Month: March 2008

Monday Monday Monday!


Crazy day today. Took care of a bunch of errands, made a good double-batch of buta kakuni, had friends over for shabu-shabu & Rock Band, took Mobius to the beach, and made some headway cleaning up the spare room.

Of course, I also ended up falling asleep in the hammock in the mid-afternoon and as a result burned the living crap out of some balsamic I was reducing, but other than that, hey. Not too bad.

Played around with the iPod Touch that Ei-Nyung got for me for my birthday. It’s pretty incredible – so much functionality in such a tiny device. One interesting thing is that a couple of my friends have been working on porting Aura, our GBA game from a couple years back, to the iPhone, now that the SDK is out.

Kick ass!

Kitchen

So… the kitchen’s done… with one exception. The permit can’t be finalized, because the inspector found out there were unfinalized permits. Fun. Re-opening the permits today cost $4,800, and the inspector’s coming tomorrow to do the first round of inspections.

*sigh*

Still, on the positive side, the kitchen’s done (for the most part). On another negative side, there’s something weird going on with our fridge. It appears to be keeping things cool, but it’s reading out that it’s at 68 degrees. Which is obviously not refrigerator-like temperatures.

*sigh*

So, today’s been weirdly good and bad. On the positive side, it’s been ten years as of today since Ei-Nyung and I started seeing each other! And I’ll leave it at that. With more pictures of the kitchen.

Moving Back Into the Kitchen

Spent a couple hours tonight moving stuff back into the kitchen. There’s a couple minor issues – the first was that the refrigerator kept beeping, and wasn’t actually cooling down. This was curious, but after a couple minutes of exploration and a little disassembly, I found the door sensor hadn’t been reconnected when the delivery people reassembled the doors. Oops. Easy fix, and we’re on our way.

The second problem is that the plumbing below the sink is leaking. Nothing that can’t be relatively easily fixed, but sort of a bummer nonetheless. A quick trip to Ace in the morning should take care of that no sweat. Everything else is FUCKING SPECTACULAR.

The tile looks awesome, the sink is HUGE, there’s tons of closet space, the lighting is bright and cheery, the new fridge is huge, and there’s space for everything we need (and probably then some). Oh – the other weird detail is that the stove isn’t level. It tilts slightly forward. I’m sure it’s not a big deal, and Monday those guys can level it out, but it is a touch odd.

We ended up sticking an old Altec Lansing set of speakers & a subwoofer into the cabinet above the microwave – so if you want to listen to music, you can hook up an iPod and have at it. Sometime over the weekend I think I’m going to drill a hole into the adjacent cabinet and run a wire with a connection, because the only real problem is that it’s all mounted kinda high. If the iPod, at least, could be mounted lower, it’d be much more accessible. It actually sounds decent even with the cabinet doors closed, which makes for a really eerie effect.

Yeah, I know – pictures – but I didn’t want to post the end result without a really good shot of the kitchen in bright light, and that means it won’t happen ’till tomorrow.

There’s still areas that need to be painted, so it’s not “finished” finished – we need to do a really good job masking up – there’s a lot of stuff to screw up if we do a bad job of that. Oh – one of the last details that needs to be hooked up are the living room lights and the pendant lights above the bar division between the living and dining rooms. Not that big a deal – probably ten minutes of work, but it hasn’t happened yet.

So, Jim & Co. are coming back out Monday for the last of the inspections and to finish up the last bits, then we’re off to the races! Good times.

Sandman + Politics = ?

I don’t actually think it’s proper to cast Hillary as a demon, but this is a pretty funny use of a quote from Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” series, and it does to some degree sum up how I feel about Obama, and why I like him more than any of the other people running this cycle.

Faucet

So… that’s our new kitchen faucet. I think it’s the most badass faucet I’ve ever seen. Ridiculous? Oh, hell yes.

The kitchen’s coming along quite nicely. It’s actually so far along that it’s doubly frustrating that we can’t just move all the appliances in and start using it. But, there are things still to be done.

We’re picking up the tile for the backsplash tomorrow, then Monday, they’re supposedly gonna start tiling the backsplash, moving in the rest of the appliances, and finishing up the granite – the sink still needs a pretty serious cutout. Then, they sand the drywall (I have NO IDEA why this step comes so late in the process). Supposedly, they’re gonna be done by Wednesday, which is just astonishing to me.

The stuff that’s in is gorgeous. The cabinets look great. We’d picked out four samples of granite from Granite Expo, went to a couple other places, and saw that most places have exactly the same types of things. We fell in love with a honed black granite (matte finish), but the only way to get it was through a specialty store, and the cost difference was almost $3K, so we passed. Ended up going with a style of granite that we *didn’t* have a sample for – a little risky, ’cause we hadn’t seen it in the kitchen light – “Black Pearl,” I think it’s called – and it’s *awesome*.

We’re getting a mix of green clear glass subway tiles for the backsplash, which we’re picking up tomorrow morning. Ended up getting a pretty good deal for the tiles. Then we need hardware from IKEA for the cabinet handles, and we’re good to go. This feels insane – like there’s no way it could actually be happening. We’d been talking about redoing the kitchen for years, but I thought it would be still longer until we actually did it.

If things actually do finish up reasonably, and nothing untoward happens in the next few days, I hope I’ll be able to write a really glowing review of this guy – ’till then, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.