This one is a no brainer. I have a few videos that I just love to watch, so here is a selection. Some I made, some from others.

The weird

Salad Fingers. It’s very strange, but compelling. If you like it, there is a whole series:

The geeky

A demo of the first Apple Macintosh by Steve Jobs, January 1984, in front of 3000 people. It makes me smile:

The cool

The very first example of Lipdub I saw online (Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger). It is just so well done.

The awesome

I really like the song, and the singer – my friend Mshel. Who knew she could sing and play the ukulele!

The cute

Where Wyatt and I goof around at Drexel’s on Megan’s 18th birthday:

And finally, the wacky

Me and Meagle duke it out on the top of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris during our trip around Europe:

I thought I’d break this one down a bit…

My most visited website: Facebook. Hands down. Can’t stay away. Sometimes amuses me, sometimes like a train wreck that I can’t look away from, always a useful distraction.

My favourite website design: I like the way my friend Mshel‘s blog page looks. Sometimes I go there just to look at the pretty pattern and the groovy banner pic. That’s not creepy is it?

My favourite website for interesting content: PostSecret, weird and interesting. Sometimes it brings tears to my eyes.

My most useful website: has to be Wikipedia. I visit this site every time I want to know anything about anything. The 17 Laws of Futsal? Wikipedia will tell you! All the movies Jason Isaacs has ever appears in? Wikipedia! Hurrah for Wikipedia for making me look smarter than I am.

My favourite new discovery: RunKeeper. How awesome is this! It tracks all my runs, I can see how far and fast I’m going, it tells me how many calories I burned AND it’s an iPhone app. Very cool.

Honourable mention: Twitter. It’s just there, twittering away. Always on, always interesting.

Oy vey.

If you know me, you know I don’t cook. Our oven has been broken for about six months now, and I can’t say I especially miss it. I am simply not inspired by cooking. I started cooking for the family at a young age (about 7-8 years old) so it has always felt like a chore.

As an adult, cooking for a vegetarian and two picky children didn’t help much. And now I have to cook for a picky child, a picky adult and a slightly fussy teenager. Cooking is what I do so that I don’t starve. If I didn’t have to, I never would. This means that most of my meals are as easy and convenient as possible (rice and veges in the cooker, chicken on the barby).

The whole lack of enthusiasm is not helped by the fact that I have to eat a low-fat, low-sugar diet, so I can’t eat most of the food from recipe books.

But there are a couple of recipes I use occasionally, so here is one:

Lemonade Scones

4 cups self-raising flour
300ml milk
1/4 cup sugar
1 can lemonade (355ml)
1/2 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 220ºC. Cover an oven tray with a sheet of baking paper or spray well with non stick baking spray.

Mix all ingredients in a bowl to a smooth dough. Tip out onto a well-floured bench and cut into squares or press out with a round cookie cutter. Place the scones, just touching each other, on the prepared baking tray. Bake for about 15 – 20 minutes until starting to colour pale golden. Check they are cooked through and cool on a wire rack, covered with a clean teatowel (this keeps the scones lovely and soft).

Cut in half and spread with jam or honey when cool enough to eat.

Variations:

• Add some dried fruit to the mixture for example – 1 cup chopped dates or 1 cup sultanas or raisins or 1 cup dried cranberries.
• Add 1 cup of chocolate chips to the mixture.

To make savory scones, replace the lemonade with soda water and any of these optional extras –

• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 1 cup grated tasty cheese
• 6 rashers lean rindless bacon, chopped
• 3 tablespoons chopped parsley or fresh herbs

To make a cinnamon pinwheel scone:

Mix 2 teaspoons cinnamon with 3/4 cup caster sugar. Lay the dough mixture out flat on a well floured bench. Pat out to be a rectangle approximately 30 x 20 cm. Sprinkle the cinnamon mixture over the surface. Roll up from the long side into a sausage shape then cut into slices. Lay the slices on a prepared tray so they just touch each other, cook and cool as above. The lovely sticky cinnamon filling can be quite hot so remember to cool them down before biting in.

What is a ‘hobby’ exactly? I have a lot of different things that I do for enjoyment, but I’m not sure if they would be classed as hobbies. Is running a hobby? It’s one of my favourite things. My most favourite thing is cuddling my future husband but I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t be classed as a hobby in the strictest sense of the word.

I love chillaxing in front of the telly with whatever series we are watching at the time (Survivor, Project Runway, Top Chef, Star Trek, Sarah Connor Chronicles, FlashForward, etc…). TV is not really a hobby, though, is it?

Dancing is probably my favourite hobby (other than hockey of course, but I have bored you enough with tales from the rink). Stephen and I started ballroom dancing classes about six weeks after we first met, and we both really enjoy it. It’s a challenge to learn and master each new step, and now after a year we can dance a basic waltz, quickstep, foxtrot (rhythm and slow), tango, samba, rumba, cha-cha and jive. It’s a great feeling to take a new move that seems impossibly hard and then learn how to dance through the steps seamlessly. And I think we are actually quite good at it.

The thing that makes this hobby a real challenge for me is that I am totally tone deaf. I can’t hear the beat of the music at all. I just step out and trust that Stephen will guide me around the dance floor in time to the music. And he does, impeccably.

And dancing brings out the best and worst in us. We bicker over where his feet are, why I’m not in time, whose arms aren’t in the right place (spaghetti arms!). But we also laugh and canoodle, and gossip about our classmates, and have a really great time together.

We are never going to be the next Fred and Ginger, but that’s not really the point of a hobby, is it?

I’m not sure I can claim any special talents. I asked Stephen what he thought my main talent is…but I won’t repeat his answer.

I’m good at a lot of things, but I wouldn’t call them talents. I’m great at organising people and things, I’m a pretty good writer, I’m good at being friendly and outgoing, I pick new things up fairly quickly. But I don’t think these things are all that special.

I’m stumped.

Now I don’t want to be repetitive, but I want to talk about hockey again…

I felt sick before my first full game tonight. It’s really hard to try something completely new, be really bad at it, and keep coming back for more. But this week I was a little better than last week, and next week I’ll be a bit better again.

In my life so far, I have always tried to put my all into anything I try, and I usually find that I can do well at it. It’s an unfamiliar feeling to be an absolute beginner and have no clue what I’m doing. But I am determined to get better!

And I feel so lucky that I have a really supportive team, and an awesome boyfriend who tells me I’m doing great and that he’s proud of me. I’m having so much fun and he’s right there beside me cheering me on. It’s such a good feeling.

I think my favourite painter is Vincent Van Gogh, and my favourite painting by Van Gogh is definitely Starry Night. I just love the colours and the form of this painting.

I’m listening to the Dixie Chicks on heavy rotation at the moment. I particularly like I’ll Take Care of You. I like it because it makes me think of being a mother to adult children – that I’ll always be there for them, no matter what.

For some reason, it’s set to scenes from Zena Warrior Princess. YouTube is a strange and fascinating place:

Hmm, fan fiction. I can honestly say I have never read or written any fanfic. I am simply not that kind of geek.

For those of you who don’t know, a fanfic is a story written by a fan of a book, movie or TV show. The fan-writer takes the characters and plot of the original book or show, and develops them in new and interesting ways.

When I think of fanfic, I think of Star Trek.

According to Wikipedia, Spockanalia was the first modern example of a fanfic. It was a fanzine (magazine written by fans) published from1967-69 and had four issues. I can only image what it contained…Star Trek fans can be a *little* strange.

I have to make the sad confession that I have read some of William Shatner’s TekWar series. Not exactly fanfic, but as geeky as I get. I vaguely recall that they were interesting enough, although not especially well written.

I sometimes wonder what Star Trek actors and writers must think of the fans. I suspect that William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek, quite enjoys the attention. Other than writing sci-fi novels, he attends Star Trek conventions and was involved in a documentary about the TV series. It seems to me that Star Trek is a universe of it’s own, complete with action figures, collectable trading cards, comics and fanfic.

And there we go, I made it back round to the topic in the end!

I just finished a book that I’ve been trying to read for years – Richard Branson’s Losing My Virginity. Because I’ve been really struggling to read any book in the past couple of years, I got this one as an audiobook from Audible. I listened to Richard recount his life as a successful entrepreneur on my morning runs – it was a very enjoyable way to spend some quality time, just me and Richard and the cold hard road.

Like I’ve said before, I really love listening to audiobooks, and Audible is a quick, cheap and convenient way for both Stephen and I to enjoy books we would otherwise not get a chance to read. We have a subscription that gives us one audiobook of our choosing each month, and I find that’s about the right amount of time to get through a medium-sized book. We’ve even built book-listening into our weekly routine. ‘Date-Sunday’ consists of us going to our coffee place (chosen because it has comfy sofas and good cake) and listening to whatever we’ve each downloaded that month. It’s great together/apart time, and is a precious part of my week.