My mom really enjoys The Last Restaurant Standing on BBCA, and I've seen it promo'ed endlessly during The F Word, so last night when there was nothing else on I decided to give it a try. By the end I think my blood pressure had spiked into the red zone. The level of tension and grim desperation on the show is truly unbearable.

And did that couple actually try to serve up Welsh-Chinese food? What is that, exactly?

I went to a dinner party a couple of weeks ago thrown by a friend from library school, and one of the other guests was a psychology professor who wrote a diet book a few years back called The Shangri-La Diet. The basic premise that you can fool your brain into lowering your body's set point by slurping down a couple tablespoons of unflavored oil each day. Rita has been doing it since she had her baby and has lost 60 lbs total--down 20 lbs from before she got pregnant--and hasn't even been working out. She says she's only really hungry about once a day. I got the book and it's pretty interesting. Cathy and I are going to give it a try. He recommends flaxseed oil, which is quite good for you anyway. Seth is a pretty funny guy and currently teaches in Beijing.

I finished Sonny Barger's book earlier this week. Even though he has very different philosophies about life than I do, it's hard not to kinda like the guy.

After letting it languish untouched for months, I've been trying to make as much progress as possible on my Cozy shawl and have almost hit the halfway point. Because I was in a hurry when I bought the yarn and didn't have the nice people wind the skeins into balls at the store, I have to do it myself at the end of each ball. This time around I managed to make an unholy mess (while trying to keep Isis from "helping") which took a good four hours to untangle and rewind. I watched all of The Last Templar, an atrocious miniseries starring Mira Sorvino as the world's most incompetent archaeologist, while I worked on it, which is how I knew it took four hours.

This recent post on one of my favorite blogs made me laugh because we used to get raccoons in the backyard in Danville all the time and it was a constant effort to keep the cats out of their way, especially Koosh. I vividly recall one morning trying to shove Isis and Sparkle out the back door, surprised that they were resisting so much when usually they were frantic to get out. It suddenly dawned on my sleep-addled brain that something odd was taking place on the deck: two gigantic raccoons were going at it. Ours weren't quite as noisy as Laurie's pair apparently was, but a disquieting experience nonetheless.