Hello folks and welcome to the first instalment of Notes. What is Notes, you ask? Well – Notes is a planned series of weekly posts of random/interesting info/news/thoughts, etc. (aka Notes) that I want to share with you, hopefully every Friday. You might be thinking – hey, wait a minute, this sounds a lot like Fun Stuff, and speaking of which, where is this week’s Fun Stuff post?

A very good point and how very observant of you dear friend/reader. Unfortunately, I’ve decided to scratch the series of Fun Stuff posts, and instead replaced it with Notes. As you’ll soon find out in detail why in one of the Notes below, I made this decision because I thought that it was a little weird to talk about serious/sensitive topics (such as death) under the heading of Fun Stuff. Basically, I realised that the term Fun Stuff was too restricting, and that the term Notes was more fitting/all-encompassing as it can cover all sorts of rambles/stuff that I can/want to talk about. Fair enough? Excellent. Now, let’s get to this week’s pair of Notes. bigsmile

Note #1: Aussie Food Bloggers. If you’re an avid food blog reader/browser like I am, you’d understand how difficult it can be to follow all of your favourite blogs for the latest posts. In order to not miss any new posts, you can sign up to the blog’s email subscription, or follow the blog through a feed reader/news aggregator like Feedly, which is what I also use, and recommend. In addition to this, I recently found out about Aussie Food Bloggers, via Maureen’s Orgasmic Chef blog.

Aussie Food Bloggers is a new website that not only has a list/table of “The top Australian food blogs ranked by popularity and influence, updated daily.” – it also has a list of the most recent posts published by the food bloggers on the site. I personally think this site is an invaluable resource to find and connect with other food bloggers, as well as conveniently follow/read the latest food blog posts as well. There’s also a similar site for American Food Bloggers. Be sure to check both of them out, and be kept up date with your favourite food blogs.

Note #2: Melbourne Cup 2014. As many of you may know, the Tuesday just past (4th November) was Melbourne Cup Day – the famous horse race that has been marketed as “the race that stops a nation”. During the morning of the race, I had a strong feeling to choose horse #5 to place my bet on. A couple of hours before the race started, and as we were about to place our bets online, I learnt that horse #5 was named Protectionist. I loved the name and thought that this horse was indeed the right choice. Then, for some strange reason, just as we were about to place our bets, I scanned through the list of the horses names and changed my selection to horse #3/Fawkner instead.

As you may know/guess, Fawkner didn’t win, and instead Protectionist was the winning horse. The moral to the story is to go with you intuition and follow what you know/think is right. When will I learn? Anyhow, not all was lost because we did place a small bet on Protectionist anyway, for our dog, Swan, who kindly gave to us her winnings. Also, RIP horse #21/Araldo. It is very sad and unfortunate indeed that you died on the day. I wanted to share my Melbourne Cup story with you, but I couldn’t have done so without mentioning Araldo’s death. This sad news is the reason why I changed the title of these weekly update posts to Notes instead.

That’s all for this week’s Notes post folks. Have a great weekend all. New recipe on Sunday! bigsmile