Website wrangling, an amazing dinner, a waterfall and a coffee encounter

“Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already”
Soren Kierkegaard

This week I have been playing around with creating our business website, trying out different platforms and have settled on Wix at this stage. It’s been fun finding my way around this process and experimenting with different looks and templates and it’s likely to be a work in progress for a while. Still wrangling with how to connect my page to my existing domain, so I’m on a steep learning curve trying to understand servers and domain settings etc. (There’s lots of jargon) :~ I’ll need to get a lot better at this if I am to do it for other people.

Last Friday marked 38 years of Neil and I together; so hard to believe it was so long ago, and yet here we are still going on crazy adventures together. We celebrated with a wonderful dinner at home, cooked by Neil, of course.

Starting with a beautiful cheese souffle, so soft and light and his first attempt at a souffle; perfect. Followed by rare beef filet with red wine and pepper sauce, potatoes with duck fat and a green salad, washed down with a lovely bottle of Tahbilk Cabernet Sauvignon, which we picked up the day before at the cellar door.

Dessert was pears in red wine, then choc dipped and served with mascarpone cream. Sooo yum. I am very spoilt.

After going to the Strathbogie conservation session last week and learning about the local area, we decided to go for a drive and check out some local places of interest in the Strathbogie ranges. We headed out to Gooram falls which is a more of a water cascade on the Seven Creeks reserve, and went for short walk down to the water, where we found a lovely spot on the rocks for a picnic lunch, making use of the leftover beef filet in dinner rolls with some caramelised onion chutney. This is a pleasant spot, with easy access to the creek along various paths and with some picnic tables near the carpark. The creek is running well at the moment after last weeks rain, so it looked lovely on such a sunny afternoon. A few photos taken.

We went on to Polly McQuinn’s weir further down the road, and then drove up to the top of Mount Wombat for stunning 360 degree views across the whole area. There are lots of phone and communications towers up there, but it’s still a lovely view.

view from Mt Wombat

By chance, while we were in the area we stopped for a coffee in a café and saw a sign in the window advertising the business for sale. Uh-oh. Here we go again. This has been a feature of our life – thinking about buying cafés and restaurants at various times, as our kids will no doubt attest, we have looked at dozens of businesses over the years, dragging them around to all sorts of places and getting excited about some plan or other, only to have it all fall flat for one reason or another. I suspect that we have never gone through with it out of fear of failing and our secure jobs just seemed too comfortable to leave and risk everything. Now, however, we are in a different position. So, this once again gives us food for thought about what we want to do. Are we capable of running a café? Is this really what we want? Will it restrict our lifestyle too much? Just when we have achieved a kind of freedom, do we want to tie ourselves to a business? Could we ever go on holiday again? So many questions…Of course, after getting this idea into my head, I have redesigned menus, refurbished the premises, planned boozy brunches and Friday night happy hours, all while lying in bed at 3 am.

Sometimes I feel like I just run off with any idea that comes along; whenever some new idea presents itself, I imagine the possibilities to the nth degree in the early hours of the morning, inventing all sorts of scenarios and tangents. Developing a convoluted story in my mind of how it could be done, and where that would lead, and what that would look like, going into all sorts of crazy detail. Envisaging websites, marketing plans and Facebook posts, names, signs, décor, customer interactions…it just goes on and on. Anyway, something else to think about over the coming weeks. Likely it will come to nothing as usual.