Hardly. I’d drink it first for the sheer pleasure of the thing. But this article (if you can read it. It might require registration.) from the Washington Post highlights wine as an investment. I am not sure how easily flippable wine is, but you often hear about wine at auction in NYC. Basically a restaurant stocks their cellar and then at a future date decides to sell off what they have at auction. Private collectors do the same. To me, it’s a volume play. The man in the story who has a single bottle of the 1990 Petrus should just drink and supremely enjoy his wine. Unless he has a full case, it’s kind of silly to sell it off unless he’s involved in a club with some serious collectors or something.

Leave it to me to start the Friday Drink topic early. *sigh*

Mom and Dad $225 - luggage
Sibling and Spouse - $0 nothing but my lovely presence for the holidays (read more below)
Nephews - $40 on clothing
Co-workers - $70 - special presents for three people and yummy chocolates for the office
Boyfriend - $90 theater tickets
Friends - $40 books for some girlfriends

That was it. No cards sent. Just a lot of holiday phone calls.

I bought a $500 Visa gift card for my cousin and his wife as a wedding present, but was fully reimbursed for it because my sibling was supposed to send an international money order last year while he was getting married, for which I gave $200. Fine. Sending it insured cost me an extra $12.

I did end up spending about $500 on my flight to CA, $30 to fill the car I borrowed instead of getting a rental, $74 on lunch for my family, $60 on seaside brunch for me and my parents, $10 on tape and some wrapping paper, $40 for dinner for me and the babysitter who took me to the airport instead of a shuttle service, and $160 for one night at the hotel after my folks checked out. I didn’t want my sibling to pay for it for me. It felt a little moochy to do that. So overall, my trip to CA cost me $874.

Eh. This wasn’t too bad. It could have been worse.

Crud. I thought I posted this last week.

This is a rare Saturday post, but I feel guilty for blowing off the blog while on holiday this week. (And drinking beer at lunch on Friday with my co-workers. Don’t laugh. I’m still doing server maintenance this weekend. I’ve EARNED IT.)

After the IRS website, I love Kay Bell’s blog, Don’t Mess with Taxes.

Recently, Kay was featured on NPR, but she didn’t say a peep about it on her blog. So I will toot her horn here.

OMG! KAY WAS ON NATIONAL RADIO!

It was a piece on year end tax moves and has 4 other resource links you might want to read while you have three days left this year. (Which are gone now because I spaced out over the holidays.)

Well, it didn’t cost me $100. That’s good.

Rundown on the night:

1. I picked up these tiny bottles of champagne for $5 each. Three couples = 3 bottles for a BYOB event. Turns out we don’t need them b/c we’re heading to a club instead of a warehouse party. One could say I wasted the money, but I’m using one of them to make my lazy morning mimosa today. (er, afternoon?)

2. We eat dinner at home. Chicken Kiev with saffron rice and grilled brussel sprouts. Tasty. Leftover saffron rice makes good fried rice with leftover chicken for breakfast today.

3. Drive up to Baltimore for weird club/quasi warehouse party. Cover is $10 each. But the drinks are $4!!! FOR STOLI VODKA DRINKS!!! Natty Boh was $2 a can. Heh. It was $6 bucks a case when I was in college. LOL. (National Bohemian Beer, from the Land of Pleasant Living. It’s a Baltimore icon literally. The night sky has a red neon sign of their winking man logo.)

OMG do I love how cheap Charm City is. Somoene’s date was from NYC and she was also loving the cheap drinks too.

I drove (free parking!), so I pounded two drinks early which was the equivalent of 3-4 drinks and one nice sweet champagne drink at midnight, gratis. I also had two waters, but I have no idea how much they cost. Sometimes, it’s nice to have a date take you out. Cheap as it was.

The music? The atmosphere? Well, heh heh. It was basically a hipster/art school party. (MD Institute College of Art is in Baltimore) Needless to say, I was laughing my a$$ off at the New York Dolls wannabes. But as one of the DJ’s said to me, they’re poseurs. Everything was cracking me up last night. The ’80’s pop song mash ups/samples made me laugh. I was telling our friends (who are much younger than me) how I had these songs on vinyl and these were some of the first albums I’d ever bought. The Purple Rain LP I own was a gift from a girl who dressed like Madonna a la Material Girl era. Pretty hilarious in retrospect. The killer of the night. The song that had me drooling with laughter was the Falco mashup of Der Kommissar. heh heh.

Everyone else was enjoying the deep irony being hipsters, but I was probably having the most fun of all. I was reliving all those moments in my bedroom dancing in front of the mirror and singing into my hairbrush. It was a good night. Pretty low key and didn’t really require a lot of effort, short of driving home while a little tired. I am so glad we didn’t spend all night driving around DC trying to find the *IT* thing to do.

Sometimes, it helps to have low expectations.