Red Wine and Chinese Food

There has to be a first time for everything. Family dinner the other night included dishes too numerous to explain. It became painfully apparent during our first course that I was the slow one at the table. We'd ordered snow crab prepared two ways, one with a black bean sauce, another with salted eggs. Both delicious. Both very messy. I quickly gave up on elegance and abandoned my chopsticks in favor of using my hands. Between trying to crack open the shells and extracting the meat, I somehow managed to drip sauce all over the table and myself, which of course set in motion me trying bring some semblance of order to my wedge of the table, and by the time I was done with that, everyone else had finished eating. So with five pairs of eyes staring at me I repeated this process of inefficient eating, finishing a full ten minutes after the rest. Thank heavens for the Shiraz so I could forget my troubles.