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Friday Five:

1. What’s your favorite piece of clothing that you currently own?
Hmmm. I’m not sure if it counts, but I love my panda shoes somethin’ fierce.

2. What piece of clothing do you most want to acquire?
A month or two ago I would’ve said a knee-length suede coat with (fake) fur at the collar and cuffs. Every girl in Sydney was wearing them this winter, yet every one I tried on was about three sizes too small. I can’t help it; I’ve got broad shoulders. So I gave up on that dream. Nowadays my clothing aspirations aren’t centered on any one specific garment. I’m all about getting down to a size 14 so I can shop in the damn frilly girls’ stores. I hate everything in their windows (it’s all pastel gypsy crap right now), but I hate even more the fact that even if I wanted to wear it, I couldn’t. So that’s what I want.

3. What piece of clothing can you not bring yourself to get rid of? Why?
It’s corny but… my high school letter jacket. I never wear it – in fact, I hardly ever wore it in high school, and it currently resides in my Mom’s basement – but earning that thing was a dream come true. You all know I was the big brain in high school. That’s all the more reason why I wanted to prove I could do something other than that. I wasn’t the greatest tennis player ever, but dammit I earned those varsity letters. (Although, if some greater power offered me the choice to trade the jacket for the body I had back then, I’d do it in a heart beat.)

4. What piece of clothing do you look your best in?
I had to ask the Snook. He says it’s my short black skirt and my long black calf boots. What a cheeky monkey.

5. What has been your biggest fashion accident?
Just check out any of my school pictures up until about 10th grade. Seriously. If it had stripes, or patches, or ribbons, or huge embroidered teddy bears, I probably wore it at some point. Of course, then I passed it on to my sister. 🙂

Oh yeah! I scored a massive 15/15 on this spelling quiz. The 1991 Lagrange County Spelling Bee Champion still has it. *patting self on back* (Link courtesy of Max.)

At last! I finally have Mac OS X 10.2 in my possession. During last weekend’s fruitless trip to the Apple Store I noticed that the Apple seminar road show was swinging through Sydney this week. Today I dragged the Snook down to the Convention Centre in Darling Harbour to check it out. What a haul! I got tons of free stuff: brochures, stickers, a gigantic Jaguar poster. Even better, when I bought the OS they gave me a $50 rebate coupon and a free T-shirt! Now I don’t feel so bad about missing out on the first day action. *grin* Anyway, it’s all installed and I’ve been having some fun playing around with the changes. The new iChat is especially interesting. Pictured here is my current desktop if you wanna check it out. (Yeah, I’m lovin’ the leopard skin.)

After the seminar we headed back out to the Harbour. It was such a beautiful day. I’d been in one of my blue “Why did we leave London?” funks but those never last long in the face of Sydney sunshine. Snookums caved to my whim and we took a ferry all the way around to Circular Quay, under the Bridge and near the Opera House. I never get tired of that. I couldn’t resist taking a few pictures. Here’s the Snook having a rest, a view of the city skyline, and a shot of the big scary entrance face at Luna Park. (Imagine going through that at night as a kid… “Can’t sleep. Clown’ll eat me!”)

       

Oh. My. God. CBS is making a reality television show about hillbillies. They’re going to transplant a real “rural, lower-middle class family” to a Beverly Hills mansion and watch the hilarity ensue. Isn’t that funny? Or do you all find this as completely offensive as I do? Why is it okay to make fun of this segment of the population? “Imagine the episode where they have to interview maids,” laughed CBS VP Ghen Maynard. Yeah, what a riot! Those idiots probably don’t know anything about maids! They probably eat squirrels and stuff! I could die laughing. It’s so fun to exploit poor people for amusement. Ooh, I’ve got another suggestion for CBS’s fall lineup: “The Real Jeffersons”. They could move a poor black family into a rich white apartment building and film the results. Comedy gold, my friends. Hey, I can’t wait for the episode where they try to buy crack from the doorman! Won’t that be funny? What, you mean it’s not socially acceptable to make cracks about black families? Yet it somehow is when they’re poor Appalachian farmers? Bite me, CBS.

(If you’re confused, that was all meant to be sarcasm. I really am pissed about the show and I’m leaving feedback at cbs.com right now.)

Why go to the effort of being a woman of substance, when you will get so much more attention by being a waif? That’s a damn good question.

All right, Book Groupies. I think it’s time to start the discussion! If you’re not quite done yet, just wait until you finish to join in so we don’t inadvertently spoil it for you. This isn’t going to be a set length kinda thing; we’ll just talk about it for as long as people want to talk about it.

The forum itself should be hopefully self-explanatory, but let me know if you have any problems. It’s a threaded discussion (unlike my blog comments), so you won’t have to hunt for replies to your posts. You don’t have to login or anything, but your IP address will get logged so I can track/ban abusers if necessary. There’s no HTML allowed, but you can use something called “PhorumCode” to format your messages. (Instructions are linked on the posting forms.) It’s pretty simple.

In related good news, I finally got my copy of The Lovely Bones today! (It just got released here today, so any other Aussies should now be able to find it.) I think I’m going to try to set it aside for a few weeks, though. I read fast, and I finished Back When We Were Grownups way, way too early. I’d rather have the book be fresh in my mind. But if you’re interested in joining in for September, be on the lookout for a copy!

Home Brew Report: As of yesterday, the beer (which was bottled two weeks ago) was ready to be consumed. Apparently it’ll keep getting improving for the next couple of months, but of course we couldn’t wait to try it out. Here’s the Snook cracking open the first one, pouring it, and giving it a taste.

       

It was… okay. As the Snook put it, “It tastes like home brew.” It was pretty fizzy, but they were big bubbles like you get in a Coke. It wasn’t quite foamy enough. (He thinks to get that result, you have to use more grain and less sugar.) The taste was pretty yeasty and pronounced, and it hit the tongue almost like cider. It’s definitely drinkable, but it’s not going to win any awards or anything. Oh well, the next batch will be better!

Me: Wow, the National Library of Australia is going to start archiving porn websites to add to its “extensive collection of erotica”.
Snookums: (in Eric Cartman voice) Kewl.

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Australia. Brilliant and hilarious and true. Australian beaches are simply the nicest and best in the entire world. Although anyone actually venturing into the sea will have to contend with sharks, stinging jellyfish, stonefish (a fish which sits on the bottom of the sea, pretends to be a rock, and has venomous barbs sticking out of its back that will kill you just from the pain) and surfboarders. However, watching a beach sunset is worth the risk of all of these. (Link courtesy of John.)