Dining Room Storage

I made it through 6 hours at work today (including wonton soup for lunch, just like mom used to buy!) and at the engineering meeting started feeling kinda hot and lousy.  I came home at 3, and have a temp of 99.2F.  Since my "well" temp is generally around 98.2F (like on monday at the doc's office), that means I am running a fever.  gah.   Oh well. On to the fun stuff.

I've been asking friends and family what to do about my dining room storage situation and the answer is pretty much unanimous at "wall of cabinetry". But just plain ol' kitchen cabinets weren't the right solution.  I need low rise drawers, and lots of them, for tools and craft things.  Bigger drawers for paper, smaller drawers for screwdrivers and brushes.  "Map drawers" are my ideal, but they're a little too specific and just won't fit or function.

Before I became lousy with illness, I'd received a Home Decorator's catalog.  The cover had the craft hutch I've been looking for lo these many years.  I really dug the green color (which, in its defense, matches my couch), but it's going in a line of otherwise white cabinetry, so I had to go with white.  I suppose I could always gunk it up with color later. It's Martha Stewart, if you can believe that, and it's wonderful.  It's in two pieces - the image on the right below.  A sewing machine fits in the lower right, and paper or fabric on the lower left, then all kinds of crapola in the upper hutch.

If you click though to polyvore (the first link after the picture as I accidentally deleted the link to the pic and don't have the patience to restore it) then click on the hutch, then (yeah, right) look at the alternate images, it will show you the thing loaded up for the catalog, and why I love it already.  I ordered it last night.

I also ordered 2 3-drawer filing cabinets and a 6+2 drawer that I'll get to use for tools inside (finally!) as well as pens and brushes and whatnot.  They're both 41" high, and leave just enough width that I can cram in a shelf to hold my stereo (but not the speakers) and some 12-packs of soda (which don't quite fit under the sink anymore).  And it will be beautiful and work great. 

Dining room Storage by CrankyOtter on Polyvore.com
New cabinetry for dining room wall - while I like the curio cabinet (up left) the rest of the stuff is what I actually got. I totally would have gone for the hutch in green, except I had to go with white to not make the space look insane. I think the tall 6+2 drawer set will be good for both screwdriver type tools and pens and brushes.

The only decision left is what to do for upper cabinetry to hold my cookbooks (and whatever else).  Options are 2 rows of open, white shelves, a closed "Varde" cabinet from IKEA, or closed IKEA Adel cabinets that match my existing (but with no glass inserts) in either 36 or 66 inches wide (1 lg vs 2 small + 1 lg).

I'm so excited I'm just burning up!

Orange Stars

I was trying to think of a title that references "lucky", but I may have found my next tattoo... I'm inordinately fond of 5 pointed star tattoos, particularly the ones around Kat Von D's left eye. I can't really see myself tattooing my face with stars, but I could find someplace. And maybe I should get some orange in it.

As I was relaxing tonight in one of the dozen or more "foot massage" places that has popped up in my town (I know of a dozen, I hear there are more) and charges $20 for an hour's relaxation I thought about how lucky I am. I was able to go do this when I felt iffy. I broke myself taking a walk. I managed to bruise the bones in my big toe by, um, walking around in shoes that weren't perfectly comfortable.

Then, knowing that my existing Chaco sandals are one of the few shoes I can wear without inserts, I was able to buy more via Zappos.com who has free return shipping if they don't fit exactly as I'm expecting.

And I have this cheap little netbook and an expensive cable connection that allows me to surf the web from Already Pretty to Whorange to I'm Revolting who posted a picture of Abby Walton's funky painted fingernails that I was able to emulate after "rehydrating" a couple old colors with the butyl acetate/ethyl acetate mix I was able to buy at the store next to the Trader Joe's (since I can't get it from my chemist friend anymore... and TJ's doesn't carry my favorite sundried tomato bruschetta topping or frozen black raspberries anymore either. I can still buy my favorite Pop-Secret Homestyle snack sized microwave popcorn.)

So, there are minor slights. But I'm learning hip-hop dance routines despite the toe, have enough money this year to ease up and get things I need when I need them, even if they aren't on sale, and there are all these fabulous people out there curating links on blog sites so I can follow the most bizzare but interesting things instead of sleeping. I'd just like to acknowledge how cool this all is.

Braise: Beef Provencal Stew

My cooking lesson in braising left me with the microwave fish curry but not many other things I felt like trying. They were all big efforts for something I wasn't thrilled about. What I was thrilled about trying is the Beef Stew recipe from Cook's Illustrated. The thing that intrigued me about it was their insistence that adding a couple anchovies deepened the umami flavor in the dish giving it depth without fishiness. Since I have developed issues with MSG, I need something to help with that savory boost. And I have wanted to do a beef dish with browning then braising. I have to say it was a good thing I wanted to try this for fun because it consumed my entire saturday to get this on sunday.



For the full story,

The Good Stuff

New Shoes!!
Went shopping with a friend on Saturday, and on my own on Sunday. Managed to replace both my brown and black work shoes in short order. I got black Clark heels and black flats on sale, then used my Kohls cash to buy full price sketchers. The cool thing about the sketchers is that they're the exact same design as the shoes I totally wore out, but a darker brown, which was what I was searching for having decided a darker hue would match more of my stuff. Also at Kohls, using the "free money" I got during my shopping spree a couple weeks ago, I got 2 pairs of fun heels. One for me and one for a friend - total cost for both was $20 :) Funnily enough the ones for me are technically 2 sizes too small, but fit the bottom of my foot great.

Potential new friends:
On the way back from shopping, I took the northerly route and stopped for cheap vietnamese food and a cheap movie. The only flick I felt like seeing was Whip It (yes, again) so I dropped the $3 and went in. There was a while before it started and I was one the first two people there. So I got chatting with the other lady and then her friends. We seem to have similar taste in shows so I suggested they could email me if they didn't mind me tagging along to the next twilight movie or seeing Puppet Up. Here's hoping.

Traffic School
I'm done, I'm done! Well, technically I'll be done tomorrow when I turn in my paperwork, but jeez it has been a long time dealing with this. It's done before the busiest holidays at least.

Improves the Taste

I went back to the cheap theater this weekend to see "Hangover" which was funny and entertaining, if not very smart. Yes, it starred all guys with some female cameo type roles, but oh well. Not every movie must have good female roles. One could argue that this didn't have good male or female roles... except the guy who leaped naked out of the trunk and started wailing away with a tire iron.

The theater is up in the next valley and rather close to the only local vietnamese restaurant I know of. It has been 3 years and I'm still stunned by 2 things: how little decent ethnic food is available outside The Valley, and how EVERY ethnic restaurant in CA sprinkles their food with cilantro. One of these days I'll remember before a steaming bowl of soup comes out with the devil soap in it. Fortunately, it hadn't steeped long and I was able to pull it out along with the raw onion garnish (wtf?). Unfortunately, the raw onion did its damage and made my belly blow up uncomfortably, but I didn't notice until after I ate the otherwise yummy beef soup with bean sprouts, basil, lime, and jalapeno add ins.

Saturday, I walked my new boots to the neighborhood cobbler to get heel strike plates put on to prevent my heels from rocking outward, then walked over to get my hair done. My previous stylist moved to a new salon that is not only more expensive and farther away, but uses product that I'm allergic to. The new stylist didn't get a funky enough color in my hair, but it is a decent looking normal color and the hair cut seems fine so I'll use her again. We also bonded over love of vietnamese food. She told me about her favorite place in The Valley, so I decided on more while I remembered to ask for no cilantro.

Pho 999 is your standard cheap diner set up, and was very busy. The rice vermicelli bowl with chopped spring rolls and roast pork was excellent. Plus, it was near an Asian market. I've been looking for one to get some lychees at a decent price for my Halloween side dish of demon eyeballs. (Lychees stuffed with cherries from pie filling.) I hit the jackpot at the Bangluck Market. I was cracking up over the name the whole time.

At the market, they had 5 or 6 types of palm sugar which I found irresistible, having never noticed it before. So now I have a moderate sized vat of palm sugar. I managed to find a tiny bottle of fish sauce for 89 cents, since I want some but don't want a giant amount. (That plus lime juice makes a tasty dipping sauce for fried stuff.) They had a half dozen brands of lychees, along with similar fruits at very affordable prices. They had mint for a third the price of the farmer's market. I impulse shopped like crazy and got out with 4 heavy bags for $22. I came back with enough time to grab some things at Trader Joes and Ralphs. And out of the three, I think Ralphs is the funniest name for a food store. But funnier, were some of the Bangluck labels many of which were translated so generically as to be useless. One heavily promoted item was bottled Maggi brand "Seasoning". The label says "improves the taste". Um, ok. It looks like soy sauce. I have no idea beyond that what it is. I didn't impulse buy that one.

Today was kind of short. I read too late into the night; slept too late in the day. While awake, I made soup from an actual recipe! I do not like the trader joe's low salt veggie broth - too carroty. But aside from that the bean soup was tasty. The soup was thickened by pureeing one can of white beans, which worked fine. Then I fell asleep on the couch. Nuts. Since then, I've reawakened, cleaned the kitchen fiendishly, packed away the newly dried farmer's market basil so I could lay out the Bangluck mint, and watched the Discovery show on Ardilopithecus. And this, of course. Aside from being a little worried about how much I slept and the cilantro sneak attacks, pretty much everything goes in the happy column for the weekend.

Lemonade

My day started off all wrong, but it was not all bad. I have been trying to get to bed earlier this week and only kind of making it (notice it's 1am). After nearly passing out on the couch to John Stewart, I was in bed before midnight, but I took a magazine to read and it got me all fired up. I knew that reading about ideas of things to do, and food, wasn't the best idea, but combined with work worry, I'm AWAKE.

Funnily enough, in a bit on budgeting, the Cooking Light recommended feeling better by writing down "4 non-financial things you're grateful for". Wonder where I've heard that idea before... so here goes.

The kicker that really woke me up was that this gratefulness/happiness comment was 2 pghs after I found out that someone named Teri Gault stole my idea independently had a genius idea about grocery cost tracking but actually implemented it. On The Grocery Game one can get prices on items from various local grocery stores. Heh. Well, it entertains me that someone else had a similar idea to mine and makes it work.

The reason I have this magazine is that a friend of mine renewed my lapsed subscription thinking we could choose a recipe each month, make it on each coast, and compare. Have we? No. Life exploded. But I like this friend and want to keep in touch and isn't she the sweetest for thinking of it? This month has any number of recipes (lower fat cinnamon rolls, easy sausage rolls) and quick dinners that I want to try - they're either a twist on something I make a lot of or something I'd want to make a lot of if it works out. I'll be trying to give that idea a go this month, then. Back on the homefront, I got to have lunch with my friend again - we aim for every wednesday but the last 8-10 weeks have mostly not worked out.

We won again at trivia. Only instead of our recent two people, we had 8. Our team founder, my coworker, is out on medical disability and not having a great time of it. Got the usual losing weight, feeling terrible, too tired to socialize thing going on. So it was good to see him out and about with his wife and other friends of theirs. Plus with them there, we held our lead through the sports round - where did team X reloacate from? I knew one; all together, our team got double on the double or nothing that requires all correct answers.

The thing that made me happiest today happened midafternoon. I went over to a local machine shop. (There are many nearby. I find this thrilling.) I tested out and picked up a wafer handling tool I designed to use for handloading some wafers into a tool before we complete the conversion of the automated handler. It works, and it came from my brain, started as a sketch on paper, and is now a fun little tool.

Turns out I do feel better now, and more settled. I heard from work about my tool qual which is still in progress but looking good. Better than I'd feared. Maybe my process actually is robust enough now to take a licking and keep on ticking. I'm confident enough after this last check in that even if it gets put available tonight, I'll be ok with it. Now hopefully I can sleep because I have a ticket for "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" tomorrow in Santa Barbara and I want to be awake for both the show and the drive home.

Seedless Solstice

Seedless. I've ranted a bit before about seedless watermelon. Probably the reason I haven't done so more often is that I've been laying off it for a while since I seem to have a slight allergy to it that involves making me feel "off" after eating it and a mild flush to the skin. But I love it and was craving some a few weeks ago, and I got another this weekend in my Great Kitchen Restock trip.

Yet again, the watermelon is seedless. It's sweet enough, but the flavor is not complex or forceful, and the color is a dull and unappealing pinkish orange. I wonder if it's the season, the variety, or the seedlessness. I know some people think that enjoying fruit with seeds in it is like flaming about the awesomeness of dialup from a T1 line, but damn. What the hell is wrong with at least allowing me to choose a fruit with seeds?

And I can probably answer that: given the choice of seedless or flavor, I chose flavor but 80% or so of other people pick seedless. Instead of stocking the same grapes in seedless and seeded, the store will offer 3 varieties of seedless. (And frankly, grapes don't seem to suffer from being seedless except maybe the concords which I still buy with seeds.) And if stores lose money on seeded watermelons, I can't blame them for not offering them. But I do wish they did.

I do wonder how growing up seedless will affect the coming generations, aside from no watermelon seed spitting contests. At least cherries still have pits.
/rant

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

I spent a good deal of time in the noonday sun this weekend. I always forget how much making vitamin D exhausts me, so this was written after a pretty long nap.

Saturday I met up with some book club ladies. One of us is moving out of the country in a couple weeks so we used a going away party as an excuse to drive to San Diego for a sandwich. Sadly, it was about 2 weeks too late to catch the lady merely moving out of state. The destination might seem far for a sandwich, but it's not much farther to SD than to Santa Monica from where most of the ladies live in OC, our inland attendee can get to SD easier, and I like going there. We met for lunch at the Hotel Del Coronado, had drinks and delicious sandwiches then shopped for a bit at the Hotel (no new sandals for me this time) and meandered into town for some decent gelato.

We rescued the car from valet parking about 10 minutes before the parking charges went out of control, and decided not to re-park on the street and head back to watch the sand sparkle in the sun. It was the right choice as we were all pretty tired after getting up early on a saturday and driving, but it still feels weird as that beach is one of the draws. We did walk along it, but didn't get the sand in the tootsies. And the cute valet boy liked my car. Me too. It got 4 of us back safely and in style.

Sunday was slow - I met up with my trivia friend to see Inglorious Basterds. When we got to theater, we realized it was only playing in the spiffy theater that costs an extra $10 so couples can share a loveseat. We didn't really need the date special or the extra cost, and decided to look elsewhere. Thanks to her iPhone, that was no challenge. We did get an hour or so to kill so we headed for Anthopologie and went shopping. I found several things that not only fit, but flattered and were on sale so I went crazy. She found an expensive shirt but it was unique and cute as a button so she splurged too.

The movie was odd. It had little bursts of violence but not anything like what one might be used to from QT. I think the tough thing was that while the antagonist was obvious (antagonists/were), there didn't seem to be a clear protagonist, especially not in the first scene. And even the good guys were not so good and pure in heart and soul - there was definitely the issue of when in war, people do things that are awful, even the ones who are ultimately doing good. Odd bursts of humor were scattered thoughout. I noticed that the movie was a little slower paced, but don't really have a judgment on if that was good or bad. The camera wasn't all jumpy and for that I have to give thanks. Lastly, those were the fastest credits I've seen in 15 years. It left me feeling good about the film.

Today, I met up with another book club friend for lunch and a walk. We checked out a furnishings store near the restaurant that had a really unique square dining table that rotated slightly and flipped out to an octagon. After that brief foray in the shade, we got down to business and went over to get our walk on. In that noonday sun. With hats, water, and a moderate pace, it was a nice little walk, but dang it was hot out. Over the mountains at the edge of the valley there was a largepyrocumulus cloud mar, king the fire on the far side. It looked like a mushroom cloud when I first saw it but had streamed out into a blah sort of thing by the time I got somewhere I could take a picture. We resolved to walk at a more sensible time on our next outing and parted ways. The park was very crowded, the guy who got my space after waiting for me to brush some serious dust off my feet liked the car too :)

I washed the rest of teh dust off my feet by swimming a few laps at the pool. Before I was overcome by napping, I tried once again to use PVC glue to fix the slow leak in the aerobed. But my cement was old and set so I tossed on the hippy housedress and ran out for more. I picked up a watermelon while I was at it. I don't think they like me much, but there was nothing else in the world I really wanted today, so what the hell. After the nap, it's been TV, slitherlink puzzles, and blogging. No scrabble today, since I stayed up too late last night with it.

Well, aside from 2 calls from work, that was my labor day weekend. Not bad, not bad. How was yours?

Internet Enabled Shopping My Way

I need to run to the grocery store. I'm about out of paper towels. The only kind I buy is the Bounty select-a-size. I hate "full size" sheets because I use them like constantly and the smaller size is perfect for 99.9% of my paper towel needs. (I only use Bounty because Viva stinks to high heaven and Brawny isn't; it shreds. In the last 10 years I've only not had B:S-A-S for 3 rolls and every moment of that deviation caused regret.) Even using them fiendishly, it still takes me a pretty long time to work through a roll. Still and all, I'd like to know quickly where to get them cheap. Today.

Much to my surprise, given the variety of crap I come home from the store with, my shopping list is actually pretty consistent. The variety comes from buying whatever's on sale that week that I like but wouldn't buy without the sale. (Why I don't want to pay $2.50 for a can of soup but will gladly spend $6 for half that soup in a restaurant I haven't yet wrapped my head around.) Anyhow, given this proclivity to have the same core list, and for the most part, the same fringe list, I was just thinking of something that would make my life easier:

Automatic list pricing and comparisons.

My vision is a spreadsheet (I really do love Excel) laid out with columns for:

1. the grocery item
2. preference for name brand, store brand, or generic
3. quantity
4. units
5. price at Preferred store A
6. price at Preferred store B
7. price at Preferred store C (opt. etc...)
8. price at Wildcard store within X distance
9. optionally, where last purchased

The "price" columns may need to be 2-3 columns each, one for regular price, one for today's price, and one for a link to a coupon (although that could hyperlink from the "today's price", now that I think on it). Regular price could either be entered by hand or preferably, given today's "club memberships", uploaded from the store database after a purchase. It also occurs to me that this could be used for any routine purchase - jeans, grooming, sporting goods, office supplies with their own sheets. Items could be grouped "weekly" , "monthly", "quarterly", and "yearly" if desired. Naturally there would be a checkbox to select desired items so a list could be printed or sent to a PDA. But for the first pass, all items stay up.

The money feature is this: Each "today's price" column would then be conditionally highlighted with one of 2-3 colors, indicating best price, second best price, etc. So when I need to get paper towels, fresh mushrooms, clementines, and soy sauce, I can hop onto my list, highlight those items and, with a quick glance for the most orange (or green or purple) column, see if there's any one store that would be a better deal that day and go there. If I have more items or the deals are disparate, it might make sense to hit two stores. If I have a feeling that I'll be doing some impulse buying I can do an "update all" and see which store, overall, has the best prices that week and go do my impulse shopping there.

There are lots of other things related (why do these things always get exponentially bigger?) like how to make money - the regular stores can pay per expected customer base or advertise based on volume; the wildcards (which would come up based on a best price or other algorithm) could pay to increase their view percentage. Food companies could pay too, to offer an "equivalent, alternate" product. (Although Pepsi can kiss my ass because I drink Coke, I also like Dr. Pepper and Squirt; Maybe Dr. Pepper wants me to try their new cherry version.)

More interactively, maybe a store could offer instant personalized coupons good for you or me (using your club number) for that day only to get us to a particular store: if I start to print the list for Vons instead of Gelson's, say, Gelsons could offer 2-3 specialized coupons. If cheap strawberries would swing the deal, they'd discount my strawberries to get me there to impulse buy their prettier stuff with higher profit margins.

Then I come home, feed in my receipt numbers, and a secondary database (from which one can plot trends or totals) records my expenditures (this is ancillary from the main idea, aside from updating "regular costs and last point of purchase info). When it notices that I buy a lot of, say, Easy Mac, it can ask if I want it moved from quarterly to monthly. And I can either say "yes" or think "damn, am I eating that much Easy Mac? I thought I ate a lot of cucumbers!" Which reminds me that I'd have to have a column for "farmer's market" which, ideally, would list foods by season. Since the FM's a cash transaction off the books, it would be a voluntary update, but I think I could handle that if I was already getting the use of the rest of the list, just to keep everything in one place and find out how much more I spend there.

poll by twiigs.com

Huh? Huh? If someone already does this, do let me know where to find it. I didn't want to google search it before I was able to record my original ideas.