settings, I gave it to my oldest who has enjoyed my computer hand-me-downs for years. Apparently this one wasn’t as cool, though, because even restoring it to factory settings it crashed several times until half the memory was removed. It was supposed to be upgradeable memory-wise, but I’m thinking they didn’t configure the motherboard properly in order to increase memory. 

Either that, or the memory card I asked my hubby to get me for my birthday back in December was bad – hard to say. I’m just glad that my new computer had the option of getting the maximum amount of memory from the get-go so I can run multiple browsers and my video editing software and my Adobe software all at the same time without having it lag or crash. 🙂

Now that the weather is starting to warm up, I’m starting to get restless to purge some excessive packed boxes and finally – finally – get my winemaking room set up. Especially after my brother posted a pic of him doing a tasting in his garage last week:

Isn’t his setup amazing? He built those barrel racks himself. It’s been awhile since I’ve visited his wine garage, he’s really expanded his barrel collection in a big way. He and I have been making wine for about the same number of years – we thought it was funny he started here in Washington while I started in Pennsylvania, unbeknownst to each other. He makes dry red wines, I make sweet wines, so we enjoy trading wine with each other.

I have a room in the basement that’s plumbed for a kitchen, so that will be my official ‘Winemaking Room’ – I have a double stainless steel sink I need to install, plus a restaurant-type faucet. Once I get that in place, I’ll have to call a plumber to get it hooked up to the water – that’s something I’m not going to mess with. I also picked up a stainless steel long table that I’ll use in lieu of installing an actual countertop – perfect for sanitizing for the winemaking process, as well as sturdy enough to keep carboys on it and on the shelf below.

These are what I got that are ready to be put together and installed:

I have another room in the basement that will be perfect for a wine cellar, since it has no heating vent and no window in that room, so the ambient temperature is very consistent, and I’ll be able to put in a wine cellar cooling unit through the wall to ‘exhaust’ into the furnace room next door. I just have to empty all the boxes from that room first, since it became sort of an impromptu storage space when we moved in.

I have visions of ripping out the carpet and am hoping that there’s a cement floor underneath the carpet – I’m assuming so, since it is a basement after all. Though it remains to be seen, there’s hardwood floors under the carpet in my office, so maybe I’ll get lucky and there will be hardwood floors under that carpet, too (fingers crossed). I’m also thinking about covering the walls with shiplap to give it that rustic feel, like this:

Once I get started on these big projects, I’ll definitely post about them as I go along, so you can go along for the ride, too.

And with that, let’s jump to the funnies, m’kay? This cracked me up:

This is funny:

This is valid:

This is hilarious:

This is funny:

I love this:

This cracked me up:

This is funny:

This is hilarious:

This is funny (and so true):

This is hysterical:

This is valid:

This is hilarious:

This is concerning:

And I’m just going to leave this right here for you:

That’s a wrap for this week – you know the drill, link up and join in the fun, everyone is welcome. And don’t forget to think about the donuts of your day! 

Link up your Random (or not) here:

Keeping the random alive (barely) – feel free to snag a badge and play along – one for my wino friends:

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And one for my non-wino friends:

<div align="center"><a href="http://stacyuncorked.com" title="Stacy Uncorked" target="_blank"><img src="http://stacysrandomthoughts.com/Files/randomtuesday2.jpg" alt="Stacy Uncorked" style="border:none;" /></a></div>