I Paint Them, Jeremy Ferments Them

I think Jeremy and I both have needed to rekindle hobbies and interest for a while now. You know, doing something just for fun and not having to do with the kids. Being productive in free time.

It's quite a concept.

Especially now that we have cable.

But on Thursday we were laying low because Tessa was coughing quite a bit and she said she wanted to paint. When I broke out her washable kid paints, I broke out mine as well. I had bought them an acrylic set last fall in hopes of painting when I was laid up but it never really happened.

But I was on so many hard core pain meds, I have to say those would have been interesting painting. As a side note, hard core pain meds made me really really ridiculously good at Words With Friends. When I stopped using them, I lost my savant scrabble skills.

Anyway, Tessa painted and I painted. After 30 mins she lost interest and watched a movie, but I kept going all afternoon.

Ta-da! I painted some grapes! The only experience I have with painting AT ALL comes from my four times doing 'wine and canvas' classes. But they really taught me a lot about how to mix colors and blend blend blend.

See I thought if you wanted to paint purple grapes you would buy purple paint. Silly me. All you ever need is a primary color pack (you  know, roygbiv---actually minus the V which is apparently not part of roygbi anymore) and you can do anything.

They look cartoonish because I know nothing at all about shadows and highlights. But that's okay. They match the other cartoonish paintings of mine sprinkled around the house.

-

So this is the first thing I've ever ever done freehand without someone guiding me. I'm pretty happy with it. Here's the original picture....

It was an absolute coincidence that while I was painting grapes, Jeremy was behind me working on his own grape project...making wine!

We are about to have a whole mess of grapes to harvest (hence the picture above, from our yard) and we are going to make wine. This is something we did in a former life a million years ago but are trying to rekindle.

Did you know that Jeremy's wines from 1999 took blue ribbon in an international wine competion?

Did you know that Jeremy himself got to be a wine judge in the same competition when it took place in Indy (and that the two statement are not related)?

Did you  know that wine competitions are sometimes judged by 23 year old grad students?

All true.

So before our actual grapes are ready and the messiness of 'crush' begins, Jeremy decided to buy some grape juice at a local wine store to hone his long forgotten skills. Apparently that's a whole industry....buying brand names vineyard juices and taking them home to make your own Opus at a fraction of the cost.

So far it's going well and Jeremy is feeling very very happy again.  Our kitchen smells like a winery, and when he's all tied up with work...it's not uncommon to find him sniffing the barrel for stress relief.

I asked him how many times yesterday he sniffed his barrel and he didn't want to answer me.