Yrae Chronicles

Happy Australia Day two days later! This summer has been absolute balls and I feel like Australia Day this year was really all about the CFS volunteers et al. One of my Dad's mates is a CFS volunteer and has been doing stints in NSW, obviously Cudlee Creek and over to Kangaroo Island. The amount of time these people are sarificing to go into the teeth of these bastard fires time and time again is just insane.

Alex was over for a bit of a whirlwind weekend from Sydney, landing on Saturday for a 30th birthday on Sunday then off again that night. I picked her up from the airport Saturday morning and we headed up to LOT.100, which I've been meaning to do... well, since it opened, really but especially this summer. It's a sort of Hills booze collective place, joint cellar door between these five beverage companies: Hills Cider Co for the cider (my favourite cider), Mismatch Brewing for the beer (they have fruit flavoured beers!), Adelaide Hills Distillery (who make 78 Degrees gin, among other things), Ashton Valley Fresh for the non-alcoholic juices and, most importantly, Vinteloper for the wine. Vinteloper was one of the wineries that lost every single vine to the Cudlee Creek fires and, like every other business affected, they haven't been asking for donations but instead just saying BUY OUR STUFF. GIVE US BUSINESS. So we went there to do just that :D LOT.100 itself is perfectly fine, though from the pizza oven you could see one of the hills behind them was distinctly more brown than others, so that's terrifying.

So yus. Got a pizza and a cheese platter for lunch, a glass of rosé and a glass of red, then two bottles of shiraz, two of rosé and one of pinot gris to take home, along with some cider and beer (both flavoured with Davidson plum, aww yeah).

We then Googled antique shops in the general area and cruised up to Birdwood via Woodside and Lobethal, straight through the middle of the fireground. This was the first time I'd been through the fireground since the bushfires and my god it's terrifying. Entire hills behind Woodside burnt. Trees literally right on the edge of Birdwood turned to charcoal. One house that was just a few bits of corrugated iron sitting in ash. Acres and acres and acres of brown vineyards and burnt orchards. Entire chunks of forest where the road went through it with the trees completely black right up to the very top, their leaves bleached white to ash, and just imagining these towering walls of fire reaching that high; and then, right in the middle of it, a house still with its rose bushes out the front. This is the stuff that always amazes me in bushfires, the stuff that doesn't burn. Just imagining the inferno the fieries had to deal with, and they saved not just the house but the roses. I dunno that just... feels more real. They're volunteers. This isn't their job, they're not just getting it done and moving on, they know the roses are just as important to save, cos that's life. To whoever lived there, they love their roses. It just touches me to see that.

Every time we saw livestock we cheered them. Well done, cows and sheep, you survived a bushfire! Cos there were plenty of photos during the fires of livestock wandering the streets after the owners just opened the gates to give them the best chance at survival.

The gum trees, of course, will be fine. Give 'em six months and they'll all be covered in fluffy green pompoms cos that's what they do, but the rest is going to take years to rebuild. I still need to sit down and figure out exactly who I want to donate to. Red Cross just kinda puts it all into general revenue so your dollars aren't necessarily going to end up with the people you're donating to, so that bugs me. I want to go directly for KI, since it'll be a while before I can take leave to get over there and spend money on the island. I've been up to the Cudlee Creek fireground and spent money there, going to the T20 Showdown this Sunday (it's Crows vs Power but they're playing cricket I can't wait) but still need to work out an actual solid donation.

Anyway. Sidetracked. We visited three different antique shops, specifically looking for jewellery because Alex loves her some antique sparkles, and finally found some proper vintage stuff in Birdwood where I enabled her into buying a ring. Cos it was pretty! And the fire was RIGHT THERE at the end of the street! And it's not like it was hellishly expensive, and it was pretty! So she bought it. I'd seen a necklace of freshwater pearls out the front, all in different colours, and then inside found some earrings of the same multicoloured freshwater pearl variety. So I got them both.

We've also decided our next girls' trip will have to be KI. SA Tourism Commission has ditched the current campaign in favour of #BookThemOut and, ngl, made me tear up first time I saw that. I've always been a parochial South Australian, always try as much as possible to buy SA stuff, and this just makes me want all the more to go do SA things.

Vinteloper's first vintage back had better be called 'Phoenix' or something I swear to G.

HOLY SHIT THE INTERNET LOADS AGAIN. I can load other pages of LJ outside the flist! I can download Doctor Who! dA doesn't take 20 minutes to load one picture! IT LIVES~ *loves on it* Never say we downloaded 86gigs in a day ever again, cos I swear I'll be around next time to bitch your arse off >(

SO YES. I went up to Mum's and Dad's over the Easter long-long-long weekend*, then took the remaining three days of last week off. Mmm, 10 days off for only 3 days of annual leave, tasty. Good Friday, Mum and I had a Dexter marathon, which finished on Monday, so she's caught up with that now :D We also had pork for dinner, because we're REBELS and pork belly is made of win and awesome, especially when Thai.

Easter Saturday was the traditional Oakbank Races, which my parents and a group of their friends do every year but this was only my second time. The 6am start tended to put me off in previous years >> You have to get up that early so you can drive inside the track and park in the best spot right on the boundary without having to squeeze between the four-wheel drives and Mercs. Tradition goes that each couple/family is in charge of one part of the day's eating--one lot does breakfast of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, another does lunch entree, my parents get lunch mains (barbecued Moroccan salmon, and my watermelon, olive, feta and mint salad this year), then there's dessert and afternoon tea/coffee and a cheese platter.

The five blokes, including Dad, have had a running VOR** competition, which has always been won by one of the guys until an ammendment of the rules two years ago that made it the VODR*** competition. Much fun is had comparing these c1969 bottles of red to vinegar and drain cleaner (ie pour it down the drain cos it's not good for ANYTHING). Dad's was the youngest--only a 1987--but one of the nicest I thought. Quite drinkable indeed =3

Packing up everything into the car at the end of the day, we had the footy on and everyone, including about three other camps around us, bonded over listening to the Power get beaten by the Gold Coast. It was hilarious stuff, you guys. You don't even know.

Easter Sunday Mum put on a feast four the four of us plus Colin's girlfriend and it was beautiful~ X9 We don't really tend to do Easter in my family, apart from a Lindt gold bunny from the Easter Bunny, but I think because I've moved out now, Mum decided any excuse X3

Easter Monday/ANZAC Day, nothing much. Went down to Victor Harbor to have an open inspection of Nanna's house and NOBODY turned up =( So I played Pokémon until my battery ran flat cos I hadn't charged it in about a week. And then Dexter marathon :D Followed by Doctor Who and alksdghlaksj this series will be epic, I can tell. Moffat love <3 Next episode is now downloading because I CAN DO THAT NOW OMFG.

Easter Tuesday... buggered if I know. I think we caught up on Burn Notice or something.

Wednesday was BAROSSA DAY~ <3 <3 You guys know I love the Barossa by now <3 <3 Visited the tried and true favourites of Henschke, Rockfords and Peter Lehmann and 'didn't have time' to do Two Hands. They were charging for it. Wineries that charge for tastings... yeah that's dodgy. But yes. I walked away with 15 bottles from Henschke, 9 from Peter Lehmann and one each of the Rockfords reds on the tasting menu (so another 6 of them, plus a white). They're sitting behind me in boxes at the moment, which will have to change =/ Vast majority of this stuff is for cellaring, so drink-in-ten-years type stuff. I worked out that my time off--three public holidays and three annual leave days--roughly paid for the wine, so that's a nice way of looking at it =3

Thursday came back home and found the internet was still buggered after the previous Wednesday when it had carked it, Friday I spent being pissed off at the internet for being dead but knowing nothing would be done because it was going to rollover today anyway, Saturday I was fed up enough with the net that I gave up and went to Marion. Two stylin' jumpers, two elegant pairs and two feather pairs of earrings and a fluffy scarf later I feel happy.

Also on Saturday night, ( footy happened )

Sunday, made dinner, yesterday back at work, today still at work, but HAVE INTERNET BACK NOW YES. Life is good :D




* We also got ANZAC Day on Easter Monday, so the Easter Monday public holiday rolled over to Tuesday. FIVE DAY WEEKEND HELL YEAH.

** Very Old Red (wine)

*** Very Old Drinkable Red (wine)

Being tipsy is fun :D Especially when you've done so on $60+ bottles of wine. I like when Anna P comes up here. Dad takes her expensive bottle of red as an opportunity to bring out his own expensive (and impressively aged--like the 1991 Penfolds Estate shiraz. Ooh yes) bottle of red. And I bought some nice cheeses to go with it while we watched the cricket peter out to an unimpressive draw, so that played second string, but it was all very nice X)

We'll have to do it again for the next match. Maybe Australia will actually WIN A GAME omg. How un-Australian is this series, srsly?