Donald J. Sobol dies: Author wrote popular “Encylopedia Brown” series – The Washington Post – Oh no! I loved these books, and some of the things I learned from them stick with me today. (Like the fact that a gold brick would weigh 300lbs, and a word with three double letters in a row is ‘bookkeeper.’) I also loved that Leroy’s best friend and bodyguard was Sally, a smart but tough girl who punched out the town bully, Bugs Meany. This grown-up Sally salutes you, Donald J. Sobol.

“They Don’t Make Feminists This Outrageous Anymore” – Slate article about Caitlin Moran and her book How to Be a Woman. I read the article and immediately bought the book on Kindle. Looking forward to reading it next week on vacation!

If you are not reading Cake It to the Limit, you should be. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I need to make some crazy cakes.

Kitchen Renovation Photos
If you follow me at all on Facebook, you’re probably sick of hearing about the damn kitchen. I don’t blame you! But not everybody’s on Facebook, so it’s time to do a big photo round-up for everybody else. We kicked off the renovation at the end of January and it’s only just now finished. Big thanks go to both of our employers, who were really accommodating about letting us work from home on days where we had contractors in. While most of the work was done by others, we had to do a lot of packing, cleaning, painting, cleaning, unpacking, and more cleaning ourselves. We were without a kitchen for a total six weeks, and I never want to go through that again in my life. If you want to see all the details, just go here. And now for the glorious Before and After…

New Subaru BRZ
The big day has finally arrived, and I can now spill the beans. For the past several months at Sitback I’ve been working on a top secret new project: the launch of the Subaru BRZ sportscar, which is – we think – the first new car the world to be sold exclusively online. It’s been amazing to work on such a high-profile, top-secret project. I am not a Car Person, and I knew very little about the automotive industry when I started. I’ve had the opportunity to learn a LOT about how cars are sold and financed in Australia. I wrote hundreds of pages of documentation and got to attend meetings with high-level stakeholders (including a day trip to Melbourne just for a meeting!). A couple of weeks ago we demoed the site to the Subaru top brass, and as a special treat they brought the car for us to check out. I even got to drive it. It was pretty sweet! And then today was the big launch. These things never go smoothly, and it was tense through the afternoon. I had no idea what kind of reception the site was going to have. I hoped that maybe we’d get a couple people to place orders? Instead we sold out! What a crazy, crazy rush. I got to see this project alive and doing what it’s supposed to. Subaru got heaps of publicity for their new launch. And less than 200 lucky people actually got to order the car. Looks like everybody’s kicked a goal… 🙂