This weekend was the big event, the Arboretum Plant Sale. It was the big event for Smartyplants. I decided to help G and helped out at the beginning. It is always rush at the start. Everyone comes early to get the best selection. Salvias were popular. I could overhear people talking about them and the great selection. I answered what questions that I could and helped backstock the selection. It was fun and overall a good sale.
Bound for Africa
My hands are shaking and my heart is racing. I did it. I purchased our tickets to South Africa. There is no going back now.
A trip to South Africa has long been a dream. It all started with G’s curiosity for unusual plants. Many people might say strange plants. He started collecting Stapelias also known as carrion flower. They have the coloration and scent of rotting meat. We had a greenhouse filled with Stapelias and many of their related genuses in the early ‘80s. His passion led him to investigate all the curious succulents that grow in South Africa. Our office was covered with maps of Africa so we could look up where the plants grew. As you learn more and more, you discover how wonderful the botanical richness is of South Africa. Apartheid kept us from considering the country as a destination. Later it was the perception of danger.
Just before we went to Chile, a coworker went to South Africa. She visited CapeTown and drove the Garden Route before going on to Kruger and Botswana. They had a great time. I mentioned it to G and that made him feel a lot better especially since they had their two kids along.
And this year is our 30th anniversary. What better way to celebrate.
But I am such a procrastinator. I started researching back in January but just didn’t get motivated. I’ve put it off and put it off. We talked to a couple who visited Namibia. Suddenly, our ideas expanded to Namibia. They mentioned how great it was and how easy it was to drive in both South Africa and Namibia. We ordered a map of South Africa to get an idea of how long it would be to drive. Unfortunately, the map was out of print and never arrived. We got distracted with trips to Death Valley and Tucson. Before we knew, it was April.
A local travel store held a slide show on safaris in Southern Africa. It spurred us to get planning. I also read something on Fodors that mentioned that you need to book several months in advance to find accommodations in Etosha.
We spent two rainy weekends getting dates decided (September 1 – September 29) and planning an itinerary. I thought it would be best to have someone book the Namibia portion so I contacted Cardboard Box, a travel agency in Windhoek. Yes, September is very busy and Etosha was almost full. Rachael, our agent at Cardboard Box, did some creative changes to our itinerary and we finally got it firmed up. I sent off the deposit last week.
But I never feel like I am going on a trip until I purchase the airline tickets. I did that today. We are going to Africa! Look for more details in upcoming posts.
WBW #8: Regaleali 2002 Nero D’Avola
Sicily has been on my list of places to visit for a long while. I read the memoir “On Persphone’s Island” by Mary Taylor Simeti and I was hooked. Later someone on the SlowTalk message board mentioned a cooking school at a winery in Sicily. The winery was Regaleali. They have not only wine tastings but also accommodations and a cooking school conducted by Anna Tasca Lanza. Every so often I dream of visiting and taking the class.
Regaleali is also the maker of my first Sicilian wine. One hot summer, I was drinking Rose wines. I had run out of different French Roses to taste came across a bottle of Regaleali Rose. It was perfect for a warm summer day. Bright with the taste of raspberries.
I found a bottle of the Nero D’Avola by Regaleali and decided to give it a try for Wine Blogging Wednesday #8 – Sicilian Reds tasting selected by Ron at LoveSicily. It is imported by Winebow and is one of the Leonardo LoCascio Selections. I couldn’t find the exact wine on the Winebow website and I think it may have originally been called Regaleali Rosso.
There are no tasting notes on the label but if it is the Rosso, there are several tasting notes on the Winebow site. Wine Enthusiast- February 2005 gave it 88 pts and said the following of the Rosso:
“Nice and jammy; the quintessential ripe, easy quaffer. Plenty of black fruit and licorice cover the bouquet, followed by deep plum and black-cherry fruit. The finish is fat, full and continuous. A fine effort for its type.”
I was very disappointed with the wine. It was very tight when I opened it and I could taste a little amount of the fruit over the alcohol. I let it sit open while I cooked dinner and it improved a little bit. It was fine with the food but did not ‘Wow’ me. I would not buy it again.
But the dinner was a great success. I wanted to make a Sicilian influenced dish. One idea was to make a pasta with eggplant and tomatoes but I really didn’t have time to prepare the eggplant. But what about Swordfish? I needed a sauce that would use Sicilian ingredients. A little cruising on Epicurious and I found Swordfish Stemperata; a sauce of green olives, onion, raisins, capers and mint. Perfect.
What was not so perfect was for Comcast to have DNS issues just when I tried to get back online to print the recipe. I knew the ingredients but not the proportions or how to cook. I decided to just improvise and it worked. G loved it and is still raving about it. I only used a little bit of mint – maybe a tablespoon and it didn’t overwhelm the dish or the wine. I pan fried the swordfish steaks and spooned the sauce on the side. I also served a salad of cucumber, tomato, onion and feta. A nice Mediterranean break.
WBW 7 wrapup = Obsure red wines varieties
I’m just back from a quick trip to see the spring desert wildflowers in Arizona. Andrew has posted his wrapup for the obscure red varieties. What a turnout! We even had our first PodCast. Lots of interesting varieties to try. A big thank you to Andrew for hosting and the great tasting!
2001 Château de Perron, Madiran. France
The theme for this month’s WBW tasting is Wine Rummage. I don’t think I’d call it a rummage but more like a great opportunity for exploring the exotic world of red grapes. What a fun idea!
The challenge was to come up with something that would intrigue me. I have recently tasted several of the obscure varieties suggested by Andrew. Our winers group recently tasted Barolo and we are planning a tasting of Duero. I really didn’t want to do another tasting of Malbec or Carmenère from Chile. I regularly drink Mourvèdre and Grenache blends from Southern France. I mulled over some of the southern Italy varieties but what caught my fancy was Madiran from France. Perfect!
I had tasted this variety twice. Heart of Darkness from Bonny Doon Vineyards is a good introduction. We also had a bottle when we ate at Le Pichet here in Seattle. But I knew nothing about it or the tannet grape.
I found this wine at my local Whole Foods for $12. It is imported by Kermit Lynch. I’ve learned a lot about southern French wines by drinking his selections and almost always love his choices.
There were no notes on on the label and few on the web. One site said:
Full bodied with concentrated, extracted fruit flavors. There are focused berry flavors and earthy notes of herbs. This bottle shows how well the sun ripens in the southern reaches of France. The acid and tannins offer up a mouthwatering experience.
The label in the store said it had flavors of licorice and spice. I’m not certain if it is 100% Tannat grapes. Notes from the 2003 vintage said:
This deep red wine is made from 65% Tannat, 20% Cabernet Franc and 15% Cabernet Sauvignon. It is from the village of Madiran in southwest France. The cellars at Chateau de Perron date back to 1734 and have not seen any modifications since that time.
The Tannat grape is grown in the Madiran area, a wine region from the Southwestern area of France. It is produces a very dark, thick and tannic wine. It is often blended with Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. The soil area is hard, chalky clay soil and the wine definite takes on the flavor of the terroir. It also surprised me to find out that it is grown in Uruguay. Now that is an obscure source for wine!
I opened the bottle and there was a whiff of ‘brett’; a light odor of sweat and leather. So I decanted a bit off and let it breath while I started dinner. I was pretty certain the earthiness would ‘blow off’. It was very dark in color reminding me of black cherries.
After about an hour, I poured a glass. The sweaty odor had disappeared. There were hints of berry, cherry and licorice. I bought a piece of Le Vieux Berger Roquefort cheese. The smooth salty flavor was a perfect foil for the thick chalky flavor of the wine. Heart of Darkness is a perfect description for this style of wine.
I served it with a rib-eye steak, sauteed mushrooms, blue cheese, and green beans with almonds. I served my non-meat eating partner a piece of wild sturgeon that had been marinated in a little balsamic vinegar. It was a little light for this heavy red.
I really enjoyed this wine. I love tannin thick reds that are influenced by their environment and Madiran is definitely a winner for my tastes.
Death Valley Links
Another week of rain in Southern California! Is it going to dry out in time for our visit? So far, Death Valley has received over 3 inches since the beginning of January. The hills are green, the valley is in bloom and the rivers are flowing. But there have been good reports of flowers. Yooohoooo!
G has been doing a tremendous job organizing and packing the camping gear. We went out and got a new ice chest with wheels and a handle. This will make it much easier to get in and out of the airport. We’ve packed the soft good (tent, sleeping bags, poles) in a long duffel bag. We’ve got stove, boots, cooking gear, food in the ice chest.
Here are some great sites for planning a trip to Death Valley
National Park Official Site
California Wildflower Hotsheet
Death-Valley.US They also have a great forum for checking the latest information.
Death Valley National Park Links
Malware – Part 2
I thought I was finished and won the battle with malware. But I was wrong! I was still ‘bugged’ by warning from MS Anti-spyware (MAS) telling me that My Search bar was trying to change my toolbar. It would only happen when I switched between G’s account and my account so I didn’t notice it until a couple of days had passed and G logged on. I did another scan and found some more remnants of the viruses but I just couldn’t get rid of this warning about My Search Bar.
I finally went out to the MAS newsgroups at Microsoft and got a couple of other good pieces of advice. A member found the guid for the program and I was able to search for the guid in the registry. I found a reference to it in ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Internet Explorer \ Toolbar \ WebBrowser’. That got it.
I’m also giving SpywareBlaster a try. I’m hoping it will block those critters.
Some other pieces of advice
If you have more than one account on your PC and use XP, turn off System Restore on all the accounts. This will prevent the registry entries for these critters from being backed up.
Boot into Safe Mode (F8 on startup) and thoroughly scan all accounts.
Scan with multiple anti-spyware programs and a virus checked.
Use some type of spyware blocker and keep it up to date.
Frosty Tiger Mountain
We have been having remarkable weather. The jet-stream seems to have split and we are getting sun while Southern California and the Southwest is getting rain. That means even more flowers for us. It was time to hit the trail.
G wanted to so Mount Si but I wasn’t really interesting in that long of a hike. So we decided on doing Section Line trail on Tiger Mountain. It was sunny but cold. Little did we know there were also icy roads. The first indicator was the DOT sand time coming on I90. Then there were the flares. The right lane was frosty white. Sure enough there was a spin out and Jeep Cheroke in the ditch. Too bad they took out the back of a State Patrol car first.
We parked, put on the boots and gingerly walked up the road to the trailhead. The frost was beautiful. We headed off to Nook trail and away from the crowds. The cold was nipping at my cheeks but I was warm. Soon we made the junction from Nook to Section line. It is such a killer. Straight up. It was a little bit icy in spots but not bad. The really steep part is under thick evergreen forest so it was not slippery. But that last part after Railroad. You think you are almost there and there is still a kill 1/2 mile. But finally we broke out into the sun. Such a gorgeous day. Views to the east of Cascade foothills. To the West, the Olympics and the Seattle skyline. You could even see the Space Needle.
After a Luna bar and a Clif shot, time to go down. It was so busy and icy. I almost slipped once or twice. But it went fast. It wasn’t bad until we got almost to the car and it was slippery and frosty still.
Overall a great winter hike. 5 miles – 2:45 time.
Malware Wars
I got hit by a ‘drive-by download’ on Sunday. Yes, it was an unlucky 13th. I naively was reading a message board (not SlowTalk) and clicked on a link. It took me out to a site to provide song lyrics. Those sites are notorious downloading malware/spyware to your PC. If I had only known….
Suddenly, a windows installer box popped up along with lots of different popups. Crap. The dirty little popups also wouldn’t let me close them safely by clicking on the upper right corner or right clicking and choosing close. Grrr… Next thing I knew, Norton was popping up left and right telling me a Trojan was trying to run. Double grrr.. I checked Add/Remove programs and several pieces of junk software had been installed. My toolbar was changed to MySearch and there was a lot of junk on the tool bar.
I unplugged my connection from the network and started to do some scans. I already had Ad-Aware and SpyBot. They caught quite a few. Next I ran Norton and it found some items but couldn’t delete them. Sigh… It was taking at least an hour to scan my machine with Norton. I did some manual deletes. Okay. I thought I was clean. I plugged back into the network. Damn. There went Norton again. They were still on my machine. 4 hours later and several scans, I was back where I started. So I decided to load on XP sp 2 that I fortunately had on disk.
Monday, I mentioned it to a couple of co-workers and did some searches on the virus, etc. One of the coworkers mentioned safe mode. Right… now I remember, I need to boot into safe mode so those little buggers don’t load and then I can get them. I also remembered reading a great newsletter by Brian Livingston at Windows Secrets. His January 27th newsletter went into details how many anti-spyware software would miss most malware. It mentioned the new Microsoft Anti-Spyware Beta being one of the best.
I went home early. I downloaded the MS Anti-spyware beta and installed it. It found even more. I spent about 4 hours scanning and cleaning. Everything was looking good. Okay… I booted out of safe mode and plugged back into the network. EEEeeiiiii. There goes Norton again. They haven’t left. Time to load on Zone Alarm so even if the bugger is on my machine, I’ll keep it in a small cage. I also had a program name to search on.
Now it was time to pull out the big guns. The Windows Secret Newsletter mentioned a great study by Eric Howes. He gives some right-on tips on his page comparing the different anti-spyware programs. It also has a great part on what to do when you have been infected. I did a bit of googling on the offending program. The next step was to run HijackThis and have someone knowledgeable analysis the log. He lists several different forums to get help on the Hijack This log. I used and highly recommend Techsupportforum.com. I posted a log in their Hijackthis forum and within a few hours I had a reply. They were right on the mark at getting rid of most of what was lurking. They give clear instructions on what to do and I’ve seen them stick through some tough cases. I am in support and I work on a message board. I know what the job is like. My hats are off to them. They do a remarkable service. I am also going to send them a donation.
I followed their instructions and thought I was fine. But something was still lurking. I configured my machine to star tup with Norton, ZoneAlarm and the MS Anti-spyware software loading automatic on start up. Yes, it takes almost 3 minutes to boot up but it is keeping it at bay.
Shortly after booting up, the MS Anti-spy told me that My Search Bar was trying to change my browser toolbar. It would catch it and I’d delete it. But it was happening every time I logged in. Hmmm.. They recommending running anti-spyware and anti-virus again. I downloaded a new version of Ad-Aware. It got several items but it was still there when I logged in. I also tried Trend Micro’s Housecall anti-virus scan. No luck.
I’ve had spent almost 15 evening hours to try to kill this. I decided to give it one more try tonight. Whenever I got the message about MySearch bar trying to make a change, I would also get a pop-up about Norton making changes to my browser. Hmmm.. This seemed strange. I was also getting pop-ups for Norton’s automatic update. I decided to check the IP address. It went to a strangish location. So I decided to do the Live Update via the software instead. Low and behold, it had a virus definition update. So scanning began again.
I booted into safe mode. Ran updated Ad-Aware. I was clean. I also went though my Windows\System32 folder and noticed an unusual name exe from the 13th. I noted it. Then ran Norton. It found two threats and sure enough one of them was the suspicious file, winbhgk32. It couldn’t delete it but I knew where it was… I deleted it from the folder, rebooted and logged on. Nothing. Loaded the browser. Nothing. Woohoo! I think I might have it.
It took 5 days and almost 20 hours!
Lessons learned? A lot!
Keep Up with Windows Update I hadn’t kept up with the Windows updates and I suspect that some of the malware took advantage of the vulnerabilities.
Apply Windows XP sp 2 Service pack 2 would have probably helped. I would have at least had a firewall to prevent any attacks on other ports.
Run a commercial Firewall The Windows XP sp 2 firewall is okay at preventing things from coming in but does absolutely nothing once you have something on your PC. A real firewall such as ZoneAlarm will alert you to both programs trying to get in and get out.
Get help I work in support and I couldn’t have done it alone. Find a good support board on line or someone who regularly deals with this to help you if you are infected.
WBW #6 – Warwick “Old Bush Vines” Pinotage 2003
I almost didn’t think I’d make this month’s tasting. Sunday I was attacked with some pretty bad malware/spyware. I’ve worked on it for the past four evenings and I think I’ve finally got my computer cleaned up. I’ll post later the sad story and lessons learned.
My wine for this month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday is a bottle of Warwick “Old Bush Vines” Pinotage. I want to thank Cook Sister! for hosting it.
I am very interested in knowing more about wines from South Africa. We are planning a trip to South Africa to see the wildflowers in September. We are planning on doing a tasting or two and I need to know more. I plan on checking Cook Sister! blog more to learn about South Africa.
This is my second tasting of the Warwick Pinotage. It is from the Stellenbosch region. The price was $18.00.
Label Notes:
Pinotage is a uniquely South African variety which was born and raised in our valley. Pinotage is particularly concentrated and full bodied when grown on ‘old bush vines’. This wine displays an alluring array of mouth-filling dark fruit flavors, a lush seductive texture and a lingering finish enhanced by carefully managed oak maturation. This is a wine to enjoy now or in the next 4-5 years. Warwick Cellar is on the premium red wine slopes of Simonsberg, near Stellenbosch. Established in 1770, the winemaking tradition was revived in 1964 by the Ratcliffe family.
Tasting Notes:
I really enjoyed this wine. Immediately after opening, it had a slightly smokey flavor which left after it had been opened for a while. It has a nice garnet color. I definitely agree that it has a strong flavor of black fruits such as berries and black cherry. It is a little tannic but still very drinkable. It is slightly soft but yet has a very full texture.
I had it with a couple of thick lamb chops seasoned with rosemary ang garlic. For a vegetable, I roasted some fresh aspargus and carrots. It stood up well to the asparagus. After dinner, I had a nice aged cheddar from Fiscalini Farmstead.