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Last night we finally had our much-anticipated Murder Mystery Dinner Party. The theme was 1920’s Chicago and the guests went all out on the costumes. The Snook, as you can see, was a dodgy millionaire gambler. (He also cooked us an excellent four course dinner.) It was an entertaining evening of alcohol, murder, sex, greed, bootlegging, crooked cops, and dangerous ladies. Nothing but good clean fun at the Chippendale Legitimate Businessmen’s Social Club! Photos are available here. Thanks to all the guests!

Happy Birthday to my sister Amy! Our cat’s namesake turns 25 today. (Well, yesterday really, but it’s still her birthday where she is!)

Awww… Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet, has just passed away. Man, I used to love his show. I had a crush on his hot assistant Craig.

Excellent. OverSeasVote.com makes registering for a US absentee ballot pretty darn painless. I’m definitely using it this year!

Bloody hell. I just had a big long post about how I’m getting better at work but it’s still hard standing all day, and how it’s really fun when we get American tourists in, and how I managed to take a phone call and handle the whole enquiry myself, and how I got a great pep talk from my boss with nothing but positive reviews… but somehow I lost it. So bugger that. I’m too tired.

Have I told you how much I friggin’ love The O.C.? As I mentioned before, Channel 10 purchased the rights (after it tanked on another station) and they started showing it a few weeks ago. I think even the Snook is getting hooked! At first he claimed he didn’t like it – because “there aren’t any cute girls, and that main one looks like she’s 35” – but it’s slowly winning him over. Last weekend I had on a hooded sweatshirt and he was all, “You’re pretty far from 8 Mile!” and I was all, “Welcome to the OC, bitch!” We need something to replace the aching void of Buffy and Amazing Race.

Mac users: I just found a great little application called gCount that automatically checks my Gmail account for new messages. Pretty neat.

How many of these 100 Wonders of the World have you seen? I had fifteen, but only because we saw, like, all of the Italy ones on our trip last year.

How many hate groups are in your state? Indiana has fifteen and (as I expected) most are KKK groups. My parents went to high school in Butler, which is, like, their national headquarters or something. (Link courtesy of Max, who unfortunately has to contend with “Neo-Confederates”.)

My First Day

The Good: Well, that was different! I can honestly say I did more work in the past eight hours than I did in the previous four months at Epson. It was all pretty interesting, too. We had a lot more people in than I expected and I was kept busy ringing up sales and helping people find things. I also talked my damn head off. Every knitter in Sydney is going to remember the chatty American! I won’t get bored.

The Bad: Man, I am beat. Standing all day is harder than I remembered. My feet kill. And GOD, some of those old ladies are mean! One woman was looking at a really simple mohair scarf we had hanging up so I asked her if she needed help. She said she wanted a pattern for it. I’m like, “Oh, I don’t think there is one, really. I’d guess you just cast on 15 stitches and knit every row, changing colors every couple of rows.” And she was like, “I can’t rely on your ‘guess.’ I need a pattern!” Whatever, you stupid old Feathers-scarf-wearin’ bag!

The Ugly: Oh god. I can hardly bring myself to type it. “How many balls of wool does it take to knit a scarf?” I must’ve heard that fifty times today. It’s like a zen koan. There is no answer! I’m thinking, “Look, there are infinite thicknesses of wool, infinite sizes of scarf, and infinite patterns you can knit on many different thickness of needle, so that means that it would take an infinite number of balls to knit your damn scarf, IDIOT!” By the end of the day I had given up. I just started answering “Four!” with as straight a face as I could muster.

On the plus side, do I not have the cutest hair in the world? This what it looks like with me attempting to dry it without proper round hair brushes. I kinda like its shaggy texture. It’s very Melanie Griffiths in Cherry 2000, I think. Just one more and I’ll stop, I promise.