Eldridge Cleaver

Nowhere in the Wikipedia entry for Eldridge Cleaver does it say that he liked a Denver omelet with two English muffins, well done.

That's the kind of essential information readers of mrsguy come to expect ;)

Shipwreck

This weekend was the auction of family items that we consigned to a local auction house.

Unfortunately, nobody is paying much more than the minimum for anything on sale. Mom and her caregiver and I went over there to see it in action, which was fun. And if you're inclined to find it depressing to watch your precious family items being sold for a pittance, it is. But the backstory on this one was lengthy.

We contacted an estate appraiser to come look at the household contents. He said he thought that we should do an auction instead. We had an appraisal of the Asian art from the 1990s that valued just that portion at $82,000.

My regular auction house came to visit and said that the take was going to be more like $10,000. I called middleguy sis and she didn't want to sell it if it wasn't going to sell for that much because she loves the Asian art.

The auction house only wanted the bother of the rest of our items if we included the Asian art.

This left me in a position of having many many many items, including large pieces of furniture, to move out of the house. This, after having spent weeks moving and making decisions on stuff in the house during the hottest summer on record. Oh yeah. Plus menopause and dealing with my sweet mama who needed me. Work? That, too.

Middleguysis asked the nephews if they wanted our jade panels (a prized family item), and they did. This didn't really help, but added another task (meeting them at the house to move the panels).

I offered the auction house some of the jade items, including one that Mom had given me, in order to entice them to take anything. I held back things that we really really like. They were satisfied, and came and took the whole thing -- some fancy furniture, some Asian artwork, some hideous porcelain items. And now, on the weekend of the auction, those things are selling for just about nothing. But almost *nothing* is selling for more than the opening bid. Not sure what it is -- the heat wave, the Chinese economy...I am not taking it personally. And what were we going to do? Keep it all as a museum to our youth?

On the upside, I checked my phone just in time to see in real time that the bizarre shipwreck painting that I'm obsessed with had no bids. I am now the owner of a large 19th Century of a shipwreck. For $100 bucks. mrguy thinks it's cool. Can't wait to pick it up.

First, my last trip to the house. With the mammoo, her caregiver and mrguy.

Kitchen Remodel 2015

Now that things have settled down for a week, I can spend a teensy bit of time in the kitchen. My inspiration is Sunday Suppers at Lucques, which I found in a box on the street outside the mamoo's new place. It was clearly someone's go-to for several years, because it's bookmarked, oily, and filled with weird ephemera. 

The recipes are really "of their time" (kind of like the Silver Palate Cookbook) but somehow timeless as well. Today, I'm making a composed salad with Green Goddess dressing, which turned out amazing.

I found myself reading the cookbook on the way to find tile for our new kitchen. We have the cabinets picked out (kinda like our old Ikea kitchen but custom), the floor (green slate, which reminds us of vacations on the coast) and we had to find tile for the backsplash. We looked other places but found our way to Gate 5 Rd. as we did before. 

 
This time we're buying cheaper tile but found something in stock that we like. Primarily, mrguy likes it. If he's happy, I'm happy. We each have our thing: I get my stove with no vent overhead, and he gets a crazily bourgeois refrigerator.

People wonder why we're remodeling. The kitchen is pretty. But there are drawers that fall off their rails when I use them, and a piece of the fancy stove falls on the ground every time I'm near it. The previous owners didn't bother to bolt the dishwasher to the floor, so until we did it would fall forward every time you opened it. The outlet under the sink, which would be illegal anyway, is just duct-taped to the wall. Then there's this:

When the cats are being pursued by other cats, they throw open the cupboard and take refuge behind the pots. It cracks me up but it isn't sanitary. In the new kitchen, no cats in cabinets.

This Is Not A Bill

The littlest cat is an artist, creating abstract works in the medium we know as "paper that is left on the dining room table". She prefers light card, and daily produces work that is, individually, about 2cm square.

This morning, working in plain paper, she created new works of greater size and complexity than usual. I have titled this one This Is Not A Bill.

It was a site-specific work, but I moved it to the kitchen for documentation purposes.

Crazy Dreams

Last night I dreamed that a house on my mom's block back home was a fish store. I went there to try to get food for my pet seahorse.

Hijinks ensued. 

There was taxidermy (not of a seahorse, but of a giant deer) and I made a lot of money from that endeavor.