Right between the saddle and the long neck on this lamp is the key to keeping it from wobbling — a lock washer.  Before that fix, for the longest time, this nice porcelain retro lamp leaned a bit:

There are dozens of posts on the internet that describe how to rewire a lamp, but they often skip the part about including a lock washer on each side of the assembly (inside and outside the lamp) to keep it from unscrewing itself and becoming wobbly over time.  I learned this trick from the people at Royal Touch at Coit and Arapaho in Dallas.

Here is a closeup of a lock washer:

Also – when rewiring don’t forget your underwriter’s knot:

This great illustration comes from the Flickr account of b_light, who has an awesome photo set on How to Wire a Lamp.  It is worth a look.

Here is the rewired lamp with a new $10 shade from Tuesday Morning:

O good times, for this…

… is now this …

Fancy!  My new washer and dryer play music.  I pulled the trigger on this purchase recently when the old Kenmore washer started leaking.  So far I have found front-loading far superior:

• The washer uses far less water, less than you would think could clean anything.  Before, I thought if you opened a front-loader mid-cycle, water would spill out everywhere.  Not so, because the clothes at their wettest are merely soaked.
• The dryer filter ends up with a fraction of the lint the old machine produced, ergo clothes must be less beat up in this process.
• The “Steam Refresh” cycle on the dryer removes odors and wrinkles.  I am gradually refreshing more things instead of washing.
• The stationary drying rack lets you dry items like sneakers and delicates without tumbling.

This Samsung pair was disturbingly expensive but ranked first in the Consumer Reports test.  I highly recommend if you have to replace your set.

It’s a lucky week for me.  Check out my new find.  It’s a greenhouse!  Recovered from brush and bulky!  Without a doubt my best (and largest) trash find ever.

The process of acquiring the greenhouse was quite a thrill.  I spied it on a nearby block while riding in a car with a business associate.  She had driven us from an office downtown to a meeting in Garland.  We swung back through my neighborhood so she could show me a house she’s thinking about buying on our way back to the downtown office.  It was pure coincidence that this block was a quarter mile from mine.  I thought about asking her to stop the car so I could exit and examine it, but I wasn’t sure that would give such a good impression.  Let’s talk business… no wait a sec, lemme go pick through this pile of trash over here first.

After returning downtown to fetch my car, I drove back and eventually found it again.  A neighbor and a couple passing cars were eyeing the structure, which was sitting in the street, just past the curb.  I knew time was of the essence here, it was quite heavy, and I didn’t have the truck.

Hmmmm, how to move something fast during the day in my neighborhood?  Lawn crew!  It took about ten seconds to find some guys with a flatbed.  Communicating was difficult, but with hand signals and gestures they got the point that I needed some help moving something a few blocks.  I offered $30 but ended up paying $40, as it required moving a bunch of equipment from the trailer to the truck.  In retrospect perhaps I should have been more shrewd.  I find that the rule of Craigslist, garage sales, and just about every other junk transaction is that you should take the asking price or first number you expect to pay, and knock it down by about a third.  Maybe more.

For now it’s in my back drive, waiting for me to figure a final space for it.  It needs a replacement roof panel, and it could do with a new paint job on the frame, but other than that she seems good to go.  In the spirit of naming great estates and boats and all things fancy, I am naming her The Ravendale Greenhouse, for the street on which I found her.

Scardello Cheese 101, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

This post is for my mom. Growing up, I disliked cheese. Really that’s an understatement. I detested cheese. I remember eyeing and sniffing mom’s noodle and rice dinners (anything with more than a single ingredient), which I’m sure were really tasty, and accusing her of sneaking in cheese. I would become nauseous watching her and my dad eat queso at the Paradise II Mexican food restaurant. The smell of my dad’s shaker of Parmesan grossed me out. Once, I heard Bryant Gumbell say on the Today Show that he didn’t like cheese, and I bet I repeated that a million times. I am sure this behavior was annoying.

I’ve softened on cheese since then. I’m challenging my adult palate, as Tom Colicchio might say. A few days ago I visited a stinky cheese shop called Scardello’s. Along with a friend I took a class there called Cheese 101. We tasted 18 cheeses from soft, lemony chevre to stinky, blue stilton. I don’t think I’ll ever be a cheese lover, but I am no longer a hater, and I can appreciate a fine piece of fromage, as the French might say.

Class tidbits you may or may not already know about cheese:

• Parmesan tastes like pineapple
• Gouda tastes like caramel
• Chevre tastes lemony
• Cheddar isn’t really yellow, that’s just food coloring
• Truly stinky cheese is “washed rind” cheese (I still say steer clear!)
• Good blue Stilton tastes like bacon
• To impress guests, serve Stilton paired with truffle honey

The next time my mom visits I plan to take her to this cheese shop.

PK Grill, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

A few years ago my grandma gave me her old spaceship-like charcoal grill. It’s official brand name is the Portable Kitchen, and the cooking vessel is cast aluminum. People in-the-know call it the PK. Does it look familiar? Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like a lot of people had these back in the day.

Recently I felt inspired to start using it. The grates inside had rusted quite a bit. I went online to find out how to get replacements. To my surprise, I discovered the PK continues to be a cult favorite. The old PK is back in production. Yes, you really can buy one of these new.

Apparently it’s popular because it’s easy to control the inside temperature using the grill’s four sliding air vents. It produces consistent low heat, low enough to smoke meat.

I’ve fired it up a few times recently. I highly recommend smoked beer can chicken.

For the truly curious, here is some history from the official PK site:

In the early 1950’s, the man known as the “Barbeque King” of Texas acted on his dream of making the perfect barbeque pit. Mr. Hilton Meigs, a Beaumont businessman, contractor and inventor, designed and manufactured the first Portable Kitchen® cast aluminum grill in 1952.

The immediate popularity of the grill inspired the Meigs family to move to larger operations in Tyler, Texas a year later. Using Tyler as their base of operations, Mr. Meigs and his son, Douglas, loaded as many grills as possible in their 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air (removing the back seat to accommodate more grills) and traveled all across the Lone Star State to pitch their cooker. Sales soon spread to retailers across the country and to several countries overseas. Operations were eventually moved to Little Rock, Arkansas.

Unfortunately, the advent of stamped metal charcoal grills and trendy gas grills in the 1980’s led to the early retirement of the Mr. Meigs’ heavy-duty cast aluminum cooker. Tired of rusted out, cheap charcoal grills and convinced that a propane flame could never produce the flavor of charcoal-fed hickory smoke, Paul and Sarah James retrieved one of Mr. Meigs’ Portable Kitchen® cookers at a garage sale.

The rest is history. Wholeheartedly believing that the Portable Kitchen® cast aluminum cooker is still the perfect charcoal grill and smoker, the James family has set out to reintroduce it to the market. Rekindle an old flame!

Fence Repair, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

Do you ever fix something and find that the new material makes the old look much shabbier? Seems like this has happened to me a lot lately….

* New cedar next to old
* Bright white caulk around old tub
* Sleek stainless dishwasher in clunky old kitchen

Squirrel was Here, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

Your eyes do not deceive you. This is a ripe, half-eaten homegrown tomato perched atop my backyard fence. Deposited by a squirrel no doubt. Looking outside my kitchen window, I witnessed perhaps the same squirrel running up my neighbors roof with a smaller red one in its filthy undeserving mouth.

How depressing. To avoid this I believe you either must pick them green and let them ripen inside or create a physical barrier with netting. I hate to pick them unripe because they don’t taste as good. What’s the point? But I’ve been so busy the net’s not quite situated right. Obviously. Need to work on that. But until then, it appears I’m writing off a chunk of my crop to the squirrels.

Kennebec, Red Lasoda, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

Kennebecs are the white ones. They turned out smaller than the red ones. Not sure why.

Red Lasoda Potatoes on Plant, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

Yesterday I pulled up my first potato plant. To my delight there were two perfect little red potatoes on it! Red lasoda, to be precise. For some reason I was a little shocked. This is my first potato rodeo, so perhaps that’s why.

A closeup of the newborn taters:

It appears I could’ve had two more, had conditions been right:

I hadn’t planned on pulling these up, but I found myself wondering when these would be ready to go, so I just grabbed one. Earlier in the day, I had purchased a few new potatoes at Whole Foods. What an excellent opportunity for comparison!

Keep in mind the store-bought ones are organic and expensive ($3.59/lbs). Yet they still look a ton different. Mine are the pink ones:

I set up a taste test and steamed both sets. I was nervous mine might not taste a lot better. But there was no doubt, the fresh ones were about a billion times tastier. They had a much creamier, more potato-ey texture and taste than the ones from Whole Foods. The store bought ones had a bitter aftertaste that I probably wouldn’t have objected to had I not tasted the better ones.

I have probably thirty total plants that include two other varieties in the garden that should be ready to pull in the coming weeks.

First Tomatoes, originally uploaded by espeedy123.

My first tomatoes ripened this week. The two larger ones are “patio” variety. One of the small ones is “sweet 100″ and one is “sweet millions.”