Wine around the world

With many people coming to visit us in the past six months, we have a little tour trail we like to take first time visitors on to show off the food, wine and sites of the region. Of course, it is adapted based on their interests, but wanted to share our little trail for a day visit.

1. Lunch at Briars
2. Visit to historic Berrima – especially to the lolly shop (the lemon and toffee bon bons are to die for …… not together of course!!)
3. Drop in to Berkelouw’s Book Barn just out of Berrima
4. Sample some wines at Centennial Vineyard.

That’s just about enough activity for one day!

For people coming for the weekend, depending on what floats their boat, we venture a little further with some great trips:

1. Drive out along Range Road and Tourist Drive to Illawarra Fly
2. Visit the famous Robertson Pie Shop while we’re out there!
3. ….or keep going further to the beach in Kiama
4. A nice trip to the picturesque Burrawang Village Hotel on a lovely sunny day
5. Walk up Mt Alexandra to 40 or 60 foot falls
6. Brunch at Elephant Boy Cafe in Bowral

There are probably plenty of other places in the area we can take them, but we are still learning the area and playing tourists ourselves. Give us another six months!! ;0)

When I first moved to Kangaroo Heights I was gagging from loneliness. I walked around with a pathetically needy grin plastered on my gob and would have made friends with the soft-in-the-head crossing guard should he have made any overtures in that direction. I was in desperate need of a friend so when heathen #2 invited his friend Pat over one Friday afternoon I took the bull by the horns and suggested to the Mum that she come a bit early to pick him up and we could have a glass of wine.

That was my first mistake.

Friday came and at six o’clock sharp the bell rang. I opened the door and in strutted Mikaela. I offered her a glass of wine and we sat down at the kitchen table to chat. We talked about Kangaroo Heights, how we were settling in, how the kids liked the Heights, what I thought of the school, damn it’s really hot out there…you know, the usual surface chit-chat between mums who’ve just met.

As we chatted Mikaela finished her first glass of wine and didn’t look like she’s going anywhere soon so I poured her a second. One thing led to another and next thing you know we had polished off one bottle and cracked open the next.

Meanwhile, the husband had arrived home. I introduced Mikaela to him and once he had left the room she started commenting on oh how handsome he was, he’s seems so nice, you’ve got yourself a good one there, where did you find him, I wish I could find one like that…basically phwoar. I kind of shrugged and said ‘Well, you know, he’s a husband and yeah, he’s a pain in the arse sometimes but as far as husbands go he’s not a bad sort.’ She continued with the ‘your husband is so grand’ theme so I asked about hers.

That was my second mistake.

‘Oh, he’s an asshole, a loser, a real dickhead.’

‘Well, yeah, um, ok, but what’s he like?’

She leaned close and narrowed her eyes.

‘I’m fucking my mechanic.’

‘Oh.’

‘Five or six times already.’

‘Really…’

‘Maybe I’m sharing too much.’

Ugh. To be a nice middle-class housewife is to sometimes be an idiot. This is where I should have said Yes! Over-fucking-share you sloppy cow! But I didn’t. Instead, I went all oh no it’s fine you’re fine it’s ok no worries.

‘You know, I sometimes think being a prostitute wouldn’t really be all that bad.’

Just as she was dropping that bomb-which made me think the mechanic situation might be more of a business arrangement than anything else-the husband strolled into the kitchen. Mikaela leered at him while he poured some more wine for us, then noticed her half full/half empty glass and barked, ‘What, did the tide go out?’. The husband quickly topped her up while declining her invitation to ‘go on, have one and give us a chat, honey’.

A few minutes later young Pat wandered through the kitchen in a daze. The husband followed and caught my eye.

‘Right, the heathens are tired and the tide has gone out. Grab your bag, Mikaela. I’ll walk you and Pat home.’

Her eyes lit up at this and she stumbled out the door.

***

By early Saturday evening my hangover had abated enough for me to think about moving off the sofa and maybe checking my emails. The first one that popped up was from Mikaela.

Thanks so much for a great evening, I hope I didn’t overstay my welcome. Went home and fucked my husband for the first time in ages.

Hmmmm. Best to pretend I didn’t remember anything.

No worries, very hungover, barely remember you leaving, great time, talk to you soon.

A few weeks later heathen #2 was invited over to Pat’s house for a playdate. I was supposed to pick him up at six but inadvertently (OK, I deliberately arrived late to avoid any wine tasting and soul baring) arrived closer to seven. I rushed in, apologizing, smiling and hello-ing like a mad woman.

Mikaela’s husband was sitting in the kitchen at a kid-sized table with #2, Pat and a few other stray heathens that I didn’t recognize. His knees were up around his ears, his skin was the colour of tip-ex and he was vibrating like a violin strung too tightly. Once I said hello and nice to meet you I really couldn’t think of anything else to say so I apologized for sending his wife home drunk a few weeks ago. He bared his teeth at me.

‘Oh, that’s ok. Don’t worry about it. It’s the first time she’s been amorous in ages so really, I should be thanking you.’

Meanwhile, Mikaela was standing there all dolled up with her big blonde hair, glittering blue eye shadow, sparkly shirt and a smug smirk on her face. She said she would offer me a glass of wine but she was about to leave for the evening so maybe another time. The words were barely out of her mouth when a car started honking outside. I saw my opening and grabbed #2, tossing a smile and a thank you over my shoulder as I headed out towards the door.

Once the heathen and I were outside we were confronted by a rumbling muscle car in the drive, all blacked-out windows, airbrushed mermaids on the bonnet and acre upon acre of chrome.

As the driver revved the throbbing engine a few times it occurred to me that Mikaela wasn’t just going out, she was booked in for an oil change, a lube job and was most likely going to spend her evening tweaking his blower.

Does social media work for blogs? Yes. Yes, yes, and yes.

I started this blog with my Facebook network, mostly friends, some family, and a few acquaintances. The first week’s readership was small, the next doubled, and the next doubled again. I had about thirty or thirty-five readers consistently interested in my work. Some were close friends in Boston and family, others were friends with whom I am hardly connected any longer, hadn’t seen since high school, maybe longer.

None of them were vocal. Few comments, no real feedback. But they were there; the stats were there. Their presence pushed me onwards when I might have otherwise abandoned the attempt.

Then I joined Twitter, and in the first week I grew a network of around a thirty I followed and thirty who followed me, give or take after you deleted the spammers. Readership doubled again; Facebook readers remained and tweeps came and retweeted. The next week I had about a hundred following and a hundred followers (my ratios are good, huh?), and readership doubled again to over a hundred independent viewers.

That’s five weeks (six minus the foundation week), and my blog has grown by two to the fifth power. I don’t see any reason that the growth will stop until I run out of tweeps, and I feel convinced that I’m barely touching Facebook’s real potential at this point.

Even so, the differences, to me, go like this: dropping an ad into Facebook is like dropping a penny into a pool. A small splash, the water ripples for you, and the penny sinks. Dropping an ad into Twitter is like dropping a penny into Jell-o; it riggles along until you drop something else in it.

As for the following piece, I apologize only to Jennie. You asked me not to write about you; too bad.

**

Aside from porn, I in my youth never had a consistent form of sex in my life. The girls I knew were horny, and I knew how to push those buttons, but they were also smart, wily, and conflicted.

One time during college I took Justin to my friend Ashley’s house. I had just broken up with Christina and he was about to leave for Marine boot camp, so I worked out a little double date for us with Ashley and her friend Holly. I intended for Ashley to give Justin a thrill to remember Plano by before he went away, but he was too straight edge for an offer like that, or else he was just downright embarrassed by the straightforward nature of the scenario.

Justin said that he didn’t know what to do, wouldn’t know how to handle our dear Ashley. So I showed him: I walked up behind Ashley, pulled her chin to the side, and attacked her neck with gentle nibbles. She moaned, she shuddered, and she asked me incredulously, “How do you do that?”

The scene reminded me of the one time in high school when Ashley and I almost got together, the time that essentially guaranteed we never would. Younger, seventeen, I had invited her to my home in order to invite her to prom. She hesitated, and I told her to take her time. We laid down on a couch together and watched The Princess Bride. She had her back to me, pressed against me, and I cupped her breasts with my hands, ran them down her swimmer’s body. She turned hot, and then she got up and walked away. We didn’t go to prom together.

When I left Justin alone with Ashley in her living room, Holly acted in the same way as Ashley had. Young, virginal, she squirmed against the carpet of Ashley’s bedroom when I poured cold strawberry sauce on her neck. She let me ravish her with my hands and tongue, neither asking me to stop nor initiating anything herself. I could taste the heat of her blood under her skin; I had my hands down her pants, rubbing her as she panted. She told me not to stop, but I asked her if she wanted to go further. Eventually, still in each other’s arms, we fell asleep. She left in the morning, and nothing ever became of it.

Jennie had the same initiative to not-sex that Holly had, the same seemingly religious impulse that contradicted directly with her will to fleshy desires. Her motivational conflict resulted in sinusoidal sexual patterns. Three weeks on, three weeks off. My pillow talk verges on the ridiculous, so we’d have sex and then talk about religion, her relationship with God, the pursuit of truth in my life. Perhaps I cyclically inspired her religious fervor; perhaps she was fucking with me under the guise of religion. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where sincerity ends and emotional games begin.

And yet I’m a man who respects principles, never the one to force the issue of sex where it’s not mutual. Perhaps this lack of a will to power on my part is what leads to what seems like an inevitable disappointment in my relationships: that the girls I date, though educated, expect the male to take the sexual lead, to direct the sexual course. If so, how chauvinistic, and what a lack of interest in my desires.

I want the girl to be interested. I yearn to please her, no matter how shallow our relationship is. I want her to enjoy being pursued, to give remuneration. I’ll only go so far before they initiate a next step: there’s nothing I hate more than a cold fish.

Jennie and I eventually came to an end over this misfortune. One day after another three-week asexual stint, she came over to bed me again. By the time she left, I knew that I’d had enough.

And yet I’d put up with much the same treatment from my very next girlfriend, Christina. Our relationship really comes in two parts: sophomore year and senior year. The whole of our sophomore ride, though sexual, lacked sex. She spoke of respect and fear and how she was still a virgin, though I highly doubt whether that statement was true. Still, I respected her wishes, and we kissed and fondled and I went down on her without her going down on me. And we didn’t sex, contrary to my mother’s belief.

One day during that sophomore year I had come home with Christina to introduce her to my family. Of course my parents were aware that I had had a sexual adolescence, much to my mother’s annoyance. Christina and I were upstairs watching a movie in the main upstairs room, one open to anyone who walks up the stairs and where my father spent a good deal of his time during those years. Because of the projection TV, we had the lights off.

Mother called up the stairs, “Greg, turn those lights on!”

“We’re watchin’ a movie, ma!” I hollered back. Christina had fallen asleep; she lifted her head off my shoulder.

My mother yelled, “Turn them on, Greg! I know what you do with girls up there in the dark!”

I looked Christina in the face after my mother said this; she had turned ashen, mortified. I felt embarrassed on her behalf, stood up, and marched downstairs without pausing the movie. Mother retreated into the backyard, and I pursued her. Of course, the TV room was only separated from the backyard by a thin window, and I’m relatively sure Christina heard every word we shouted.

“Mom, I’m not having sex with her.”

“Oh, bullshit!” My mother using profanity was rare; though she allowed it from my sister, she had slapped me the one time I had used it around her.

“She’s a good girl, ma! She doesn’t want to do stuff like that.”

She snorted a laugh. “That’s what Elvis said about Marilyn Monroe, and no one believed him either!”

I balked. “What?”

My mother’s finger shot into the air and shook with the exaggerated tremble of her angered body: “Elvis and Marilyn Monroe!”

A lull entered our conversation. I asked, “Are you serious?” I gave her a few seconds to answer before I finished, “Well, I guess that’s it, then.”

Christina and I broke up not too much later though for an unrelated reason. At the time, the reasons had seemed plentiful and the complaints against one another could have doubled as a code of law, but I recognize after some distance from our relationship that the split basically resulted from a mutual dislike of having a long distance relationship over the summer; she’d return to Houston and I to Dallas. Officially she broke up with me while she had me trapped in her Chevrolet Malibu on a long car ride out of town through rural roads. But I didn’t fight too hard to keep her around, either.

That summer I worked a menial job, a temporary night-shift construction gig that paid fairly well and let me destroy things. I called Christina every few nights to let her know how much I missed her until one night I perhaps overdid it, singing her a song that was playing on the CD player of my truck. When the song was over, she told me that she didn’t miss me and that we were through. She hung up, and I went back to work.

Bryan, Michelle, and Sydney came to my house a week later, and we all got sloshed on spirits, playing drinking games with Irish cream and vanilla vodka. Sydney and I slipped off to my bedroom while Michelle and Bryan caught up and made out; it was my first actual sex since I had broken up with Jennie, the first time in my life that I had had sex drunk, and the only time I had sex drunk with someone I wasn’t having sex with regularly sober. Of course it was a mistake.

One of the reasons Christina had broken up with me was Sydney’s reintroduction to my life. She had asked me to promise her that I would never cheat on her, and in one of the more controversial moments of my life, I had refused. Very few friends of mine have agreed with my refusal or my reasons for giving it.

I don’t make promises I can’t keep. In one of the introductory moments of my relationship with Christina, she had asked me to promise that I would never make her cry. I refused that request as well. She had smiled then, pleased with my candor. On this occasion, though, my blunt honesty seemed to her a fault.

I’m a writer, defined in my terms mostly as a person with an over-active imagination coupled with the disposition to record his thoughts. As a child, my parents caught me in any number of obvious lies, since I let my imagination run away with me. I grew older, though, and as I did I tried to reel in my mind’s propensity for exaggeration. The method I underwent in this pursuit was an evaluation of the human condition, an amateur exploration into why humans do the silly things they do. In this vein—a path which included observing my friends, asking them to observe me, and any art with a psychological angle I could ingest—I discovered that humans are capable of quite a few very silly actions, not the least of which is unexpected infidelity; and by unexpected I don’t mean that his partner doesn’t suspect (most suspicion is unwarranted, and most warranted suspicion is put aside), but that the person himself does not suspect.

The most common argument against this analysis of the human scene is that there’s always choice. At some point in the inception of an affair, an attached lover has to choose to cheat on his significant other. In my opinion, such a view shows the thinker’s naiveté: to assume that any given person chooses before he acts generally gives that person too much credit; people act for any number of unconscious reasons—unconscious here implies a lack of choice, which must be conscious—and in an attempt to explain such actions attempt to insert their motivation, usually foolhardily and in direct contradiction to the actor’s situation. Therefore, unexpected infidelity occurs; not only does it occur, I believe (possibly through my own inexperience with infidelity) it is the norm.

For this promise Christina asked, and I refused not because Sydney herself, a drugged up pitiable slut approaching me primarily for my pity and presumably for my help, was a threat to our relationship but rather according the principle, perhaps silly and idealistic: I won’t make promises I can’t keep. Any married man will tell you that’s no way to make a relationship work, and it’s not. But I’m nothing if not idealistic.

Sad and drunk, I fucked Sydney and enjoyed through an alcoholic haze my first experience with sloppy, self-serving, and artificially extended drunken sex. She left, and I didn’t see her again for weeks. Sydney called me and asked if we could get together again, but I refused her offers. She’d ask me if we could just be friends, say that she needed my friendship. I would take her to a movie to find out; in the dark we’d hold hands, then the kissing started, and by the end I was so excited for the sex to come that I accidentally backed my truck into a light pole. So, no, I guess at that point that I, without other recourse for sex, and she willing to give sex, could not just be friends. I didn’t see her again before she left for the Air Force.

I did, however, have to call her again. Shortly after our sport fucks my urethra itched and urinating at first began to hurt and then to sear, to burn. When I examined my penis, I saw that the skin around the urethra had turned scaly and looked like the dried-out remains of a sunburn. I called my family doctor and made an appointment; when I arrived, he asked me to remove my shorts and lay down on his table. I did, and he shoved a cotton swap inside me; the sudden sharp pain caused my body to tense involuntarily, and my hands flinched. He laughed, saying, “I bet you’ll remember this before you go sleeping with loose girls again.” Later, when I told my first primary care physician in Boston about the experience, my doctor would tell me that painless screens for STDs have existed since the mid-nineties but that some doctors still prefer to use the swab just to reinforce sexual morality. Good for him, I guess, but as you’ll see soon, dear reader, it hardly worked.

I had Chlamydia, a bacterial infection easily cleared up by antibiotics within a week. I called Sydney to let her know that I had gotten it and that she might want to be screened herself, and she became indignant, told me that I couldn’t possibly have gotten it from her. I told her that it had been over a year since I’d had sex with anyone else, and she maintained that I was mistaken. I asked her who else she had currently been sleeping with, and she mentioned some guy I didn’t know out in Allen who could find out on his own just how painful the disease was. My friend Bryan told me, though, that she was having sex with his brother Jay as well, and I felt compelled to warn him; when Sydney found out why Jay had stopped having sex with her, she called me up, chewed me out for violating her privacy, and refused to speak to me ever again, a promise which lasted a few years and ended with little or no real effect since without a real need for my pity Sydney has little reason to keep in touch with me.

I’d have a few other sporadic sexual partners throughout the first semester of my junior year. The most significant of these were the two intellectual extremes, Emily the education major who never let the contradiction between her devout views on conservative Christianity and her open sexual policies bother her and Courtney the educated debater who evidenced a disparity between knowledge of books and of the world usually reserved for romantic novels.

I don’t remember how Emily and I found each other, only that the first time she approached me about sex she asked if we could get drunk first. I refused, and she said she’d drink before she came over. I told her that if she showed up drunk I wouldn’t have sex with her; if she couldn’t fuck me sober, she wouldn’t fuck me at all. She agreed, and so the affair started. Twice a week we’d get together, and she progressively climbed the kinky ladder until she went past where I was interested in going, which was where we stopped: Sex itself contents me for a long while, and I don’t need any spices added to it until the repeated flavor makes itself monotonous. She wanted to start off on the heavy side, and my lack of interest caused her to pull away.

Courtney was something altogether different, a student from one of the courses I was peer instructing, just the sort of relationship I had promised myself not to get into when I took the job. However, my responsibilities included entertaining the students and getting them involved with social groups on campus (Goal number one is student retention!), and I had invited a few of the students over to meet my friends and to attend various parties. The male students I invited declined, but the females came in a small pack of three: Sarah, Andrea, and Courtney.

One day during Thanksgiving break when most of our friends had left but she and I remained, she came over to watch a movie with me. It started friendly enough, sitting on my couch together. Then she leaned against my shoulder, and I tensed. Her head fell to my lap, and I didn’t push her off. She mentioned that she felt cold, asked me to lay down with her; I removed the back cushions of the couch and put my left arm under her head and my right hand on the flat of her stomach; even through her shirt I could tell that she had lied.

Courtney had fallen asleep by the time the movie was over, and she unconsciously nuzzled into my arm. I tried to get up without waking her, but she came two and yawned that she had better get going. I walked with her out my front door and down the cement steps to her car. She opened the door, and right when I was about to thank fate for letting me out of this pickle without too much drama, she turned and asked me for a hug. I put my arms over her shoulders and slid my hands down her back, pulling her in a soft and sensual hug. Her breasts pushed into the soft tissue of my stomach just under my ribs; the wire of her bra tinged the excitement with discomfort.

“What is this?” she asked me. “What are we?”

I sighed and looked away from her, loosening my arms.

“Couldn’t we be together?” She had heard my arguments against dating my students, but it wasn’t forbidden; it was just something I had decided not to do. Cheers to my moral stamina, since that was the only boundary between what she wanted and what I’d give her.

I still wasn’t looking at her when I said, “I’d rather not.”

She moved her arms in between us, placing her forearms vertically against my chest. When I turned my head to look down at her, I saw that she was searching my eyes for a tiny flicker of passion to kindle her hope, her slightly pouting lips complementing her expression. I kissed her suddenly and stepped past my qualms without much difficulty.

We dated for several months. She met my parents in the spring, and they liked her, a first in my young life. Around my friends and at parties, we would make out, falling asleep together on the carpet of my living room so as not to blur her strict Christian principles, which kept her from wanting to go further. We talked about her religion, which I was only beginning to move away from completely at the time, and about the affect of learning how to debate on children, which in my opinion is to stunt the process of forming a personality by means of restraining spiritual nutrition (that is, restraining the child’s ability to gestate opinions and information outside of his field of hand-me-down beliefs). Her opinion was somewhat different.

One day she came over and we went into my room together. The lights out, we kissed in my bed. My hands roamed and then she directed them; my teeth pinched and then she moaned, breathed heavily. For the first time, I put my hands under her shirt and felt her flesh, the studs of the aureole. Following my own desires, I reached down and unbuckled her pants, rubbed my hand over the top of her simple white cotton panties. She lifted her hips, pushing against my hand so that I could feel her rough pubic hair through the soft cloth.

I pulled my hand away, stopped kissing her, and sat up. I can only imagine the look on my face as strained and irritable.

“What’s wrong?” she asked me, her voice strained with more confusion than worry.

My hormones and the tease of the situation brought out my grumpiness, perhaps to an unjustifiable extent. “I shouldn’t have to stop myself for your sake,” I said. “You’re a smart girl and willful. You know that you don’t want to go this far.”

Now fear started to creep into her; she sounded a bit like a mouse: “I know. Thank you, though.”

“Don’t thank me for holding you to your morals. Stop yourself next time!”

She placed her left hand on my arm, but I stood up and walked away. “You should go.”

Courtney didn’t say much as she buttoned her pants and adjusted her bra. She asked me if I was sure, and I hugged her and kissed her cheek and told her I’d see her tomorrow.

Of course I didn’t. A couple of weeks went by before she finally sent me an email about how things wouldn’t have gone any farther than they did, which made me laugh a little to myself. It also said that she felt afraid because she knew she wouldn’t have been able to stop me if I had decided to continue. I let out a bark of a laugh and replied with something terse and nasty. For some reason, we’re awkward around each other every time we happen to see each other these days.

Sometime in this period, Jennie came back into the picture, our lack of serious relationship putting her religious qualms to bed, I suppose. She pinged me out of the blue one day, asked me whether I’d be willing to hook up with her if she just came over that evening, and that was the beginning of something casual and fun that ended when she began to date Mani.

So I was outside, minding my own business drinking a glass of 2005 Terra d’Oro Zin, when I got to hear a conversation that I was not prepared for from the next door neighbor.  Apparently there is a woman (older by the sound of her voice) over there that had to ask “Are you supposed to tear the hole out of the toilet seat cover?”.  Well, it was very hard keeping my wine from coming out of my nose and from laughing out loud.

I guess I have to admit that I am glad she uses them, but really?  She started talking about how hard it is to pee with them on the seat and that…well they get stuck to her hand.  I am not going to go any further.

In case anyone out there needs to know…tear the damn hole out when using the covers.  But most of all, use them.

P.S.  Wash your damn hands when you are done too.  You know who you are that don’t.

P.P.S Yes I plugged a wine above and it is the complete opposite of this conversation.  The Terra d’Oro Zin is a wonderful bottle of wine that represents what Amador can offer you in the sub 15 dollar range.  I have never had a bad bottle ore even a so-so bottle of Terra d’Oro wine.  Run down to your local Raley’s or Belair (Sacto only) or your favorite wine shop and pick up a bottle as soon as possible.

~Wavy

The city, I remember, was very beautiful, but what I remember most was the picturesque old town of Barri Antic, with its antique buildings dating back to the thirteenth century; I sometimes wondered what it would have been like to live there during that time, to walk the stone streets greeting my neighbors or to breathe in the cool and pure air while lying down on the soft grass looking up at a most magnificent blue sky on a Sunday.

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If you would like to check out some of my music, or if you are studying French and would like some listening practice, click on the link below:

www.frenchdashmusic.blogspot.com

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If you would like to read this story from the beginning, please follow this link:

http://frenchdashmusic.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/the-long-way-home/