orange wine

Today I reracked my orange wine.  And a very nice drop it is turning out to be.  I added a very small amount of sugar to the racking and I am going to bulk age it for a couple of weeks then bottle it.   Now I am a complete amateur when it comes to making wine but I am learning heaps along the way.  The first wine I bottled was a rice and raisin wine.  At the bottling stage it tasted horrible.  I decided to boost the flavour a bit by adding some sugar to sweeten it a bit.  After all I enjoy a glass or two of sweet wine.  Uh uh.  If you are going to add sugar to wine you add a little sugar to the wine, not everything that you can get your hands on.  A litle bit would have worked wonders.  After a few weeks the wine matured and it would have been a reasonable wine except it is so overly sweet it is nearly undrinkable.  Lesson learnt.

worms

Second day of my two week holidays today and after spending a relaxing day in the country yesterday it was down to the real work today.
After doing a bit of shopping here and there Jenny and I finally made it to Bunnings. We headed straight on down to the garden section.
"Do you have worms?" I asked the guy as he headed towards me.
He smiled. "Well no actually, I don't" he smiled again.
Duh I thought to myself. Ask a stupid question.
He smiled at me again.
"But I think if you went back to aisle 22 you would find them about three quarters of the way down on the right hand side.
We trotted back to aisle 22 and sure enough there on the shelf next to the compost bins were boxes of worms.
I was amazed. Worms ...on the shelf. Then I began to wonder about their shelf life. How long could they stay there and still be viable?
I checked out the boxes. One lot contained 500 live worms and the other 1000. Wow 1000 seemed like a bit of overkill to me so I gently picked up the box labelled 500 live worms and made my way to the checkout.
At home I gently carefully unpacked the box. There seemed an awful lot of something in there but it didn't look like worms. Maybe they were past their use by date and I hadn't noticed. I decided I had better put on my reading glasses and actually read the box.
Oh! In smaller red writting it told me that this box contains" Worms - Worm Eggs - Castings - Food Fillers, and to please take the usual precautions as you would when dealing with any fertilizer related product. Mmmm so it doesn't look like there are actually 500 real live worms in my box and not only that does it also mean that my box of environmentallty friendly worms is actually toxic?

terang not kerang

near Cobden Vic

Stone wall fences between Colac and Camperdown Vic.

David had a job in Terang yesterday.

"Fantastic I'll come along to keep you company". I enthused. 'I always enjoy a day in the country. " I haven't had a good look around Kerang for a long time."

"No its Terang were going to. Totally in the opposite direction."

"OK a few hours in Terang sounds nice to".

And it was. The day for a winters day was perfect. We drove down from Melbourne through Geelong,Winchelsea, Colac and Camperdown. The scenery was beautiful. Green everywhere and I was totally impressed with the stone wall fences between Colac and Camperdown. They were beautiful. Terang itself was a lovely place. We had lunch on the run from a local cafe. Very nice. On our way back to Melbourne we drove via Cobden and Simpson. The terrain was spectular. It was mainly diary country. Dairy cows, dairy cows oh there are a few sheep and more dairy cows. An incredibly idealic day.

who is training who

Another exhausting day at doggie school. I am sure Modo the Magnificent truely believes this is where he goes to educate me. He will do what I ask him to do as long as 1.he has finished checking out that cute little number with the long black hair 2. is not watching what is going on in the other field - just in case they are doing something more interesting than him. Or 3. as long as I realise that he is still the one in charge.

Doggie school is a battle of the wits and I am coming in a poor second.

the little car who couldn't

The other night a driverless car deciding it had waited around long enough slowly and silently backed itself across the service road, over the nature strip and onto the footpath. As it made it's way onto Maroondah Highway and freedom it became stuck on the gutter and had to wait there rather foolishly to be rescued by the very person who had left it waiting in the first place. How unlucky can a little car get.

and now the real journey has just begun

Some of the equipment needed for my e-journey. And the big bonus I didn't need to be at the airport by midnight.

Oh joy of joys I have finished my learning 2.2. I did let a bit of doubt creep in at times and I had the 'I will never finish this' feeling but finish it I did and now I look back and think that wasn't so bad afterall. Actually it was at times totally frustrating. Just trying to get the time and at times finding a handy little helper available when I needed them was the hardest bit. No on second thoughts understanding what it was that I was reading or supposed to be doing or actually getting it to work the way that it was meant to work was the most frustraing part or maybe it was stareing down the endless list of things still left to do... Anyway on my e-journey I have encounted many many things that I would never have known about and now I have a little understanding of a lot of these things. It is now up to me to build on what I have already learnt and make this e-journey truely worthwhile.

audiobooks

This is only the beginning. Great to see so many out of print and hard to find books made available through this media. A lot have been scanned which must have been hugely time consuming. You would really need a passion to scan your whole collection. I also had a look at Dymocks and for around $8 you can instantly buy a downloadable audio book for your ipod. Think of what is available now and what will be available in 5 years time.

podcasts, smodcasts

While doing my rounds of the podcasts and something to do with libraries etc I came across Sunnyvale Public Library www.sunnyvale.ca.gov/Departments/Library. Fantastic. I’m still trying to work out exactly how to get a feed from their site to my blog. Guess I will have to wait until I am able to find he who knows everything. If I put a few nice treats in the fridge I am hoping that that will bring him out into the open. Sunnyvale public liibrary is definately worth a look.

you tube cont......

Oh boy. This was fun and totally frustrating. I was in a car riding into a thunderstorm, on the side of a motorbike riding into Derby WA, I saw some beautiful historic photos of Conegliano Italy and watched a couple of guys sitting by the fridges outside of Euston enjoying an ale or two and 'talking' to the big trucks as they drove past. Then I found this wonderful card trick and decided that this was what I was going to add to my blog. This is where the frustration began. After trying many imaginitive ways to put this in my blog, I looked up instructions by doing a google search. It still didn't work. I eventually dragged one who knows all away from his homework. Oh thats easy he said full of know how. Uh uh no it wasn't. I did however have the right idea it was just that my video was also linked to a web site and when copying the embed info we had to copy piece by piece leaving out the www.http and then putting it back into the code after we had copied it. OK I think I hear you laugh there is an easier way than that. There may be but this worked for us.

you beaut you tube