Painting the Office

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Sneak Peak

We were up early, before mass, working on a project.

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Here's a sneak peak of what we were up to.  Check back later this week for more!

An Artist of the Floating World

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Kazuo Ishiguro is an author that I recently discovered.  His most famous book is The Remains of the Day.  Last time it was my turn to choose the book club book I chose another book of his: Never Let Me Go, and I liked it quite a bit.  So, for Christmas I asked for some more books by Ishiguro, and I received two!  Thank you Shannon for getting me An Artist of the Floating World!

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Unlike The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, An Artist of the Floating World is set in Japan.  Ishiguro was born in Japan, but raised in England.  I haven't read many books set in Japan, so this was new and interesting.  The book is set a few years after WWII ended, but the narrator spends much of the book looking back over his past, so most of the "action" of the book is before and during the war.  The main character is an artist, and the book focuses on how his art changed over time.  The changes were due to his progression from student to teacher, but also were related to the political climate.

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Both this book and Never Let Me Go are told from the first person perspective.  But one thing that is unique is that they both have narrators that talk to you.  It's not just that you are hearing the main character's story, but he is actually saying things like "If you've every been to the Bridge of Hesitation, you'll remember that . . ." or "I don't know how it was where you were, but for us . . ."  I don't think I've every read another author that uses this particular technique.

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I liked this book, and would recommend it for people who are interested in Japanese culture, as well as people who are interested WWII.  There isn't much of a beginning-middle-end feel, it's more a book that makes you think, even after it's ended.

Sprocket and Kazul

Over the weekend, Melissa brought her new cat, Kazul, over so that we could meet him.

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He and Sprocket hit it off right away. 

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Kazul tried to hide from Sprocket in the bathroom.  Let's just say that there are now cat scratch marks about 5 feet  off the ground on the bathroom wall.

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Once he figured out that the bathroom wasn't a good place to hide, he decided to get out of reach.

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Sprocket so wanted to be friends and play, but Kazul would have none of it.

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They were so intent on each other that David was able to get these picture without either of them moving so much as an inch.

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David took Sprocket upstairs so that Melissa could calm Kazul down enough to get him down.  Then Melissa and Kazul left.  When Sprocket came back down, he was sure that the cat must be around the house somewhere.  He went and sat in the kitchen and looked up at the top of the cabinets again, waiting for Kazul to pop out!  Silly Puppy!

Granola

Today I made granola.  It is one of our breakfast staples.  During the week David and I usually eat either oatmeal with brown sugar and craisins, or granola & yogurt for breakfast.

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Olive Oil Granola - courtesy of the New York Times

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Ingredients:

3 cups old-fashioned rolled oats

1-1/2 cups raw pistachios, hulled

1 cup raw pumpkin seeds, hulled

1 cup coconut chips (I actually use flakes)

3/4 cup maple syrup

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

1 tsp. kosher salt

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1/2 tsp. cardamom

3/4 cup chopped dried apricots (we were out, so I used craisins instead.)

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Preheat oven to 300 degrees.  In a large bowl combine all ingredients except the dried fruit.  Spread mixture on a rimmed baking sheet.  Bake for 45 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes.  Transfer back to the bowl and stir in the dried fruit.

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 Do not let the granola cool on the baking sheet.  It will harden and become nearly impossible to get off.  Yes, I am speaking from personal experience.

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Painting the Office

We started painting the office over the weekend.

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There's a lot in there, so we decided to move all the stuff to one side, and paint half the room at a time.

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I'm not sure when we'll be painting the other half of the room . . . maybe one night this week, or maybe next weekend.

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Sprocket had to wait in the hall, so he wouldn't get into the paint stuff.  Even with his bed shoved into the doorway to get it out of the way, he likes it.

Double-Sided Printing

Today I discovered that our printer can print double-sided!

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Who knew?!

Little Bee

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I'm in a book club.  Each month one person chooses a book and we all read it and then get together to discuss it.  This month's book was Little Bee by Chris Cleave.  It's about African refugees in Britain, and oil wars in Nigeria.  I'm a sucker for happy endings, so I was a little bit apprehensive.  I just didn't see how it could have a happy ending and still be believable.  In fact, I figured that it would be a pretty depressing book.  

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I'm happy to say that I was wrong.  Little Bee is definitely a book about serious issues, but it also has some laugh-out-loud funny parts.  That's not to say that Cleave makes light of serious situations, but rather that he recognizes that life is funny, even when it's tragic.  The ending isn't really happy, but it isn't really sad either.  It was just open ended.

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A bonus for our book club this month was that Chris Cleave came to Portland and did an event at Powell's.  We didn't realize this when the book was chosen, so it was just luck or fate or something.  He was a really great speaker, and I felt more hopeful about the non conclusive ending after hearing him talk.  I also bought his other book Incendiary, so you can look forward to me reviewing it sometime in the future.

White Bird

I found this ugly little bird on clearance at Fred Meyer for about $1.50.  I bought this ugly bird in order to try out a a project that I saw on a decorating blog.

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I'm not sure that this photo really does justice to the ugliness of this bird.  It was kind of a blue gray with weird pink stripes on the wings.

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The idea of the project is pretty basic.  You basically use white spray paint and cover the whole thing.  Now my ugly bird looks porcelain-ish, and it matches my owl book ends.

Media Console

David and I take great pride in the fact that we can park our car in our garage.  We have a one car garage and we have managed to fit about a million things in there.  We have a large shelf unit that holds tools (hammers, screwdrivers, clamps, a router, and multiple saws), gardening stuff, biking accessories, canoeing accessories, and a few boxes of storage stuff.  We have 3 bikes, a lawn mower, a barbecue, and a deep freezer.  And still we usually park the car in there!

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However, from August to November we weren't parking the car in the garage.  Instead we were using the garage as a workshop to build a media console.  

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This media console is based on this one from Pottery Barn.  We used these plans from ana-white.com.

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We built our media console from scratch.  We bought lumber, nails, screws, and wood glue.  I learned how to use a bunch of the power tools that we have, and now we have a finished product that we are very proud of.

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In case you were wondering, no we did not go to the trouble of making 16 drawers.  Those are all fake drawer faces.  There's a big cabinet in the middle, and larger drawers on the sides.

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In case you are interested, below I've put some pictures from the construction of the media console.

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David using a drill to screw in a screw.

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Me using the drill.

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Oops!  We broke a drill bit!

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The "skeleton" of the cabinet.

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Oops!  They forgot to make this screw into a screw!

It's Fate!

Over Christmas, while up in Seattle we were making a breakfast casserole (a Christmas morning tradition).  While removing the casserole from the oven, the lid slipped off and broke.  So our set of Pyrex has been looking like this:

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Then, this morning while I was at Fred Meyer, I happened to walk through the clearance section.  And guess what I found?

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For how much?

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Yep 40% off the lowest marked price = $3.58!

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Does it fit?  Yep!

Office Paint

We've been having some trouble deciding on a paint color for the office.

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I think that we've finally settled on "Tropical Splash."  It's the blue on the right on the bottom row.

Pink Cowl

Last year after I finished taking the PE, I bought this yarn as a reward for all the studying that I had done.  It is a wool silk blend, and since it's so soft and shiny and pretty I was waiting to find the perfect project to use it.

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I thought that this cowl pattern was a perfect fit for my yarn.  Cowls go right against the neck's sensitive skin, and the combination of merino wool and silk is very soft and not a bit itchy.

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I had only one skein of yarn, which made a cowl a good choice because it doesn't take much yarn.  I used the entire skein.  In fact I ran out of yarn when I still had about 10 stitches to bind off.  Luckily I had a different yarn that is a near match for color, and the bind off isn't easily visible.

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The Sirens of Titan

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Two years ago my brother and I mad an agreement.  He agreed to read my favorite book and I'd read his.  The agreement was made when we were on vacation, in a pub in Austria, and frankly I never thought that I'd have to keep my end of the bargain because I didn't think he'd read Pride and Prejudice.

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And then a few months ago Robby called me up to tell me that he'd finished Pride and Prejudice.  He told me that Mr. Bennet was hilarious (which he is) and that he'd be sending me a copy of The Sirens of Titan to read.  Well, a deal is a deal.  I put it off for a while because he never sent me the book, but when he came up for Christmas he had it with him.  So with no excuse left, I read it.  

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It definitely wasn't the kind of book that I usually read.  It was very weird, written in the past but set in the future.  I'm not sure that I could sum it up very easily . . . parts of it are set on Mars, Mercury, and Titan (Saturn's largest moon), and it had a set of main characters that were not especially likable, which I guess is lucky because then you don't mind so much when life doesn't go as planned.  

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I'm not sure that I'll be reading any more Kurt Vonnegut books, but then I don't imagine that Robby will be reading any more Jane Austen.  It was a fun experiment, however, and I'm glad that we made the deal . . . and followed through with it.

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I've decided this year to use the blog to keep track of books that I've read.  So periodically you can expect book reviews to appear here.

Blueberry Pie!

Happy New Year!  After taking a break from blogging for the holidays, I'm back!

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