Last night we had a watershed moment in our kitchen renovation. First, On the sink side of the kitchen, all the upper cabinets are up, levelled, and housing dishes.
Second, and more importantly, we have an oven, for the first time since we moved into the house. Granted its a small oven, but it’s an oven nonetheless. That’s our fancy OTR convection oven/microwave oven/ vent hood you see nestled so prettily with very large cupboards on either side.
Next, the floor needs to be finished. We can’t get the tall pantry in on the sink side. until it is. Or install the fridge. Or indeed have a sink.
Isn’t it amazing how motivating the prospect of fresh-baked pie can be?
So many of the websites I’ve been frequenting for years have either slowed down to a crawl, or actually closed up shop. Many of them claim that the immediate hit of satistfaction they get from Twitter has rendered the long post writing form of traditional ‘blogging’ obsolete for them.
Others have said that their blogs had been created as soapboxes (this site was not created as a soapbox at all, but instead as a safety valve for creativity. It’s also not a blog.) from which to pontificate on politics, web standards, design, whatever, and that they no longer needed to pontificate. The Democrats have both houses and the presidency, web standards are the status quo, good design is alive and well in the new medium (though not on Twitter, interestingly) and whatever else people would have to complain about can be complained about on Twitter.
A lot of them have said that life has simply become too busy to blog. So many of them are freelancers now, or have recently had children, or are involved in new projects, and besides Twitter is so much easier.
I think that’s an interesting spin. In fact, I suspect none of them can be bothered any more cos Twitter is just so damned easy. Why bother building an inverted pyramid structure to organize your thoughts into paragraphs when you can slam out 140 characters of context-free pith in 20 seconds?
I’ve seen a few good tweets. One guy I know writes all his tweets in Haiku. It takes time and energy, and he uses the 140 character limitation to force his creativitiy into tight spaces. It’s awesome. But he also writes reams of long-form stuff. He writes news articles, and lengthy blog posts on the subjects that are close to his heart. He writes about music, and photography, and living in Toronto, and above all, he recognizes that all media are really there for one reason: to tell a story.
You see, I believe the whole universe is filled with stories, whizzing through the cosmos at the speed of thought, tiny undetectable particles of story desperately looking for a way to be told. Good writers represent big targets for these stories. They write a lot, which makes their story collectors bigger. But when they stop writing, those story collectors atrophy and shrink.
I think that’s what has really been lost, when I see all these websites I used to love reading not posting any more, or exclaiming in broad voices that ‘blogging is dead’ and that Twitter killed the blogging star. They think they’ve told their stories, and now that those stories are told, they don’t know what to do with their websites and blogs any more. But they continue to tweet. Some have stuff to say that would be better said in a long-form post, and still others have something poignant to say on Twitter. But many are contributing to the ambient noise of the Internet, and it’s these I have the greatest trouble with. They’re creating a fog, making it even harder for those story particles to find good ways to be told.
And story is the point of all media, remember?
Maybe that’s my problem with Twitter. Maybe I haven’t seen enough examples of people using this new format to tell compelling stories. I’ve played with Twitter, which hasn’t helped (I primarily use Twitter as a way to update my Facebook status). Maybe I’m old, and simply don’t ‘get’ it. Maybe all I’ve seen of it makes it an anti-medium to me. A story deflector.
I’ll admit I haven’t been writing much lately. I’ve stopped writing fiction altogether, though don’t for a moment think that I believe that Stories mean fiction. I’ve told some stories, but I haven’t told all of them.
And lately I’ve been feeling the itch again. Bet I won’t be the only one.
Yes, that’s right – we’ve started installing the upper kitchen cupboards. We are planning on having the upper convection/microwave oven installed by the end of the week. It’ll be the first time we’ve had an oven since we moved into the house, and that’s damned exciting!
We were camping for a week, so nothing got done on the kitchen, but right before we left, a flurry of activity resulted in the walls being painted and a great deal of progress on the floor.
As you may or may not know, Sarah put 5/8” plywood down over the subfloor. This meant she had to drill many hundreds of holes, and screw many hundreds of screws. It was an unenviable task, and she did an amazing job at it. Then we painted.
You can’t see it well, but yes, you are seeing orange.
Now, simply because this wasn’t orange enough for me (is it ever?), we put Ditra down right before we left for camping, in preparation for the tiles that will go on soon.
After the tiles go down, then they get sealed, then we grout, seal the grout, and then we can install the cabinets. This will be a major improvement: our living room and dining room are chock full of cabinets and kitchen counters.
You might remember when our kitchen looked like this:
Then we did this to it:
Then, after a lot of electrical work, and other infrastructural stuff, the drywall started going up:
And after last night it looks like this:
Walls are primed. In fact, the ceiling has been painted its final white, though it needs another coat. After that, the wall paint will go on (probably two coats), and then we’ll be able to start putting the upper cabinets up, while at the same time getting the Ditra down in preparation for the flooring (which we will keep secret for now).