10 Years and Counting

Last week, I went with my mom to a very special Sevierville Chamber of Commerce member event.  The Hillside Winery celebrated 10 whole years of making excellent wine in Sevier County!  They had all kinds of neat things there for their celebration including this delicious cake with purple and blue icing on it.  The only thing that would have made this even more delicious is if the cake was chocolate.  It was vanilla and it was superly yummy!

Anyway, Mr. Stanfill (he’s the Membership Coordinator for the Chamber) and Ms. Clabo (she’s the Comptroller of the Chamber, and I don’t know exactly what that means except I know she’s in charge of knowing where all the money is coming in from and going out to at the Chamber) and Ms. McCroskey (she’s the Chief Executive Officer of the Chamber), they were all there, too, and I think maybe I saw Ms. Marr (she’s does Marketing for the Chamber) but I’m not sure because there were so many people at this event.

In fact, here’s a picture I took of people just coming to the event at the beginning of it!

That’s in the store part of Hillside Winery and there were way more other people in the other room by the exit sign that’s actually a enter place to get to the wine tasting section of Hillside Winery and even past that is where they make all the wine.  And plus, if you want, you can go there any day they’re open and ask for a tour, and if it’s tour time, one of the Hillside Winery people will take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of where they make wine.  I went on that tour and it was crazy what I learned about how wine gets made,.  Also it was superly interesting.

So anyway, while we were at the 10th Anniversary Celebration of Hillside Winery, I made sure I took a look at all the neat stuff in the store part and I even took pictures.  First off, I like this place a whole lot because they’re Chamber members just like me (I’m a Chamber member) so that means we’re kind of like business cousins.  We know each other, and we’re sort of related and that means we’re a lot like family, except we’re business related, not grandparent related.

Just like me, Hillside Winery totally loves kitty cats, and they have a lot of kitty cat and wine related things for sale on the store side of the winery.  I took pictures of some of the sayings you can put up on your wall, and then I saw this superly cute kitty cat corkscrew.  I don’t know what it means that it’s a double-hinged corkscrew but I know kitty cats like to play with corks from wine bottles, so I think probably this corkscrew makes sure the corks don’t get stuck in the bottle when you try opening it up.

My one grandpa had trouble this one time at our house opening a bottle of wine with a cork in it.  He used my mom’s corkscrew she had for like a bazillion years and it broke.  So my mom got her back-up corkscrew out (the one she won in a gift basket from another Chamber event she was at I didn’t get to go to with her), and my grandpa broke that one, too.  Next, he went out to his truck and came back with a screwdriver and I said I didn’t know there were screws on a bottle because that would be way easier to open the bottle than trying to pull a cork out with a corkscrew.  And then he used the screwdriver the same way he used the corkscrews, and this time the cork came out and the screwdriver did not break.

I’m thinking maybe a double-hinged corkscrew is probably superly strong like my one grandpa’s screwdriver is.

Also, the Hillside Winery store side has lots of other great stuff for sale (besides the wine on the wine side).  For example, they are totally a hundred plus percent ready for Hallowe’en, and I love Hallowe’en.  This year, I’m going trick-or-treating dressed up as a Ninja Princess, and maybe between now and when Hallowe’en happens, I can get my mom or grandma to buy some of these great Hallowe’en things from Hillside Winery.  I especially love the orange wine bottle with the black spider and spider web on it even though I really don’t like spiders in real life.  But if it’s just a painted spider on a painted web on a orange bottle, we’re good to go on loving that kind of spider.

And I saved the best for last because in just two more weeks, it’s going to be the Missy Barrett Treasure Chest of Hope Pirate and Swashbuckler Party where I’m going to raise as much  money as I can for the Smoky Mountain Area Rescue Ministries and that’s on Thursday, August 30 from 5 in the evening until 7 in the evening at the All Season Suites at 239 Dollywood Lane in Pigeon Forge.  The good news about that is that the day after is a day off because that’s Labor Day weekend.

Hillside Winery has this great pirate display area and I didn’t take pictures of everything in that corner because I think you should go there and see for yourself how cute all their pirate and mermaid stuff really is.  Here is a sneak preview of that pirate area though.

So Happy 10th Anniversary to Sevierville Chamber of Commerce member Hillside Winery, and I hope you’re around for another 15 years (because 25th Anniversary parties are the best) because then I’m going to be old enough to drink some of your wine that my mom and lots of other people say is superly delicious especially with steak grilled on an open flame in the backyard.

 

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Special Suppers Are So Worth It

School is starting soon (like in 2 weeks) so my brother Josh said he wanted to have a special going-back-to-school supper with me at a fast food place he loves like crazy.  It was a superly nice thing for Josh to do but also a bit funny because my mom doesn’t really do that going-back-to-school stuff other moms do because she looks out for sales all year long so when school comes back around, she already has pretty much everything we need already in the supply closet in her office.

Anyway, Josh’s favorite fast food place is Taco Bell, and when we went there I understood how come because it looks to me like they get it that teenagers have superly huge appetites because when I went to Taco Bell with my mom before, we never got a box of hard shell tacos that was stuffed full to the point where the box was poking out on the sides like this one did.

Josh said the food inside the box is the same amount as all the time, and the box was just kind of squooshed down a bit on the top and that’s what made the side poke out that way.  I wasn’t so sure because if the box was squooshed down on the top, then the tacos inside would probably be busted up or something.  But they weren’t.

Now when you look at that taco, there are some tell-tale signs about what’s going on with that taco especially when it’s a hard shell taco.  First off, you can see it’s a bit greasy on the left side and there’s a teeny ween spot in the middle.  That’s from the ground beef and the shell is soaking up the juicy part of the ground beef.  Sometimes if it gets a lot of that juiciness, the taco shell busts on that one side, so remember that so you don’t have a surprise like biting into your taco and having everything bust up and land all over your clothes instead of in your mouth.

Mostly though, you should just open up the package on the table and check for any cracks that are happening in your taco shell.  If there’s a crack, then make the strong half of the taco be like the bottom piece of bread in a sandwich and eat it that way.  That’s how I do it and I never have any tacos falling on me and my clothes.  Sometimes they fall on the table but that’s okay because really you should be eating over your plate (or the make-believe plate of your wrapper) so you don’t look like nobody ever told you what good manners look like.

In any case, Josh ordered the 12-pack option and that’s because he was superly hungry and he ate most of the tacos.  But that doesn’t mean I didn’t eat a whole lot of tacos.  I ate almost as much as Josh did.  I ate 4 and he ate the other 8, and plus we had soda to drink.

We talked a whole lot about going back to school and what teachers maybe we’re going to get.  In high school you get different teachers for every single subject, but in my grade, you pretty much have the same teacher for everything except for a couple of classes and that’s because high school teachers specialize in what they teach and teachers at my school know a lot about a lot of things but not about everything.  That’s why some classes are from other teachers of our school.

Then we talked about how we didn’t go away on vacation, and I told Josh people are always talking about how vacations are a chance to get away from it all, but there’s nothing about where we live I would want to get away from, so I’m totally a hundred plus percent A-okay with no vacation this year again because  I love everything here.  And plus, there’s so much to do here like hiking and stuff like that, and all of that is free and educational.

Josh agreed with me, and then he showed me some of the art he’s working on in his scribble art book he takes everywhere with him.  He told me he thinks that steampunk art and zentangle art are related, and after he showed me some of his steampunk work and some of his zentangle ideas, I think he’s right.

So if you have a chance to go out for a special supper with a family member, you should do that because it’s not like eating supper along together at home when your parents aren’t around.  It’s better than that — way better.