Too Many Connections

I hate days like today. They should be fun. We live in the country. Not upstate NY country. That's rural but pretty close in. This is Oregon country. Actual mountain lions. Someone living within a couple miles of us owns a machine gun and isn't afraid to use it. You wander away from home here and you might die of exposure. You can get used to that but it's nice to get back to the busy world once in awhile. So I get to go to the big city today for a meeting. The big city being Portland. It's a wonderful place. We lived there for 13 years. I got to have lunch with my friend Katie. Good Indian buffet and great conversation and somewhere in the middle of that Linfield's MySQL database decides it's getting too many connections and starts SHUTTING DOWN THE ENTIRE WEBSITE! Of course our sys admin is on vacation the rest of the week. Of course this is Spring Registration so the academic future of hundreds of students depends on online registration working and of course online registration is web based.
So I cut the meeting short, jump back in the car and enter the parking lot that is hwy 99 heading to the coast. Let me back up a bit. Linfield, my beloved college, is in McMinnville, about halfway between Portland and the ocean. More importantly, McMinnville is between Portland and the most heavily visited tourist destination in Oregon: Spirit Mountain Casino. Don't laugh, Number two is the Woodburn Outlet Mall. Back in the 60's or 70's the state in a well intentioned but ultimately painful decision, decided not to push the Interstate out to the ocean. The result is zillions of people trying to get to the beach and the casinos on two lane roads that are perpetually grid locked.
Anyway, by 4:30 I'm back at my desk just in time to restart Apache and hang around for two more hours praying the damn thing keeps running until 8pm when registration finishes. 6:30 and it's still running so I dash home (out here "dashing home" takes 30 minutes), I run in the house, fire up the laptop and the damn server is hanging again! One more restart and I'm just done.
Carolyn saves me from the spiral of self-pity and unemployable anxiety I was spiraling down by bringing home a bottle of Kim Crawford's 2006 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. New Zealand rules if you're looking for really approachable Sauvignon Blanc. The good French ones often need to be paired with food to really shine. This one could be a cocktail wine. I'll admit, I have a miserable sense of smell, but even I got this one. For those of you new to this wine, Sauvignon Blanc has a distict nose. Your local Somallier will call it "boxwood". The caretakers of Romancats.com would call it the smell of cat urine. Don't worry; think of it as the smell of really good cheese or maybe "slutty in a nice way". Just take a sip. This is well balanced with nice fruit, good acid, and a pleasantly tart finish. Carolyn thinks there might be some CO2 in there. That's not unusual but it means you don't want to cellar this. It might have started fermenting again. Not always, but it's something that tells us we should be drinking this as soon as it's cold. I'm not sure I agree. I don't see any bubbles in the glass. Unlike a lot of whites that should be served a bit warmer than you might think, this one's great straight out of the fridge. In the summer you could even throw an ice cube in it. Yes, you could! Deal with it! You don't have to massage the flavor out of this one. It's not overwhelming but it's not shy.
It was a bad week. We survived registration. A lesson to the virtual world: having a paper fallback system and people who know how to be nice to stressed out clients can save your ass. Next week will be better.