Bon appetit!

{The renovated kitchen in Julia Child's former Cambridge MA home. Photos from Premier Properties of Boston}

{Julia's kitchen back in the day, now on display at the Smithsonian. Julia had the counters custom designed at a height comfortable for a 6'2" woman to cook at. On the right is one of two pegboards designed by her husband to hang all her pots, pans and molds. Photo from the Smithsonian via current.org}

The late, great Julia Child donated her famous Cambridge kitchen to the Smithsonian, so it stands to reason that the house it came out of would need a slight remodel. Now that the house is for sale, the world can peek into the rooms that never made it on camera in the 40+ years that she lived in and filmed her Boston-based public television cooking show.

The original kitchen has a homey look that contributed to the success of her show, which focused on the approachable aspects of gourmet cooking. But I think she would have appreciated the bright airiness of the new kitchen, especially as it features Miele, Sub-Zero and Kuppersbusch Okotherm appliances, as well as a big marble-topped island perfect for rolling out pastry dough. As it should, for $4.35 million, no?

Time for Vacation

Robin at A Little Bird Told Me turned me on to this nifty Wordle widget that takes the most-used words from your blog postings and amalgamates them into this cool visual word cloud. Given that "time" "work" and "paper" show up so much in mine, I think its a sure sign that I need a vacation.

Whose bright idea was this anyway?

{Light bulbs, originally uploaded by Alastair Bird.}

I am not a fan of the eco-correct, mercury-filled, last-forever compact florescent light bulbs (CFLs). I have spent way too much time under their flickering beam in corporate America to want to live with them at home as well. Plus I took all that time and effort finding just the right paint colors for my walls; if I wanted puce walls I would have painted puce walls.

So I buck the trend and stocked up on some soon-to-be-outlawed 4-packs of the Reveal incandescent light bulbs at the Home Desperate tonight after work. In exchange for their low prices I endured the wrath of some CFL eco-freak who acted like I was beheading a kitten. I told her I was allergic to CFLs but I don't think she believed me.

For the record I do lead a pretty green life otherwise - recycle, reuse, walk to work, etc. But do I have to bathe my home in icky green light to be green?

These ain't no kindergarten scissors

{Impenetrable Castle (detail), 2005, by Peter Callesen}

I am so envious of artists who work in a medium like this, their skill, their patience. It's not like an oil painting, where if you make a mistake you can paint over it, or a dress, where you can rip out the seam. One slip of the knife and kaput! hours of work, ruined.

Peter Callesen, the Danish artist behind these creations, magically turns two-dimensional paper into three-dimensional images. He calls it "obvious magic, because the process is obvious and the figures still stick to their origin, without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is also an aspect of something tragic in most of the cuts."

{Cut To The Bone, 2007}

"Some of the small paper cuts relate to a universe of fairy tales and romanticism, as for instance "Impenetrable Castle" inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", in which a tin soldier falls in love with a paper ballerina, living in a paper castle. Other paper cuts are small dramas in which small figures are lost within and threatened by the huge powerful nature. Others again are turning the inside out, or letting the front and the back of the paper meet."

{Erected Ruin, 2007}

You put your left foot in...

I had a really stressful and busy week at work last week (huge project, plus juggling multiple little projects, Kelly the fab assistant out with lyme disease, insane condo board meeting, and no time to post or to catch up on reading all your fabulous posts), and this video cheered me a little. Except for the part about how I can't dance like that.