an asparagus short

Our first farm share of the season arrived last week and in it was a small handful of organic asparagus. Last night the mister tossed the lot in a bowl with olive oil and salt and grilled them and it might have been the best asparagus I have ever eaten. We talked about that at the time, “is this the best asparagus we’ve ever eaten?”, which immediately prompted us to remember all the good and varied asparagus delights we ate in Belgium (during asparagus season! How lucky we were) and then we thought of the small shot-glass of chilled white asparagus soup we had during our first meal in Antwerp and it was settled. The grilled asparagus was the second-best asparagus we’d ever eaten.

House Talk

So, the Summer of Us turned into the Summer of Our House about 10 minutes after I published that last post. It started with the long-overdue purchase & delivery of a new washer & dryer. I can’t tell you what a treat it is that a full load of laundry now dries in 42 minutes. Forty-two minutes! It’s maddening to think of the 3+ hours it used to take with our old dryer. The waste! The waiting! We should have done this years ago.

Once the excitement over 42-minutes-to-dry wore off (OK, so it hasn’t really worn off yet), I turned my attention to other house matters. What other home-related annoyances have we been putting up with? If a dryer can bring me so much joy, imagine what some new bedding can do! I started making a mental list, and before we knew it, we had new bedding (which was, indeed, overdue — my favourite whites were threadbare, literally), a couple of rugs, and a lamp. Then I decided that it was time to get rid of the rug in the living room (an OK-ish sisal with a dreary blue border — the mister picked it up for a song at a sample sale a few years ago and it did the trick well enough, but I’ve never liked it much) and move the rug from under the dining table to the living room. Then we brought home a couple of dining chairs from the mister’s parents’ basement and I covered the well-used seats with a layer of batting and a delicious print (that has a tiny hint of orange!).

Then this past weekend I got a brilliant early birthday present — a pair of Bertoia Diamond Lounge chairs (deeply discounted, from Morba, for the locals). I’ve been coveting the side chairs for the dining room for a while, but when we saw the diamond chairs (deeply! discounted!) this weekend, we knew we couldn’t pass them up. So, into the living room they went, but that meant the whole room required re-envisioning, so we moved the coffee table out and into the basement and the ottoman (which has been a cat-bed for the last 5 years) is now the coffee table. The cats are beside themselves but the humans are quite happy with it.

Whew. Are you still with me? I wasn’t kidding about The House Talk.

So, now, I’m making some new cushion covers for the couch, sewing up some chair pads for the new chairs (ours didn’t come with any, and replacement pads for $220+ a piece? I don’t think so!), and rethinking the fireplace. It’s not a functional fireplace, so we’ve had some candles in there for a while, with a tired brass grill (scored from a garage sale) in front of it. I think we’ll toss the candles and find a new-old cover for it. Or something.

Also? Last night, I caught the mister browsing Flickr for bathroom renovation ideas. Uh-oh.