venting out.

i'm a bit scared with the recent exchange of text messages I've been having with the owner of the house we are planning to buy. just this morning he told me might stay till end-june. i firmly said it was not possible since, to put it bluntly, we will be homeless by end-May. Scary but true. I think it was a matter of negotiation on our end, and we might have handled it better, but then again these are things that come to light a bit too late. in my end I really think that if they handle the transfer the soonest possible time they would have no problems at all and they will get the loan release by the second week of May. And for me this is really essential to the deal, and it should be honesty now, because the second we hand them the payment, then it really is ours. they cannot simply say they intend to stay till june, because we cannot simply give out our own plans to see to theirs.
just venting out....

Say.....

could it be that this thing isn't salmon?

Overdue Bathroom Status Report

Several weeks ago, we made some important strides in the bathroom project. We installed the vanity and its plumbing, and we reinstalled the toilet. I did some drywall work in there, too. Lots of trips to Home Depot and plenty of help from my father-in-law were involved. I would have posted a while ago, but Blogger refused to work.


Yes, that's a functioning half-bath you're looking at. Very satisfying. It was good to have when all of my siblings were staying last weekend. That's a whole other post, however...

Whole Wheat Braid

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The Gramma Table

In memory of both of my departed grandmothers, I have constructed the Gramma Table. My father-in-law helped by offering advice and an extra pair of hands. He probably prevented some mistakes, injuries and obscenities.

It's bigger than it looks here. It's eight feet long and over two feet wide. It weighs a lot, over 200 pounds to be sure. We've already eaten at this table twice, and it was only finished this morning. This evening's dinner showed that it goes well with beef kebabs, couscous, Mozart quintets and birds. I like it.

The Gramma Table Belongs to Someone Else Now

 

The neighbor kitty, Charlie, has taken a liking to the Gramma Table. 

Got Crap?

Lindsey's aunt has moved recently. She was kind enough to drop by with three boxes of old stuff. It was actually pretty interesting to me, given my nostalgic bent. Lindz was quite annoyed at her aunt's lack of regard for our time and any plans we might have. The phone call began with "I'll be by in about an hour with some stuff. Some of it's family stuff like silver; some of it's kitchen stuff." Hmm. Super. Anyway, it was interesting. We were the proud recipients of several silver platters (age and value unknown), an old aluminum chafing dish set, a couple of iron skillets, some old glass bowls and a stuffed cactus. Here it is:

What, I might ask, do we need with a stuffed cactus? Now, a macrame owl for the wall, that would be desirable. But a cactus?

And how about a bunch of old, stale spices? Among these items was some 1978 meat tenderizer. I can safely say that our household had been lacking that.

You'll also notice not one, but two bottles of Angostura Bitters there. In addition to the fact that we've already got one, I found it interesting that one of the two bottles we received yesterday seems to have been manufactured before the days of tamper-evident packaging. My sister-in-law is pregnant right now. That child, even blessed with a centenarian lifespan, will not outlive our supply of bitters. There's some alum in that array of items, too. I had never seen that stuff except in old Tom & Jerry cartoons.

Here's where my nerdy kitchen interest seized control of me. Among the boxes of stuff was an old Pyrex casserole dish. It's on the left. The dish on the right is a Pyrex dish which I purchased two or three years ago at the most.

I'm curious about how old the one on the left is. Notice the tighter corners and different handle styling on the ends. And take a look at the writing on the bottom. It mentions microwaves, so it can't be too many decades old:

And this is the font on the newer dish (it's backwards because they reverse it for legibility when viewed from the top down):

There was a Pyrex bowl that might be of the same vintage. I intend to use them. The stuff lasts for ever, and it works great.

And here's a funky brass bottle opener, posing next to a loaf of bread I baked this morning:

I like the bottle opener. Not surprisingly, however, we, um, didn't exactly keep everything.

Caught in the Act of Mooching

This was shot on the evening of Bryan's return from Germany. Oliver stayed with us while Bryan was away, and he was a brazen mooch of the very highest order. We demonstrated for Bryan here. As you can see, he coasts through life on his good looks and charm.

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aprende a hacer Collares, pendientes, anillos, pulseras con abalorios. Hazlo tu misma es muy fácil. Tutoriales paso a paso, esquemas, cursos de bisutería

Bookshelves

We like books. For several years, our books have lived on some cheap shelves from Target.

I took some time off from my pointless coma of a job so I could build some real shelves. It was a good old sweaty, sawdusty experience.

Here are the first two of the three units in place.

Here they are, coated in extra-fumy enamel paint. Lindz and I got a good buzz off of that.

It's hard to truly realize the change in appearance from this picture. The shelves are seven feet tall, about nine feet wide, and eight inches deep. They occupy almost the entirety of one wall. They're made of real wood, not glued sawdust, and they didn't travel here from the other side of the world! What a concept!

catching up

Im now playing catch up with all my post backlogs. And believe me, they are a lot. So please be don't surprised to see plenty of new posts from me because this is something I have to do now. I won't have any more time to do it in the weekdays so I'll have to do this now. Good thing there is already LAN connection in our bedroom, and my dell memory is around 2GB. Its fast for me, and actually when I open up my adobe photoshop files they open up easily, though I have not really tried to do an actual layout in my office laptop since I use it the whole day at work, and then sometimes leave it in the office at night, or sometimes just take it home and do nothing. hahahaha.... Ok, so I still download a LOT of scrapbook kits. Pardon me, but its my biggest weakness. Seriously.

Diving Bird, Glass Dude

Lindz caught this shot of a Puffin at feeding time at the Seattle Aquarium:

And I shot this in the Hot Shop of the Museum of Glass in Tacoma:

meeting up with friends

I just had a sumptuous lunch with my friends from Nestle today, and I enjoyed it every bit. Now I have to reminisce all the times we actually spent together, and I really, really miss having them around. They were the type of friends you can maturely talk to about all the issues in life. And since they were all were smart guys and gals, its always a good brain exercise to be speaking with them. Like I always said, I never had any regrets for trying the life outside, but, if I were to free-handedly choose which company I would like to go back to, I would choose Nestle without a blink of an eye. Why, because I love the people I worked with there. My officemates were my close friends and I never had to pretend to be anyone else for them. The work environment was hard, yes, but if when I weigh now the friendship + benefits + compensation, its so far the best. :-)
Well, I don't have to be working for Nestle to keep my friends, but just the same, I'd just like to say they were truly best friends and I miss them all!

Tiling the backspash is more further accomplished than yesterday it was.

We put tiles good. Much straightness.

Pretzels

(listening to "Cortege et Litanie," by Marcel Dupre)
I can't come up with a word that describes the way fresh pretzels smell. It's bread, but there is something else there. Pretzels are bathed in hot, slightly alkaline water before they are baked (for the glossy skin and chewy texture). Perhaps that makes the smell slightly different, but I don't know how to describe it. It smells like it did when I made pretzels with my late grandmother as a kid. Exactly the same. I baked these pretzels for a potluck at work, but I felt some very personal emotions when I made them. These feelings were strong when I struggled with the elastic dough, seeking the perfect amount of flour on my hands. Grandma's knobby hands, with their flowerpetal-delicate skin, subdued the dough with infuriating ease. You are not a true master of something before you've done it a lot. Her pretzels were slender, shiny and consistent. They were laid out to cool on towels beneath the high ceiling of the bright farmhouse kitchen. It was a thousand years ago, and it was this morning.
I squeezed mustard onto one at midnight, and I felt that I had not wasted my time and flour.
As with my stollen, the pretzels taste pretty decent, but they are uglier than Grandma's. It is my fond wish that people eat them and are happy. I would hope that Grandpa would have given a herzlich "Ausgezeichnet."

Druggies

A month or two ago I read the blog dedicated to DJ Montano, this socialite guy who was being accused by his ex-boyfriend of stealing his money. It was a very powerful guy going against the Gucci gang, this gang of socialites who does drugs and all that. The blog gets around a hundred thousand hits per day, and has gone to a point where people actually donate to his paypal account and it has reached 10,000 USD. Whew. Now one would think that after this the Gucci gang would go to drug treatment centers to stop their own addiction, which not only affects them but their families as well, but I guess they
haven't. To sum it up, even prominent, big shot families have skeletons in their own closets too.

No Other Woman Movie: Realizations

The other day I downloaded the movie No Other Woman (sorry to those against piracy!) and I was watching it during break times at work.  I finished it and liked the movie, then asked hubby to watch it again with me two nights ago.  Surprisingly, I enjoyed the movie very much, and it may very well hit a spot in my top ten movies of my time (currently what's in my list are transformers - all three of them, and pretty woman - its a pretty short list now). I think the actors gave a superb performance. I'm not saying they can win best actors or actresses come awards night, but I personally think portrayed their characters very well.  The script was well written, with quite a few quotable quotes in there, and the plot was really so nice because it plays around what actually happens in real life.  That to me is the best thing.

(Spoiler Alert)
The movie plays around the lives of three individuals: Ram (Derek), Charmagne (Christine) and Cara (Anne).  Ram and Charmagne are married for 5 years, with Ram being a furniture salesman (or owner, wasn't clear in the movie) and Charmagne was a housewife.  Cara is the heiress of a successful businessman who happens to be developing a luxury resort, she's liberal and studied in NY.  Ram and Cara meet during one of the visits of Ram to the resort as he is one of the bidders for the furniture of the resort.  To cut the story short, they get into a relationship and Charmagne finds a way to confirm it, and in the end there was fighting, there was temporary separation, but all ends well as Cara leaves and Ram and Charmagne gets back together.

Being a wife myself, I feel the character of Charmagne.  And yet, I can't really blame Ram's character.  Ok, so you may think its all his fault.  I am not all for the getting into an affair is ok thing, but somehow I have come to accept the fact that men are not really that hard to spell.  An affair may not be the first thing on their minds, but offer them something in a silver platter (aka a girl saying that theirs is a non-committal relationship) and you have a guy sold.  Everyone wants freebies anyway.  So ok, in the end Cara falls in love, and apparently for the first time, and she decides to fight for Ram too.

There are soooo many realizations with this movie, I think I can't even spell them out in one post.  For one, wives can think theirs is an ideal marriage.  How do you know when there's something going on? Worse, how do you know something is amiss when your husband is acting normally anyway?  What is normal behavior?

When you're in the position of the wife who had been cheated on, how do you move on?  Or do you forgive at all?  This is a subject of discussion in the forum I'm in with mostly wives and moms.  You know what?  I've told myself over and over again that I don't mind one-night stands.  What I can't tolerate will be him getting into an affair.  I can't share him with anyone else.  But you know what, after watching that movie, I realize how much pain an affair can cause in a relationship.  I won't change my stand, but understand where the wife is coming from, having to leave the house to allow herself to heal.  I might have done the same thing, heal, then fight for him.  but that will only be after I see that he really commits to the marriage.  If he's staying just because and there is no love left, then why bother?  I'll show him what he's losing though?

In the end, I realize that more than preparing for a fight with the mistress, its important that a wife makes sure that she can be the other woman.  Be as desirable as you can be.  You can be a housewife (but not a boring housewife), a career woman, or a mom, but you have to also play the role of the mistress. That way, who would think to go astray?

The Pantry

We worked our asses off this weekend. It's not completely done yet (the doors still need to be painted and attached), but we went from here:

to here:
It involved moving the entire contents of the pantry, painting the pantry, painting the old kitchen wall cabinets, installing them, building some shelves to fit the corner (out of the old shelves) and moving everything back in. We'll have to live with it for a while and fine tune the placement of everything, but I think we gained significant storage space.

It looks great in there. It's the same color green as the kitchen (amazingly difficult to photograph; it looks completely different in different lights). As an amusing side note, we found a date stamped on the back of one of the cabinets: January 13th, 1981. We installed these cabinets in their new location 27 years to the day after they were built.