Coffee and Sports

Age ordered a coffee machine last week, and Saturday he finally had the time to pick it up from the post office. He also had a second card to call - which basically means that there was another parcel for him/us to collect. It said 'wine' on the card. He thought he could do that easily with the scooter (I had the car in use, transporting myself and my golf clubs to my Saturday golf game), and he thought it all out, taking a very big travel bag with him. However, he didn't count on the amount of wine there was! For our birthdays Lois and Richard got us namely 6 (!) bottles of lovely Canberra wines, in a flat box of 1m long, all 6 bottles neatly displayed in a row. So Age's plan to get the wine and the coffee machine home on the scooter went out the window. He took a taxi home instead. You can't say he isn't creative.

So now we're able to make real espressos and cappuccinos, trim decaf moccaccinos, americanos, long blacks, flat whites, soy lattes, and more! The challenging part is frothing the milk in such a way that you get microfoam, and not big airy bubbles. Need to practice that part a lot more. And because it's such fun to make coffee, we both had a nice and strong cappuccino yesterday evening - which resulted in being awake in bed. That it was 26 degrees still probably didn't help either.

Yes, a hot one today, 30 degrees at 6.30am already, soaring to a 39 around lunchtime, and then a southerly change (phew) with a nice 29 right now (7.30pm). We don't notice the heat that much actually, when it's that hot you just don't go outside much, and inside everything is airco'd. But... today was the first heat of the Santos Tour Down Under (TDU - a Tour de France, but then in South Australia), and I'm happy it wasn't me who had to race 140km on a bicycle with 41 degrees. Not really 'easing back' into the racing season after the winter break.

We hear quite a lot about the TDU, it's on every news bulletin on the tv and the radio, and also via Twitter and the Uni I get a lot of news about it. UniSA is sponsoring a team on the TDU, so that helps in being informed too. Not that I'm that interested in cycling races, but I've never been that close to it. May even be able to get a signature from Eddie Merkx :-)

Also on right now is the Australian Open Tennis tournament. It's great to be able to watch the matches live on tv! This too is broadcasted widely, and we get all the inside information through radio, tv, internet. Australia is fairly proud to have these events it seems. We just heard on the radio that we'll be having the Australian Swimming Champs in Adelaide in two weeks time or so - maybe a good opportunity to see Thorpe in real life?!

Then lastly: a King Crab, displayed in one of the shopping malls in town. Crazy how big they are. Apparently they are a bit of a pest I've heard - I don't know exactly where. Well, you don't want these nibbling on your toes in the water.

Be sure to check out two new blogs in the list of blogs: The Antarctica Diaries, about a scientific mission currently happening on Antarctica. It's not really a blog, so updates aren't detected by blogger, but there is something new every week.
And the Course Superintendent of our golf course keeps a blog too - there's quite a lot to maintaining a golf course!