Tonight’s culinary adventure: homemade chicken ramen in the Wagamama style. I liberally substituted things in that recipe, throwing in a bunch of leftover bok choy, snow peas, and carrots. It turned out pretty well!

The all-important weigh-in was tonight… and my stomach was in knots all day. I was so stressed. I felt like it was the day before a final exam. By 5:00 I totally felt like barfing. I just had a horrible little voice in my head saying that it was all a mistake, that the scales had been wrong, that it was all a fluke, that somehow I’d manage to put on weight… It was awful. Eventually it was 5:30 and I headed over to the Dymocks Building. I spotted our group leader Emily and waved nervously. “I think it could be a good night,” I said, pointing at the “Total Loss: 4.9 kilos” in my booklet. “I’m hoping to reach my first goal.” I stepped on to the scales and tried to lean forward to see the digital readout, but I had to settle for watching the attendant scrawl it in my book: “6.0 kilos.” SIX KILOGRAMS. That’s thirteen pounds! The stomach butterflies disappeared. I felt JUBILANT. I rushed to tell Emily and collect my “5 Kilo Achievement Bookmark,” which I promptly MMSed to the Snook. I felt like hugging everybody in the room. I got congratulated by several of the other members. And when I got home, the Snook gave me the biggest, proudest hug EVER.

And yay! I get to go buy my reward tomorrow… Pictures to follow.

Random Tiger Tip for Australians: I was playing around with the nifty weather forecast widget (on the Dashboard) when I noticed that we were going to be having a very, very warm week. Curious, I clicked on the widget to be shown the extended forecast in Safari… only to discover it was for Sydney, Florida. It seems the widget defaults to US cities. Happily, Australian locations do seem to work; I just had to enter “Sydney, New South Wales” instead. Just so you know.

You my Midga.
Roger Ebert has published a fascinating bit of correspondence between himself and Daniel Woodburn (a Little Person most known to me for his role on Seinfeld). Woodburn takes Ebert to task for using the word “midget,” and Ebert uses it as an excuse to educate himself and us on the history of the word. Did you know that historically “dwarfs” and “midgets” were entirely separate classifications of Little People? I sure didn’t. I admit, though, that I don’t perceive a lot of negative connotation in “midget,” but I’m willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.

Tapestry Craft Breaking News: The Noro is here. I repeat, THE NORO IS HERE. I just opened the box and did a little dance. It’s so purrrrrrty!

There’s a hole in the Internet.
Where can one find truly local news online? Yesterday when I left work, there was a big commotion up at Home Yardage. Albert and I stood in the street trying to see what was happening. “I think somebody’s under a bus,” a guy said. Whoa. Somebody got hit by a bus? Our stretch of York Street is pretty bad for pedestrians, what with the cars (and often delivery vans) parked along both sides and only one cross-walk in the middle of the block. As we drove to our squash lesson we were passed by numerous police cars and an ambulance. Here’s the thing though: I can’t find one single word about the accident online. Not a thing. I want to know what happened! The ABC doesn’t seem to have local Sydney news, only regional stuff for the country. The Sydney Morning Herald doesn’t have it; neither does News. The Transport Infoline sure as hell doesn’t have anything about it. So where can you hear truly local news in the city? Isn’t there even a police blotter? Or is this just something you can’t get in metropolitan areas?

Wow. After thirty years, Indiana is finally going on Daylight Savings.

ROWR! We are officially Tiger-ing it up tonight. So far I’ve only been able to install it on the iBook (since the iMac is awaiting service… again). The biggest immediate change is that I’ve now gone RSS crazy. I went through all my daily reads and bookmarked all the RSS feeds so Safari can notify me when the content changes. So if you don’t have a feed, get one!

Later: I’d seen a couple people mention the snazzy RSS Visualization screensaver but it didn’t show up in my options. Took a little digging to discover that it only works with Quartz Extreme video cards. I guess it’ll have to wait til the iMac is back in action!

Why Geeks and Nerds are Worth It. Hee! The Snook and I got quite a kick out of that. He keeps telling me to “back that ass up” and “put on some make-up” now though. 🙂