Here’s some amusing trivia for your lunch break: 100 Things We Didn’t Know This Time Last Year. BBC staff compiled it from news stories published throughout 2005. The one that immediately caught my eye was the assertion that the orange Monopoly properties are tactically best. This refutes the Snook’s longstanding belief that the red properties are the key to winning the game.

Help me, Grammar Nazis!
We were just reviewing an ad for the shop with this copy: “What Ever Your Passion, Tapestry Craft Has Something For Everyone.” And I suddenly realized that “What Ever” should be one word, not two. Right? The dictionary only lists it as one word, yet upon Googling there are tons of examples of people saying “What ever happened to…?” Of course, I’m talking about the Internets here so those might be all idiots. At any rate, we’re now having them change it. I just want to be sure I’m right. Thoughts?

New Year’s Resolutions

• I will get to my healthy BMI range, but I’m not going to beat myself up over how fast it happens.
• I will run the Nike Women’s 10K and the City to Surf this year.
• I will finally get my finances in order so I can enter my thirties as an honest-to-goodness grownup.
• I will do my best to cut toxic people – both professionally and emotionally – out of my life.
• I will read more books.
• I will take a photography class so I can hang out with the Sydney Photobloggers and not feel like a doofus.

Anybody else got any good ones?

When the Snook and I next visit Indiana, we’re soooo going to see the world’s largest ball of paint. (Link courtesy of Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

Since people keep asking us, no, they haven’t caught the murderer yet.

Dubious Holiday Achievement: The Snook and I cleaned off twenty-two episodes of Scrubs from the TiFaux. And by “cleaned off,” I mean “watched for ELEVEN HOURS CONTINUOUSLY.” We love Scrubs.

I’ve been working on the redesign of the Knitter’s Guild website all day. (Old version; New Hottness) It’s not done yet but you can take a peek if you want. All design credit goes to Hank, who kindly volunteered his time and talent and somehow refrained from balking at my stipulation that the text had to be HUGE. (Old ladies are blind, yo.) In terms of the code, this is my first hard-core XHTML + CSS site ever… which means that the Snook pretty much had to hold my hand the whole way through. He’s the best. I dunno; I just have a blank with this stuff. I’ve resisted learning it because I don’t like feeling dumb, and I just knew it was going to leave me frustrated and tearful. It did. I got used to being the whizzy Internet chick – the web-goddess, if you will – and it’s hard to face having to start over at the bottom. He knows how to deal with me though. Like I said, he’s the best. (Oh, and yeah, I still used tables to position the columns. Suck it, Zeldman!)

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…