Around Here

Around here.....

We had a happy Father's Day weekend, starting with a walk up to Chautauqua Friday night to have a brat and beer while listening in on a concert at the auditorium, and ending with friends over for Korean beef tacos Sunday night.   Loved this photo I caught of Ben and Paul Friday night. 

I submitted this photo for the challenge of this week's photography class.  The subject was "Elements" and after sitting in front of this wood burning grill at Oak the other night for a while, I finally realized I could capture some good images of "fire" for the challenge.  This was taken with an iPhone, which I thought was pretty amazing, and just used a bit of PS editing to crop it and remove a few distractions.  

And if you're wondering what we were doing at the grill; well, we were watching Zach the drillmaster cook our huge Tbone steak!  (Don't gasp; we took half of it home.)

The kitchen update moved a step forward as we finalized the cabinet selection, moving from pure white for the upper cabinets and grey for the bottoms to more of a stain over a "riffed oak" which shows much more of the wood texture.  Seemed a shame just to paint over nice wood, and in the end I liked this finish the best.  Whew!  These expensive decisions are exhausting!  But that's it; I'm not changing my mind again. 

We decided to go ahead and have our new dishwasher installed instead of waiting for the kitchen upgrade and it is so sleek and quiet and does such a great job of producing spotless dishes and pans that we are all quite smitten with it. 

Since the stove hood was in that same order, we had it installed also, which adds another upgraded element to the kitchen.

And the carpenters came out for a final planning session about replacing the garden window in the kitchen with a bay window.  That work should start mid-July and be done within a few days.  What a nice change to have a weather-tight and pretty new window in that wall.  Last winter there was often ice on the inside of the window in the mornings!