A good piece of advice for home builders is to not carpet the main entryway. But if you must, go ahead and use a sponge floor covering since that will produce identical results, at much lower cost.
A place for everything and everything in its place. The wooden shelving unit survived the transmogriphication, as you'll soon see. Oh, the suspense!
Sodden grey carpet...Begone! Faux imitation Corinthian burled elm panelling...Begone! Alien autopsy fluorescent light fixture...You stay right where you are!
The Aspen cabin look is starting to come together, if the cabin's logs were stacked vertically, and if the logs had regular, repeating widths.
A do-it-yourself tiling job is the most satisfying project in home renovation, right up until the next step...
Aaah! My beautiful tile floor! Will it ever be clean again?
The answer is no. As in, "No, my tile floor will never be clean again."
Seventeen hours of polishing on bended knee later...it's Miller time.
Ah, trim. The shield atop so many of life's minor seam-related sins.
Organization, illustrated. But for how long, do you suppose? (September update: not that long, actually.)
The final results speak for themselves, but not in the same way that I'll speak for myself on my deathbed, when I utter to the loving family assembled around me, "I wish I had spent more time napping on the couch and watching televised golf."
I had forgotten that kettle corn even existed until buying a bag at last summer’s Dawson City Music Festival. Strange, since it clearly obeys my Law of Deliciousity:
Sugar, Salt, Fat: Pick two.
Advanced corollary to the law: Pick three.
Kettle corn is surprisingly easy to make, extremely economical, and relatively choke-resistant, which is important given the speed that you’ll soon be scarfin’ it down.
You will need:
- 1/2 cup el-cheapo popcorn. No need for Orville’s services here.
- 1/4 cup vegetable oil. Corn oil seems appropriate.
- 1/4 cup white sugar. I haven’t perfected my brown sugar recipe yet.
- 1 tsp salt. Or more. Hell, it’s a recipe, not a court order.
Heat the oil in a large pot with a lid over medium-high heat. Add a two or three kernels to start, and when you hear their plaintive little pops, turn down the heat to just a little more than medium and add the corn and the sugar.
There are two important rules to obey at this point: don’t peek under the lid, and keep shaking that pot vigorously every five seconds or so. If you have a boiling oil-proof face guard, then by all means sneak a look once in a while.
Keep shaking that pot (oven mitts are helpful to hold the lid on) until the popping starts to slow. Turn off the heat. Keep it on the burner and keep shaking until a second or two goes by without a pop. Remove the pot from the heat, but keep the lid on for a moment lest a corn explosion spray your kitchen with sticky oil.
Pour about half of the corn into a bowl and salt liberally. Pour the rest in (quickly so it doesn’t stick in a lump) and salt that too.
Scarf away.
I just discovered FocusWriter, a free writer’s word processor that runs on most any operating system. I’m going to give it a try because the glitzy window chrome that ornaments most word processing tools is too distracting. Here’s a snapshot of my entire screen when it’s running:
The perfect soothing backdrop for the Great Canadian Bile-Oozing German-Speaking Made-of-Expired-Chicken-Liver Robotic Alien Novel.
The backdrop is courtesy of National Geographic, which offers terrific wallpaper photographs for your desktop.
On May 3rd, we had our last snowfall of the spring. Today, September 23rd, we had our first of the autumn. For those keeping score, that’s 144 snow-free days this year. Not too shabby.
Every computer chair should come equipped with a built-in floor-mounted fuzzy seat warmer.
I dare you. In fact, on the advice of my legal counsel, I double dare you. Just try to kill my laptop with a power spike:
For portability, the 25-pound uninterruptible power supply may be fitted with an attractive carrying handle.
(It’s actually thought to be a bad idea to daisy-chain surge protectors. That didn’t stop me from once attempting to build a perpetual electrical generation machine by plugging together two uninterruptible power supplies in a loop. Genius!)