Kitchen: What I like best

Looking north (towards bathroom and neighbor's house),
before framing had been installed on the window and door.
I didn't take any photos of the floor direct, but you get the warm effect here.

I walked into the kitchen on Sunday afternoon (two weekends ago) to discover HD spreadeagled on the  floor, just lying there.  I gave him a skeptical eye, but he said, "Come and try it!  It feels great!  This is so comfortable." (He had been installing baseboard -- requiring stretching out on the floor to get the right angle on the woodwork.)  I joined him and experienced the surprising cushiness of our new cork floor.

What I like best about the kitchen is perhaps this cork floor. Cork is a new old-fashioned fad, which, because it is eco-friendly (I believe the cork is harvested from trees without killing them, so it is a renewable resource that encourages rain forest growth -- or something like that) is tremendously popular in the Portland housing market.  (Marmoleum, equally eco-friendly requiring less maintenance, would have been more popular, but we couldn't decide on a color -- and it seemed too stark and bright for what we had in mind for the kitchen anyway.)

To save having to level out (or remove) the existing fir subflooring, we bought a floating floor -- that is, planks of cork on a light frame, which snap together to form a seamless whole. (You can see how they fit together here, in the photo right above the word "linoleum".) We bought the floor in 2007, during the first, aborted, attempt to renovate the kitchen, because it was on sale.  We bought the Ikea cabinetry almost three full years later, and they are almost exactly the same color.  (Which is good, but we didn't realize they were the same until we brought home a sample cupboard door.)  The cork is warm, and springy, and pleasant to walk on.  It will be great for Cordon Bleu dinners, when the cook is standing in the kitchen for hours on end.

Looking northwest, towards the basement stairs and the foyer on the left.
The new door to the basement, installed. The fridge is now
where the ladder is in this photo, taken in June.

Then again, perhaps the thing I really like the most about the kitchen is a totally cool phenomenon, entirely fortuitous. It needs a bit of explaining.

The stainless steel refrigerator is positioned, offset by three feet, across from the door to the basement.  On the landing, partway down the basement stairs, in line with the basement door, is another door, which opens onto the side yard and the flower garden outside. Both doors have windows in the top panel (they are north-facing, at the 45th parallel, so it is dark in the winter, and we wanted every particle of light we could get).  (I wrote about the new basement door here.)

Looking southwest, from the bathroom doorway. The fridge, now. 

We discovered when I was washing dishes in the new sink, and HD was doing some work in the side yard, that when the outside door is open fully, and the basement door is partially open, the prism bevel around the window in the  basement door forms a camera obscura, directing the image of the outside onto the surface of the fridge door.

See the green picket fence and the petunias?

Now do you see them?

This is not a simple reflection: the garden is at least 6 feet below the "garden" in the image, not to mention being offset horizontally from the fridge as well.  And, the basement door has to be ajar -- not fully open, nor fully closed -- in order for the image to appear.

Standing about three feet in front of the outside door, looking
across into the kitchen "hallway".  Notice the edge of the fridge on
the left. The camera is about 6 feet above "petunia" level here.
By the way, straight ahead is two fabulous Ikea 88" pullout pantries.

This phenomena will only get noticed in the summer, when the outer door is open, but its ephemerality makes it even more fun.  And how fitting for the house of an artist!

Note about the fridge, for those who want to know: It is simply the Ikea standard two-door stainless steel fridge with ice and water in the door.  Which means, it's a Whirlpool. I should say, it's the Ikea standard in the USA.

Interstice of Sun

Interstice: A space between things or parts, especially things closely set; a narrow chink; a crack.

We had no rain on Monday -- or, at least, we had 31 hours with no rain, with Monday afternoon conveniently landing in the middle of that interstice.  I was able to squeak out and get the last remaining bed planted with the petunias and marigolds that I bought on a sunny day, back before the rains started in early May.

(South side of the fence: all flowers.  It doesn't look like much now, but -- fingers crossed -- it will be lush most of the summer.)

I don't hate petunias and marigolds, but they aren't particularly adventurous in a northern American garden. However, they are cheap (about 100 plants for $20), and they grow without requiring much maintenance, and they are ruffly and pretty.  Going quite against my all-inclusive heart's preference in the past, which is to have two or three plants of every color, I stuck to my head and chose all white petunias. (The marigolds, I admit, vary from bright yellow through orange to rich dark burnt sienna.) Marigolds have the added advantage of naturally killing nematodes (and I think other microscopic pests) in the soil, so they are an organic pesticide to plant around tomatoes.

(North side of the fence: mixed marigolds and vegetables.)

And I did plant tomatoes, provided by a friend who goes to the trouble of starting Heirloom Tomatoes from seed. From West (bottom of the second photo) to East (lost in the distance), we have Sun Gold Cherries (the same sweet ping-pong-sized fruiter we so loved last year), Black Krim (a different meaty dark Russian tomato than the Paul Robeson I planted last year), Stupice (to fill in for gourmet heirloom, like the Pink Brandywine last year), San Marzano (romas) -- and then, at the far end after a long gap of no tomatoes, a Sweet 100 Cherry Tomato. Last summer I planted the two cherries next to each other; they intertwined so luxuriantly (although planted three feet apart), that we couldn't tell if a golden fruit was a golden cherry, or still-immature red cherry. This year, we'll know.

(In the Topsy-Turvy, one last holdout, a hybrid Early Girl.)

That left only a part of the bed that gets less sun (when there is sun) -- more than six hours a day between now and about a month after Mid-Summer's Day, but the shadow of the roof glooms increasingly long after July.  So, not enough sun for tomatoes just when they need it most. Instead, because I had the seeds anyway, I planted a line of cucumbers and a longer line of green pole beans.  Dotted periodically with healthful marigolds, to provide pest prevention and color until the veggies grow in.

I had one more tomato plant, which I put in a topsy-turvy on the other side of the house. Last year I had a cherry in there; this year, a small beefsteak tomato, Early Girl.  This one, I purchased.

You might wonder at the wisdom of planting tomatoes -- the bountiful reward of summer, easing one's transition to the shorter days and colder nights of fall -- in a house which we may or may not be living in by then.  The Early Girl was my tongue-in-cheek gauntlet: from flower to fruit in 50 days, it claimed.  Are we going to be out of this house by July 20th? Bring it on.

Of course, that presumes we have some sun.  We've had over an inch of rain since June started, and today's forecast is for an "unusually heavy rainstorm" lodged on us by a stalled jet stream.  The slugs are happy at least.

Snowdrops

I returned to Oregon last night, after a day's travel.  (Which, in the mindset of the colonials who I learned about on the East Coast, and the pioneers who wagon-trained across the Plains to this coast, is pretty dang miraculous, to travel that far that fast.)

I skipped to the end of the season, too.  We have a full bed of snowdrops outside! The bulbs' greenery are poking through the dirt, too -- crocusses, daffodils, bluebells and early tulips.  My carrots appear to have survived the cold stretch we had in December, and I may be able to harvest some by the end of February.

So far, so fast!

Spring is Springing

Sorry not to be posting more often. I've taken lots of photos, and mentally written several entries, but there hasn't seemed to be enough time to actually make them into something you can read with current technology. No mind-blogging available yet.

Anyway, I still don't have time today. I've spent the week completing an online test for an online job -- the kind of thing that won't make my career (nor even balance my checkbook, although this will stem the financial hemorrhaging). 30+ hours of testing -- training, really, for the work I'll be doing. But I passed, and now move into 3 weeks of probationary training, for which at least I'll be getting paid.

So here are a couple of photos that I took more than a week ago, of the tulips in our yard. I planted them last fall (I blogged about it, but it's not the kind of thing one remembers, unless you yourself planted the nearly 300 bulbs). As a whole, they brightened up the yard, but didn't cohere as much as I had hoped they would.

I did manage to get a near-perfect ring of successively flowering bulbs around the tree -- little harebells in front, then a mid-sized wild parrot tulip, followed inside by a slightly frilly taller red tulip, and then crowned ultimately by very tall, sophisticated, fringed yellow tulips (which hadn't bloomed when I took these photos). It was as if I knew what I was doing!

This weekend is supposed to be hot and sunny. We'll be out planting summer tomatoes and squashes, and the dahlias and glads for later in the year, too. So I should have more photos to share in a day or two.

Dahlias

In late May, I bought a few bags of dahlia tubers from some half-price bins at Home Depot, because the season for planting them had already passed. And then I forgot about them. By late July, the tubers were a little soft and dried out, so I plopped them into the ground as an emergency measure. I didn't think they'd bloom, but I wanted to give them "soil-time" to rejuvenate so that I could plant them for flowers next year.

Imagine our surprise with these beauties (photo taken a couple of weeks ago). I don't recall seeing dahlias as huge (5-6 feet tall) or as productive as these before: they started blooming in early September, and even today (Halloween) we have over a dozen blossoms (and as many buds yet to flower).

Below them are a run of marigolds which were also very happy by the end of summer; on the left is yet another dahlia-emergency planting -- another gorgeous bloom, but overshadowed by their huge brighter cousins alongside.

Passion Flowers (Passiflora)

I've talked about our brick patio in the back, and shown how HomoDommi managed to mask the neighbor's ugly decrepit garage with a frame of wood and several climbing plants -- clematis, honeysuckle, mandevilla and passion flower.

The passion flower won, clearly, this year, covering the north lattice and stretching out over the fence along side. The other plants are all still alive and growing, just without the abundance of the passion flower. Over winter, the greenery will die away (not what we intended) and the race will be on again next summer.

I am not familiar with passion flowers -- either they don't survive in the Midwest, or I hadn't noticed them in all the years I was there. Indeed, the flowers (at least, of our genus) are mild and retiring as a whole, against the background of thick dark green trifoliate leaves and curlicue graspers. According to wikipedia, early Spanish Christian missionaries "discovered" the flower (Europe is about the only place on earth where they don't grow natively) and named it for the passion of the Christ: the radial filaments represent his crown of thorns, and the sepals represent the ten apostles, the three stigmata are symbols for the three nails, and the five anthers symbolize Christ's five wounds. These missionaries were true Christ-geeks, for I can't imagine seeing such a horrific, bloody and physical analogy in this delicate and subtly-scented flower.

Apparently in Israel and Japan it is known as variants on clock-flower -- a more literal interpretation given the petals like clock "spokes" and the blossom's life cycle of one day. But that name doesn't capture the unearthliness of the flower -- at least the missionaries sensed something less mundane about the blossoms. To me it looks like something from another planet (just as cleome looks wonderfully alien, too).

Writing this entry, I discovered I have taken over 66 photos of the vine, trying to capture its true essence. I still haven't quite captured it. (These photos were all taken in mid-September. It's done flowering now, except for some late stragglers, blooming to spite the cold and rain of October.)