To The Surbiton Manor Born

      Obviously, it needed to be done. Note the ancient light fixture and dingy grey walls. Winter has set in, and attention here at Surbiton Manor moved indoors with us.  With a few extra days off over the holidays, I thought it would be fun to paint the lower-level bathroom. Not exactly "fun" in the traditional sense, but memory of what it feels like to "have painted" and a frustration with the dingy grey that the Hated Previous Owners (HPOs) coated the entire interior of the house in made it sound like it would eventually be fun. While that all turned out to be true, the actual process of paintING is horrible. When you are on coat 5 of white paint on a once grey door, regret sets in. Though, as the Butthole Surfers remind us on their classic album Locust Abortion Technician , " The funny thing about regret is that it's always better to regret something you have done than something you haven't done. " My usual  Before After Half a Gallon of Paint

  A stainless steel specialized pan for popping corn is one of the best investments we've made recently.  We had got in the habit of purchasing bags of pre-popped corn. First of all, plastic bag bad. Secondly, there was the cost. $4 a sack, typically.  This was nuts. The pan cost $35. The popcorn for the pan (1/2 cup & 3 tbsp. of olive oil a batch) costs pennies in comparison. We can get the popcorn in a cardboard carton.  All in all, this is a great thing. A tasty snack, cheaper & better for you.  When I mentioned this to my dad, he said that his father & mother-in-law used to make their popcorn this way, just about every night "even after microwave popcorn came out." "Oh dear," I thought.  "So, Dad," I queried, "have you heard of ' popcorn lung ?" bronchiolitis obliterans - so called because it was discovered in factory workers in microwave popcorn packaging factories where the chemical diacetyl was floating around. Apparent

  Tape measure indicating a whopping 18" of snow. Not a drift. The media frequently exaggerates oncoming weather, no doubt to drive "clicks." But yesterday was an exception. If anything, the weather forecasts that K. and I watched minimized the storm. Long story short, from about 1:00 in the afternoon Friday until (it sounds like) 3:00 in the morning today, we received 18" of snow here at Steepmeadow. We watched the snow pile up all afternoon. After a bit of supper and guitar practice, we cleared the driveway for the first time, trying to keep it manageable. By the time we'd reached the bottom with shovel and sturdy electric snowblower, the top was already 2" deep again. We would look up from re-running the Dr. Who Christmas Special Voyage of the Damned  to see it swirling down. The firepit looked (and still looks) like a crazed blancmange, intent on winning Wimbledon for the Scots.  Blancmange We awoke to a marshmallow world. I abandoned plans for an arm w

  Our Bourgeois Xmas Tree It's a little weird to be a radical atheist and still celebrate Xmas, I'll grant. But family traditions are a lot of fun. In this case bringing a pretty tree into the house and adding a bunch of kitschy cornball ornaments to it and exchanging gifts with family & friends.  For years we had a plastic monstrosity that stood about 7' tall, had been inherited after more than a decade of use by Kiki's parents, and used by us for another 7 years. At last the "pre-lit" aspect of it completely died last year. We considered what to do.  What is the least environmentally horrible way to stick this bizarre fetish in your living room?  So we did some research. What we settled on was the Bourgeois Tree Experience offered by this nearby Xmas tree farm, Kruger's Christmas Trees. They have a nice statement on sustainability :  As local farmers we have developed a close connection with our land.  As global citizens we remain conscious of the e