Here’s a nice interview with R.E.M.’s Mike Mills as he reflects on Chronic Town twenty years after its release. (Link courtesy of Kevin.)

Sommelier, here I come!
The Snook and I almost missed our first wine-tasting class tonight because somebody misread the date on the acceptance letter. Tsk, tsk. Anyway, we’re doing this class through the Sydney Uni CCE with Huon Hooke, who’s this pretty famous Australian wine judge and writer. Tonight we learned all about how wine ages and why every wine doesn’t necessarily get better as it gets older. We tasted four different wines, two reds and two whites, and within each we had an older and younger version. (The oldest as a 20-year-old cabernet savignon. Snookums thought it was a bit past its peak though.) It was pretty cool for a novice like me, because comparing them like that made it easy to see the changes. I even managed to ask a good question: “If the big variable in how the wine ages – and whether it goes bad – is the cork, why the heck are we still using them?” Turns out Mr. Hooke is a big advocate of using other things, like plastic corks and screw tops. Huh. I also had a lot of fun watching the hoity-toity grown-ups spitting out each mouthful like professional tasters. Not me, babe. That wine was too good and expensive to waste. The “young” vintages were all, like, $60/bottle, and the older ones didn’t even have prices listed (because apparently the only way you get them is at auction). I believe wine exists to be drunk, so I downed ’em all. Lest you think I was the only lush, though, I’ll have you know that the woman on the other side of Snookums not only drained each glass before we even discussed it, she admonished the guy pouring for not giving her enough. I at least made a pretense of being there for the learnin’. 🙂

What a glorious spring day. Mmm, I wish you could smell our garden right now. Too bad that whole Internet odor thing was a bust. You’ll just have to look at these pictures I just took and pretend.

           

That first one is just a bit of the waterfall of jasmine that is cascading over the fence between our place and the neighbors’. It smells so amazing. A couple other houses on our street have it too, and you can smell it the second you open a door or window. That second picture is the little lemon tree Mama Snook got us last year. It’s doing much better in our garden than it was on our apartment balcony. In fact, it’s got some little buds and we thing it’s going to flower! The third picture shows some of the gigantic peace lilies we have growing in the back corner. It’s the same plant we used to have on our clothes dryer in London, except much bigger with several large flowers. And last is our neighbors’ lemon tree, which has dozens of large fruit the size of baseballs dangling from it. The closest branch is only a couple feet from the fence, so I’m hoping a stiff breeze might knock some over our way. 🙂

Notre Dame won their first game 22-0. GO IRISH!