Happy New Year!
The Snook and I have been enjoying a pretty low-key holiday weekend. After the debauchery of the first Martini Club session Friday night, we decided to forgo the traditional New Year’s Eve activities in favor of watching TV at home. On Sunday we mainly hid inside the house from the disgusting heat (over 100 degrees F!) while preparing dinner for our friends Leanne and Brendan. Since Brendan’s an apprentice chef (at one of our favorite restaurants), we made a last-minute attempt to impress him by brining and smoking a chicken. We’d never done it before. For the brine we used this recipe, and the only glitch was that we’d decided to do it so late that we only brined it for four hours, not eight. We then smoked it on our barbecue using some apple wood chips for about two hours. It turned out delicious! So that was a success. We also had fresh prawns from the Sydney Fish Markets, grilled squid salad, and green beans from Ma Snook’s garden. The Snook’s homemade summer pudding was the glorious finalé. Man, it really is time to get back on the diet…

Don’t forget to go play a round of “I Never” at Tara D’s Friday Pseudo-Drinking Game. Today’s items are fun…

Often when the Snook and I are in a shop, one of us will spot an item and whisper: “That’s for the Basement.” This refers to a shared dream that we have of one day owning a house with a large furnished basement, which we will decorate with all the nerdiest, coolest retro kitsch we can find. Our Basement is definitely going to have a Tiki Bar. It will have soft-focus 70’s paintings (or possibly needlepoints) of doe-eyed tropical naked women on the walls. It will have shag carpeting. Cocktails will be served in multicolored aluminum drinking cups. And in the corner will sit one of these beauties…

Ooh, you can now input your latitute and longitude on your MetaFilter user page! There are only a couple of us listed in Sydney so far.

To this day, I’m unable to go into a Dunkin’ Donuts without thinking: “Time to make the donuts!” Rest in peace, Fred the Baker.

And what did you do for Christmas this year? Me, I patted an albino wallaby! I also drove over six hundred miles, got slobbered on by a giraffe, played a round of Putt-Putt of Death at the crappiest “tourist attraction” in history, and ate my weight in Christmas pudding. Oh, and no sightings of the murderer, though there was a (debatable) avian homicide.

I cancelled my Blogger account way back in 2001, and I’ve resisted the impulse to register again ever since… but as of today I’m back. No, I’m not moving away from my home-grown system; it’s just that I got an invitation to join a new Sydney grogblog* called The Martini Club. So those of you with Blogger sites may notice that my comments are signed differently. Just in case you wonder!

* I just made that up. You read it here first, folks!