I don’t want to jinx it by being too optimistic, but I had a good week. I ain’t breakin’ out the red Crocs just yet but we’re nearly there. And while I did take the night off from exercise, I didn’t use Moron Customer’s comment as an excuse to self-destruct tonight. That’s a Good Thing.

Serenity as performed by hand puppets. That’s pretty funny. I liked that they referred to Mr. Universe’s “girlfriend” as the Buffybot. (Link courtesy of PCJM.)

• Italian lady in the acid wash jeans who asked a hundred questions and swore up and down that her friend bought some ball of wool here that we Just. Don’t. Sell. She then proceeded to pile up four hundred dollars worth of yarn on the counter only to decide to leave half of it at the last minute.
• The vandal who ripped half a dozen pages out in the middle of a $50 Rowan magazine. Listen, jerk, do us a favor and just steal the book if you want the pattern so damn bad. Don’t frickin’ RUIN it.
• Titsiana. Yes, her. We had a shoplifter on the weekend walk out with two pairs of rosewood needles and the kit for the Anny Blatt wrap I knitted. That’s well over two hundred dollars worth of stuff. Upon reviewing the security footage, guess who it was? I can’t bloody believe it. Maybe that was her plan all along, to freak everybody out with her glistening boobs and her crazy personal space issues so that the staff keep far enough away from her that she can do her thieving.
• The nice regular customer lady who complimented me on my new hairdo and then, while I was digging out some embroidery scissors for her, added “Congratulations…” and then time seemed to slow down and in that nanosecond I had about fifteen guesses for where that sentence was going to go, things like “Congratulations on your wedding!” or “Congratulations on losing the weight!” but instead she said IT, the thing that makes my blood boil – “Congratulations on the baby!” Blank stare. “THERE. IS. NO. BABY.” “Oh my, I’m so sorry! I shouldn’t…” “THEN LET THIS BE A LESSON TO YOU.”

Of course, it’s really that last one that burns me up the most. Here I was finally getting some confidence back and feeling really good about tonight’s WW meeting, and then some RUDE MORON has to go and ruin it all like that. The Snook tried to put a positive spin on it: “Really you should take it as a compliment, because what she was really saying was that you have a small bum.” And I can see where he’s going with that, but it doesn’t help much. All the weight I’ve lost just serves to accentuate the pot belly even more. CURSE MY APPLE-SHAPED GENES!

I am a marketing genius. It hasn’t even been a week and we’ve already sold FOUR of the Jordana Paige bags. Of course, business acumen is a double-edged sword… We’re sold out of the brown messenger bags, which was the one that I wanted for myself. 🙁

That million would’ve come in handy.
I should mention that I did not make it to the Big Brother auditions this year as I had intended. Instead the Snook and I began our pursuit of the great Australian dream – we went house hunting. That’s right; we two perpetual adolescent geeks are actually planning to buy a house. Or rather, a flat. It won’t happen for months and months but we figure it doesn’t hurt to get a feel for what’s available. We checked out four places in this area… and to be honest, they were all CRAP. None of them were as nice or as big as our current place. (Yeah, we’d buy this place if we could, but the damn letting agency owns the whole block and they’re not selling.) At least now we feel slightly better about our recent rent increase. But anyway, yeah, Australia will have to wait another year for the Web-Goddess-on-Big-Bro phenomenon. I’m sure you’re all devastated.

Now I’m just bracing myself for inevitable hysterical “YOU’RE STAYING IN AUSTRALIA?!” phone calls from the fam…

Apparently the first issue of YARN Magazine should be hitting the newsagencies this week! Any Sydneysiders spotted one in the wild yet?

Update: They sent the shop a copy! I like the articles, look, and vibe of the magazine, but I have to say that the patterns didn’t especially grab me. I did like the felted wine bottle socks though, and the Twilley’s Denim cardigan is pretty…

Trail Note
On Wednesday I bought a new pedometer, one with a stopwatch and distance calculation built-in. The distance thing is a bit of a crapshoot; you tell it how long your stride is and it multiplies that by the number of steps you do. Factor in the fuzziness of determining a “step”… and the error factor gets pretty huge. I’ve used it twice on my regular Pyrmont run now and I’m still getting a distance of around 5K. The ability to stop the clock when I’m waiting at stoplights certainly helps though. I’ve cut about five minutes off my time just from that. It’s still taking me about 45 minutes to do the circuit though, which is a good ten minutes off my last competitive time. Oh well. It’s a hilly course and even when I’m not stopped waiting at lights, sometimes I have to slow down for cars and pedestrians. I’ll get faster. (I saw the hypnotherapist today, in case you’re wondering where this tentative optimism is coming from.)

On my way home from work tonight, I could swear I heard a far-off wailing noise, almost as if someone in, say, Perth was crying out in devastation. Poor Robert. You could’ve been a Fern! At least we know that there will be another season of the Race, and that it won’t be another of these crappy “Drive between various BP stations in the U.S.” versions…

Note to Self: If your iPod freezes up again, this is how you reset it.

Okay, now I feel like I’ve had a few days to digest the movie and I can talk about it objectively. I’d warn you that there are spoilers ahead, but if you haven’t seen it and you haven’t read the book, what the heck are you doing reading this anyway?As with Pride & Prejudice, I steeled myself beforehand with the knowledge that they were going to have to cut out LOADS to get the story down to a reasonable length. For the most part, I think the GoF writer did a good job. The house elves and SPEW were never integral to the story, and neither was the whole “Will Vernon Dursley let Harry go to the World Cup?” thing at the beginning. The pace was a bit breathless though. At times I felt like I was watching the trailer for a much longer film. “They’re at the World Cup… Now they’re at school… and two seconds later the Beauxbatons and Durmstrangs are arriving!” A little breathing space might have been nice.

Things I really wish hadn’t been left out: The bit about how Barty Crouch helped break his son out of Azkaban. I liked that he was complicit; it makes his death seem less “Awww, sad!” and more “Fair comeuppance for a right bastard.” I wish that Barty Jr. hadn’t been visible as the “baddie” from the very beginning; there was very little suspense about who Voldemort’s “true faithful servant” was like there was in the book. I wish we’d gotten to see Molly Weasley, if only for a moment. I wish they’d left in *some* of the stuff about Fred and George starting their joke business, if only because it’s going to seem pretty sudden in the next one when they quit school to do it. (Not to mention the fact that in the book, their suspicious behavior provides a lot of plot misdirection.) I wish there’d been some mention of Moody before we saw him, just so it wasn’t immediately obvious that he was involved in the plot. (And hello? That whole snakey tongue gimmick? Way, way too obvious.) Mostly I just wish they’d explained some things a little bit more. Dumbledore just jumped right over the whole “Priori Incantatum” thing. (I had to wonder what the two non-Potterphiles watching it with me thought during that graveyard scene.) And as someone else said, why didn’t we get to hear about how the other contestants got past the dragon? Fleur seemed to suck so bad at the other tasks that it would have been nice to know the sole girl Champion wasn’t completely useless.

Things I LOVED that they put in: The ferret scene (of course). Neville practicing his dancing. The Wyrd Sisters playing and the kids all rocking out. The bit where Fred (or maybe George) asks Angelina to the ball. The fight between Ron and Harry (though the movie makes it out to be more about Harry not sharing with Ron his “plan” to put his name in, rather than Ron’s huge jealousy issues about his friend being famous and rich.) Seeing Ron after he asked Fleur to the Ball. Daniel Radcliffe shirtless. (Yes, I’m going to hell. The Snook was trying to cover my eyes at that point.)

To be honest, these are all little things. Overall I enjoyed myself… right up until the ending. Where in the hell did the happy come from? Cedric’s dead, Voldemort’s back, the government is covering it up, Harry is pissed off and angry… yet somehow they show us a bunch of kids cheering and waving goodbye and somehow that’s supposed to mitigate everything? It seemed very forced and out-of-left field. The Empire Strikes Back ends on a down note, and this movie should have too.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, my sister is married to Viktor Krum. That is all.