daverea.com

We’ve all seen the fun e-mail forwards that go around, filled with lots of personal questions to answer and forward on to your friends and family. American Express seems to have picked up on this, and they’ve been running a series of magazine ads with handwritten survey filled out by famous people. Tonight, I came across Kate Winslet’s in an issue of Food & Wine (thank you for the subscription, Lauren!) – maybe you’ve seen the TV version?

Seeing as it’s a short one – just 16 questions – I figured I’d fill it out. But rather than pass it around by e-mail, I thought it might be more fun to paste the results in here. Feel free to add your take in the comments section!

My name: Dave Rea
Childhood ambition: To be an inventor
Fondest memory: Developing prints with my Dad, in the RIT darkrooms (age ten). Picking blueberries with my family in the hills around Keuka Lake.
Soundtrack: Scott Thomas Band, California
Retreat: Behind the lens of my camera, strapped into the driver’s seat of my car, or soaking in Sam McClain’s guitar between my B&Ws.
Wildest dream: Learning to fly (airplanes)
Proudest moment: Every time Kelly tells me she’s proud of me
Biggest challenge: Engineering
Alarm clock: My cell phone
Perfect day: A balanced blend of cooking (or just eating) delicious food, taking beautiful photographs, exploring something new and spending time with the people I love
First job: Filing papers at my Dad’s office for $2 per hour (age six)
Indulgence: Knob Creek bourbon
Last purchase: $26.40 worth of 87 octane unleaded
Favorite movie: American Beauty
Inspiration: My Mom
My life: will leave behind more than the sum of its parts

Valentine’s Day is on a Tuesday this year. Kelly and I always do something special for Valentine’s Day, so we opted to do the weekend-before this time around – and today was spent on our first “official” Seneca Lake wine tour. We’ve visited lots of wineries on Seneca Lake (and other finger lakes) before, so today we got a chance to explore a bunch of new wineries (and new wines) that we’d never visited/tasted before…

The event was called the “Wine and Chocolate Weekend”, in keeping with our Valentine’s Day theme, and each winery offered a chocolate treat, the recipe for their treat of choice, and a sampling of wines to taste. We started the day at 10:30AM at Fulkerson (the only previously-visited winery of the day) with chocolate chili, then moved on to Lakewood to pick up our tickets and the map to follow for the rest of the afternoon. After making a quick stop in Watkins Glen for some bottled water and a gas fill-up, we headed up the (previously-unexplored) East side of the lake and visited Atwater Estate Vineyards, Chateau LaFayette Reneau, Bloomer Creek Vineyard, Red Newt Cellars, Leidenfrost Vineyards, Hazlitt 1852 Vineyards, Tickle Hill Winery, and Penguin Bay Winery.

By about 3PM, we needed a break! We decided to head back down around the South end of the lake, through Watkins Glen and venture up the West side. Since this was the more familiar side for us, we skipped most of the tour stops, opting to visit Miles Wine Cellars, Earle Estates Winery & Meadery (we’d never tried mead before!), Anthony Road Wine Company and Seneca Shore Wine Cellars.

“But Dave,” you ask, “Isn’t that an awful lot of wineries for one couple to visit in a single day?”

Yes.

But if you’re smart about how many wines you taste, and how much of each one you drink, and making sure you’re not tasting on an empty stomach (no problem at this event!) then you can actually do it without ever even feeling tipsy. Kelly didn’t fare this well, so she ended up sleeping the whole way home, but we both had a great time and enjoyed exploring some new places and new flavors in one of our most familiar Finger Lakes stomping grounds.

Oh, and as if our wine rack wasn’t full enough (it is), we bought a little over a case of wine to boot. So if you get invited over for dinner at our place any time soon, plan on wine being served! Now we’ve just got to drink enough in the next 9 months to make space for the wine we’ll inevitably buy if we do the November “Deck the Halls” tour!

I’ve been listening to John Mayer’s new album, Try!, all evening. Go. Out. And. Get. It. Now.

This disc makes me want to stand up and knock my desk chair out into the hall, and proceed to bust a move (or several of them) on my plastic office carpet-protector. Then proceed to play along on an imaginary Hamer Special Flame-Top. These are some damn good blues. We’re talkin’ BB King caliber here. George Thorogood and the Destroyers. Credence Clearwater Revival.

This is a different John. This is an all-grown-up John. This is John Mayer as the sauce on your rack of ribs at your favorite smoke-filled blues joint. As Martha would say, It’s a good thing.

“Everything I do is judged,
and mostly they get it wrong…but oh well.
The bathroom mirror has not budged,
and the woman who lives there, can tell…

…The truth from the stuff that they say,
She looks me in the eye and says
‘Would you prefer it the easy way?’
‘No? Well okay, then. Don’t cry.”
- Ani Difranco, “Joyful Girl”

The songs on my iPod are mostly random singles from various artists – I have very few complete albums on there, so unless I want to just shuffle all 4GB of music, I end up picking tracks to play as each song ends. That gets a little annoying, so last week I decided I needed some playlists.

The first playlist I came up with was the much-needed “Chillout” list. Mellow music – Norah Jones, Dave Koz and the like – great for the ride home after a hectic day at work. The first song is Dave Matthews covering this Ani Difranco song. He does a good job of it, too – I like his version better than Ani’s! It’s the perfect opener for a playlist designed to calm you down.

Lately, I’ve been finding lots of reasons to hum the last three lines to myself. Or find my way to an empty stairwell and sing them quietly if I need to. There are easy ways in life, and I certainly haven’t picked them. Getting married and maintaining a healthy relationship is not easy. Engineering is not easy. Keeping the bills paid, the car running, the cat healthy and the house clean is not easy. Medicing on ambulances is not easy. But all of these things combine to make my life rich and maintain the balance between challenge and reward.

My Mom was a tireless encourager. After all the discouraging kid-times I had, she’d pick me up, dust me off (sometimes literally) and help me try again. Nowadays, when I’m working through a discouraging problem or facing a difficult situation, I think of her sitting with me, as if she were helping me with homework. I think of her repeating those last three lines of lyrics to me.

I’ve never preferred it the easy way – at least not for the important things. And while that choice inevitably makes me want to cry at times, those imagined words are what very often get me through the challenge and on to reach the reward.