Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
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9:50 pm - Cabinets, Day 2
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It looks like a kitchen! The right cabinet arrived today, as did the last appliance. With a minor exception, all the cabinets are in their place. So are the appliances. Today was like Christmas, opening all the boxes. The plumbing and wiring hasn't happened yet, though.
Our kitchen now has a sink, washing machine, dishwasher, oven, and warming drawer. Which one is the only one that's currently usable? ( Inevitably.... )
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| Monday, October 13th, 2008
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10:13 am - Chocolate Week
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Dear People in the UK,
Happy Chocolate Week! It starts today and lasts through Sunday.
Even if you can't attend any of the events, you maybe interested in some of the offers available with print-outable coupons. London is disproportionately represented, but there are chocolate shops in many other parts of the country offering events and coupons too.
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| Friday, October 10th, 2008
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10:54 pm - Cabinets, Day 1
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It's as if someone took a blank piece of paper and pencil and sketched in a kitchen. The space is defined in gestures, precise lines and details here, rough indications there.
7:55 am - The cabinet delivery guys arrived early, with lots of cabinets and spare parts.
9:15 am - The fitter arrives. We have already figured out that one of the cabinets is too large and not exactly what we ordered. It will not fit. We call the cabinet people. The replacement cabinet will come on Tuesday. This complicates things.
10:00 am - The fitter wonders if the contractor will (later) redo the plumbing. They obviously have different ideas of where pipes should go with respect to cabinets.
2 pm - I gain newfound respect for a local pub. The fitter has ordered his lunch from them and came back to wait 10 minutes until it was ready and he needed to go back to fetch it. The doorbell rings. The pub has - unsolicited - brought him his lunch. Talk about service!
5:30 pm - The sink is installed (but not plumbed in) and all the cabinets that can be are in place. Nothing else can realistically be done until the wrong cabinet is replaced. We were told handles wouldn't be needed until the last day; ours arrive on Monday so he can't even install some of those while waiting for the cabinet to show. The fitter gets a three day weekend, and we get a day's delay to our kitchen.
7:00 pm - It's challenging doing dishes in the bathroom sink. I can fit in two mugs at once at most.
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11:34 am - The invention of the windmill
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During one game of Call My Bluff I had just finished what I thought was a convincing definition, claiming that a particular word related to the invention of the windmill. Alan shook his head at me and declared: 'Nonsense, Toksvig. Everyone knows that the windmill was invented for the sole purpose of filling up the blank bits in the back of 16th-century Flemish paintings.'
From the Sandi Toksvig in the Telegraph, 28 Sept '07, by way of Windmill World
Those medieval paintings? Just warming up for the main show, of course.
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| Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
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5:30 pm - Kitchen update
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All the appliances except for the washer-dryer have arrived.
Five meters of ducting showed up this morning, a day early. I still need to order an external grille plate, but as long as it arrives in the next week, we're good.
The cabinets and fitters come on Friday.
We have a sudden handle decision to resolve. We'd picked one we liked at the cabinet shop, and then they told us they weren't produced anymore so we'd have to pick something else, but they'd check on it, just in case. We went to B&Q, picked out an entirely different handle, and mail-ordered it last night. (We spent time trying it out in the shop first) Today, the designer mentions in passing that the handles will be delivered directly to us; the ones that were no longer produced. So now we need to decide in time to cancel one of the orders.
In other news, ( my kitchen is emptier than yours is.... )
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11:05 am - Breakfast
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I filled out a survey yesterday for the university which employs me, an anonymous survey, approved by the appropriate research oversight committee. I was doing okay with the question wording until I came to a question about breakfast. It asked "How many times per week do you eat breakfast? (A roll and coffee does not count.)"
If a roll and coffee doesn't count as breakfast, what does? Not a breakfast bar or a stack of buttered pancakes or a doughnut surely, since those are about as substantial and varied as eating a roll. Does a bagel and cream cheese count? Cereal and milk? A piece of fruit? Fruit salad? Does it have to be a full fry-up? Would two rolls count? Would orange juice instead of coffee make it count as breakfast?
Breakfast: Today, I have no idea it is or how often I eat it.
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| Monday, October 6th, 2008
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4:46 pm - Boxes
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I've decided that we don't need to buy any living room furniture. We can construct it all out of our growing collection of enormous cardboard appliance boxes. Then I can paint it all in bright, cheery colors.
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| Friday, October 3rd, 2008
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1:18 pm - Let there be mountains for all!
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| Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
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3:53 pm - Peppermint Beach
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2:50 pm - Crime-fighting comes in all shape and sizes
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| Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
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4:46 pm - Kitchen Update
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Today marks the day - I think - of having the least kitchen. The holes for the washing machine drainage and the exhaust hood were punched throught the wall today, and except for the sink, everything else is already cleared out. As soon as the contractor's tools are cleared, the kitchen will be even emptier, but those don't count as kitchen to begin with.
Speaking of the exhaust hood, I just received a phone call from the company from which we ordered it, asking how the delivery went. I'd love to know myself. Their customer service was pre-emptive. It may yet arrive this afternoon. The dishwasher, on the other hand, really did arrive, the first appliance not-destined-to-be-used-until-kitchen-installation to do so (although the kitchen sink arrived last week).
The kitchen is now painted, at least one coat of it, white ceiling, Jasmine White walls, and - in a somewhat necessarily hasty decision - a Peppermint Beach door. I'll post photos of it tomorrow. It's very - vivid; which I wasn't expecting, based on the swatch.
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| Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
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11:10 pm - Color
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Greetings from the land of moderately-ridiculous paint names!
Without cheating and looking it up, guess: exactly what color is "Peppermint Beach"?
(C. thinks you should all provide RGB codes for it. I'm more forgiving and will settle for words.)
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10:47 am - Beware the vacuum cleaner
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| Monday, September 29th, 2008
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10:50 pm - Drop-down box
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Today was a contractor-free day, so I went to the British Library. Before I could request books, I needed to renew my card. One of the optional questions on the computerized renewal request form was my university. I couldn't answer the question: the form had been autorefreshed with a drop-down box based on the country I said I lived in.
They were only trying to be helpful, but it's another example of why writing a good form is difficult.
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| Friday, September 26th, 2008
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11:21 pm - Kitchen update
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C. came home from a work trip abroad on Thursday night, three days into kitchen work. It was all rather changed since he last saw it.
It's even more changed today. The kitchen is down to a sink, a scrap of countertop held up by a few planks of wood (literally; not parts of cabinets), and some piping. The gas and water guy was here today, a cheerful young man with a native accent from somewhere in SE England that was nearly incomprehensible to me. Whatever he did, without even telling him it was a problem, it fixed the pressure in the boiler and our ability to have hot water in the kitchen sink without the water on at full blast.
Temporarily, the kitchen is beautifully spacious with so little in it.
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| Thursday, September 25th, 2008
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8:53 pm - The pop song problem
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I was beginning a new book, reading its very first page. Characters in Marissa Doyle's Bewitching Season - Sorcery and Cecelia written post-Harry Potter - use Latin spells to perform magic. On its very first page, one character commands "Repellere statim!" And my brain is back out of the book as Spice Girls lyrics prance through my mind.
I have this problem occasionally. "Fiat" - car brand, verb, whatever - has been reliably putting The Beatles into my head. "Quo vadis?" takes me straight to Peter Sarstedt (although until I looked it up just now, I couldn't've told you who wrote or sang the song).
Fortunately, Doyle doesn't provide the spellwords for most of the rest of the spells used in the book, so I finished it without any further earworms.
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| Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
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11:31 am - Book Technology at Kalamazoo and Leeds
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I am looking for one more paper for the book technology sessions for Kalamazoo and, ideally, one more paper for a single book technology session for Leeds in 2009 as well. For Leeds, both currently-lined-up papers will have something to do with eyeglasses and vision, and we could tweak the theme to accomodate any third paper which intelligently complements those topics.
I MUST have details about all Kalamazoo proposals by the end of Thursday at the latest. For Leeds, I would need to hear back by Monday, Sept 29th at the latest, since the forms can be submitted electronically.
Here's the CFP for the Kalamazoo sessions again for reference.
Call for Papers
Book Technologies (Sponsored by AVISTA)
International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 7-10, 2009
In the production, use, and storage of books, a large variety of tools and techniques come together, including pens, pen knives, parchment and paper production, clocks for timing the pace of writing, organizational technologies such as indices, bookmarks, bookshelves, lecterns, libraries, book chains, and eyeglasses for reading books.
AVISTA is sponsoring two sessions on Book Technologies for the International Medieval Congress (Kalamazoo, Michigan) for 2009. These panels will explore the multitude of technologies which come together in all apects of the production and use of books.
The Association Villard de Honnecourt for Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art (AVISTA) is a scholarly organization dedicated to any and all medieval topics which relate to the practical sciences or technologies. For more information on it, see its website: http://orgs.uww.edu/avista/
Abstracts and cover pages are due to Shana Worthen (sworthen@owlfish.com) no later than Thursday, September 25, 2008. Cover pages are available here: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions.html#PIF
Edited to add: Hurray! I have a full complement of papers for Kalamazoo now lined up. If I could find one more for Leeds, then that session would be a go too.
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| Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
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10:51 pm - Kitchen
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Today begins an adventure. Our kitchen is being ripped out. One wall of cabinets, tiles, oven, hob, and recirculating ventilator is gone (or at least, piled up outside). The tiles practically fell off the wall, they were so marginally attached. The kitchen contents - as little of it as we unpacked, knowing this was coming - are arranged on a bookshelf and in boxes in the living room. The new sink arrived in the mail today. And I'm learning a whole lot about using microwaves.
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| Sunday, September 21st, 2008
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7:19 pm - Quince followup
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| Thursday, September 18th, 2008
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11:08 pm - Cricketers
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Location: Clavering, in Essex, west of the M11
The waitress is telling us about the day's specials. "The soup of the day is autumn vegetables. The veg is from Jamie's garden." She smiles and leaves us to our decision-making. She knows we're in the know. Does the pub never get people just dropping in inattentively for a meal, without being clued-up? I can't say. We were in the know; the Good Food Guide told us it was Jamie Oliver's parents pub, the one where he grew up. That it was vaguely convenient for a visit afterwards to Fitchingfield and its postmill was an even bigger incentive for going.
( Sweet, bitter, and full... )
Cricketers serves well-presented food, the ample menu an intersection of modern British and Italian cuisine, with an emphasis on fresh, local food (such as Sutton Hoo chicken), and minor tie-ins with their own, homegrown celebrity chef (whose cookbooks, autographed, are for sale by the entrance). The food is generally good, occasionally not quite all together, but satisfying enough we're interested in going back for desserts. Cheerful service by relatively young people, a pleasant traditional pub feel with plenty of space (but not so much that it feels industrial), and plenty of parking in a very small village all make this a pub worth returning to.
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