DietBlog: Put your arms in the air, kids, because we’re officially on a rollercoaster! Yes, I’ve gone from gain to loss to gain. It’s cool; all that candy on Saturday may have been magical but it sure wasn’t Points-free. I can deal with a measly pound. I got renewed inspiration tonight from my friend Katie, who apparently found these posts inspirational enough to join WW herself. Kickass! That’s four people I’ve converted now. I stuck around afterwards to sit through the induction routine with her (since I never really had a thorough one myself), and it turns out I was totally doing a bunch of stuff wrong and never realized! (For example: I was banking my exercise points each day, when you’re actually not supposed to do that. Oops.) I’m a little bummed that Super Fun Leader Megan is leaving us for a semester because of a uni scheduling conflict, but I think the group is vibrant enough to sustain it. And get this – I may have a second job… working the cash box at the WW meetings! The girl who normally does it is leaving so the position is vacant. Nobody else seems to want to do it, so I told Megan I was thinking of volunteering. I apparently get my meetings for free, and I earn some nominal salary as well (like fifteen bucks or something). I kinda like the idea that I won’t be able to skip out on any meetings too. I’m supposed to go early next week to see what it’s like…

Awww, man! I’ve technically missed it, but for those of you in Chicago, happy Roger Ebert Day!

Ooh, I just got an e-mail that the Jordana Paige Knitter’s Messenger Bag is almost ready for sale! They’ve got pictures there on the site. I am seriously coveting the camel/brown version.

This one’s for the Snook: How to Poach an Egg, complete with picture of the results of each method. We’ve actually tried the Delia Smith method ourselves and were similarly disappointed with the results. We blamed it on not having extremely fresh eggs, though, which I’ve always understood to be the key to the whole enterprise.

Customer: I can’t believe you’ve got all this Christmas stuff but no Nativity scenes!
Me: We’ve got Nativity scenes! See?
Her: No, I was looking for Christmas stocking designs. *pause* It’s all because the Jews and Arabs are taking over the world.
Me: Excuse me, this shop is run by a Jewish family…
Her: I bet it is!
Me: Look, we’ve got tons of Nativity scenes here. See? Whole books full of Christian iconography. There you go. We just don’t have any stockings right now!

And I left, fuming. How dare she? She looked like any other customer, like somebody’s Mom. Your typical middle class, middle-aged, white Australian Christian lady with boofy hair and big earrings. When she said it, my first response was to try to shame her by pointing out that the people who owned the shop she was in were part of the groups she was maligning. Instead, she took it as a friggin’ explanation. I’m still mad. I went downstairs and Albert asked me what I was so upset about. “Could you go upstairs?” I said. “There’s a blonde woman over by the fabric counter. Could you just stand near her for a while? Maybe mutter something about Palestine or leave a suspicious package next to her?” He laughed it off; he’s dealt with people like her before. I haven’t. I just still can’t believe how casually she said it, as if everybody knows about the big Jewish and Arab conspiracy to keep Fat Racist Cows from buying Baby Jesus Christmas Stockings. (And who puts the Nativity on a stocking anyway? Stockings are about Santa, woman! So blame the damn commercialization of Christmas, not a Zionist conspiracy.) Some of the other staff said that she made similar comments to them, so evidently she was just wandering all over the shop spouting this crap at anyone with ears. I’ve worked out what I should’ve done though, and what I’m going to do in the future: I’m going to say that I’m Jewish. And I am going to shame her. And then I’m going to ask her to leave the store. Not that she’ll probably come back anyway…

Gleewarts Express pictures
I’m still going through my (sixty!) pictures and adding captions, but in the meantime Amy and Rob have put some of theirs up on Flickr. My personal favorites: The Snook and I get up close and personal with a big friggin’ snake; I shake Dumbledore’s hand and it looks like I get some mythical power transferral; Amy and I excitedly wait for the 9:01 book launch; the high school girls who dressed up as an entire Quidditch team (seriously the best costume idea of the day!); and me and Molly Weasley have a family reunion. (And check out Hedwig in that last one! Didn’t she look cool?)

Matt invented an interesting concept: Indestructibles. These are those songs you enjoy no matter who’s performing them. (Or in concrete terms, songs you have more than three different versions of in your iTunes library.) I posted a couple over at his site but I keep finding more:

• “One” – U2, U2 + REM, and Johnny Cash
• “Throw Your Arms Around Me” – Hunters and Collectors, Eddie Vedder, Crowded House, the Doug Anthony Allstars
• “Take On Me” – A-Ha, Reel Big Fish, MxPx
• “Fell in Love with a Girl” – White Stripes, Richard Cheese, Joss Stone (though she changes it to “Boy”)
• “Fly Me to the Moon” – Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Julie London
• “I Will Survive” – Gloria Gaynor, Cake, and Jim Carrey (doing Andy Kauffman doing Tony Clifton)
• “Back Home Again in Indiana” – Bobby Darin, Bobby Hackett and Jack Teagarden, Milt Hinton
• “Hotel California” – Eagles, Reel Big Fish, Don Henley (on his own doing a weird reggae version)
• “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” – REM, Great Big Sea, Vic Chestnutt (from a very weird out-of-print REM tribute CD I have called “Surprise Your Pig”)
• “Just Like Heaven” – The Cure, Goldfinger, Richard Cheese
• “Landslide” – Fleetwood Mac, Smashing Pumpkins, Tori Amos
• “Leaving on a Jet Plane” – John Denver, Chantal Kreviazuk, Me First & the Gimme-Gimmes
• “Losing My Religion” – REM, Tori Amos, Tesco Vee’s Hate Police (again from “Surprise Your Pig”), Sydney (techno dance version)
• “Mrs. Robinson” – Simon and Garfunkel, the Lemonheads, REM (an extremely drunken live version with Robyn Hitchcock)
• “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” – the Beatles, Save Ferris, Enoch Light Orchestra (from a mix CD from Matt, actually!)
• “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” – Charlie Daniels Band, Primus, Lynn Anderson, Alvin & the Chipmunks (no, really), and several other versions where the Devil goes elsewhere
• “Radio Free Europe” – REM, Just Say No (from “Surprise Your Pig”), and The Replacements (an EXTREMELY drunken live version)
• “California Sun” – the Rivieras, Annette Funicello, the Ramones
• “Shiny Happy People” – REM, Mitch Easter, and REM + the Muppets (which is actually “Shiny Happy Monsters”

I’d find more but the Snook’s yelling at me to go to the store…

Check it out, Dad – albino deer. I remember seeing some deer with partial albinism in Brown County a long time ago, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen that was totally white.

The Gleewarts Express trip is getting all sorts of media attention already… And here too.

Holy crap, ladies and gentlemen. I am DONE. I didn’t really intend to digest the whole thing in one sitting, but here I am seven hours later all sniffly and hungry. Don’t read the comments if you haven’t finished it yet.