Music and Cats

One of my favorite poems for the winter solstice contains these lines:

They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.

Adorning one’s home with evergreens — holly, ivy, fir or pine — was a pagan custom prior to its adoption by Christianity. Depending on one’s perspective, evergreens may symbolize life in the dark of winter, or immortality, or rebirth. Sure, the symbolism is evocative, but what I love about evergreens is the sensual: beautiful colors and textures, and a scent that conjures up the celebrations of winter for me like no other.

To open the Advent calendar window for Day 2, click here: (more…)

There’s a reason it’s called National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day, instead of, say, National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Evening. Once I had all of the shelves and drawers out of the main part of the refrigerator, and had begun the soaking and scraping process, I realized that scrubbing down the entire beast would in fact take a whole day. As I had only the couple of hours left in the evening to clean, and write some sort of blog post about doing so, I decided to limit my efforts to the main body of the refrigerator. The refrigerator door will have its day couple of hours, probably tomorrow. And the freezer will have its turn as well. But not tonight. The main case of the refrigerator, though, is now a thing of beauty.

I have to confess: I did not clean out my refrigerator today. I was going to do it, because I thought that today was National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day. And apparently, according to some calendars, it is. While the origins of this (holi?)day are lost in the mists of pre-Internet time, the most wordy (which is not to say definitive) source I found speculates that NCOYRDay was instituted by the folks at Whirlpool, who set it on the third Wednesday in November… which would be today.

However, with the advent of the Internet, the world as we knew it changed. In the time of e-Cards, which were soon created for more weird holidays than I’d have thought existed, NCOYRDay got stuck, not on a day of the week, but on a particular date, November 15, which happened to be the third Wednesday of November in 2000.

Far be it from me to argue with the wisdom of the Web. I’ll clean out my refrigerator tomorrow. And I’ll post photos, too.

For more dirty fridge pics, click: (more…)

One year ago, we were days away from moving in to our remodeled kitchen. We’ve cooked in the new kitchen for almost a year now, and for those of you who are interested (or who have gotten here by Googling “black granite countertops” or “subway tile backsplash”), here are a few thoughts on the process and products that went into our kitchen:

1. Getting rid of the 4th door into the kitchen was the right thing to do. We rarely used it, and I don’t miss it at all. And the small hall closet we created where the door had been is, as you might expect, very useful. It took months for me to learn, but now, when I can’t find the jacket I was wearing the previous day, I look in the hall closet. Usually, Paul has hung it up for me. (Thanks, sweetie!)
2. The honed black granite countertops are wonderful. They have been easy to keep clean, and we haven’t had problems with staining. (This is not to say that there are no stains; Paul noticed a couple of dime-sized stains last week. I think that means it’s time to seal the countertops again.) Unexpected bonus: the dark gray, matte surface is a great backdrop for food photos.
3. That sunny yellow linoleum floor is a thing of beauty… when it’s clean. Unfortunately, keeping it clean has proven time-consuming, as we track in dirt and water through the back door. The floor is overdue for sealing, which should keep it looking better between moppings.
4. Exhaust fans are good. (I say this not only as a cook, but as an architect who knows how badly water vapor can damage a house.) Our ‘before’ kitchen had no exhaust fan, and serious wintertime cooking was certain to fog the windows. Our variable speed range hood can handle any amount of steam we manage to create. Unexpected bonus (I think): anyone who parks in our driveway while the exhaust fan is running can tell what’s cooking for dinner.
5. Everyone should have a bookshelf in their kitchen. Enough said.
6. Cooking with gas is just as great as I remembered it… even better, in fact, with a really nice stove.

By the way, this is our kitchen a year ago, before we moved in. Photos of the lived-in kitchen to follow, later this month.

It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m enjoying what is, sadly, a rare treat for me these days: a weekend day not spent at the office. The sun is gradually breaking through this morning’s gray skies. And through my office window, I hear the twittering of birds stuttering of a jackhammer.

I took this photo of our house this morning, from the bottom of our driveway. It is, truthfully, a bad photo of the house, but I wasn’t trying for high art. I took the photo to document that which the jackhammer is at this very moment destroying: the old, mossy concrete retaining wall on our side of the driveway.

As is common in some of Seattle’s older neighborhoods, our house shares a driveway with the house next door. The property line runs down the middle of the driveway, and also through the middle of the garage at the back of the two lots. The upkeep of the driveway and garage are, therefore, a joint venture between us and our next-door neighbors.

This wall has a knack for taking bites out of unsuspecting vehicles, including ours during our first months here. Once we learned to negotiate the driveway, we didn’t think much of the wall until our neighbor sold his house. The driveway is narrow — only seven feet across — and our soon-to-be new next-door neighbors drive large vehicles. (Why any city dweller needs… no, don’t let me get started. Anyway…) As part of our shared plan for redoing the driveway (regrading, repaving, widening slightly), the wall is coming down. On Tuesday, a landscaper will come to regrade that edge of our yard, and install a a loose rockery to help retain the slope. Once planted, it will be pretty, and our driveway will be a safer place… even for oversized vehicles.