Coffee Break: Dae Violet Hour

20 Comments

1. What are your favorite specific wines or wine brands? Looking to branch out from Meiomi and Conundrum. Tx!

   1. I have found that Costco wines are almost always quite good. They curate well.

      1. I learned here that the Kirkland Marlborough Sauvingon Blanc is actually Kim Crawford. I also tend to like the Pinot Noirs and Cabernets that Costco sells.

   2. Whatever the good independent wine store or local grocery store wine department recommends. They often have excellent value wines from smaller producers.

      1. +1. And if you have a Total Wine, they’re good too. But try the local spots first :)

   3. I like California cabs. Caymus, Far Niente, Reguschi, and Chimney Rock are some of my favorites.

   4. Trader Joe has surprisingly good wine.

      1. Kona Sauvignon Blanc!

   5. I love a lot of French wines but I feel like for grocery store wines it’s hard to go wrong with a California red Zinfandel. (I throw the word red in there specifically because I once made the mistake of ordering a glass of “Zinfandel” in New Jersey and got the pink stuff…)

2. How likely are those dna ancestry tests to be right? Like my family as far as I know is wasn’t white going back through colonial times. They are from rural areas with no migrants, so English and maybe some scotch-Irish ancestors in the 1800s.

   I have a sibling loudly claiming we are something else and I think it’s likely bonkers on the test (versus family cheating caught this way or some actual truth to it). Like no one has known a non-English speaking ancestor in any family memory I can recall, so I doubt we are Dutch or German or anything like that. Maybe it would make us more interesting than being simple country folk, but even a lost 1800s immigrant heading to the southern coastal plain (but nowhere near a port) is but one leaf on a family tree.

   1. What kind of results are we talking about? Those tests just show genetic similarities and there are all kinds of reasons why your ancestors might come from one country but have genes similar to people from another. And of course it is pretty common for children to be created outside of marriage, consensually or otherwise.

      1. Eh, but if you are “broadly northwest Europe” and your family names are Smith and Taylor and you are from south side Virgijia, don’t claim you are Belgique even if you like the beer. Even if you were from there, it is so long ago as to be tenuous bordering on fictional. OTOH, Germany and France have changed borders so often, who can say? Ditto Poland. But sometimes we tie a heritage to a language.

         1. My understanding of the national and ethnic assignments/ declarations in those DNA test is that they are “tenuous bordering on fictional”. Great phrase.

            It’s likelihood and confidence. So a scientist is 85% confident that you are 5% Turkish, but probably 99% confident that you are 95% Scotch-Irish.

   2. Several of my family members and I recently did 23 and me. Our minds are blown because it appears that someone we all assumed was a blood relative was actually not a blood relative at all, and is from a completely different part of the world. The non-biological relative is deceased, but some living souls have been left with a lot of questions that will probably never be answered but with an explanation of why they look so different from the rest of us. I thought this only happened to other families.

      I believe the results are accurate, because the test identified many of our relatives, even second cousins I grew up with, and the results are consistent among all of us who tested. The mystery person’s ancestry and the probable dates as identified by 23 and me match up with a large influx of immigrants to my hometown.

      So yes, I think it was accurate for my mostly mayonnaise-American family. I have heard from friends of other races, however, that it is less so.

   3. It is the rare family that has a “correctly” documented family lineage. You never know. Cheating is as old as time.

      Yes, 23andMe is quite accurate. Sounds like your sibling is being a bit insensitive, but it isn’t surprising.

   4. My brother in law is convinced his dad his red-haired family of second generation Irish immigrants to the US are partly descended from a “Cherokee Princess.” Not based on DNA, but from some really bad linking of family trees in Ancestry.

      It does seem every southerner I know thinks they are part Cherokee, though.

      There’s a lot of crap on those websites & apps. It’s the Garbage-In-Garbage-Out problem.

3. I posted a while ago– just returning to vent a bit. Some time ago, my husband and I noticed that a close family member had been acting strangely, including by expressing profoundly paranoid behaviors. We weren’t sure whether they were experiencing a mental health crisis, or whether they had relapsed after over a decade of sobriety. It came out that they had been abusing substances, perhaps for months. Some of those substances can induce psychosis, but it’s still not evident what’s going on. I have not seen them in a totally lucid state since then.

   The last six months have been awful. They are refusing any form of treatment, and while the substance use and most extreme behaviors have slowed somewhat, there were weeks on end responding to emergencies and trying to manage other (well-meaning) family members. We’ve now reached a strange equilibrium where we’ve accepted that there’s little we can do, and there are fewer day-to-day crises, but nothing has advanced or changed at all. It’s been particularly hard on my husband (it’s his relative).

   Just venting — life is tough.

   1. I’m sorry. That’s so tough to have to stand by and not be able to do anything, or do much.

   2. Yes, I remember your posts. I’m familiar with this stressor, unfortunately. It devastates families. My aunt had a psychotic illness from a young age, and ultimately became homeless. I never learned the details. But at some point she pulled things together, after we were long estranged.

      My brother’s wife is also mentally ill with a psychotic illness, and it has been just devastating to his marriage and their children. Years of instability, very damaging to the children and my brother. I fear for all of them. Finding good care is very very difficult, and when a person is in denial of their problem (or has a disorder that causes lack of insight), it seems hopeless. You must wait until the person is so disabled they are a danger to themselves or others to “force” any treatment. And even then it can be brief, with poor follow-up. And endless cycle of instability, and brief calm.

      I strongly encourage your brother to find a support group/person by seeing a therapist on his own to suggest strategies to use with his sister and help him cope. I also found NAMI local support groups very helpful. Check for one in his area. I met a woman there who I would meet for coffee sometimes. Great person to vent to, who understood.

      When I read on this site about someone being upset about burning a food item while on vacation, I just quietly laugh to myself. If they only knew…..

4. Pureology Hydrate is my fave for conditioner. It had a cooling effect and leaves me hair silky smooth!

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