Aldoblog

A quick update on the kitchen remodel. (Look, I wrote it without a qualifier! I must be coming to acceptance…)

Rochelle and I are, shall we say, fond of cocktails. We’ve been known to drink a few, and even make a few for friends and guests. And, we’re always on the lookout for new ones, especially things that are easy to make and serve. This year’s find: Trader Joe’s Organic Strawberry Lemonade.

For many years, Rochelle used Netscape Communicator for her email. A little over a year ago, I switched her to Mozilla Thunderbird, which is the code and user-interface successor to Communicator. For the most part it works very well, but it has one astonishing omission: its anti-virus capabilities are terrible.

There is no doubt that I should have seen this coming. Should have been ready, mentally, financially, for this to get really complicated, really fast. But it really did seem simple to me, back when we first started.

I am writing, of course, of our apparent decision to rip the kitchen out to the studs.

On New Year’s Eve we had a daytime open house and “freecycle” party. I thought I’d post the invite here, since people told us it was pretty amusing…

You know that “oh shit” moment at the top of a roller coaster, when you’ve just finished the slow climb up, and haven’t really started the first drop. The point where you’d really like to take just a couple seconds to summon your courage, but it’s too late, out of your hands, and carrying you away whether you’re ready or not?

That’s what buying our new stove was like tonight.

On New Year’s Eve, Rochelle and I had a “Freecycle party,” where we put all the things we were getting rid of in our dining room, invited people over, gave them plenty of alcohol, and then told them they could take anything in the pile that they wanted.

Luigi has this alternately amusing, endearing, and irritating desire to sleep in between Rochelle and I. He likes to be the meat in the sandwich. Given that he sleeps on top of the covers, and weighs 18 pounds, it means he essentially separates us into separate compartments of the bed. Almost like a chaperone.

It started innocently enough. Rochelle’s mother very generously offered to buy us a new stove, after we complained about our current oven during Thanksgiving. And, if we could have just done that, it would have been a great kitchen improvement that would have cost us almost nothing.

Regarding photos of a recent night out…

“How bad was it?”

“It wasn’t that bad. We all kept our clothes on.”