What I did today

When I woke up this morning, it was such a beautiful day that I changed my mind about going into work to catch up on all the stuff I didn't get done on the weekend. I got undressed out of my work pants and black socks and work shoes and put my pajamas back on.
Work this past weekend was busy, on Saturday we had a wedding in our restaurant, so all of our dining got switched around, with our normal restaurant service in our function room, a trek up the hill for all the staff and equipment and food. It was Anzac Day weekend, though you'd never know it. One public holiday feels the same as the others in a hotel, except the decorations change. Feeling patriotic, everyone was patriotically horse riding and shooting and eating and having high tea.
I was very excited to have the day off today, even it it means a super early start tomorrow.
I decided to start on my list of things I must do.
First thing on the list was to take a walk along the newly slashed path and see how far it would take me up the back yard. I headed past the dam, with only 2 ducks today. Wary of snakes, I kept to the track. We thought they were all asleep (the snakes) but we have had a resident green snake all weekend at work on the verandah so I was being extra cautious.
The slashed path continued past the old airfield cones and into the neighbouring paddock (to the main part of the paddock) into a place I'd only been once before, in the car, and become surrounded by cows. It has always intrigued me because of the big hole in the earth wall at the boundary to the paddock that allows the tiniest glimpse beyond (it is probably just a big bunch of dirt, but curiosity about the hole has grown in the six months since we moved here.

No success with the big hole, it was only 50 metres away, but it was 50m of hip high grass and no one knew where I was and I had no water. Saving the hole for another day, I followed the track in the opposite direction. It led up a hill that had always looked so so. In our big paddock backyard, there are lots of corners that just look like more bush, so it had never seemed like a place to check out before. But because the slashed pathway led there, I figured there must be something to look at. The place was on the right of the strange grove of trees that have always looked too uniformly neat to be accidental. When we moved in, we thought they were olive trees from the previous owners who were starting an olive farm


I rounded a corner and came across the dam. This small dam is fed by yet another creek (4 creeks and counting that lead into our paddock). It had two small baby ducks having a swim, and then a huge rustling in the bushes and water which turned out to be scared mummy duck.


Further on, adjacent to the grove, I found the creek which was the source of the dam. No so much a creek as a huge erosion path, and suddenly I discovered the reason for the uniform trees.


The trees turned out to be the source of the amazing smell that we have enjoyed for the last 4 weeks or so. The blossom on the trees smells just like the most beautiful honey and fragrant smell of spring (ok, I know its Autumn, but some smells escape even my descriptive library of aroma). Standing in the shade at the edge of the grove, I drank up the wiffs. Then the birds started and I was laughed at by kookuburras.

I did not really want to leave to go back,it was so peaceful and new and far away from my normal life, even though my house was within view, but I had no water and I knew the walk back was fairly long (for me).


As soon as I got home, I started on task 2. Satin flowers. I saw this technique in a scrapbooking magazine a few months ago and had to try it. Last week in Toowoomba I dragged Michael into Lincraft and purchased 8 colours of satin pieces and a dozen intersting buttons.
What you need to do is cut your satin into 5 circles of decreasing size. Then using a tea light candle, pass the fabric through or close to the flame, so that it curls up. By turning the circle as you burn the fabric, it circles into a shallow bowl shape. By repeating it for each circle, you end up with lots of inner layers of circles which become petals. It is then assembled by stiching together and decorating with a nice button. They are great for a homemade broach or for scrapbooking.
I made three of these, just to prove I could, the decided it was time for Task 3.
Task 3 was writing my wine training course for tomorrow, which I am delivering as the first of s series of short training events for our waitstaff, who have next to no wine knowledge.

One of the points I have always tried to get across to people, whoever they are, is that wine is suggestive. That is, while people's perception varies and everyone smells different things in wine - depending on their experience and palate / aroma memory - as soon as you provide your opinion on a wine, others will start to smell that thing or taste that taste. It is unavoidable, which is why many serious wine tastings are conducted in silence. Wine evaluation is contagious.

This is important for waitstaff to know, because it means that they dont need to know much to be able to talk about wine. They can provide their sensory experience for the guest, and as long as it is not ridiculous, most people will agree.
One of my favourite tests in wine tasting is the uniformity of wine if you take away two sense, sight and smell. You are relying on the small amount of information that taste buds contribute without the retronasal information. Without sight, you have no expectation of what you might be about to put in your mouth. It is a great exercise as it shows just how reliant wine tasters are on their 3 main senses.


I tried it at home today, just to remind myself of how hard this lesson is. The first time I did this was at uni. We were all blindfolded and the teacher poured the wines into glasses out of sight, and gave them to us one at a time in our hands to taste, which we had to do with our noses pegged closed. The only thing we had to do was decide if the wine was red or white, nothing harder than that.
No one was allowed to talk, we had to put up our hands, still blindfolded, when the teacher asked if we thought the wine was red or white. The only tools we had were our sense of weight of the wine, tannin, alcohol. In other words, what we felt in our mouths. Being a seriously competitive bunch, we all considered for a few minutes before making this careful decision. Being in training, most of us got the right answer, over and over, but it was tough.

Today when I did this excercise, I thought I had it right on my first go, I took my fingers off my nose triumphantly and and the blindfold, and thats when the last of the palate hit my tongue and I looked at the wine I was holding and realised I had been too hasty to judge, being out of practice.

After the fun with wine, I caught the kitty sitting on my boudoir chair in the sun and she looked seriously cranky to be caught out.