Author: doug

Lis and I went for a walk around the neighborhood this evening.  It was a much more pleasant and sedate walk than we’ve been accustomed to in Southboro, not involving any stretches along busy roads like Rte. 85.  Still, I saw nothing photo-worthy.  But upon our return I saw the garage.  Someday, once boxes are cleared and organization is accomplished, I will park inside.

Tonight I cooked the first full meal in our new kitchen.  We’ve had good meals at the house already, but they’ve been of the quick, low effort variety, or from the grill.  I actually used all 4 burners.  Tonight’s selection is seared Coho salmon fillets with a lemon-lime glaze, served with couscous and a salad.

The good news is that the stove, while old, is in good working condition and puts out a good amount of heat with decent control.  I’m sure we will replace it soon enough, but for now it will serve just fine.

“Enough with the freakin’ phone already”.  OK, OK.  It’s just I built this little shelf for the phone in the kitchen today, running a new phone jack for it and everything.  This regains us a tiny little bit of much-needed kitchen counter space, and occupies an otherwise dead space next to the fridge.

We went to a wedding reception for our friends Jeff & Andrea today.  They got married a while back, with a big party later.  Today was “later.”

This photo is not my best of the evening, nor perhaps the most interesting, but it does capture the feel of Adolphus Busch Hall at Harvard, the venue for the evening’s festivities.

“Doug, why are you taking a picture of the phone?  Isn’t that the same phone you’ve had for years?”  Well, it is and it isn’t.  I found an additional handset for our phone system (which already has 2 cordless handsets) so we can have one on each floor.

Notice that this one says “handset 3.” The best part: $30.

A funny thing happens when you move a big CRT TV like ours: it goes out of alignment.  The TV is facing a different direction with respect to the earth’s magnetic field, and plus I suspect getting jostled around on the truck and stairs didn’t do it any favors.  In this picture, you can see that the text is crooked — it’s not the photo, it’s the actual picture on the TV itself.

I dug up my instructions and notes on this TV’s service mode and corrected this issue tonight.

We went over to Michael & Sabrina’s tonight for the Lost season finale.  We brought cookie dough from the cookies-in-a-jar mix that Sabrina had given us as a housewaming present.

We lost power tonight, just as I was starting dinner.  I plugged in the rotisserie motor, turned it on, and pow, it stopped.  I figured I had blown a circuit breaker, but no, a truck had hit a light pole.  Fortunately, I was able to simulate a rotisserie by turning the chicken 1/4 turn every 5 minutes or so.  And so Lis and I had dinner by candlelight.

Lis bought fresh fava beans at Russo’s.  We were supposed to have them later in the week, but I was so excited at the prospect that we had to have them tonight.  Plus they go really well with beef.

Did you know that fava beans are the only old-world (European-native) bean?  The rest came from Asia (soy), Africa (black-eyed peas) or the Americas (most of the others).

A number of the systems in our new house are in good condition and functional, but dated.  The kitchen is, of course, the prime example, but today’s entry concerns the alarm system.  As near as I can tell, it was put in 24 years ago (prior to the previous owners), and was state of the art for the time. Here I’m showing the back of one of the door/window units.

But now, only the original, expensive service company is willing to monitor it, so we are replacing it.  We’ll gain a few features — pet-friendly motion sensors, water detector in the basement, etc — as well as more modern monitoring features.