in return.

thanks for voting. as a thank you: fresh content.

the 22nd was the christopher's birthday. i took him out for some truly excellent and unusual food. Fatty Crab did us right.



jalan alor chicken wings, fatty duck and pickled watermelon/pork belly salad. birthdays are for living. also, if you go, the waiter isn't upselling you when he recommends the reisling. it really is that good, and i don't even like reisling.

next, i promise: continuing kitchen saga.

pick me.

you lucky things.

you get to help pick my new headshot.

vote in the comments. and only say nice things.

broccoli.

it's so much better in a bowl of pasta.

i thought i'd start putting up photos of the kitchen piecemeal. it's for real almost done, now, in january, three months from when we started. the last bit to get finished was the countertop in the little island; the installers cut it badly and we asked them to reinstall, which meant ordering a new piece and re-cutting, and the piece itself took weeks to arrive, general incompetence, etc. it's finally here and cut and in place and looks good, although sadly it is not actually as pretty a piece of butcher block as the old piece was. figures. anyway, chris started prepping the surface for polyurethaning, and noticed there was a scratch on it. not a surface scratch, but a defect in the wood. he wanted to try to sand it out.

he sanded it, all right. and the scratchy place did look better after he was done. however, he had sanded a dent into the countertop.

oh, irony. you are a cruel mistress.

i freaked, and then woke up the next morning and realized it wasn't so bad. but i can't wait for all of this to be done.

old crappy non-kitchen:




that's it, man. it was just a sink, an 18-inch oven and a fridge with some milkcrates painted silver. next on oil of brulee: we tear it down.

overwhelming.

how does the laundry pile get so freaking big?

we should each own two pairs of jeans, some underpants and a couple of sweatshirts. then this wouldn't happen.

syne.

new year's eve was lovely. at lincoln center, they had flutes of champagne for us in the lobby. we dressed to the nines (and tried to photograph ourselves, which didn't work too well), and the show was lovely. chris sent a note backstage to a friend of his who was in the show, and she called us later, as we were in our pajamas eating popcorn and watching the times square madness on television (not as many people kissing and proposing this year, sadly). i have to say, standing up in times square for hours in the cold sounds like a perfectly terrible thing to endure. i'm always surprised the people on TV are smiling.