Words Into Bytes

Looking through the Marble Arch in Knutsford aka Cranford.

Beginning this month PBS is playing the BBC version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford on Masterpiece Theater. Based on seeing the just the first episode so far, I think this adaptation captures the tone of the short stories perfectly: sweet and funny and a bit poignant. If you missed the first episode, you can catch up by watching it online.

Of course, I’m prejudiced in favor of Cranford; the village is a thinly-veiled Knutsford where Elizabeth Gaskell was raised. Knutsford is also where AJM was raised. (Technically he is from the small village three miles down the road which has little more than a post office and a convenience store.) I like to ramble through Knutsford and marvel at how Gaskell captured it and those wonderful “old ladies”.

Cranford is in possession of the Amazons, all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women.

So begins the little book (really a series of short stories) that is at once nostalgic, for certain kind of genteel English parish life, and radical. I don’t mean that there’s an overt feminist message; I’m remembering only that Virginia Woolf considered a book entirely about women’s friendships radical 70 years after Cranford was published. But I digress. The best reason to read Cranford is because it’s funny. You do think a cow dressed in gray flannel waistcoat and drawers funny, don’t you?

Behind the humor, Mrs. Gaskell’s social conscience is still in evidence. The humorous stories do not ignore problems with poverty and class differences or the homogenization of place brought about by new technologies. Cranford does not want to be modernized and lose what distinguishes it from other places. These issues seem much more present, more a part of the narrative, than they are in Jane Austen’s books. Not that Cranford ever sounds preachy.

Minshull St connects King St and Princess St.

Even today, Knutsford is mainly a two street town and very picturesque. You can follow this map of Knutsford that explains the links between the real and fictional towns and their inhabitants.

Last year when I was in Knutsford, I experienced rather the same emotion that the Cranford characters felt when they were threatened with the building of the railroad. A Starbucks had been installed. A Starbucks in a town of antique shops, tearooms, and wine bars. It seemed so, as Miss Deborah would say, vulgar.

Cross Keys Hotel on King’s Street, Knutsford. The original Cross Keys Inn was demolished on 1909.

Selected Quotes

This is only a small list of my favorites from the first couple of stories. There is more, more, more. I’ll add to this list in time.

[The Cranford ladies'] dress is very independent of fashion; as they observe, “What does it signify how we dress here at Cranford where everybody knows us?” And if they go from home, their reason is equally cogent: “What does it signify how we dress here, where nobody knows us?” – p 2

“Elegant economy!” How naturally one falls back into the phraseology of Cranford! There, economy was always “elegant,” and money-spending always “vulgar and ostentatious,” a sort of sour-grapeism, which made us very peaceful and satisfied. I shall never forget the dismay felt when a certain Captain Brown came to live at Cranford, and openly spoke about his being poor–not in a whisper to an intimate friend, the doors and windows being previously closed; but in the public street! in a loud military voice! alleging his poverty as a reason for not taking a particular house. – p 4

[Captain Brown, contradicting his hostess, says that he finds Dickens superior to Dr. Johnson, and reads a scene to the company.] Some of us laughted heartily. I did not dare, because I was staying in the house. – p 9

[Mr. Holbrook] took me all around the place and showed me his six-and-twenty cows, named after different letters of the alphabet. – p 32

When we came back, nothing would serve him but he must read us the poems he had been speaking of; and Miss Pole encouraged him in his proposal, I thought, because she wished me to hear his beautiful reading, of which she had boasted; but afterwards said it was becase she had got to a difficult part of her crochet, and wanted to count her stitches without having to talk. – p 35

“There were many old ladies living here then; we are principally ladies now, I know; but we are not so old as the ladies used to be when I was a girl.” – p 50

Good technology makes a task easier. It adapts to us and provides a tool that simplifies what we already do. Great technology redefines a task so completely that we change our behavior, not because we are forced to adapt to the technology but because the technology has provided us with new ways to interact with the world and to do things we never imagined doing before. The iPhone is in the latter category. I’ve had mine for only a few days and I’ve been so constantly delighted that I can’t imagine how I lived without it.

When I bought my first Mac (Classic 512K) in 1985, my father couldn’t understand why I spent over $2,000 for “a glorified typewriter” especially when my refrigerator didn’t even work properly. And yet having a computer changed the way I wrote, changed what I wrote, and led me down a new career path to technical writing and finally programming. I might even say that had it not been for my first Mac, I’d never have been working as a course developer at ETI, never met AJM, and never bought this house or gotten married. That purchase did change my life. Now, nearly the same age as my father was in 1985, I find myself wondering why I should spend $500 for a phone. I hardly use my phone. I don’t have it on me when I’m working in the garden and I never remember to look to see if I have messages when I come in.

I had to spend a lot of time justifying the purchase of the iPhone. 1) It is my Christmas present and AJM wants me to have it. 2) My original iPod has been broken for half a year and so with the iPhone I’m replacing both my broken iPod and my old cell phone. 3) I’ve only ever had one cell phone and it is so old that I’ve had it before the old AT&T was bought out by Cingular who was then bought out by the new AT&T. My plan is so old, the new AT&T can’t even figure out how to upgrade me. 4) JQS has a new job which will be providing him with an phone thereby allowing me to drop his coverage from my plan and using the savings to pay for the extra coverage required by the iPhone. 5) AJM, JQS, and SAM all have video-enabled iPods and, although I initially thought watching movies on an itty-bitty screen was ridiculous, after seeing it, I’m sold. So after dragging my feet for six weeks, I went into the Apple Store in the Domain last Tuesday and bought an iPhone. Procrastination paid off. The very day I decided to make my purchased Apple came out with the new 16GB iPhones.

My First Day with an iPhone

7:31. Morning coffee. Each winter morning AJM makes me latte and brings it in to me before he dashes off to work. I gave up coffee several years ago so this latte is decaffeinated and mostly just foamy milk. I only drink it in the winter to warm up in the morning. After giving up coffee, I find the taste rather stale and nasty. Also, I’m not alway a lay-about. Probably half the nights my nose wakes me up and I have to huddle on the couch and try to sleep sitting up.

8:45. This morning, however, AJM has to testify in court for a coworker whose ex-husband has been stalking her. I offer to drop him off at the court house and pick him up afterwards. While he’s at court, I drive over to the AT&T store on 5th St in order to try to cancel my old phone number. Unfortunately they don’t open until 9AM. So I’m left with 45 minutes to waste and spend it trying to learn the settings on the iPhone and figure out some of the features. I’ve just changed the ringtone and decided to head back to the store when AJM calls. His finished his testimony. I pick him up and we go back to the AT&T store (because the old account is his name) and we cut off the service (I hope). As it turns out, we did the entire operation over the phone and they didn’t ask for AJM’s confirmation at all. So it seems I could have done it from home and without wasting either of our time.

9:34. I need to spend some time this morning reorganizing the house. I’m currently cleaning out every closet. As a result, every room is in upheaval with piles of things to be sorted through. Keep. Goodwill. Trash. The house looks like we’ve just moved in with boxes stacked everywhere. I decided to forego one of my other Christmas presents, a metal filing cabinet, because we don’t have any place to put it and it would be difficult to move around. So for about a tenth of the cost of the filing cabinet, I bought some plastic file bins. I used to have cardboard ones but both mice and bugs get into those and shred the papers. When going through my papers, I’m being very harsh. I try to imagine someone else having to sort it all out when I’m dead. Some articles I keep because of they have a historical interest that is also personal: like the 1977 article where I first read about videodiscs, or the 1983 article about the difficulties of wordprocessing Chinese characters. But I manage to put bags of other magazines and articles into the recycling bin. The question remains. What to do with all these back issues of the New Yorker? We pack each year’s issues into a box and put that box in the garage. Seeing it all laid out, even AJM thought we should dispose of them. And yet, now that we’ve thrown out so much other stuff, I’m dragging my feet and thinking we have room for them–at least for another year.

9:35. Why do housework when I can be playing around with my new toy? I’ve wanted a camera phone for a long time. When I travel, I use the timestamps on my digital photographs to record the diary of the trip. It’s faster and more convenient that writing it down. I haven’t figured out how to take a good photo with the iPhone yet. I have trouble holding it steady and the photo turns out blurry. Nor is the picture quality what I’m used to with my CoolPix. It’s especially poor in any light but bright sunlight.

11:43. Lunch with JQS. This is our last Wednesday lunch together because this is his last week at DPS. On Monday, he starts a new job with Vyke Communication and will be working way up north in Cedar Park. After he gets settled in his new job, we’ll have to start a new tradition. Maybe dinner and a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse. We ate at Banzai because it’s faster and cheaper than Mikado where we went last week. JQS always gets the chicken curry lunch special and I always get the unagi bento. This week, we were stymied because chicken curry is no long included in the lunch specials. We’ll probably never eat here again–not because of the chicken currry. But I wonder if they’ll think that’s the reason. “Only two days ’til retirement,” we joke as I drop JQS off at DPS for the last time. Sounds like a set-up for a Lethal Weapon movie.

12:40. Stuck in Austin traffic, southbound on Lamar at 6th St. on the way home. In my Miata, everyone else’s SUV looms over me. Usually I avoid this intersection by cutting over to Guadalupe around 15th St. Usually I run a bunch of errands that I’ve saved for my Wednesday out. This intersection is so much nicer now with the Flagship Whole Foods Market than in was in the 1980s when it was just a used car lot.

14:27. I’m on my way to the dentist when I do a double take at South 5th and West Mary. The old post office which is going to become the new Twin Oaks library is being torn down. Just last Saturday on the way to Central Market, AJM asked me if they were going to demolish it. I thought not. I stop and take a photo to email to AJM. The photo quality might not be great on the iPhone but the ease with which one can snap a shot and email it is fantastic. Although I’m very impressed with the keyboard on the iPhone, emailing a photo is even easier. I see myself sending photo updates rather than typing out email, especially, for instance, when I’m on a trip. This is one of the examples of how technology can change behavior by making it dead simple to do something I never even thought of doing before.

16:18. On my way home from the dentist I swing by Barton Creek Square Mall to buy a protective cover and holster for my iPhone. I want to be able to use it in the garden, both so that I can listen to music and so that I can be more connected to people trying to get in touch with me. Coming down the big hill on Loop 360 near Barton Creek, the phone rings and I realize I haven’t learned yet how to answer it. This distracts me just a moment, just long enough for me to almost hit the car in front of me which has slowed down for the light at the bottom of the hill. Whew! All day I’ve been so happy. It wouldn’t do to have a wreck now, especially given that I just got the car out of the shop yesterday.

I take almost half an hour trying to decide on the cover that’s going to work for me. One of the great improvements of the iPhone over the iPod is that the volume control is a physical button on the side. You don’t have to go through any screens to turn the volume up or down. There is also a button on the top to put the iPhone to sleep and another button to turn it on. I don’t want a cover that will block the access to any of these features.

16:43. When I arrive home, I IM AJM to tell him I got the iPhone holster and cover. He asks me to describe it and then thinks better of it. “Why don’t you take a photo of it and email it to me?” So I do.

iPhone Impressions

I love my iPhone so far. I keep it on all the time just like a communicator on Star Trek. Actually it is vastly superior to a communicator, as that was just a wearable walkie-talkie. I use the timer feature when watering plants while I’m working in the garden. (I’ve discovered that I can use my nose to work the timer when my hands are too muddy to touch the screen; that’s how simple the controls are!) I like having my calendar, address book, and email all integrated. The map feature is fascinating, especially how it knows where you are…even though it doesn’t use GPS.

I was disappointed with the Notes feature. I thought I’d be able to upload Notes and carry them with me…like my book and wine lists which I use when I’m shopping so that I don’t buy something I already have. But no. You can only take notes and then email them to yourself. No way do I want to laboriously type out a note on the iPhone keyboard. In this instance, old technology is still better. And for some reason, the To Do list on the calendar doesn’t work either. So if you want to keep a To Do list or any other kind of list with you, there is no elegant way…yet.

The iPhone is very intuitive. When I looked up a restaurant to get the phone number for takeout, I tapped on the number on the screen and it went immediately into phone mode and asked it I’d like to call the number. Wow! When you are listening to iTunes and a call comes in, your song pauses and then starts up again at the same point when you’re finished talking. However, if you go into other modes that don’t require sound, the song continues playing. Having a physical button for sound control is great, so much better than the iPod. And the fact that the font on the screen is large is fantastic. I could never see any of the controls on my iPod without my glasses but can do almost everything on the iPhone without them. The calendar display is better than the calendar on my computer.

Yes We Can

Making up my movie list for 2007, I realized that I just don’t see enough movies anymore. So on the first cold, rainy day of the year, I headed to the Alamo Drafthouse for a movie and lunch. Sitting in the darkness of the almost empty theater, I felt that familiar thrill, the anticipation of entering into an alternate landscape and timescape.

Sometimes I find myself secretly rooting for a movie while watching it, hoping that it is going to live up to its promise and not make a wrong turn or embarrass itself. Despite the generally good press, initially I had my doubts about Juno. It took ten minutes or so for me to be drawn into the movie. In those early scenes the soundtrack is less accompaniment for the visuals than the other way around. I felt Juno wasn’t so much a movie as a big-screen music video. The opening credits and scenes scream indy coolness as does perky Juno herself. It was trying too hard. Also, in these early scenes, Juno is all wisecracks and insouciance. Getting pregnant is a bummer but she has a handle on it. No biggie. However, when the dialog comes to the forefront and the characters begin to reveal themselves, the movie engaged me. As it turns out this is how it should be. Juno’s not the kind of girl to reveal her inner self to anyone immediately. Over time we see beneath her facade. As she tells her father, “I’m trying to handle things beyond my maturity level.”

Much has been written about Ellen Page and she is a delight as Juno. But had the movie relied on her alone it would have been one-dimensional. The supporting cast, especially Juno’s dad, J.K. Simmons, and her step-mother, the always wonderful Allison Janney bring depth to the movie. They’re brilliant! Movie parents are so often caricatures, especially parents of pregnant teens. These parents are disappointed with Juno’s news but they are not hysterical. And when Juno is out of the room the roll their eyes and talk about her the way parents of teenagers really do. “Did you see this coming?” “Yeah, but I’d hoped she’d be into drugs or expelled from school.” Watching the interplay between Juno and her parents it is easy to understand where she gets her frankness and her earnestness. Most appealing to me was the matter-of-fact practicality with which all three characters faced the situation. What’s done is done; now what’s the plan?

I was reminded of last year’s Little Miss Sunshine. That movie really played up the family as a collection of mismatched eccentrics. Despite some very poignant and serious family issues, ultimately Little Miss Sunshine was played for laughs, a celebration of the dysfunctional family. Juno shows more restraint. It is more real and more genuinely sweet, and at its foundation it is a celebration of the functional family without any sticky sentiment. Juno always respects its characters, all of them, not just the protaganist. In Juno the resolution of the story rings perfectly true because it grows naturally from all that comes before. And yet, it was not a pat ending, or even a predictable one.

I disagree with Roger Ebert assessment of Juno as the best movie of 2007. However, I’ve only seen it once and many movies grow on me with repeated viewings, so I may yet change my mind. Ebert also says that Juno has “no wrong scenes and no extra scenes”. Not so. The scene with the women’s clinic punk receptionist was played too much for comedy and did not ring true to my own experience as so many other scenes did. Did Jason Reitman feel it necessary to villify the women’s clinic so that Juno could have some clear cut motivation to flee it? Most of the film is so nuanced that the scene seemed out of place. Also if Juno is so smart, I have to ask (along with her Dad) how did she get pregnant? Where was the condom? All of Juno’s moves are so calculated. This was by her own admission “premeditated sex”. I don’t think it’s in her character to be that dumb even raised in these times of watered-down sex education.

The movie Juno most reminds me of is Ghost World. That would make an interesting double-feature. Perhaps I’m imagining a similarity because there are so few movies about thoughtful teenage girls.

Myers-Briggs

Especially appealing to TJs.

Bottom line: Recommended

Living in a small house I often feel that life is one of those sliding tile puzzle games I used to get in a box of Cracker Jacks. In order to move something into a space, you have to empty that space. And, whatever already occupies that space has to go somewhere else. But before you can move it, you have to empty another space, ad infinitum.

The first thing we did in the kitchen remodel was empty the cabinets that we needed to tear down. A lot of stuff went into recycling (we seem to save every can and jar) or to Goodwill. The dishes and tools I knew we didn’t need on a daily basis but wanted to keep went into the garage: the ice cream maker, the bread maker, the tortilla press, the fondue pot, all my Christmas serving dishes and fancy Japanese dishes. After we rebuilt the kitchen, we had less storage space than before because we didn’t replace the upper cabinets. I wanted to get a feel for how we used the kitchen before deciding if we needed any more cabinetry.

In the last year we discovered we needed storage for odds and ends like the broom and the vacumn cleaner, the bucket and mop, the large appliances that we don’t use daily, and the seasonal serving dishes. And light bulbs. And paper towels, toilet paper, and napkins. We needed a pantry.

Incandragon long ago converted me to the cult of Elfa. When we received the Container Store’s annual 30% off Elfa catalog, I knew it was time to act. On New Year’s Day. I emptied the hall closet. The first week of the year I ripped out the old warped boards that I’d put up as shelves when I move in, plastered, primed, and painted it. AJM got into the act by ripping out the old carpet (which had apparently once graced the entire house but was removed out before I moved in so I could be sold a house with “hardwood” floors) and scraping the wood floors. Within a week we had bought the Elfa shelving and by Sunday, January 13th we’d installed it. From conception to completion, that is certainly a project record for us.

The closet was a glory of gleaming empty shelves. I always regret having to spoil such a pristine space. Annie at The Transplantable Rose pegged my feelings about the new pantry exactly.

Having the shelves installed must be satisfying, and then you can spend some time on organizing and arranging the stuff. That can be so much fun with a new space, while your mind is still playing with possibilities….not like normal straightening and tidying after the system has become set in concrete.

This closet was, of course, not empty just waiting to be filled with the kitchen overflow. It has always contained the many boxes that comprise my office, as well as my office supplies and drawing paper. All this had to go somewhere and the somewhere it went is the front bedroom. Last fall I had cleaned out the front bedroom, which has the habit of lapsing into a storage closet, and transformed it into a proper guest bedroom. I wasn’t ashamed when AJM’s mom stayed for a visit. Now the front bedroom looks like a storage closet again.

Of all the things in the house, these boxes, which contain nothing of material value, are to me the most precious. They contain all I’ve written, drawn, and photographed. This is the sum of my life…in boxes.

Update: 2008-04-23

Finished migrating posts in the Postcards category. Need to rethink photo size for this layout as the old 320 px width is too small.

Update: 2008-01-22

Finished migrating all the posts related to the kitchen remodeling project to a new category, Kitchen Remodel. Added some new photos and new posts, too.

Update: 2008-01-19

With AJM’s help changed the permalink structure to so-called “pretty links”.

Update: 2007-11-07

AJM has set up Words Into Bytes on WordPress. However, I haven’t migrated the old content yet. I haven’t decided if I will. For now the archives can be found via these links by category. Any posts you linked to in the past should have the same permalink URL. Until I get serious about this migration comments on the archive pages are turned off.

• Bookshelf
• Confessions of an INTJ
• Essays
• Movies
• Gallery
• Guilty Little Pleasures
• Life in the 21st Century
• Material World
• Short Takes
• Soul Searching
• Words Into Bites

Read the rest of this entry »

This isn’t a “ten best” list; my criteria when ranking movies is “which would you rather see again right now”. For example, I think No Country for Old Men is a better movie than the Bourne Ultimatum, but it’s not an enjoyable movie. Thus, I ranked it lower.

Recommended

• 2007-01-07. Children of Men. With AJM at the Alamo Drafthouse South.
• 2007-11-22. Bladerunner. At the Paramount with SAM and AJM. $8 each.
• 2007-04-20. Hot Fuzz. With AJM and SAM at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. $6 each.
• 2007-01-28. Pan’s Labyrinth. With JQS at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar.
• 2007-12-25. The Golden Compass. With AJM at the Gateway Stadium 16.
• 2007-07-21. Ratatouille. Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar.
• 2007-08-10. Bourne Ultimatum. With AJM at the Gateway Stadium 16. $8.75 each.
• 2007-11-24. No Country for Old Men. With JQS at the Arbor 8. $6.50 each.
• 2007-11-09. Michael Clayton. With AJM at the Gateway. ($8.75 ea).

Read the rest of this entry »

My nine month silence on our kitchen remodelling project might have duped you into believing that we finished it. Oh, optimistic you! After we got all the major appliances installed and had a floor, walls, lighting, and a working sink again, we were ready to give the project a rest. We were so tired of spending a year working on the kitchen and living in a shambles that we just haven’t been able to bring ourselves to pull out the tools for another weekend adventure in DIY. Our attention faltered. Besides, we are highly adaptable here. Compared to the old kitchen, or the kitchen in progress, the almost-finished-but-not-quite kitchen was good enough for now.

Our focus shifted to a new project, a garden house project. One thing this kitchen project taught us is that we wanted someone else to do the next big project. As most of you know, however, the garden house project ended in disaster, a lot of money spent and little to show for it except that we still have another big project to tackle.

To retreat from that prospect for a moment, we turned our attention to some little things we could finish up in the kitchen. Motivation ran high because Margaret is coming for a two week visit in October and she is “looking forward to seeing the new kitchen and garden house.” So we looked around the kitchen and saw it with new eyes, as someone who hadn’t been living in it the last nine months might see it.

After we returned from running screaming from the room, we decided the highest priority was to get new doors for the closet. I think this space was actually a walk-in pantry. I don’t know if the water heater has always been there; rotted wood floors indicate that at one time it leaked. The CACH system is fairly new. I think it was installed in the 1990s just before I bought the house. Perhaps that’s when a wall was put in to make one deep closet two shallow ones. Whatever the case, we had to do something to hide the water heater and central heating system.

I had been eyeing various strategies for replacing the old plywood closet doors (which always hung crookedly and were peeling). Because the kitchen is so small, I wanted a translucent or reflective surface. I didn’t want anything that would make the room darker or feel more cramped. AJM and I finally agreed on these rather pricey ($325) doors from Home Depot.

As usual, our non-standard handmade house presented difficulties during installation. The biggest problem is that these new doors run on a wide track that didn’t fit in the space for the track in the closet. AJM had to remove a board in back of of the existing track. Unfortunately it was very difficult for him to prize it out because the CACH unit was in the way. So he had to cut it out in small pieces by hand.

After he got past that hurdle, the installation went fairly smoothly until the doors were up and we decided that they were too short. Yes, we measured…twice. Either cutting out the old board changed the dimension or the doors were designed for rooms with carpets. We were unhappy with the gap at the bottom. So AJM took the doors down, screwed a board to the header, and reinstalled them. Another weekend (the long Labor Day weekend) wasted, I mean, with a project successfully behind us. We were so pumped that we finished putting all the cover plates over the light switches.

“For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature…the pleasures and pains of life came to her with trebled intensity…The downfall of some dear hope or plan plunged Anne into ‘deeps of affliction.’ The fulfilment thereof exalted her to dizzy realms of delight.”
–Lucy Maud Montgomery. Anne of Green Gables.

One irritating fact of kitchen remodelling is that valuable lessons are learned during the process that would have been handy to know before we began. The big lesson I learned today is if you fall in love with an appliance, buy it, even if you’re not ready to install it. Appliance manufacturers change their product lines more often than Apple updates iPods. I did this with the dishwasher and it sat in the entryway for 9 months but I got the one I wanted. I waited almost too long with the range; one store had only the floor model left with dents but, luckily, the other store had one in stock. And then, yesterday, I went to buy the refrigerator. This story really begins in 1987. As I wrote in a letter to CMB,

“Other news: the refrigerator finally died about two weeks ago. I bought a huge beautiful white one. They delivered it last Thursday. JQS was so impressed. (When you are poor, you’re easily impressed!) We hugged each other a lot. He smiled up at me and said, “Now we can live a normal life!” I guess our life was pretty abnormal with the old refrigerator. Do you remember the old refrigerator? Thawing it out every week. The food always going bad. Three years of that! It seems incredible to have a refrigerator where I can keep ice cream for more than four days. And I don’t have to keep the butter in the freezer to keep it from getting warm and going rancid.”

I had gone to Sears and ended up buying the biggest top mount refrigerator they had. The main reason I chose that model was it had tempered glass shelves. I hate wire shelving in a refrigerator. It cost more than $700 which was a lot for refrigerator in 1987. I had to justify it to my coworkers by explaining that if the refrigerator lasted 10 years, I only paid $70 a year for it. Well it lasted 19 years. What a bargain!

Actually, we’d still be using my refrigerator except that AJM convinced me that his side-by-side would make more sense in our small kitchen. Mine was so wide that it required a large door clearance. And his was newer. So we cleaned his up and gave mine to refrigerator recycling.

Within a week I knew I had made a mistake. (Compromise: when everyone loses.) The narrowness of the side-by-side makes it difficult to see things hidden behind other things and to get them out. And both of us realized that an old shabby refrigerator would look out of place in our new kitchen. I began looking for a new refrigerator.

Why are most refrigerators so ugly? They take up so much space and have such a visual presence in the kitchen and they all look like they were designed by folks who love Hummers. I didn’t like a single refrigerator I saw enough to spend good money on it. And then one day at Lowe’s we saw it. A refrigerator we both gravitated towards. A refrigerator we both liked at first sight, the Samsung RS267LASH. It didn’t have any bulky curves. All its lines were straight and sleek. The handles were thin and elegant. And it had tempered glass shelves. Bonus: ice and filtered water in the built in door. (I wasn’t looking for this feature but I think it will be nice during our Texas summers.) And it’s Energy Star rated.

For six months we visited our refrigerator every time we went to Lowe’s (about twice a week). I wanted to buy the refrigerator for Christmas. We had the cabinets up but the countertop installation got delayed until after the new year. We agreed that we that we didn’t want our new refrigerator scratched up when the countertops were installed. (And after what happened to the dishwasher, this was good planning.)

Yesterday I went to buy the refrigerator–and the last one Lowe’s had was the floor model. One small dent. Some scratches on the handle. AJM really, really, really didn’t want the floor model and Lowe’s offered to give us the new model for the same price as the old. This sounded like a solution. I went home and looked up the updated version. Aaaaaargh! This new model changed the two features which attracted me to the old model: the long thin handles and the monotone control display.

Like Anne, I was in the depths of despair. All those “if onlys” haunted me. (And then I felt guilty for making a big deal about a silly refrigerator. Who falls in love with a refrigerator? Well, I do. I had my heart set on it.)

Today I went back to assess the damage on the model at the south Austin store. Lowe’s is good about providing discounts on their floor models. Are a couple of nicks worth $150? I couldn’t decide. The computer listed floor models in the stores at Steck and in San Marcos. I drove to the Steck store where they had two models in black but not the platinum. They had the new model, though, and wheeled it out for me to compare. I helped the guy unpack it. I tried to love it but the first thing we noticed was some defect in the finish of the control panel.

So we called the San Marcos store and the guy there assured me that, yes, they had one on the floor with a slight nick on the handle but no dents. I drove to San Marcos. The floor model had a huge dent on the door and several nasty scratches. I drove back to the south Austin store and bought the floor model there.

I’m anticipating its arrival with less than unabashed happiness. On the bright side, at least neither one of us will be the first one to scratch it.

Before: 2006-01-02

Committed to the adventure…a year ago we were tearing up the kitchen floor.

After: 2007-01-06

On the 12th Day of Christmas my truelove gave to me…one working kitchen.

After the masons left on Thursday, we installed the kitchen sink. That was a bit troublesome because the clamps did not fit correctly. They are designed to clamp to the granite but along the back and front the granite is lying on the base cabinet and the combined thickness made it impossible to clamp the sink down. We put the sealant around and weighted the sink down and crossed our fingers.

Oh, the other problem was that the front edge of the sink was slightly warped. This produced an ugly gap between the lip of the sink and the countertop. Clamping it would have ameliorated the problem; however, we couldn’t get the clamps to fit. In the end, AJM, banged it flatter with a rubber mallet. He did this before we installed it; the granite would have cracked under the abuse. As solutions go, this was not my favorite. I could imagine big dents in my brand new stainless steel sink. Fortunately we did manage to get a little straighter and it didn’t dent.

Friday morning I installed the faucet. I have the tendency to bang dishes against the faucet so I wanted a faucet with a high curve.

This morning AJM hooked up the drainpipes. Now we have a sink and hot and cold running water.

The space at the end of the cabinet run next to the trash can is where I stand when AJM is cooking so that I can talk to him while chopping up or mixing ingredients, and stay out of his way. Most people would have made an L-shaped cabinet layout but our kitchen is so small that an L-shaped doesn’t provide enough room for both of us to maneuver comfortably. I’ve always thought that L-shaped layouts create a lot of counter and storage space that’s difficult to access.

Although there is still a lot to do (buy the refrigerator, install the backsplash, finish painting and the trim, put in the sliding doors to the entryway, reinstall doors over the cabinet where the hot water heater lives, and decide on what kind of cabinets or hutch we want for the glassware), the kitchen feels finished now. We can use it and it is pleasant and light to sit in.

Today, after we bought groceries, I scrambled eggs at one counter and AJM made sandwiches at the other. We sat at the table and ate like civilized folk–for the first time in 13 months.

Update: 2008-01-06

We still haven’t put in a backsplash behind the counter of the gas range. We can’t decide what we want and as we can use the kitchen as is, we aren’t pressed to move on with the project.