The A&P Wine Awards and Other Things!

Text to come soon!

A few pictures!

So!

This past weekend I got to take a little trip to the new Mitre 10 Mega store in Hastings, which is the flagship store (I think?) of Mitre 10 in the area and it opened on Thursday. They have a shiny new cafe there as well, which is where I went to work on Friday since they're still sorting out staffing it.

It really is shiny and new, and of course I didn't take any pictures of it.

It's also incredibly busy, or was on that day I was there. Man, that was an exhausting day! It didn't help that I got a little walking tour of part of Hastings because I went the wrong way courtesy of not knowing that Karamu Road has both a north and a south branch.

Oops!

So I got a map of it and used paint to edit it!

Yay paint!

Although now that I look at it on a map it's not all that far, it just seemed very far at 7:30 in the morning.

On the bright side, if I hadn't taken that lovely detour to visit all three of those spots (with the correct one being last, of course), I wouldn't have seen this lovely place:

I probably looked rather strange taking a photo of that at 7:30 in the morning in a Columbus coffee uniform, but oh well.

As for the Hastings Mitre 10 Mega, I did take a picture of the outside! Not that it shows much other than how ridiculously huge it is. It does show the lovely shade of orange that all Mitre 10s are, though.

Incredibly big!

And now for the last picture - the cafe where I actually work.
















I wish I had taken a "before" picture, because it looks very different now with the renovations. The gal standing in the middle of the picture is Zoe, one of the two baristas. The dude on the left is exactly that, a random customer, and you can just see the top of Mikaela's head behind the cookie jar in the middle (it has Anzac biscuits in it!).

Side note, cookies = biscuits here.

So I guess it's a biscuit jar.

Other side notes I may have mentioned, dessert = pudding and dinner = afternoon tea. Strange!

Ok, that's it for now! We're doing the A&P business tomorrow, so I'll definitely take some pictures of that. The appetizers we worked on today were a soy tuna with a coconut dressing, a gazpacho, and we'll also be doing some scotch eggs using quail eggs and black pudding (ew) instead of regular chicken eggs and sausage meat (also ew).

We'll see how that goes!

Ttfn!

So about that update!

Why hello, cats and kittens!

Hello to the people as well, because I doubt there are many literate cats and/or kittens, and those that are literate probably have more important things to do than read my blog.

Hello everyone!

First, a disclaimer: this is going to be a text-only post, despite my constant promises for more pictures, mainly because 1) I can't upload pictures on this connection at the moment, 2) I keep forgetting to take pictures and 3) the weather has been gross lately so biking around and taking pictures is a no-go at the moment.

Hooray for getting that out of the way!

So, what have I been up to, you ask?

If you aren't asking, well, too bad, because I'll tell you anyways!

Let's start with that gap in September.

Everything is fine, so don't worry about that! I just needed a bit of time to evict some skeletons that had been hanging out in my closet for waaay too long, on top of spending some time to just figure some things out. I'm not quite sure where the skeletons went off to, but they had been squatting for a while so it's about time they moved somewhere else.

So, updates!

Class: We had our second in-kitchen assessment, which I passed on the first try (woo!). The assessment was to make seafood chowder (with mussels and prawns and smoked fish), sushi covered in tempura batter and deep-fried, and spring rolls in three hours including weighing up and cleaning down. It was a little bit rushed, but was definitely easier than the first assessment.

We're done with our stints in the on-campus restaurant for the semester, for better or for worse - it ended on a good note, with me getting to do desserts (woo!) and a couple of pretty good services despite having a decent number of people in to eat, so that was also a plus. It wasn't super-awesome to make about 4 liters of creme anglaise for roughly 45 individual bread puddings in one sitting, but at least now I know how to make creme anglaise. We're now back to the old schedule of two days in the kitchen and one day of theory, so it's nice to have a schedule a bit less...bizarre than the one we had with productions. We're starting to work on/study City and Guilds questions for the exam coming up in November, and next week we'll be doing some work at a local wine thing. Last week we made chicken satay with peanut sauce, which is probably the highlight of the year since peanut sauce is fantastic and I can pretty much eat it with anything. We're finally done with the fish streak (pretty much every class in September and even a few in August focused mainly on fish - it was awesome in a very not-awesome way), so that's also a plus!

Boo on fish.

Next topic: Work!

Work has been going pretty well - I get to be on the register at times now, which is a nice change to running around trying to clear tables or serve people their food. They keep giving me more hours, which I hope means they like me because I like them. This weekend I get to go hang out in the newly-opened cafe in the Hastings store because they're a bit short staffed, it seems, so that'll be neat to see. They've also started putting more people on at one time, which makes things a bit more enjoyable as well since there's slightly less "oh dear all of this needs to be done at once" going on.

Also, a customer went out of their way to mention my excellent customer service to my pseudo-boss and one of the guys from Columbus who was training her. Yay for me!

...still not 100% sure what caused that, because I don't think I did anything quiet extraordinary, but hey, don't look a gift compliment in the mouth.

Or something like that.

Anyways.

Next up, volunteering!

Unfortunately, it's still a bit haphazard at the moment. Work is still quite in the way of times for volunteering with the coast guard, although I did manage to squeeze a bit of it in last weekend in the morning before work - that makes for long days. The emergency department is also a bit sidelined, but I managed to get a shift in a couple of days ago which was nice. A weekend or two ago I had a rather exciting time with volunteering at the hospital in that I went after work (work from 10 or 11 until 5:30, then volunteering from 6:30ish-10). Buses do not run that late, which meant I got to bike home from the hospital - about a 7 or 8km trip - at 10 PM and most of the route is along a 100km-speed-limit expressway that's poorly lit.

Excitement!

Action!

Incredible lack of safety!

(At least I had blinking lights?)

Needless to say, St. John's (the people I'm volunteering for) weren't too thrilled at the idea of having me do that on a regular basis, and I wasn't super thrilled about the idea either, so that's not happening anymore. It just means I need to play a bit of schedule tetris to try and figure out where to fit volunteering in.

Big Brothers/Big Sisters is still not quite happening - I need to call in the next day or two to figure out what the plan is. So that still needs figuring out!

That pretty much covers those bits...now for everything else!

Summer hockey: I've joined a summer hockey team, and that should be starting in a couple of weeks so that'll be good to help keep me in shape. They're mostly guys from the team I was on this past winter, so that's pretty neat!

The gym: I've actually been going on a regular basis! The only days I've missed I've missed due to either work (one Friday a couple of weeks ago I had work from 8-6:30, and quite literally had no way to get to the gym before it closed since I usually go after work) or minor injuries that I don't want to exacerbate (currently nursing a bit of a knee tweak, so I didn't do much for leg day today). In the past month and a half or two months I think there have only been three or so days where I haven't gone to the gym when I'm supposed to (three days a week). So that's pretty decent! I actually have a *tiny* bit of muscle mass now, which is weird.

Hot chocolate: I drink way too much of the stuff - usually at least a mug a day. But it's homemade peppermint hot chocolate so it's ok, right?

Oatmeal: I eat way too much of the stuff - it's good for your cholesterol levels, though, right?

Keyboards: I have one! My newest little thing to do, it's actually pretty nifty and I'm doing a bit better at it than I was expecting considering how I've never seriously sat down and tried to learn anything for more than an hour or two a week in the past..............decade?

Springtime: I actually get to have a spring! I realized the other day while going to the gym that it's been a year and a half since I've had a springtime, which is an odd thought. It's starting to warm up and some flowers are starting to grow, so hooray for that!

I think that's about it!

I'll snag some pictures of things like work and places I frequent over the next week, and I'll be sure to snag some photos of the event we'll be cooking for next week as well. Hopefully the weather (and my knee) will cooperate...

Stay tuned for pictures! I swear there will be some eventually...

It's not September anymore!

Ahoy, chaps and chapesses!

Or singular, that's probably more accurate.

Ahoy, chap and/or chapess!

(Is "chapess" even the proper thing?)

ANYWAYS.

It's not September anymore, and it hasn't been for a few days! Just a heads up.

I'm currently in the process of coming out from under that rock I always seem to hide under, and once a few more things have been done I will give you a full update on how things are going!

So hang tight for a few more days, and you shall be rewarded with random things about how I'm doing in New Zealand. Hooray!