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This morning the Snook and I watched this clip of a lyrebird from one of David Attenborough’s nature specials. Lyrebirds are native to Australia and I’d heard they were good mimics, but I had no idea. It’s amazing! The chainsaws and the camera are the bits that blew my mind.

HOLY CRAP! Australia stuns Japan 3-1. I’m kicking myself for going to bed after the disappointing first half. (In my defense, we bought a new heater yesterday and being toasty warm is not conducive to staying up after midnight…)

“Tabby Cat Chases Bear Up Tree, Twice.” HA! This is particularly relevant this weekend because I finally managed to witness Dr. Amy’s mistreatment of the Snook. He’s maintained for some time that she attacks him whenever I leave the house, and he has a theory that he’s below her in the family power structure. (I, of course, am the top.) I just laughed at him until I actually saw her nonchalantly walk up to him and then lunge at his leg (resulting in a four-inch-long scratch). So yeah, I can totally buy a cat terrorizing a bear. Snookums is just lucky we don’t have any tall trees around. (Link courtesy of John.)

Raiders of the Lost Banana. Dude, with nanners up around AUD$12 a kilo (like US$8 a pound), I’d become a banana bandit too! (The Snook wants me to link to a picture of Mr. Banana Grabber here, but I can’t find one.)

You can see the photos here. I gotta say, I was really, really impressed with the turnout we had. The weather was about as good as could be expected – it sprinkled a bit at first but held off the rest of the day. (We were under cover anyway.) The folks at the Sidewalk Cafe looked a little worried when they saw how many people were turning up, but we kept buying stuff and that seemed to assuage them. People walking by kept doing double-takes when they saw our sign, and we even managed to talk a few into knitting with us! This is definitely going to have to become an annual (or semi-annual) event.

I’ve got some Amazon gift certificates burning a hole in my e-pocket, so I headed over there today to order the Veronica Mars DVDs. I was alarmed to see a notice that my “June 6 order has recently shipped.” I didn’t place any order on June 6th. What’s even more disturbing is, the site won’t let me in to view the details of that order. All I can see is that it’s a Simpsons Clue game and it was sent to someone named “John Mackill.” I never ordered this. I don’t know that person. I never received the usual order confirmation e-mails. My fear and paranoia is balanced by the fact that they couldn’t possibly have charged to my credit card (my old number expired months ago and I haven’t put the new one in yet), and none of my gift certificate credit seems to be missing. I’ve sent through an e-mail to Support. Snookums thinks that it’s just a screw-up, and that someone else’s order has become associated with my account (which is why it won’t let me see the details). Besides, if you were going to scam someone, you’d buy more than a $20 board game, right? Just to be on the safe side, I’ve changed my Yahoo and Amazon passwords to the most elaborate gobbledygook I can possibly remember. I’m crossing my fingers this is all just a mistake.

Update Two Days Later: Yep, it was a mistake. Of course, it took two e-mails and an international phone call to clear that up. *sigh* I’m gonna have to ding their customer service score on this one.

Dad, your dreams have come true. Some guy is starting up a professional deer hunting league. YOUR DESTINY AWAITS!

I feel a rant coming on. This one is entitled: Things I Wish Customers Would Learn, or Why I Always Get Headaches Every Afternoon.

I am not a knitting robot. I do not have an encyclopedic knowledge of every yarn and pattern in the world. I don’t even have an encyclopedic knowledge of the yarn and patterns we sell in our shop. As with all humans, I tend to recognize and remember things that are unusual more than things that aren’t. So if you ask me whether a pattern exists for a hot water bottle cover, I might know that. (In fact, a customer asked me that yesterday and I pointed her right to the only book in the shop.) If you ask me for a kid’s jumper with a giant snail on it, I can help you out. But this, this is what I hate: “Do you have any patterns for a cardigan? A nice one.” ARRRGH! (I especially like it when they specify a colour, like we have pattern books with just red sweaters in them.) If you ask me a stupid, non-specific question like that, I’m just going to point you in the direction of our 600 pattern leaflets and ignore you. I need something work with, people!

On the same note, I am not a mind reader. At least once a week some idiot customer comes in and says that she saw a great pattern last week but didn’t buy it, and now she can’t find it. Oh, and she can’t remember what it was called, or what number it was, or what yarn it used, or even what was on the cover. And then she gets mad at me because I don’t know which one she’s talking about. A similar thing happened a few days ago with wool. This lady came in and insisted that she’d seen the most beautiful skein of charcoal grey New Zealand merino in the shop just days before and now she wanted to buy it. I showed her every bit of New Zealand yarn we have and nothing matched up to the idealized picture in her head. She repeatedly insisted that it was a skein, not a ball, in spite of me telling her that we’ve only ever sold, like, four things in skeins and I showed her every one of them. She dragged me around for half an hour and even at the end I think she still suspected I was secretly hiding the extra-beautiful grey wool out the back. She was looney tunes.

And lastly, look at what you’re buying, lady. I know at fancy bookstores, they let you “purchase” books and then return them for a full refund later. We’re not Dymocks and we don’t do that. We know that Rowan and Debbie Bliss books are expensive. We know that you’d like nothing better than to take them home, photocopy the one pattern you want, and then bring the book back for some other sap. But that just means that we become a library, and the books get progressively more handled until nobody wants to buy them at all. That’s why we have big signs up saying that we don’t exchange on patterns (or knitting needles) at all. There has to be a rule, and that’s it. So when some lady comes in like this morning and claims that she didn’t realize til she got home that the Debbie Bliss book she bought yesterday was “so expensive,” and that she really would only ever “make one thing out of it,” she’s not gettin’ any sympathy from me. What, did you just pick the book out at random? Did you even look at the total when you signed your credit card receipt? If she’d said at that point, “Whoa! I didn’t want to spend this much!” we’d have cancelled the sale, no problem. I might have even let her swap it if she’d come back that same day. But 24 hours later? Nuh-uh. And I’m sorry, but protesting that you really didn’t copy anything “because I don’t have a photocopier at home” doesn’t cut it. That’s what everybody says. I’m not a judge and I don’t want to be in the business of deciding who looks honest and who doesn’t. That’s why we have a rule. Most people don’t have a problem with it, but then most people don’t claim to drop $40 on a tiny book without flipping through it.

Whew. Nice to have that off my chest.

I bought new cords today… and they’re a size 12! I haven’t bought size 12 pants since middle school. I also convinced the Snook to buy a new T-shirt, thus increasing his wardrobe by, like, 20%. We are stylin’.