I received a card in the mailbox earlier this week letting me know that I had a package, so today I walked over to Strawberry Hills to pick it up. It turned out to be the skein of sock wool I won in the Give a Little Hurricane Katrina relief raffle. Unable to contain my curiosity, I pulled off the paper and literally let out a gasp: IT WAS GORGEOUS. The wool is called Vesper Sock Yarn from Knitterly Things, and it’s 100% merino. The colour is “Algae” and I absolutely love it. I’ll need a special pattern for this one… (Many thanks to Rebecca for sending it to me!)

I was listening to MuggleCast on the bus today and just sorta zoning out when one of the commenters mentioned that Emerson, the guy who runs MuggleNet, goes to Notre Dame! They were speculating whether he’d be having dinner in North or South Dining Hall as they were recording the show. It was so weird to be sitting on a bus to Bondi on a beautiful sunny Sydney day and suddenly be thrown into flashbacks of NDH: Circus Lunch, Grab ‘n’ Go, the Mexican room, Candlelight Buffets, that patch of invisible ice near Farley where I skidded nearly every single day of winter…

Wanted: the Arrested Development theme as a midi ringtone for my phone. (You know, just like Lindsay had in the season three opener.) I can find places selling it in the U.S. but none that will work in Australia. I’ve found previews of it but they’re in mp3 format. Anybody have any ideas?

Confession: I’ve never read anything by David Sedaris before. He falls into the nebulous group of “cool people I read about on the Internet and that all the intellectuals in the U.S. seem to fawn over and I think vaguely may have something to do with NPR but I’ve never managed to come in contact with.” But today I stumbled across a link to this hilarious tale of a flight gone very, very wrong and I laughed myself silly. Maybe it’s just because the Snook and I do crosswords together. (Link courtesy of on.the.verge.)

Wow, some Japanese zoologists have procured the first recording of a live giant squid. I didn’t realize the damn things actually ATE WHALES. That’s scary.

Anybody up for a game of Frozen Walrus Carcass? Heehee. I was amused by this BBC article about words from other languages with no English equivalent. As always, the German ones are especially good. (I hope tonight’s WW meeting goes well, otherwise I’ll be all about the Kummerspeck this week!)

At LAST it has been said!
Finally someone on Australian Idol heard my anguished pleas. Kate did a pretty good job with her Queen song tonight but all I could see were those gigantic shoulders lookin’ at me. “Cover up those tuck shop arms,” Kyle finally said, and I CHEERED over here in my living room. I don’t mean to be harsh – I’m a big girl myself, after all – but it needed to be said. I wish I could swear spaghetti-strap tops and puff sleeves too, but sometimes you just have to live in reality. That said, I have been noticing a ton of 3/4-sleeve wrap tops in the shops right now that would look really great on Kate (and me). I should fly to Melbourne and be her style consultant for the rest of the series. She’d totally win.

(Note that it only took me one day of reading the What Not to Wear book for me to consider myself a style maven.)

That said, how crap was Laura tonight? As soon as she announced her song the Snook and I were like, “Whaa–? Silverchair are a Supergroup?” And then she BUTCHERED IT. I hate it when the judges are mean, but man, those “that was the lamest performance that ever lamed its way to Lameville” comments were spot on. Please, please let her be gone and justice return to the world. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go rip Lee‘s kickass punk version of “Roxanne” to my iPod so I can ROCK OUT to it all week…

We’ve just “flipped the switch” to the new server for the Tapestry Craft website. It shouldn’t look any different to you folks, but it’s nice to have a little more breathing room (disk-space-wise). I also had to do a bit of programming to modify our software to display knitting wools the way we wanted. Oh, and the first batch of tapestries are now online! Big thanks to the Snook for listening to my ranty phone calls during the day and helping me out. (He’s the best.)