Endeavors in Wine

Water? check
Sugar? check
Yeast? check
Orange and lemon? check check
Yellow blossoms of a common weed?

er, hang on a minute.
two hours later i returned home, triumphant, with 2 quarts of dandelion blossoms i had harvested from a nearby cemetery. actually, this cemetery is supposed to be quite well-known, and john d rockefeller himself is buried there. to show my respect i picked his grave clean.
peeled (only the yellow bits are useful), boiled, and steeping, the dandelions look awful, to be honest. luckily they don't smell yet, for while my roommate has been somewhat tolerant of my experiments thus far, she did wrinkle her nose in utter disdain at the cheesecloth-covered browning vat of goo on the kitchen counter. just wait until i add the yeast! one more day....

a few days ago i attended a party that consisted mostly of singers. now, classical musicians are known for their inclination to drink, and singers are known for exercising stupidity to excess. being the intellectual keyboardist i am, i glumly sat in a room filled with much nonsensical hilarity. i cannot drink alcohol (which just goes to show that dandelion wine is purely a curiosity), so i was left admiring furniture, cds, the ceiling, the dying fern in the corner, and finally the wine corks that were being mysteriously thrown in my direction.
being an incurable collector (see Papers!) i was shoving corks into my pockets until my hips looked like chipmunk cheeks (a most attractive characteristic, i must say). i brought them all home and thought, what do i do with you?

the next morning, at approximately 3 am, i awoke to my cat playing as happily amongst the corks as a toddler in a pile of raked leaves. after 30 minutes of aural torture, and a sound oddly similar to a feline choking on a slightly spongy cylindrical object, i thought, i must toss you out the window (with the feline following) or i must somehow render you immobile. i graciously opted for the latter.

so now i'm doing what i once swore i would never do: making a cork board. see, i'm not a wine connoisseur--though i read about it occasionally, being unable to taste it effectively negates whatever knowledge i acquire. opinions are useless in a vacuum. however, at the risk of appearing that i am posing as a oenophile, i am assembling a cork board out of the music school's prolific refuse simply because i cannot bear throwing anything away.

if all goes well, in one year you can come by and we'll pop open a bottle of amber, sweet, flowery wine, pour it into glasses, and place them on cork-board coasters that i store on a cork-board tray. and i can lie about all the $100 bottles of wine i have personally consumed, and you can lie about my phenomenal winemaking prowess, and we can while away a perfectly mediocre evening whilst secretly longing for that diet dr. pepper in the fridge, and for a cork collection that doesn't consist entirely of bottles $15 or less.