Photo Roundup: Is this adorable? It’s my sister Amy and little brother Joey, both wearing the Christmas gifts I knitted them this year. (Yeah, that’s the Gryffindor scarf.) Joey’s even playing with one of the chickens I made him! Isn’t he a sweetie?

Here are a couple other random photos I’ve been meaning to post…

The first is my new Venus Fly Trap, which I bought at the hardware store last week. Isn’t he cute? I’ve put him on top of the worm farm, thinking he might feast on some of the gnats that hang around there. Second is the Snook’s latest brewing invention, a “heat exchange”. As I understand it, the biggest problem for Australian brewers is chilling the stuff quickly enough after you’ve brewed it. He came up with this system, which involves a coil of copper pipe with plastic tubing on either end. The coil goes down in the big pot of brew, and one end of the hose is hooked on the cold water tap. The other end runs into a bucket. Turn it on, and voila! Heat exchange. It worked really well. (And don’t worry, fellow Greenies, I made him save the water to use in the garden.)

   

SWEEEET. Bob Dylan and Ani Difranco are playing Sydney together in February! I am so there.

DAMMIT. I stumbled out of bed this morning and fired up OmniWeb to check the site. My home page is My Yahoo. What’s the first thing I see? Who won friggin’ Survivor. It’s twelve hours to the damn episode and now it’s ruined. I don’t know why I even bother.

Festive CouchCam! Wow, with one string of lights I decorated both my house and my weblog! That’s what I call efficiency.

Later: Apologies. Unbeknownst to me, the Snook turned them off when we went to bed, and during the day the light from the window is too bright to see them. Rest assured, you’ll see them tonight.

Holy crap. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you every sketch from The State (MTV’s brilliant but lamentably cancelled sketch show from the 90’s). Now the Snook will finally get my references to eating Muppets and sitting in $240 worth of pudding. Awwww yeeaaaahhhhh…

Modern men prefer skinny women. Oh, WHAT. EVER. If that’s the case, you all suck. I’m just glad I found one of the few men who evidently still likes his woman womanly.

Secret confession: Not only have I been watching Scrubs… I have a total crush on John McGinley. Yeah, he played Bob Slydell in Office Space (the Micheal Bolton fan). I can’t help it! He’s really, like, muscular and funny and stuff! And he’s constantly ripping on the main character, who I find annoying and odd-looking. Yes, I am a John McGinley fan.

I’ve had an e-mail enquiry about when we’re going to begin the next book discussion. We’re supposed to be reading Paul Auster’s Moon Palace. It’s a short book, but I figured people would probably take a long time because of the holidays. So what’s the status? Could all you Book Clubbers (and aspiring Book Clubbers) take a second to comment and say if A) you’ve read it and you’re ready to discuss, B) you haven’t read it but you want to so could we please postpone just a little bit longer?, or C) you’re going to take a pass on this one. (I really do recommend the book though. It’s one of my favorites.)

Hmm. Ebert was less than 100% enthusiastic about The Two Towers. So now I’m in the awkward position of being let down, either by the movie or my favorite critic. What a dilemma.

Ha! Y’all make fun of my knitting, but today I scored big time with it! I was sitting out at the company picnic table on my lunchbreak working on Moire’s Gryffindor scarf when a guy from the office came out for a smoke. He asked me about the scarf and we struck up a conversation. It turns out that he lives about two blocks from me! Not wanting to waste this opportunity, I immediately hit him up for a ride into work. He says “sure” and a carpool is born! That lift home today seriously cut an hour off my commute. Viva la knitting!