Amy left yesterday after a delightful weekend. I miss her already and I am attempting to come up with creative reasons to crash her family’s Thanksgiving in Vegas or appear in the seat next to her on her birthday flight to Paris. What? You DIDN’T invite me?

You know you are meant to be friends when you can go a year without seeing each other, and it feels like not a day has passed. We even brought out the good wine to celebrate her appearance in North Carolina. By good wine, I mean the stuff that won’t peel paint. Since embarking on this massive House project, we’ve decided to put ourselves on a budget. OK, I have decided to put us on a budget and Michael may be suffering a bit. Sure he sees the greater good, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to kick and scream a bit. When I told him he needed to cut back on the wine consumption in order to reduce the weekly wine cost, he managed to be as “gray” as a man with a black or white brain can be. Fine, he said and then ran off to the market.

His motives were actually quite good, but the execution was terribly flawed. I give him a four. At the market he appropriately decided to buy one of the 1.5 liter bottles that was on sale. Thinking of course that he was saving money and therefore I would pay less attention to the consumption rate, he came home quite excited about this. He proudly extracted the giant bottle from the bag and held it high. It was Ernst and Julio White Zinfandel and I could barely contain myself. “Pink wine?”, I ask. “It’s not pink!”, he says. “Um yes, yes, you bought pink wine”, I blurt through my laughter. “Nooooooooo, I did not mean to buy THAT!”, he squeaks.

So yeah….his first attempt at frugality went horribly array. He tried to drink it straight, but ended up chilling it and cutting it with seltzer. It takes one hell of a man to come home after a long day and make himself a pink wine spritzer. God, I love him.

Amy on the other hand deserved better. Granted there was some selfishness in there, as I knew I’d be right along with her matching drink to drink. I could not afford the pink wine headache. So off to Costco I went and splurged on the mid-priced bottles in bulk. Once we went through all four wine glasses, we drank happily from the discount coffee mugs. The classiness continues.