Author: Laura Conrad

I just rearranged the appliances on the counters.

One problem with my kitchen is that there’s a counter that goes
around a corner, leaving a black hole both in the cabinets and on
the countertop that’s a lot less useful than you’d like it to
be.

I thought that would be a good place for the microwave oven,
but there’s no way to work without taking up the space that the
oven door would need to open there, so instead I have the microwave on
the counter between the fire escape door and the dining room
window. This makes that counter, which you need to use for
loading and unloading the refrigerator, a lot smaller than you’d
like.

I’m not currently using the toaster as often as I have in the
past, both because of my greens for
breakfast discovery, and because a good bakery opened up down
the street, so I sometimes go buy croissants when I would have
formerly made toast.

So my current idea is that the dead area in the corner is used
for small appliances that are used often but not daily, and is
flanked by the knife rack which is still a bit improvised but
doesn’t fall apart too often as long as you don’t try to use the
giant chef’s knife, which I only use for cutting pizza. It’s a
franken-knife rack — I combined the magnetic strip I never
managed to affix to anything with the rack of vertical slots which
I snarfed from Bonnie’s kitchen. On the
other side, the smaller appliances are held in place by the slow
cooker/rice cooker/pressure cooker, which is used several times a
week.

Right now the toaster, the stick blender, and the hand mixer
live there. I’ve been sharpening the knives on the arkansas
stone, so the knife sharpener went into the appliance cabinet,
along with the waffle iron which I haven’t used very often since I
bought it.

This makes the appliance cabinet more crowded than it should
be. The obvious thing to do about that is to discard or donate
the bread machine, which has seen better days, but I’ve been
trying to decide whether

Obviously one of the advantages to doing something like this is
that you move everything out and clean under it. (I cheated and
didn’t do the microwave, yet.) So some spiders crawled out and
were very annoyed at me, but I assured them I wasn’t going to be
doing this every week. I pointed out that there were some
housekeepers who do something like it every day, and they wouldn’t
want to live there at all.

This xkcd cartoon is why I
never worry about inviting people to my house. If they don’t
invite me, I assume it’s because theirs is even worse. If they
do, they apologise for the glass of water they left out, and I figure
they need to see the real world.

I don’t know anyone who’s been killed by it yet.

One of the band memebers arrived yesterday saying that his SSI
payment wasn’t going to come. This isn’t what I get
from google, but certainly even if he’s wrong, if lots of
people believe that, they’re probably pretty upset.

The other consequence I’ve heard of was in this
post by Phil Greenspun. The short version is that because
the office he needed something from was only doing that ID, and
not all the other stuff they usually do, he got his ID much faster
than he normally would have.

I guess this probably shows that I live a pretty sheltered
life, at least on Tuesdays. And of course my not knowing about
any serious short-term consequence doesn’t mean that there aren’t
some, and certainly doesn’t mean there won’t be serious long-term
consequences.

And it also doesn’t mean that I agree with a system that allows
one man to single-handedly shut down the government. (I know the
House Republicans who elected John Boehner as speaker, and could
presumably elect someone else if they didn’t like what he’s doing,
share the blame, but really it wouldn’t be happening if he hadn’t
decided he wanted it, and it will stop as soon as he decides to
stop it.)

I went to the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts on Saturday.

I was going to write a deep essay, but it would take too much
time, so here are some random observations:

• The flow of the European painting galleries is currently
  very confusing. You walk out of the 14th century chapel into
  19th century French art. There used to be a fairly logical
  progression from Medieval to almost-twentieth-century art, but
  if there’s any logic to it now, I couldn’t find it.
• There was a similar problem downstairs in the Art of the
  Americas gallery — we were in the American Revolution, and then
  all of a sudden we were in Peru, and then we were in early
  nineteenth-century Boston. If there were rooms about other
  places in South America, I never found them.
• I did manage to find the Turner Slave
  Ship. I don’t think I’ve ever been in the presence of any
  work of art that’s so immediately affecting. I have seen the
  Mona Lisa and the Pieta, but this is
  just hanging there on the wall and you can walk right up to it.
  It is listed in the brochure as one of the 12 greatest hits, but
  otherwise it’s treated just like any other picture.
• The Rembrandt etchings were interesting, but to really see
  them, you’d need better light and a magnifying glass.
• The other current exhibition I enjoyed was the Loïs
  Mailou Jones one. My favorite of her works was a painting
  called My Mother’s Hats — her mother was a
  successful milliner.
• The most memorable new-to-me work I saw was a Japanese print
  of a daemon who committed suicide after flunking the civil
  service exam. It’s in red.
• You shouldn’t even try to see everything in one afternoon —
  we should have left and hung out in the pub across the street
  about an hour before we did.

My sister, who bought the tickets, got an email request to fill
out a particularly annoying survey about her experience. For
instance, they asked what the purpose of the visit was, and “To
see the art” wasn’t one of the choices:

Which of the following statements best describes your reason for 
visiting the MFA? *This question is required. 

* I went to see a specific exhibit and/or learn about a specific 
  topic

* I went to have a new experience and just follow whatever sparked
  my curiosity and interest

* I came to spend time with friends and/or family and help them have
  a meaningful experience at the MFA

* I went to attend a specific program, lecture, course, concert,
  class, and/or film

* I like to seek out interesting things to do and the MFA is
  considered an important institution in Boston

* I went to relax in a peaceful setting and contemplate the art 
  and/or myself