Kitchen Therapy

We can safely agree that whatever this is (and it isn't much) it is not a home-improvement blog. But I have been doing some work on Bohome, and so I thought I'd share some of that.

The most major and most recent project has been to re-do my kitchen floor. Now, lest you think that I'm handier than I am, let me hasten to add that by "re-do" what I mean is "put carpet tiles on." So we're talking about real work, but not the kind of thing you need to go to trade school to learn how do to.

Here's a shot of the bare floor once I got all the furniture off of it and gave it a good cleaning.

Doesn't look that bad in this shot, but if you've been to my place you know that these particular planks of hardwood bite back.

These photos come from my phone, so they're not up to snuff, but that little gouge in the wood gives you the beginning of an idea of how splinterrific that floor can be. After years of doing a very sad dance with my landlord(s), I finally accepted that this situation would not be handled by them, and would not take care of itself. So, with a lot of help and encouragement from Cory, I picked a place that sells good product and did some research and ordered samples and we went to the FLOR showroom in Soho and picked out colors. The tiles were delivered on Friday, and I got down to business.

Step one was to put down base lines. The instructions gave very detailed info on how to do this in a regular rectangular room with four even walls and corners. Guess what, folks: that ain't my kitchen.

I used the stone base of my (certifiably antiquated but lovely and very functional) oven as a guide for the base lines.

Then it's a question of taking stock and coming up with some design notions and color pattern ideas.

What's wonderful about these FLOR tiles is that you don't need to staple anything down, or even use adhesive on the actual floor; you just put some little sticky circles face up on your base line, and on strategic corners. I played around with form and function, weighting the areas where I do the most work with food (and therefore do the most spilling) with darker colors.

And here we go! New kitchen floor for the Bohome...

My main beef at this point is that there's an area in the entryway where the bottom of the door goes too close to the ground for even this thin carpeting to fit (a combination of an ancient, uneven floor, and door that could probably be stand a re-hanging.) After the fire a couple years ago, they put up metal doors on all our apartments, so I can't plane off the bottom edge; I just need to leave a little space uncovered. And I may cut some carpet to fill some of the nooks and crannies around the edges that are still bare for the time being. But all in all, I'm pretty happy with how it came out.

Come on by for some barefootin' in the 'boken!

Lost and Found

I've been pretty busy with rehearsals and a bunch of other things lately, so my input here has been on the sketchy side. And I won't be able to catch you all up on everything now either, but in the spirit of putting something out there...

Cory and I hosted a party for the finale of Lost last weekend. We don't qualify for the most serious category of Lost fan (those would be the ones who have whole blogs devoted to dissecting the inner workings and mythologies of the show), but we took it seriously enough to do some cooking and put together some design elements.

Our notion of design for a party was not nearly enough for my sister Lori, however. Although she has never seen a single episode of Lost, she insisted that we 'theme it up' a notch or two, and put in more of an effort than would have occurred to us.

Cory ordered some custom M&Ms. BIG UPS to Cory for the notion, and seeing it through! If you know the show, these are pretty cool; if you don't, they're probably just baffling.




The inscribed candies got little bags to be handed out to the partiers. The skull image goes with the show at least a little bit ("Adam and Eve" in the cave; the general sense of foreboding and rampant death in the last few episodes)




And the simple Black and White candies went into coconut shells.



We also got a pineapple to fit with the Pacific Island theme, used the top as a centerpiece and skewered chunks with toothpicks decorated with banners Lori made, inscribed with character names.


Stole this photo from my sister, as I somehow managed not to get any shots of the pineapple spread.

Check out her work! She picked out the tropical paper, and we gave her a list of names (with the name crossed out for characters who were dead in one timeline or another.) She used special paper and ink for the names of the "Candidates." Pretty good for someone who has never seen the show, and doesn't care about it at all.



We made a fish stew. Lori helped a lot with this on the sous chef end, but she doesn't really like fish (as in - she runs screaming from the kitchen when seafood is cooking), so she didn't stick around for the completion of that.



It was a good stew - I used cod and mahi mahi in a garlic lime marinade; peppers, onions, tomatoes, scallions, cilantro; coconut milk made it extra-special island-y; and the secret ingredient was oil simmered with annatto seed. Yum.

Also a special blend of spices, including a hands-across-the-water conjunction of hot sauces.



Here's the food table before people arrived. The dips haven't been put into the bowls yet, and a lot of food was yet to come.

This shot gives a sense of the party in action.

Off to the left is the corner of the now-fully-loaded food table. You can see the platter with Lia's corn, black bean and quinoa salad, and the sesame-peanut sauce that went on Daniel and Susan's buckwheat noodles. Sadly, I did not get a shot of Sherin's broccoli-mango salad or Shannon's bread bowls, but trust me: all was extremely tasty!

Also, Sherin put together a game of Lost Bingo. She gathered a bunch of possible events of varying likelihood, and arranged them into a bingo board to check things off as they happened. They were really great!

Cory had the first winning card. She won a mango! Here's the Great and Glorious Card of Victory:

I love this shot - lots of joy in the faces of Shannon, Leslie and Cory.

'Twas a fun party. Maybe see you at the next one - in another life, brother.

How Many Words?

Yes.

iHam

In their continuing efforts to provide premium technology with a focus on contemporary style and intuitive, user-friendly interface, Shackleton introduces... the iHam 5J

Happy April Fool's, everybody.

Vegetarians Beware

Those of you interested in graphic art and design, and uberhip toys, may be interested to know that Jeremyville is having a signing on Thursday Oct. 2, at Kidrobot New York (Soho store). Mr. Ville has been written up in a bunch of the art zines, and designed for all kinds of rad events and clients.

Here's Nightmare in Jeremyville, one of the things he'll be signing next week.

Posters

I'm guessing you're all thinking about Iowa fairly exclusively in terms of the Caucus, aren't you? Check out this poster from Sioux City past:


Pretty rad, huh? Nice to see the Feds take an interest in the local camera club.

What about this one?



Interesting in light of recent events in Vieques, no?



Or this one, from when Penicillin was new:






I really like this stuff! They're all from a great website from the Library of Congress about WPA posters from 1936-43. Cool on a whole bunch of levels. Thanks to maven haven for drawing my attention to it.

The design elements are fascinating, as are the reminders of how things change. And how they don't. New Deal, eh? Make you think of anything?

So with that, I'll leave you with a graphic reminder of the theory that loose lips sink ships...