February 2007 Archives

The job search takes us to Manhattan to visit a well known (it's been verbed!) internet search engine company. We haven't visited New York City for I don't know how long, so we squeezed quite a bit in to 24+ hours.

On Thursday evening, we visited the Chelsea Art Museum. Mostly because it was open until 8PM while most of the other museums and galleries were closed by 5:00-5:30. We strolled through the current exhibits there. The real treat (if you like your art on the abstract expressionist side) was the work by the Museum's patron, Jean Miotte.

The treats continued with dinner with nephew Willie. He introduced us to Penang, a nice Malaysian restaurant. Hey, check it out, they have a location in Boston down near the theatre district, too.

The next day, while I was squirming under a unrelenting series of brain teasers, Karen went uptown to MoMA. This was our first visit to the renovated space. I joined Karen late in the day, late enough to take advantage of the Target Free Friday Nights promotion. Just right for a quick run through of some of the museum's highlights.

No negative NYC sterotypes were in evidence. The ambience was friendly, the cabs were easy to hail, and the cab drivers all spoke decent English. We may have to make these trips more often.

This image is composed of a bunch of smaller photos, providing an 180° view of the new space. (The piebee home page will clip this on the right hand side. Drill down to see the full image.) All the old kitchen walls are down, we can see all of the bones of the room. Well, almost all. To the right will be some additional framing for the laundry closet.

The G7 was used in panorama assist mode to fix the exposure, but I didn't use the accompanying software to stitch the images together. I have found such software to be annoying. It occassionally does a good job, but when it only comes close, I prefer the Hockneyesque panorama approach. Edgy instead of warped.

Things are coming at me from two sides: I watch at work(*) while they tear down the familiar, if unloved, cubicle partitions. And at home, the contractor has begun to gut the old kitchen.

For the next six or so weeks, we will be coping with an efficiency-style arrangement. The sink, stove, and refrigerator have been relocated into the living room. It isn't so bad, but there is still work to do to shuffle all the essentials each into their own workable niche.

Living this way should not be too onerous. At this point we have shoved the shovable into the basement. There isn't much space remaining to do more. Some compactification will be needed as other parts of the project impinge on our routine. But there will be rewards at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, "end of the tunnel", those are reassuring words.

* Intrusic shuttered its doors mid-January. I am putting in some contract hours there to prepare company assets for a potential sale.

January finally saw some seasonably cold weather. The contractor missed a few days that were too cold to work outside, but the addition is now framed out. It still needs siding and roofing, not to mention windows and doors, but for now the focus turns indoors.

The plan for this week calls for us to set up a temporary kitchen in the living room. Then the old kitchen gets demo'd and the former exterior now interior wall between the new space and the old comes down. This allows us to see the kitchen/family room space in whole, in turn allowing the measurment and ordering of the kitchen cabinets.

One asterisk for this photo: the near window along the back wall is to be swapped from four foot wide to six foot.