In which we don our aprons and putter about the house.
My plan for today’s post was to share pictures of our Christmas decorations. But then we started cleaning Pete’s room, and it turned into this:
Bins were labels and reorganized, hidden deposits of candy wrappers were discovered, tears were shed. It took hours and hours and hours. If his room’s ever in that shape again, we’re just going to clear it out with a Dumpster.
Right now I’m making a spinach casserole for Thursday, and while I was chopping onions I remembered that I haven’t yet posted today. I was going to make a video of how I chop onions, but then I thought there was probably already at least one good video on YouTube. So while my onions sautéed, I went to YouTube and found one million onion-chopping videos. I figured Gordon Ramsey would be better at it than I am, so I clicked on his video. And indeed: He is a superior onion-chopper.
Behold:
Gordon Ramsey is also better at weird kitchen insults than I am. I’m OK with that. Next time I have to chop an onion, I’ll try the Gordon Ramsey method.
The light fixture in our kitchen is original to the house. It’s a small fluorescent circle, and it doesn’t really provide enough light to illuminate the workspace. It’s also pretty boring. I’d like to replace with with something that both provides more light and adds some pizzazz. Our kitchen is very small, though, and we have 8-foot ceilings. So I need to find something that’s flush-mounted or close to it, and there aren’t a whole lot of flush-mounted lights that are also snazzy.
Also, cool light fixtures cost a lot of dollars.
Here’s a selection of light fixtures that caught my eye this evening. Most of them won’t work, but one of them might if I can convince myself to spend the money on it.
The Anemone flush-mount wall fixture would definitely be a statement piece in our kitchen, but with its 23-inch diameter I’m afraid the statement might be “Look how small our kitchen is! The light fixture takes up most of the ceiling!” And also it’s $700.
Zanadoo is a spiky wonderment. The pros: I could use it to hold marshmallows, and I love it. The cons: Not only is it even bigger than the Anemone, it’s $1,920.
It’s stunning! It’s bright! It’s ginormous! It’s $6,000.
I don’t love the shape, but it would definitely light things up. It’s $1,592, though, so it doesn’t really matter whether or not I love it because we’re definitely not buying it.
An artist in Poland makes these using test tubes. You can fill them with water or flowers or whatever you’d like (so long as it’ll fit in a test tube.) At $266, it’s the least expensive fixture on this list, but it’s too long for our 8-foot ceilings. I do love the idea, though.
This one is unique, it’s neither too wide nor too long, and it’s more affordable than the most of the others I like. It’s still nearly $500, though, and that’s a lot of money to spend on a light fixture.
The most likely scenario? We’ll keep the 1956 fixture and attach some battery-powered lights to the undersides of the cabinets. (Which I’d also like to replace, but that’s a post for another NaBloPoMo post.)