Friday's Fun Stuff

Can you tell I like my kitchen? This shot was from this morning. The grapes had been washed and drained overnight and this seemed picture-perfect.

Wow. My belly is full. Just had Meal #6 tonight for a small dinner gathering of four. Tonight's menu: center cut pork loin with a ginger shiitake cream sauce, stewed tomatoes, green beans with a dijon vinaigrette, company mashed potatoes, and fresh-made golden potato bread. Dessert was a dense chocolate cake that came out as a disaster, but man-o-man the flavor was still intense.

But wait, you careful readers say: when was Meal #5? That was back on Tuesday...I think I forgot to blog about it. Main dish was spaghetti carbonara. That meal was tasty but problematic...didn't come out structurally like it should. But hey: when getting to cook in as cool a kitchen as this, who am I to fret? Tuesday's meal also involved my first huge disaster with a pot boiling over, and gracious it was a mess on that beautiful new cooktop. The ceramic cooktop cleaner took it right off, though. I was in the midst of all that prep for dinner, else I'd've given you poor souls a before and after shot of it.

As noted earlier this week, the electricians did a lot of installation of new fixtures in the existing house. Here's a shot looking from the second floor hallway back towards the stairwell. There's a new center light where a yucky unuseful fan used to be, and on the left you can see one of the four new sconces up there.

More HVAC Problems: Let's see: Barnette Heating & A/C, Inc. of Mocksville, NC was back yet again today to try to figure out why the system is still not quite operating as it should. One problem they had to resolve: the outside unit was running constantly even when the cooling system was not activated. They ended up finding that one wire had been misdirected or wrongly connected. While hanging around for them to get all this done, I managed to make cookies: milk chocolate oatmeal, the third round of cookie-making in the new kitchen.

The kitchen remains awesome but I'm going to abandon it now to go watch episode 7 of the first season of "True Blood." I'm going to leave dinner clean-up for later.