Happy Halloween

Song by Emily Wells - Becomes the Color

heard here and there

From the newspaper re: HPX2012

"Now to address the overheards... “Are they going to play that ghost song?” BOOM. You guessed it. Wintersleep. Preceded by Elliot Brood, Rain Over St. Ambrose, and Kestrels. The fact that Elliot Brood was opening speaks to how stacked the show was. And, true to expectation, the crowd became hilariously emotional and blatantly introspective during the performance of 'Weighty Ghost.'"

Wish I was there.

Also: "... my favourite quote of the weekend: 'I’m about to dance really hard for about ten seconds, you should probably back up.'"

Halloween is coming and I'm having a party. You should probably back up.

Also. I was within arms reach of this lady during a birthday celebration where she played some of her songs. I have a massive girlcrush now.

unequivocal

I couldn't wait - I asked him to put together some of the taller cabinets that would give the most storage space.

He said bluntly this morning, after assembling the first: "these are by far the cheapest cabinets I have ever assembled".

Trick or treat.

shit is getting serious

The guts of our kitchen are now sitting in our back room. I wouldn't want to make the journey again very soon, since I was a rollercoaster of uptight nerves the whole time (I may or may not have cried at the table of an Ikea dining room display...) but alas! No looking back now!

We just bought the guts of the cabinets, which are loaded with ergonomically-friendly drawers (you can see them stacked high in the picture). All soft-close, fully extending drawers and hinges *drool*, made for Ikea by Blum somewhere in Austria.

Extra odd-shaped cabinetry, toe plinths, crown molding and other fancy made items will be created by my husband. We tried to source some nice wood for door and drawer fronts, but it looks like purchasing pre-fab will be less expensive than even the raw materials. This shop even ships ground to Canada for a very good price, so I'll see about getting custom fronts done soon.

Halloween first - gotta work on those costumes!

BostonHot

So much geekiness =*swoon*



(I could live without the asshole-ish-ness of rating women. The Social Network movie by David Fincher was very enjoyable IMHO - recommended).

Lighten the Heart

I scored these beauties at a thrift store for $6 last week (retail: $105). Hope I get to wear them to the Tweed Ride this weekend.

Posted in the hallway outside my lab

FOR SERIOUS. This is stereotypical sexist bullshit and I ripped that fucking poster down, wrote a nasty note saying the same and shoved it in the department head's mailbox.


Happy Chemistry Week...

(This was before I read about last night's presidential debate, gah)

UPDATE: My very smart friend suggested I punch holes in the poster, stick it in a binder, and tack the whole thing up to the wall where the poster was.

Kitchen Quest

(aka roadtrip that will save a marriage)

I am dragging my husband against his will to the big box store with flat-pack boxes that will assemble eventually to resemble (hopefully) a make-shift kitchen layout that we will customize and improve and make our own. We've done the numbers and we just can't afford the custom-made cabinets that he wants to build. We are going south of the border and making a two day trip of it. 

Hopefully he doesn't kick me out of the car on the way back for such carpentry blasphemy.

This weekend the back room got sanded and painted:

sexy protective gear

We sourced the shingles pictured below: left second grade (with knots) from a local manufacturer  and the equally priced, clear (no knots) bundle on the right that is usually much more expensive (both $15/bundle). As you can see, the clearer shingles are greyed from exposure to the elements. We thought perhaps we could get a better product (no knots) for the same price but alas, upon drying, the shingles were prone to cupping. And anyway, I like the look of the knots and the wider shingles of the more rustic version on the left.

Left (second clear) versus Right (old & wet, but clear)

Reclaiming a bit of unused space, my better half spent a day building up shelving between the studs in the stairway to our basement to hold my growing preserves collection. This is just what I've made this year - we still have bottles from 2011 hidden away in an upstairs closet.

tomatoes, pickles, apples, beets, dried kale

We also spent a bit of time cleaning out the garden of the last remains of veggies and seed pods. I left the kale to overwinter, to see how it goes. We were also gifted with more squash to increase our collection, and I'll be storing them in an upstairs closet to see how that goes.

our own squash in the top right (smallish ones)

Also a few links for future use (on snowy cold days):
How to make stevia extract for sweetening baked goods, hot drinks and more.
How to make no-knead bread.
How to make apple butter.

Updates on kitchen (and marriage) coming soon.

fickle flooring and fancy facades

A workplace injury has put husband out of work for at least another month. The good thing is the injury will likely heal entirely in due time, the injury was on his non-dominant hand and he can draw unemployment insurance during the convalescence. He can also complete (albeit slowly) the tasks that have been piling up like: putting up light fixtures, replacing door hardware and increasing our shelving storage for all the preserved goodies I keep generating.

The two looming projects that we are chipping away at: exterior finish and kitchen cabinets. 

The house had three layers of siding:

And has had building wrap as the exterior finish for a part of the back of the house for ohhh....two years now :) Originally we had our hearts set on a pre-finished painted product by Cape Cod but as you can imagine, when we heard the hardware contractor's desk guy refer to it as the "mercedes of exterior finishes" more than once, we had to change our minds due to cost. The main draw (other than the custom colour selection option that would have given us our bee pollen yellow house - sigh!) was that the paint finish was guaranteed for 25 years to never need repainting. Alas, at 9K for trim and boards, we opted instead for a locally sourced Eastern White Cedar shingle in clear combined with Cape Cod pre-finished trim pieces (comparative price: 5K). If all goes according to plan, we will not need to address the exterior of the house for decades, because both the (completely unfinished) shingles and pre-painted boards are supposed to have very long lifespans. 

We are not terribly keen on the monochromatic result of a greyed-with-age cedar shingle but it will have to do. I will not be spending my precious time painting the house - I did it one too many times already. And it certainly is historically accurate, as we found out upon removing the asbestos shingle layer carefully:

A bit boring, but not too bad

Our trim will be white

I think this had white paint on it at one time

As for inside, we've hammered out the details of the cabinetry & appliance placements and are now currently arguing (again and again) over pre-fab Ikea drawers sets (faster, cheaper) versus handmade plywood drawers and separate rail systems (custom sizes). I would prefer to go for a joyride to Boston for the weekend (soon) and stock up on drawer slides at the big box store but my (one-handed) husband prefers to build them himself. When we are not arguing, we are working on finishing the floors. 

Remember when I had started the back parlour in a white endless circle design? Ya well the second, unwritten part of that post is that I screwed up so royally in my design (that itself was terribly unforgiving anyway) that it stayed half-finished for a month until I summoned the courage to paint over the first design, choose and cut out from mylar a second design, and begin fresh. This time nothing was stopping me, and I got it completely finished and varnished in about a week.

Retro-cool pattern, white on beige. 

Pattern Attack!

The half-finished floor had, in that intermediate month, morphed into some sort of metaphor for the house as a whole. I hated that it was unfinished but I didn't have the motivation to tackle it again.  Now we are cruising: only the back room to complete (the one with the patio door). Looking up.