1. Chef Glenn from Supper’s Ready.  For her half-birthday, I got Elizabeth a private cooking lesson.

You may be wondering about the whole half-birthday thing.  So am I, sometimes.  It has to do with us getting married right around Elizabeth’s birthday, and her not wanting the two celebrations to end up getting fused together – but that’s another story.

So, with reference to Chef Glenn, I am very grateful.  He brought along some fantastic new recipes, and spent the afternoon with us in our kitchen, showing us new cooking techniques and answering our near-ceaseless questions.  I was particularly interested in his thoughts on chef’s knives, since our knives are complete crap and we have been looking at getting a proper set for some time.  Elizabeth, Diggory and I then spent the evening stuffing our faces with the results of our labours, to our great delight.

Elizabeth thought the whole private cooking lesson was a neat idea, too, so we lucked out on all fronts.

2. The ending to Australia.  Not so much because it was a particularly good ending, but because it meant the movie was finally done. This is two-and-three-quarter hours of film about a bloody continent, for the love of crap.

It’s not that the movie was bad; it’s just that it was really something like eight different movies, none of which were long enough to stand on their own, so they mashed them all together.  I assume they named the movie by identifying the lowest common denominator between all the stories – namely, the freaking land mass on which they took place.

3. Bolt.  Diggory and I watched this over the weekend, while Elizabeth studiously ignored it and stayed buried in her book.  We laughed out loud at several points, particularly when Rhino the hamster was up to his tricks.  Probably the best animated film I’ve seen since Kung Fu Panda.

photo credit: Anthony Topper