Pasta, passion & a great picture too!

I went with Katie to Lucini's in the Old Macaroni Factory at Hepburn Springs for the opening evening of this year's Hepburn Swiss-Italian Festa.

Sitting next to a crackling log fire, and under stunning 130 year old frescoes, we had a homely and delicious pasta meal prepared by Maria Viola and her sons. This was then followed by the singing of Italian love songs and a screening of Love's Brother, a delightful production filmed at their restaurant in 2003.

Maria's great grandfather came to Australia and built the macaroni factory during the gold-rush in the 1860's and last night we also had some of her 18(?) grandchildren helping out - a wonderful testament to the ongoing tradition of family, inherent in Australian-Italian society.

We were home late (1am?) after groping our way through the fog across the highlands back to Ballarat. I can hardly move today - always a sign of a great night out!! :-)

Sunshine on toast

The sun warms our little blue planet, is responsible for many of our energy sources and drives our weather systems. As rain plop, plop, plopped from a grey sky in Ballarat today, I was thinking of the bees who made the honey I had at breakfast. Mr Speechly's bees' orange blossom honey is pure sunshine on toast!

A little test

To see if I can Blog from my phone. I'll even attach a pic and see if that works too.

Feel like I'm becoming quite the techno-man! What came first .... Hehe

My apologies for the naughty chicken-word, which roughly translates as "Cluck Pete, what happened to you?" (in chook the F and Cl always transpose).

Day 1: For want of a more exciting title!

I'm sitting here with Graham learning to build a blog.

Where am I? At BEST in Ballarat and (ha!) it's raining .

Cick here to find out about BEST