Happy Monday

Rolling your bottom around on a spiky ball is not the most pleasant way to start the morning, though it does wake you up. My back is sore again. Though really, that is its natural state; the pain free days are the anomalies. On the upside, I am a redhead, which apparently makes me more tolerant to pain than the average Joe (or blond)- there has to be at least one upside to this pesky 'more prone to skin cancer and jokes about orangutans' gene. My osteopath is often a bit impressed when I saunter in with a two-week-old injury and then he discovers how bad it actually is. Hooray, I'm tough! Now I just wish I could quit with old-lady back pain. This time it was sneaky, I woke up with a mild niggle, nothing really, a bit stiff. It has evolved into complete lower back jam (and not the fruity kind). I will however develop abs of steel because I am constantly reminded to suck them in because my stability without switching on the core is bugger-all.

Happy Monday. Injury is such a fun thing to read about isn't it. I apologise, let's get down to the moments.


As it turns out, the pot at the end of my rainbow is a spittoon.

Photo Day in May

I am a people-watcher. 

There is a lot you can learn about people (and sometimes yourself) by observing others. I am also a terrible eaves-dropper, in that I am exceptionally good at it but feel bad about snooping (well, a little bit bad). There is a bit of a blog-trend at the moment to do 'a photo an hour' posts where you take a photo of something every hour for a day. That's right, people giving you permission to have a snoop into their life!! Generally they are filled with gorgeous pictures of breakfast in bed and cute dogs frolicking. My life is a bit same-samey to do these posts on a regular basis but I do so enjoy having a little snoop into other people's lives, so I though I might do one a year (or something like that) and have a little snippet of what my life looked like at the time. And because I like rhyming I decided to do this on May Day...it made sense at the time.

I set my alarm for 6:10 but hit snooze a few times so it was almost 7 by the time I staggered out of bed.

7am

Ted ready for his walk

These are a few of my fa-vour-ite things {Autumn 2014}

Autumn is my favourite season so isolating just a few favourite things has been a bit tricksy but here are the winners.

Haighs chocolate fish 
Regular readers will know how I feel about Haighs. It has become a bit of a tradition for The Bookworm to give me a Haighs chocolate fish for easter. There is a bit of history to this choice- I love chocolate bunnies, but the ears are by far the best bit- easter chocolate does taste better than other chocolate and the ears are absolutely the best bit of the rabbit. Well, the fish is essentially 300g of rabbit ear chocolate.

Here are some make-up free selfies on easter morning in my super fashionable dressing gown. I also just got the PS Express app on my phone so had a bit of a play with it as well.

Grape Porn

I am usually a preparer. If I am going to do something, whether it be travel, bake or just go out to dinner; I study my project first, make a plan, decide what I am going to order (trust me, it is much better than have me sit in a restaurant overwhelmed by the choice of a whole menu!). My journey into the wine world has not been like that though. From snippets of knowledge gained at many a cellar-door I have trip-stumbled my way into jobs in wine retail, wine bars and now a winery. I have learned an enormous amount along the way and there is something delightfully innocent about the constant search for knowledge and the feeling that there is still this enormous cloud of possibility to be explored.

Until now I have never really worked this way. I have studied and learned all the information first and then started doing. I was always scared of blagging my way through, being discovered for a fraud. My life is about learning so this was a very narrow-minded way of approaching it, life. So bring on the trip-stumbling.

Such was (and still is) the case with wine-making. I have buckets of textbook knowledge since doing my WSET Level 3 exam and important sounding words about wine-making techniques trip off my tongue with surprising ease but it was a bit like reading some J. R Tolkien and considering yourself an expert on Hobbit physiology. To put it simply, I had not seen grapes, except in the supermarket, and they do not count. Most of my visits to wineries have always been in winter when the vines are dormant. A couple of times I have been close to vines that had leaves on them which generated much excitement but rarely have I see actual wine grapes and been allowed to go close enough to touch them.

Until now.

I assume not everybody is as excited about wine grapes as I am but some of you may be interested in seeing what they look like before they become the elegant complex nectar in your wine glass.
Just after starting my new job I took myself on a little excursion around the winery to photograph the vines and taste the grapes and this is what I came up with:

Sauvignon Blanc