Happy birthday to my Mom and to my stepbrother Colfax!

8-bit Twilight Eclipse Interactive Game. This is FANTASTIC. Twilight done as an old-school choose-your-own-adventure style Nintendo game… all on YouTube. Even if you hate Twilight – or rather, ESPECIALLY if you hate Twilight – you’re gonna love this.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Official Trailer. Looks awesome. I just wish YouTube would let me go through it frame-by-frame so I can identify all the scenes.

Edited to add: Screw YouTube. If you go to the official site, you can get to the Quicktime version which allows you to go through slowly.

New appliances!
If you follow me on Twitter, you probably saw me geeking out over our new cooktop and oven all weekend. It was very momentous! We like to cook, and our old setup was just painful to use. (Here’s a picture of the old electric hob and crappy Blanco oven from when we moved in.) Two of the hotplates didn’t work anymore, and then oven never got to the right temperature. You’ll recall that we ordered the new stuff about two weeks ago, and on Friday the warehouse called to arrange delivery. Saturday morning we started by turning off the power and disconnecting the old cooktop and oven. The Snook and I were able to remove them ourselves and take them outside. (City of Sydney will pick them up for free tomorrow morning.) Needless to say, the cabinet opening was pretty damn icky. We gave that a good washing while waiting for the delivery. And then they finally arrived! It was very exciting. Jonathan (aka dancingman) came over to help with the installation. (He’s an electrician.) Luckily we only had to make one sidetrip to the hardware store to pick up extra bits. Jonathan put in a circuit breaker for us, added a plug to the oven, and wired up the cooktop. Then it was just up to the Snook to enlarge the benchtop opening a bit so the cooker would fit in. After a very long day, we finally had it all in place!

So far we’re loving it. The oven reaches temperature in less than 10 minutes and it’s got loads more space than our old one. We’ve also played around with the dividing shelf (which allows you to set two separate temperatures). We also have a rotisserie thingo which will apparently rotate and cook a joint of meat in there?! Pretty amazing. The cooktop has also lived up to expectations. It boils a pot of water in about 3 minutes! The only problem was that we discovered that our cheapo saucepans that we’d hoped would work on the induction actually don’t. So that left us with only two pans – a big stainless steel frying pan and our Le Creuset cast iron dutch oven – that would actually work on it. We ended up going to Victoria’s Basement on Sunday to buy a set of Scanpan Fusion 5 stainless steel pots which work great. So far we’ve made a steak dinner, banana bread, roast veggies, toad-in-the-hole, and apple-berry crumble with our new setup. It was well worth the wait!

Word of the day: skeuomorphic.

Bettina Arndt sucks. I was going to write her an email about how I found her article extremely patronising and out-of-touch, but there are about 150 comments (and counting) already saying the same thing. Her attitude towards marriage is exactly WHY I was so reluctant to get married. I don’t want her to count me on her team. We got married to celebrate our relationship with our friends and family, not because I’m a victim who wants to have babies and needs the law to keep the Snook from running for the hills.

Choosing the Right Sewing Machine Needle. Bookmarking for future reference. (Did you know that Bells is sewing now too?)

YouTube: Racist Cat. Hahaha, pretty funny.