Wine Country and Jay's Staying

I've been blog-less for a week. I'm long overdue for a post. But we took an amazing trip to wine country in California in between. We started in Napa, then went to Sonoma and ended in San Fran. All three places were great (I think Hess was our favorite. Maybe it had something to do with the former Holstein, Iowa woman who served us our wine tasting tour). Going in the off-season paid off, I think. We didn't have to wait in lines. We got great service and access everywhere. Awesome. And while we were waiting to get on a cable car, I ran into a woman with whom I graduated from high school in southern Illinois. Unbelievable!

One quick observation...Iowa is nowhere near as green as San Fran. The recycling efforts there seem to dwarf ours here. We stopped by a restaurant on a pier. They had three containers for waste...trash, compost and recyclables. Very impressive.

Tuesday looks to be a big news day around here. A big winter storm may come our way. The Iowa Supreme Court takes up gay marriage (no decision expected for months). And Governor Chet Culver will finally tell Iowans how state departments will cut $40 mil from their budgets. The Des Moines Register has been trying for a while now to get those cuts. Culver's office had failed to turn that info over. I guess Tuesday we'll all finally get to see what these cuts are and what they will mean for everyone in the state.

I haven't understood what NBC has been doing for the past few years. It seems the network gives up on prime time shows pretty soon. Didn't "Friends", "Seinfeld" and "The Office" all struggle at first? And CBS and ABC have zoomed past the peacock in the ratings. Here's an interesting move though. It looks like the network will announce Tuesday Jay Leno will host an hour-long prime time show at 9m central time Monday through Friday. No network has ever tried something like this. NBC decided a few years back Leno would leave "The Tonight Show" so that Conan O'Brien could take over. Now it looks like we can watch both guys five nights a week. Now that's entertainment.