The Procrastinating Blogger

Food and Wine magazine

2009-11-29T23:35:00.000-08:00

Well, the holidays are here and as always; food and entertaining magazines publish their editions of the best recipes and what traditions are in or out for the current season. I can only imagine that for a magazine publisher this is the Superbowl of printed media in the US, Thanksgiving being the opening for the continuous flurry of cheer and food indulgence that follows right up until Easter week.

Budweiser was the winner in 2009

That being said, at least the Superbowl advertising has become entertaining, and there are even shows after the actual day to show you what ads made the cut as far as entertainment value and which simply sucked arse; with a magazine this really doesn't quite translate, there are many many ads and articles most in which you see the same exact product with different names over and over, and the articles well, that's the reason for the title of this post.

I've collected a number of food magazines during the past years and never actually bothered to look inside a Food and Wine magazine, until today. Maybe their covers aren't as flashy as Martha, or Gourmet but there has to be something special about it anyway since in the Bravo show Top Chef, the winner gets a full spread on this publication. Also they have Gail Simmons in there as an expert judge and she works both as a food critic and as a manager of something, so I thought, maybe it's one of those magazines that is less flashy on the outside but with better content (hello America's Test Kitchen).
I had some time so I started browsing the magazine, I got a little excited since they had their best holiday recipes and hosting tips on the cover; I mean why would I not want to learn where to place the forks and the spons? Sad to say, I wish someone had thrown a fork at me right then, when I started to flip the pages it was a mayor disappointment, not only their writing is very uptight and pretentious but they display an enormous number of advertisement and their recipes where pretty mediocre; like they had Rachel Ray fabricate them mediocre.
I was to a point, upset. Not because the magazine sucks, but mostly because I know this Gail woman who is a supposed food critic (from Canada lols) has a role in the desition making for the winner of Top Chef! The travesty I tell you, if she is there representing the magazine and the magazine is poop, then she is also poop.

I only hope that Toby "I hate life" Young gets to cover for her on the last two episodes, at least he doesn't seem that pretentions, and he is funny.

Point to the story is: please don't buy this crap, it's not worth it, not even if you drink a lot of wine before reading it.

Bathrooms are done...

2007-10-07T18:09:00.000-07:00

Two more down, one more to go!

One thing is for sure, next year I won't have to do so many things (big things that is) and do some work outside on our deck. After many many months, our bathrooms are stripped from that horrid and moldy wallpaper and a coat of fresh paint finished the job beautifully.

I didn't take photos of the very first project in Julian's bathroom, I tried to do venetian plaster only to have my dear husband think that it was some kind of joke because to him it just looked unfinished, I agreed after giving it a second look, VP paint is tough to work with and it takes to much time to make it look like the real thing (which is only left for crazy Italians). Also for some odd reason the paint wouldn't stop showing these hairline cracks that annoyed me.

Julian's bathroom was going to be of a boring greyish blue until I went to Lowes to return the cracking Venetian Plaster, I gave Julian a bunch of paint cards to see which he liked, it was around 10 or so all very different colors from brown to green, he picked the very bright blue you see in the photo.

I loved the color and when I started I thought
it was going to be too dark and too green but it didn't.
Since everything else in there is white it makes it happy :)
Like every kid's bathroom should be!

For our bathroom (which had the most damage from the stupid wallpaper and humidity) we had Jesus fix some things in the drywall first, then for the color I had picked out this tan that reminded me of Cafe con Leche *yum* which I was lucky enough to found in some Ace hardware by a friend's house already mixed and was only $5!

The problem with this, I crave Cafe con Leche
every time I have to pee!

Jesus came again...

2007-09-12T00:56:00.001-07:00

Have you accepted Jesus in your home? I have, Adrian has, a whole bunch of people I know have! He is a pretty damn good carpenter that's for sure, and he paints too. Proof of that is our living room, which I just noticed from my previous post that I lied :P Living room status was nowhere near finish, I guess I meant the floor and baseboard trim.

I haven't taken many photos of it now but I just installed the new dinning room and living room lighting and I love it, I think with such low ceilings it looks better than a chandelier and I just hate those flush mount lamps. Not my style anyway.

Before

I chose track lighting for the dinning area, I copied a room from Benjamin Moore paints the colors are the same but for some odd reason mine appear much more festive, took me a couple of days to get used to the orange but now with the blue pendants and the halogen light it looks better. I am still not completely married to the orange but the green (yes green, not yellow) I like.

After

On the subject of track lights, please be careful if you ever try to install these yourself, it's not hard but definitely get someone to help you, unless you want your neck to be sore.
The only problem I ran into was that we had these shitty dimmers I never liked, they are a pain and you can't really control the light as well as the regular ones with a switch which is what we have now. What happened was, after I installed the rail they caused a short because I thought that the dimmer would be in "Off" by default, well it wasn't. These "smart" dimmers are basically always running current which sucks.
So I went to get the pendants on and caused a short that blew the dimmer. *sigh* I guess I could have just got a lamp, I did find one like the one in the BJ design, but it was $3000.

The "thing" above my fireplace was, well that... An ugly thing, in shape of an eye, white and dirty full of bugs.

New hotness

I am still going to install two new recessed can lights in the living room near the entrance to have more light, houses here have no lights which is something that to this day I do-not comprehend.
Jesus will also help me with this task, this weekend he is coming to finally start fixing the wall paper problem we have in our master bath yay!

Living Room Status: Done!

2007-08-14T22:02:00.000-07:00

After almost two months of work, sweat and tears the awesome Jesus came to our house and helped me finish the trim work in the living room and dining room.
About Trim Work: It's hard work, really hard if you have no experience and no matter how many books you've got on the subject there is no way better to learn than watching a pro. There are so many tricks and things you can do to make it look so much more finished.

Little mitered cuts like this one for example:

Or these finishing caps that I would have never though of:

He also fixed the problem we had with our transition from the old oak floor to the new laminate, some genius decided to install another sub floor so there was an increase height on the old floor by almost 3/8 of an inch.
The transition pieces for both thresholds are not the same sadly, what worked on one didn't work on the other; it was a pain in the butt but both transitions are far enough apart that I think it will be ok to have two different widths.

The final result looks pretty great considering they could be bare:

Well not 100% since it still needs sanding the putty and paint the walls with awesome festive colors. Oh and the fireplace which it's coming along pretty well.

Fireplace revamped:

As you can see in this photo I covered the old stained brick with stucco, next there will be a layer of Plaster of Paris to make it smooth, the foot of the fireplace will be done in the tiles you see on the right, they are some kind of natural stone (definitely some kind of marble) they will not be in a staggered pattern which I think will make it look more modern.

Try saying that 3 times fast...

2007-08-12T22:38:00.000-07:00

"FIRST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1"

I don't know how many of you read Thesurperficial or WWTDD for your daily dose of useless Hollywood news, if you do visit these fine information websites and care enough to read the comments you will notice the "first"posts. Yees, people actually care whether they are the first to post or not, maybe they know something I don't, but I don't think I would want to be "first" when the thread is about Britney Spear's vajayjay.

Anyway moving on...
I finally caved into this "bloggin" craze everyone seems to be on these days, I will try to keep it interesting and give you regular updates of what is exploding currently in the house. The kid is starting to move which makes working on remodeling a bit more challenging, but who knows maybe I can make him mop the floors while I keep working on the fireplace refacing.
This seem efficient enough, no?

Here's the floor when it was almost done, it was a lot of work and granted I think I could have done a much better job, click floors seem to be so much easier to install when you see it on tv shows. This took me about 8 hours total, which I think for almost 300SF of space it's not bad, specially since I had to make angle cuts at the foot of our bay window, those planks where the hardest ones to install.