Some of that slammin' wine we drank up, this bottle courtesy of the Sedgehammer. On Sarah's July b-day.

During our Napa honeymoon week, we had so much vino that it took me at least two weeks afterward to break the habit of swirling everything (water, soda, coffee, milk) around in its glass to aerate it. It was a delicious and incredible experience. I'll have pictures and words to share about this for the rest of my life.

In particular though, that week provided roughly ten more chapters in the big book about why we have the single best collection of friends in the entire world. I'm not sure there's a word for the kind of time we had in California, and so much of the unique experience is thanks to the people we had around us. 'Joy' is good, but it's a little too vague. 'Indulgence' is a favorite of mine, but it implies a kind of submission and gluttony that, while most definitely present during the week, were not the focus. 'Ecstasy' sounds too dirty. 'Celebration' is getting close, for no other reason than it binds the experience tightly to so many other great events shared with these folks and others from the past.

To put it another way, there's a Napa poem in me somewhere that I'll work on for years and never get quite right.