Guess what?!!

Seasoned readers of HouseGoesHome will know just how exciting this news is ….

I bought a new car yesterday!!!!!!

It’s still on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean somewhere, but I should take delivery of it before Christmas.

I wasn’t expecting to buy a new car yesterday. I thought there were nine-month waiting lists for everything. I just wanted to test drive the model I had my eye on.

To my surprise, the salesman said he had three on the way. Sadly not in any exciting colours. I had a choice of white, silver or dark grey. I went for dark grey.

The youngest did her safe driving course on Saturday and, when I told her what colour I’d chosen, she sent back a cheery text saying: “Fun fact – dark grey cars get into more road accidents and are more expensive to insure because they blend in with the road.”

Great. Thanks for that.

Anyways, DD accompanied me to the car dealership and I got him to test drive it because I stuffed the selection process up so badly when I bought the last car.

DD pronounced it to be a nice, solid, safe choice.

And now I’m counting down the days until the orange lemon is off my hands.

In other news since I last talked at you …

Did you know Brad Pitt makes $600-a-bottle pink champagne?

Well, he doesn’t technically make it, but he owns the champagne house that does.

Well, he owns half of it.

Angelina Jolie decided give him the middle finger during their divorce by selling her half of the business to the wine division of the Stoli Group.

He is very cranky about that.

Decanter describes Brad’s champagne as: “An extraordinary achievement, made by the famously difficult saignée method, yet with a wonderful onion skin colour and poised aromas of lemongrass, small red berried fruit and pink grapefruit.”

A blend of Chardonnay grapes of different ages makes up 75% of the final Fleur de Miraval blend. The remaining 25% is from young Pinot Noir grapes, which gives the wine its subtle, pink colour.

This press materials say: “Its tangy notes of red currant and red raspberry energize the delicate minerality, salinity and iodized expression of the Chardonnay grapes.”

It was served at this year’s Oscars, taking over from former pour Piper-Heidsieck.

Dan Murphy’s sells Fleur de Miraval Champagne Rose for $599 a bottle and I got invited to try it for free on Friday night.

But I almost missed out.

I asked what the latest time was that I could get there and the PR said 5pmish, which was vaguely do-able. But she’d made a typo and meant 4pmish.

There was no time to catch public transport or wait for a cab, so I threw myself into my car and attempted to hoon over the bridge for the tasting. However, hooning was impossible because the traffic was gridlocked …. 45 minutes later a flustered me arrived at the Endeavour Drinks head office for the masterclass.

Fortunately there was a free, rockstar park right out the front .

Equally fortunately, they were only onto their third tasting, so I got to have a few sips of various wines before the Brad Pitt special was popped.

It was very delicious.

It also turned out I knew the woman next to me because I used to work with her at News Limited and she’s also the cousin of a friend. We had a massive chinwag as we hadn’t seen each other since my News Limited days.

Lucky her was catching the train home, so she got to drink all her samples rather than just having little sips of each one.

We posed for a selfie before I headed off into the dusk.

The rest of the weekend was such a whirl that I don’t remember most of it. There were a couple of lovely walks with friends, I did some more unpacking, I got my roots done and I took my dogs to Christmas drinks at a friend’s house … where one of them disgraced themselves by pissing on the Christmas tree.

Hope yours was action-packed too.

Song of the day: Oasis “Champagne supernova”