Rest in peace, Julia Child

Bloomberg (and others): Julia Child, TV’s Gourmet ‘French Chef’ of ’60s, Dies. Thanks, Julia, for teaching us all that it was OK to have fun while cooking insanely complex and luxurious dishes—and to drink wine while doing it.

Update: Beautiful reaction from Julie Powell: “… she created feisty, buttery, adventurous cooks, always diving in to the next possible disaster, because goddammit, if Julia did it, so could we.”

A cappella charity

Boston Globe: With one voice, they sing for a cause: A cappella groups seek aid for school music programs. Six local groups are using their a cappella vocal powers for good, raising money to support Boston-area school music programs.

The story also provides a really good example of the side effects of unfunded mandates like No Child Left Behind. With no curricular time or money remaining for music lessons, kids never get to experience high school band or orchestra programs. Even choruses, which require little more than sheet music and a rehearsal piano, get left in the dust.

I learned to sing in a church choir, rather than a high school chorus. In fact, it wasn’t until almost my senior year that I admitted to anyone at school that I sang. But it would be a shame to see music totally disappear from the curriculum, especially when, properly taught, it can reinforce math and physics instruction.

Goofus rides again: one-man kitchen cabinet removal

who knows what evil lurks behind the kitchen cabinets?

There was one last piece of demolition to do before the fridge could fit in the kitchen. For some reason, the cabinet over the refrigerator cupboard was about two inches closer to the floor than needed for the fridge to fit. Solution? Rip that sucker down!

This turns out to be a stupid demolition to do by yourself. Most wooden kitchen wall cabinets are attached or otherwise connected to the wall by the following means:

  1. screws
  2. molding
  3. paint

And that’s about it. So if you break the paint seal with a putty knife, pry the top molding loose, and then start removing screws, there’s a very good chance the thing is going to drop on your fool head. Or foot. Or make a big hole in the kitchen floor.

Fortunately for me, our cabinet was held in as well by d. friction. So when I removed the last screw, it still stayed wedged in place, even when I foolishly tugged on the front of the cabinet. I ended up bracing the front of the cabinet with one arm and using the prybar to lever the cabinet away from the back wall. It obligingly rotated itself around an axis formed by the topmost front contact points and the wall cavity, where I could get both hands under it and gently tug it free.

And what a wonderland of joy lay revealed! Unpainted walls, and big holes in the plaster ceiling where someone had done some quick work on the upstairs plumbing. Guess I need to learn to patch fist-sized holes (and bigger!) in plaster ceilings now. But hey, our fridge is going to fit! If it ever gets here (ETA: 12:45 to 2:45 PM today.)

Special bonus! By popular request following the original story, before, during and after pictures from the doorjamb removal.

To fish or not bluefish

New York Times: With a Bit of Love, the Blues are Just Fine. Discusses the fine art of handling and cooking bluefish, which are in abundance on the east coast in summer but which tend to, erm, get really stanky unless handled properly and cooked quickly.

Reading the level of precautions needed to get good bluefish (for instance, plunge fish into icy brine immediately upon capture), I start to wonder about other fish. For instance, when we were living in Cambridge I bought a bag of mussels at Whole Foods and cooked them in gueze (Belgian lambic, which doesn’t mean fruit flavored, just naturally fermented). Unlike the delicately-flavored wonders that I’ve had in so many restaurants, these were unpalatable. After three years I don’t remember the details, but it was definitely a taste problem, not a texture problem (which I would have written off as overcooking). It makes me wonder how one actually finds a good fish market other than by trial and error. Any Boston area readers have recommendations?

(Incidentally, this article showed up in my aggregator three days in a row. I’m grateful that the Dining and Wine RSS feed is back, but less happy if it keeps re-posting old content as new.)

Good old East Coast summer

Sitting in the Northeast, I probably shouldn’t complain about the 83° weather; after all, it’s 105 in Vegas. But right now it feels like I’ve been walking through soup for the last few hours. I note with grim irony that Georgia is actually cooler than Boston right now, though I’m sure that being in the middle of an approaching hurricane has something to do with it.

Productive afternoon anyway: unpacked my CDs, got bookshelves set up, found our china. Our refrigerator comes tomorrow and we’ll be paying a plumber approximately an arm and a leg to run new pipes in the utility room for our washing machine on Monday (we have a sink, but the house never had a washing machine so we have to have the hookups created from scratch).

One of these days I’ll have to take a vacation that doesn’t involve our move.

Photopeer gets noticed

Looks like Jonathan Greene at atamspheric | endeavors has also found PhotoPeer. He calls out one factor that I found with the app as well: it’s hard to evaluate a peer-to-peer application unless there are a lot of people already using it. And because PhotoPeer is an “invitation only” peer to peer network with no central bindery, it’s not possible to discover other users—unless of course they blog about it.

NY Times reactivates Dining and Wine feed

A few weeks ago I wrote an impassioned e-mail to the feedback contact for the Dining and Wine section of the New York Times online, requesting they reactivate the RSS feed for the section that had gone dormant when they started providing their own feeds. Yesterday I noticed the feed was active again, and today I found it listed as “new” on their main RSS page.

Am I responsible for getting the feed reactivated? I doubt it. But it gave me a good feeling to know that I let them know how much I appreciated the feed.

Incidentally, it looks like the Times has also added an RSS feed for the Olympics.

Highlights for Home Improvement Geeks

On today’s Highlights® for Home Improvement Geeks™, we have the story of Goofus and Gallant and the Undersized Doorway! Read along:

  • Gallant starts with detailed plans for his (and her) charming bungalow renovation.
  • Goofus buys not one, but two refrigerators that won’t fit through the $#!@#$ kitchen door!
  • Gallant strips an entire floor down to bare wood to lay it out the way he and she want it.
  • Goofus rips out a door jamb using a prybar and a brand-new reciprocating saw so that the smallest kitchen door opening goes from 27″ to 30.5″—hopefully enough for a new fridge.

In all seriousness, here’s how it went down. As I laid out in my last update, the plan was to remove a little trim from the doorway to widen the opening. The way this normally goes is: use a putty knife or razor blade to cut the paint away from the joint between the stop molding (the strips of wood that the door rests against when it’s closed) and then slip a prybar in to strip the stop molding out.

Had this been a normal house, that’s how it would have gone.

Instead, we have Überhaus. Built way beyond contemporary standards by a highly responsible builder in 1941. In this case, this means the stop molding wasn’t a strip tacked in place but was actually part of the doorjamb. What this meant was we had to rip out the whole doorjamb to gain any width.

To remove a door jamb, here’s what you do:

  1. First, remove the casing—the molding around the outside of the doorjamb. To do this, I used a rubber mallet to tap a putty knife into the joint between the molding and adjacent pieces of wood to break the paint seal, then used a prybar to pull the molding away. In some cases, I had to slip a chisel in to widen the gap enough to get the prybar in.
  2. In our case, the casing had two parts: some raised trim around the edges (what I like to think of as “crown molding for the doorway”) and three flat boards surrounding the actual door opening. I thus had to start with the raised trim, walk that all the way around (where I could—the door was butted against a wall, so I had to leave some trim until later), then remove the flat boards.
  3. Once I did that and caught my breath, I had to repeat the process on the other side of the doorway.
  4. Finally, I removed the jamb. Usually the instructions for this read “pry out the jamb and use a reciprocating saw to cut through any stubborn nails.” In my case, I wasn’t able to get leverage to get any of the three pieces of the jamb out, so I cheated. I made a cut about a foot from the top of the left upright piece with the reciprocating saw, pried out the bottom piece, removed the top piece, the top part of the jamb, then the right part of the jamb.

Easy as pie. It only took one whole day.

So what’s next? Well, in our immediate future, we have a 30.5″ hole through which we can fit a fridge. Once we find a reliable carpenter, we’ll have him make a mirror of the arch that leads into the same hallway. Beats having a narrow doorjamb where there’s no need for an actual door.

Incidentally, shout out to JM and A for recommending the Sawzall, which was our reciprocating saw of choice for this operation. Best home improvement tool I ever had. Maybe even better than the crowbar.

Rick Boucher gets feedback about the Induce Act

US Representative Rick Boucher (D – VA) is guest-hosting Larry Lessig’s blog this week and asked for feedback about the Induce Act. He got feedback, in spades. Reading the comment threads, it’s fascinating to trace the industry’s shifting the legal battlegrounds from “vicarious and contributory liability” (which can be defended under the precedents of the Sony case that ruled that VCRs should be allowed to timeshift network television) to “intent to induce infringement.”

Phone success, fridge failure

Item 1: We have broadband again. The Comcast setup was pretty straightforward, though the tech did wear out a drill battery trying to punch a hole in our wall to install the jack. (We have a house that’s framed with “seasoned wood,” apparently the 1941 equivalent of pressure treated lumber, and the installer said it was definitely on his top 10 lists of most difficult walls to drill through ever. It didn’t help that he decided to go through a stud.)

Item 2: We also have a phone. After Saturday’s adventures with the junction block, I enlisted the help of Charlie, a friendly neighbor who also happens to be an electrician. He showed me a thing or two about troubleshooting, to wit: (1) the wiring to the kitchen jack was shot, (2) I had not connected the outside wires to the right spot on the junction box. We did get one jack working, so I have as a project to re-wire the kitchen jack. It’s all a straight shot above the ceiling, so it will be relatively straightforward. I’m going to take the opportunity to install a little switchblock from Leviton to make the process a little more managable. (For a great discussion of different structured wiring setups, check out HouseInProgress.)

Item 3: We still don’t have a refrigerator. The second one that came proved to have case parts that extended beyond the width of our doorways and couldn’t be removed, contrary to what the salesman had told me when I went, tape in hand, to pick out a fridge that would fit. We “fired” that appliance store and are now proceeding with a new two-part plan. First, I’ll get my crowbar and remove some of the trim from the offending doorway so we get another inch or two of room. Second, I think we’ll try Sears. From what our next door neighbor told me, their installers seem likelier to attempt creative solutions to get appliances into rooms.

Quick status #2: Phone hell, and appliances

Saturday we both woke up sweating about the appliances. The doors throughout our house, a 1941 Cape Cod that we bought from the original owner’s son and that had been occupied by a family member since it was built, are narrow—the door into the living room from the front is about 31 inches, the widest door into the kitchen is 27 inches, and the door into the utility room where the washer and drier would go is only about 26. We dashed to Home Depot to enquire about installing a new door. Fortunately a very patient Irishman in the door and window department informed us that it should be much simpler—all they should have to do to move the fridge inside would be to take the doors off.

That was good news, because we had to quickly dash south to meet Lisa’s parents halfway and pick up our dogs. We got back from that errand at around 3, only to find that the visit from Verizon had failed to get our phone working. He muttered something ominous on the call about some wiring being missing.

A trip back out to the box confirmed what he said. When I had checked the network interface the first time, I failed to note the absence of any wiring leading out of the NIB into the house. Yep, there was absolutely nothing connecting the network interface box to the house. I moped for a while, then went inside and “walked the wire” from where the connection in the kitchen dropped into the garage, through the utility room, and into the storage room where an, erm, “antique” phone block was connected to the ceiling. Next to it, a strain relief tube had been passed through next to the window.

Inspiration struck, and I ran to the Home Depot for some Cat-3 outdoor grade wire. I connected it to the NIB, ran it along the house into the strain relief tube, and tried to figure out how to connect it to the old phone block.

And there the story ends for now, because even after trying a couple of variations I can’t get the darned dial tone to go. Oh well. This is probably a good opportunity to look at structured wiring options, and quickly. Our cell phones don’t work so well up on the hill.

Quick status #1: Closing and dinner

Day three in the new house, and I’m down at the Starbucks in Arlington getting some coffee ground and downloading all my email. We still don’t have phone or cable at the house; more on that in a second.

The closing on Friday went very smoothly and we celebrated with lunch at Legal Seafoods. The rest of the afternoon was spent assembling our bed, getting most of the bedroom unpacked, and taking a whirlwind trip to Home Depot and Best Buy. We ended up purchasing a washer and drier and a refrigerator. And I guess what they say about “buy in haste” is true, at least regarding the fridge. But at the time we didn’t have a chance to secondguess ourselves; we had to dash back to Arlington to change and then downtown to the North End and Paolo Diecidue’s new place, Via Valverde (no web presence yet). I’ll write more about that trip later.

Getting ready again

One more journey, this one the shortest but the most important. Lisa and I are driving from her folks in NJ up to Boston today. We’ll spend tonight with our friends and close on our house tomorrow.

I expect that I won’t do a lot of blogging after this afternoon, because we won’t have high speed until Monday and my modem has been highly undependable on this trip. Look for more updates from me sometime early next week.

Arrived

I made it to Lakewood, New Jersey about 3:15 this afternoon. The rest of the drive was uneventful, excluding all 359 miles of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which need a little work.

I have napped, had my face and hands licked by our excited dogs, and am drinking a Harpoon while I keep my eyes on various cooking things that are starting to smell good.

I talked before about some of the road toys that got me through the trip, but clearly the most important one was my Passat, which just came 3000 miles in four days and didn’t really break a sweat.

Now, dinner. Something not involving hamburgers, French fries, coffee, or carbonation added to soda syrup. (Carbonation in beer, on the other hand, is definitely in order.)