House guest

Business' best friend Wally Barney came over today. They had gay sex and now Wally is singing at the door. I think he wants to go home. Too bad sucker, you're here for the day.

Turn up the Teddy Pendergrass, it's time to get romantic.

Newly Acquired Greco-Deco, mercury glass, homoerotic coasters

Charcoal scented candles

Fresh tulips in the Dora Maar vase

Moody lighting on a cheap chair

Surgical lamp all aglow with passion

All this romance aside, I've realized that my camera is refusing to take a single photo in hard focus. I might have to gift myself a new one.

Rhubarb Liqueur

Now it's time for an older, pinker, more elegant booze. It's lighter and less floral than I expected and not too sweet. It's also really easy to make. It's rhubarb Liqueur. Brandon found the basic recipe in a local paper but we fucked with it to use less sugar. The hands on time is maybe around thirty minutes total but the total time is 8 weeks.


One 5th of everclear
4 or 5 rhubarb stems or branches or whatever you call them
9 cups of water
3 cups of sugar

Chop the fuck out of your rhubarb.
Dump those splinters into a huge mason jar.
Pour the everclear over the rhubarb. 
Close the jar.
It should look like a pickled abortion. 
Let it sit there for four weeks.
Strain the rhubarb, squeezing as much booze out of the flesh as humanly possible. 
The rhubarb should end up looking like a giant meat ball. 
Compost that bastard.
combine 9 cups of water with 3 cups of sugar in a large pot over medium heat.
Once the sugar is dissolved, you will have simple syrup. 
Remove from the heat, letting the simple syrup cool.
While the syrup cools, filter your booze a couple times through cheesecloth or a coffee filter.
Once the syrup is cool, pour the moonshine in.
Stir those molecules around.
Bottle it up.
It should yield 5 bottles.
Let it sit there for another 4 weeks.
DRANK IT DOWN, MUTHER FUCKER.

TANGSTODOOZE

I'll have a car this weekend so I want it to be a really productive one.I thought I would write a daunting to do list in the hopes that it will guilt me into accomplishing more than watching Season 3 of Skins UK.

Buy fabric for chairs, windows, napkins
Recover chairs
Find curtain rods
Sew curtains
Sew napkins
Buy more plants for the yard
Plant said plants
Get wireless router
list more shit on ebay
Spray orange chair with fresh dye
Buy spray paint for giant ombre utensils.
write blog entries about ^^^^^^^
Take Business to the dog park
Brunchers
Drink more coffee than booze

Here goes nothing....

UPDATE:

Here goes almost everything!

Things done:

We bought chair fabric but none for windows or napkins.
 We recovered the seats but not the backs of the chairs.
We bought some bulbs for the garden.
We planted the bulbs.
Wireless internet up, although it only exaggerated the ungainly tangle of wires strewn across the bedroom floor. 
listed one thing on ebay.
Business got fucked at the park...which was nauseating and hilarious.
Ate the fuck out of some brunch.
Drank gallons of iced coffee.

Outstanding stuff:

We still need to buy fabric for curtains and napkins.
Finish the reupholstering the chairs.
Sew shit so that we are not so shit.
Spray dye the orange chair.
Rethinking giant utensils... I hate them again.
Writing proper blog posts.

DOMESECTRATE

There are certain things I find myself doing and wanting, that I never understood before this apartment; Napkins, cooking, and coasters all fall under this category.

1. Napkins

 I don't often use napkins. I'm much more likely to wipe my face on my hands and my hands on my pants.  As a 30 year-old man, I think it's time for this to change. Actually, I should probably back this up to childhood memoir levels. When I was really little my family used paper napkins. They were pink or light blue and I sometimes would wad a few up and shove them in my mouth. Flash forward to when I was seven or eight and learned where paper napkins came from and about amazonian deforestation; I cried about it. My mom was so moved by the expression that she went out the next day and bought cloth napkins which she uses to this day. Flash forward again, I'm a disgusting teenager and I stop wiping my mouth-hole all together.

How are we going to fix this, buy napkins? Maybe it will come to that but I have a different plan. Brandon and I are going to the fabric store this weekend to buy clothing for our new chairs, kitchen windows and dirty faces. It will probably prove too time consuming for lazy fucks like us but whatever, we will give it a go.

Chairs: Green or teal velvet
Curtains: Op art print or sheer somethings
Napkins: ????? I dunno!!!!!!

2. Cooking

We've been cooking a bit, mainly soup and homemade liqueurs. The liqueurs and soup have inspired us to make more low effort/high yield foods like cured, canned and pickled stuff. After all, our new apartment is on the east side of the river and we have to start assimilating to the local culture some time. I bought THE PRESERVATION KITCHEN by Paul Virant... I can't wait to try curing meat. It sounds really stinky.

3. Coasters

Coasters are for old people so I just ordered a load of teal agate geode coasters off of the internet. I kind of doubt this is going to help cut the boho vibe in our kitchen nook but it should help bring in some color. 

KITCHEN BLACKER

I'm starting to feel a little more NORMAL in the new apartment now that we have black walls in the kitchen. They make me want to invite guests over for a fine dinner of goat's blood, couscous and a lovely orange salad.

I made the mistake of listening to Sonic Youth when I slapped up the first coat which made me question if it looked more like a shitty punk club than a sophisticated cookery. Luckily, the second coat was applied to a backdrop of James Blake, making the color choice feel like the only choice I could have made.

Hideously washed-out, dirty white, snagglebonch, boresville before picture

Admittedly, the kitchen is looking more MOODY BOHEMIAN than GLOBAL GOTH or HORROR DISCO right now with all the tan accents but I think I like it. 

Here's the more tolerable after. We still have a long way to go but at least it feels less like a prison's laundry room.

Look at those little dudes. We were talking about trying our hand at some sort of macrame hanging and then giving it a bright ombré dip for the spot next to the stairwell. Brandon used to teach underwater basket-weaving to boy scouts so I think he may have to take the reins on this one.

Here are those chairs we just got in a spectacle of airline textile majesty.

Picked up a foxtail fern too.

 If you had these shelves in your apartment and didn't want them to get cluttered but did want them to be functional, what would you do?

The artwork in the nook is a 1970's, slightly penisy, mass-produced miracle by "Letterman". I would like us to switch it out for something more psychedelic-POP or op art later down the line but the scale seems nice and the color pallet really compliments our tattered friend on the wall opposite.

Before we start purchasing or making giant art, we really need to touch up some of the paint and buy a bunch of shit like a sexier fruit bowl.

New Chairs

 We bought a couple 1970's vintage Thonet armchairs off Craigslist last night, both for $30. It seems like a great deal since I found this group of four on 1st dibs for $2400. Does this make me a craigslist genius? Ours were recovered in the late 80's with some sort of hideous airline print in a dowdy colorway so we are going to try our hands at reupholstering them. But what should we cover them in?

 

We are thinking of covering them in leather or velvet and I'm really drawn to the idea of malachite green with the chrome steel like in this picture. We are also talking about teal or nice, light cognacy tan leather. Since we just painted the kitchen black I think black leather might not be an option...Which feels utterly wrong when acknowledged. 

I'll be posting some before and "after" pics tomorrow.