The Color of Crazy

The last time I remember having to claim so much physical space was in grad school.  It was two weeks before my thesis defense.  Instead of carrying books and binders back and forth and trying to stuff them into lockers, I bribed the software engineering department with a six-pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale to allow me to park my research in a temporarily deserted computer lab.

I spread out my piles of color-coded "Grounded Theory" research topic papers and exploded into the sparse room where I would dive into the last edits, research credits, and coordination until my book was ready to go to print.  What a great feeling to walk out of that lab for the last time, dragging a box of binders behind me, most likely leaving a trail of colored post-it notes and matching highlighters.

Now I look at my dining room table: piles of Jancis Robinson here, Oz Clarke there.  Binders of wine notes, workbooks and specifications ... and significantly more bottles and glasses than ever were permitted to clutter a workspace in a military graduate school computer lab.

That's right.  It's pink season.

It seems, however, that my affinity for color-coding has found its way back into what feels like grad school all over again.  Instead of three giant monitor screens I now face the hot pink MacBook that began this blogging journey with me.  My left hand is a fistful of colored ink pens while my right hand alternates between a lifting a wine glass to my lips and doodling a different colored "wine fact" onto maps, notebook pages, and occasionally the table cloth.  With green I'm writing climate notes: Benguela current from the Antarctic cools (swooping arrow) the South African Coast. Purple ink denotes geographical features: Mayacamas and Vaca Mountains.  In orange I'm scribbling about thin volcanic, acidic soils, Kimmerdgian Clay, Llicorella, or decomposed granite.  You get the picture.

Although I must admit I'm now looking at a spaghetti fest of ink and scribbles of many colors which make me want to open a bottle of pink.  Ooh!  Pink:  Grapes and wine styles!  

This is a completely different undertaking than DOD-sponsored research, but can I just say, WAY more fun?  Don't get me wrong, adding to a body of research knowledge was a huge blast and quite interesting.  By the way, the book was published but is now 10 years old and I make nothing from it; DOD-sponsored research, remember? It was also where I learned to pair wine and academics.  Let's face it: queuing theory and knowledge management classes were part of what made me drink in the first place.

Yes, this is a different kind of crazy than taking on qualitative methodology in an otherwise quantitative culture of the software engineering department.  Somewhere my fluffy little wine soaked brain thought it would be a good idea to knock out WSET Level III and Certified Wine Educator credentials within the same nine-month period.  My rationale: cork dork it up twice as hard and take the tests one after the other, bang, bang, bang, while it's fresh in your mind.

The good news is ... crazy must be my happy place.  This, to me, is bliss.  This is 100 percent teeth-staining, hand-cramping, eye-crossing, map-scribbling, book- and bottle-buying (budget breaking) unadulterated cork dork bliss. 

Peace, love, and spit buckets.

Sunday mornings at our nut house ... before any other creatures are stirring.