Weekend Update!

The fruit of 3 hours labor

Saturday was, alas, another grey day.  Instead of basking in the sun on my day off, I spent it milling around a mall feeling dejected by how many things I want cost $1,000 (I'm talking USD).  Why can't cute quality stuff be cheap?  JCrew, I miss you.  Please come to me. I seriously spent 3 hours trying on stuff and ended up buying a pair of black pumps from Marks & Spencers.   The only other thing I even considered buying was this beautiful tank top from Paul Smith.  It had beautiful flower print and flowed freely.  But it was $2,400.  Yes, that's almost $300USD for a tank top! 

Cute, but not $300 cute

Maybe when this wine things pays off big.  (Ha! In what lifetime!?)

Small square bottle on the left was my fav

I also stopped in to my favorite wine shop in Kowloon City to say hi to my best wine friend Jimmy.  Paul and I always think of excused to go see Jimmy.  He's so sweet and knowledgable about wine, and always walks us through a fun and informative tasting.  This time I was solo, but needed wine for Kina, so I popped in.  He only had one red (Italian, nice), but tons of whiskey!  We worked our way through four whiskeys, a young Japanese that had been aged less than a year in fresh oak being my favorite.  Ended up picking up a nice Australian Shiraz for the Kinster, which was brought out hours later. Twas quite good if I do say so myself.


Saturday Paul and I spent an amazing night with our amazing friends.  Nina and Kenny both turn 30 this week, so they threw a 60th birthday party.  First off, I cannot say enough about the catering company they had!  As you walk into the door you are instantly greeted by one of the 3 (I think) men working asking what beverage you would like.  That's service.  They continually walked around the party offering up different little trinkets of delicious food.  There were mini burgers which I heard were nice but didn't try, tuna atop sweet potato-yum, salmon ontop of something I don't know but was delicious, mini potatoes hallowed out and filled with pork,goat cheese topped pastry-yummmmmm, and a chicken quesadilla that was not my fav- you can't win em all.

I hadn't been to a catered party in someone's home here, and it was a really nice touch and I'm guessing took a lot of pre-party pressure off Nina and Kenny.  Ohh and did I mention the wine???  Catered by yours truly!  Thanks, Kenny!!  The whole evening was flawless.  We hadn't seen Kina in a while, and we got to meet some of their friends from home and work whom we hadn't met before, and then caught up with other friends in common. The whole Thanksgiving crew was there, one of which we found out was pregnant.  Congratulations Helen and Dave!!!   Totally asa night and the only thing that I would have done differently was not have had to work the next day. Boo.  At the stroke of midnight P and I took off in our red taxi to retire to bed.

Sunday turned out to be amazing!  It was super grey and miserable when I left for HOFWs, but by the time we pulled into Cyberport (SW HK Island) the sun was a shining and the weather was hot.  Greg and Sean were up in Discovery Bay, so it was just Young Lionel and myself.  Not going to lie, I was totally nervous we would bomb and make no money and then have Greg on my back all week about how bad I failed.  Turns out we did good!

Cyberport set up

Greg and Sean would check in periodically throughout the day telling us where sales should be.  But they were never quite there.  Come 3 when Paul showed up I was kind of freaking out.  With three people there it was easier to manage the table and solicit more business.  We were doing tastings of most of our wines, and oddly, no one wants to drink wine at noon.  Come 4 or 5 it's a different story.  Once people taste the wine 90% chance they're going to buy something.  It's pretty annoying when people don't, although I know I've done it before.  Margins people, we need greater margins!  At the end of the beautifully sunny day, I walked around bottles in hand as Sean does at all events, and gave our end of the day prices.  To my surprise they sold.  I actually sold out of our Prosecco and Pinot Grigio that way!  Asa, one less thing to carry home.  All in all we beat Greg's goal by a couple thousand dollars.  Wooot!!!  And most importantly, proved that I can run a successful event!  Did I mention we got to 'taste' the wines too?  I think the liquid courage helped more than a little.  And Paul would be pissed if I didn't mention that he had a big sale!  He worked with a guy talking about wines and foods, and dude ended up buying $1,800 worth.  Perhaps I have a budding salesman on my hands.  And twas tots more fun once P got there, too!  Hopefully they'll put us on Cyberport every month.


Back to work...