Ooo. Y'all are talking about my field. My father's a mortician, like his father before him, and I spent my first 6 years living in the mortician's home built into the family mortuary.

Ah, the memories of playing hide-and-seek with my little sister in the casket showroom...sneaking into the chapel to practice on the service organ (now that sounds positively Wrong)...infuriating my father by messing up the movable type used to print the service pamphlets.

Oh, and being such a pest that they had to move all the doorknobs on the prep rooms up beyond my reach - not hard, I was a wee, wee child (round like a ball, but very very short). I used to say "My dad's in working with his folks" when strangers would ask what my dad was doing - that was Alex-as-a-child-ese for "he's embalming someone".

However, I faint at the thought of certain open wounds - blood doesn't bug me, trauma does - so, natch, I didn't follow in his (gruesome and cold-hearted) footsteps. Being a mortician embalmed my dad's soul - I'm not kidding. Cold as ice. We haven't spoken in 15 years - he could be dead, I would neither know nor care.

PS: "Six Feet Under" ain't far wrong.

Wow. Sometimes, I want to ask people "Why Goth?" NSM in your case, SH. :)

Can we shove the cork back in it and expect it to still be of comparative quality when we get back to it?

Short answer? No.

Longer answer: they make a device that allows you to put in a rubber stopper and then pull much of the air from the bottle, which will keep it fairly fresh for a day or two. IIRC, it's about $11 bucks. I *heart* it, though when we're both in a position to drink, a bottle doesn't usually last more than the one night.

We're not that big of drinkers, and I'm not sure I want to share it with anybody other than Hubby. Can we shove the cork back in it and expect it to still be of comparative quality when we get back to it?

Yes, but more than a week and the quality is likely to plummet.

t edit Heh. x-post with Plei. I generally have no problem with wine staying good for a few days. t edit again Or I have low standards. Though the vacuum air pump thingie is pretty cool.

Can we shove the cork back in it and expect it to still be of comparative quality when we get back to it?

Short answer? No.

Though you can buy a can of spray nitrogen, which is specifically meant to lay down a neutral layer on top of the wine in an open bottle and keep it fresher longer, but really, you should try to drink it all in one go.

Though you can buy a can of spray nitrogen, which is specifically meant to lay down a neutral layer on top of the wine in an open bottle and keep it fresher longer, but really, you should try to drink it all in one go.

I'm trying to remember if it was Cook's Illustrated or the local paper or Slate that just did their article on keeping wine fresh. Whichever it was, the rubber stopper method saved wine came out on top in the blind taste tests.

Oh, and also, Connie, you can always use some of the wine in a nice meat dish for the night you plan on drinking it, making sure to reserve enough for a glass or two for yourselves.

Another cool thing is that, if you donate your body "to Science" (which really means to a medical school), you can still donate whatever organs/tissues/bone/etc. are donate-able first.

Oh, yeah. I took an anatomy class for the anthro honors curriculum and it was kinda neat that when we studied a donated body to learn to identify the muscle groups they also included some random organs. They had more than one set of lungs there; one was all black, from a long time smoker and the other was nice and pink. Gave you an up-close-and-personal look at the damage caused by smoking.

The plastination exhibit has a lot of diseased organs. You start out thinking lung cancer is gross, but by the time you're done, it's the least of it. Blessedly, I've blocked a lot.

Connie, you can always use some of the wine in a nice meat dish for the night you plan on drinking it, making sure to reserve enough for a glass or two for yourselves.

Ooh, encourage my husband to experiment more with the cooking. He's the cook in our house.

Oh, fuck ... I wonder how many of his drugs say "Drink alcohol and die" on them.