Looks like free wi-fi is being rolled out in various spots around the CBD… Sweet. Now all I need is my friggin’ iPhone.

Remember how I was looking for GAP Favorite Chinos? An awesome MeFite by the name of “orangemiles” came through for me! I just opened a big box with three pairs of pants, two boxes of Nutty Bars, and assorted other junk food. Hooray for the Internet!

It looks like my brother Ant and his wife Kara will be bringing another BOY into the family! And while I’m thrilled because I’ve got lots of leftover ideas from Penn, I’m a little sad that I won’t get to knit frilly girl things yet. (JENNY – GET ON THIS.)Ha! Okay, yeah, I’m asking for it with that one. 🙂

Cincinnati Chili
O what to make for dinner on a cold and rainy night? I had a flash of inspiration: Cincinnati Chili. (Or as I knew it from college: “the chili they have at Steak N Shake.”) According to various web histories, this dish was created and popularized by Greek immigrants in Ohio in the first half of the 20th century. Basically, it’s a version of chili served on top of spaghetti, with lots more toppings piled on. My version tonight was quick and bastardized (based on this recipe), and I’m sure the purists are writhing in agony. To begin with, I didn’t BOIL my hamburger for two hours or puree it in the food processor. I forgot to add the chocolate. And I put the beans in the sauce rather than serve them on the side. Whatever; it was still pretty tasty. We had ours as “Chili Three-Way,” with shredded cheddar cheese piled on top. YUM!

In other food-related news, I discovered a great new Asian food blog last week while googling for a mapo tofu recipe. I even waylaid the staff at our local Chinese grocery to help me track down fermented black beans. I was bummed that I couldn’t find authentic Sichuan peppercorns… until the Snook came home and revealed he had some hidden in the spice cupboard. (Who knew?) The mapo tofu turned out EXCELLENT, so good I forgot to take pictures in our haste to gobble it up. But mine looked just like that guy’s photo anyway. Highly recommended.

Of dream jobs and dream apartments…
Remember the amazing apartment I found online last week? The Snook and I went to check it out on Saturday (along with three other places in the neighborhood). To make a long story short: It wasn’t my dream apartment after all. The first thing we noticed when we arrived was that I was not the only person pulled in by those photos. There had to be a hundred people there for the viewing, and we had to wait in a queue just to take the lift up. The photos weren’t misleading or anything; the place still looked gorgeous. The biggest problem for us was the kitchen, which wasn’t pictured (for good reason). It just hadn’t been done up to the standard of the rest of the place, and it would need a major overhaul to be what we’d like. Also, the bedroom faced full west, and even on this cool spring day it was noticeably warmer in there. (It would be sweltering in the summer.) So, lesson learned. I’m going to try hard not to get emotionally attached to any place I haven’t inspected with my own eyes; it’s too easy to be misled.

In other news… I have a phone interview this Friday. I don’t want to talk it up too much in case I jinx it, but it’s with my #1 Dream Company to Work For. I’m nervous but excited. Any positive thoughts you could send my way – be it prayers, The Secret, whatever – would be much appreciated!

This is so surreal. I was just checking my referrers and apparently I’ve been linked on the Wikipedia entry for “Happy’s Place”. I also noticed that a commenter here pointed me to this Google video of an entire episode. Man, suddenly it’s like I’m 9-years-old, watching Happy at the babysitter’s after school…

A cautionary tale: Do NOT drink seven double espressos in one sitting! You will overdose!

American Psycho
Since I had the day off (and I could barely walk on account of the soreness) I spent several hours finishing off Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. I found it… disturbing, to say the least. At one point today, I actually said aloud to the cat: “But I thought porn was banned in Australia?” According to Wikipedia, this book is “classified R18” in Australia and should be “sold shrink-wrapped” only to those above 18 years of age. (The state of Queensland bans it entirely.) Um, I bought my used and well-thumbed copy for $1.50 from a CHURCH BOOK FAIR. Did they not know what they were selling me? Or is it a conversion tool, meant to scare unwary readers into a religious epiphany? Because that might work.I was expecting more obvious black humor (from the glimpses I had of the movie trailer, I guess), and I spent most of the first half of the book waiting for him to, you know, actually kill somebody. He kept mentioning it to his oblivious friends, and I started to think maybe we wouldn’t actually “see” any of the violence. It was all just business suits and brand names and Genesis discographies. Yeah, then it kicked in. And each attack got worse and worse. Towards the end I was just skimming whole pages, because this is SERIOUSLY SICK STUFF. Like, the sickest you can think of. I’m still trying to work out for myself whether I think the message Ellis is trying to get across is worth wading through such muck. My googling has turned up this page of critical responses from when it was published, which helps put matters into context. This article sums up my own response pretty well. I knew that feminists hated the book, and I thought I was prepared for something “politically incorrect,” but this book crossed a line that even my “liberal-ness” finds difficult to defend. This book made me feel horrified and horrible, and I almost wish I hadn’t read it.

Just keep that in mind when you spot it on the discount table at your next church book fair…

Here’s another story on the City 2 Surf, which includes the great detail that Australian defense personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq participated in their own version, the Desert 2 Desert. Fairfax is hoping to have their results included with everybody else. That’s neat!