There’s a couple of followup items, however. I need to move the propane tank a bit further away to be perfectly in code; that’ll happen fairly soon after we figure out a plan for moving the thing (it’s nearly full and darned heavy). In order to do the rewiring we had to peel away drywall around the main and sub breaker panels, so I need that replaced and those walls repainted — not a big deal. I also need to re-drywall the deck room/exercise room, after this fall’s freeze and subsequent frozen plumbing removal.

The big one is that I discovered that my previous electrician ran my new office outlets (2 blocks of 4) off a circuit which already had most of the upstairs lights, and that the circuit is only 15A, not 20. This isn’t causing major issues on a regular basis (we measured the draw), but at startup for my office UPS and the laser printer (while the lights are on, etc) is enough to cause transient voltage drops (the UPS logs an event). So we left one circuit free on the generator panel, and in the next few weeks we’ll rewire my office to a new 20A circuit and leave the old 15A circuit to simply run the upstairs overhead lights, which is what it’s designed to do in the first place.

In terms of house projects, there’s always more to do, especially when you first buy a house and try to rectify things you don’t like (or weren’t done well to begin with). But I’m hoping for a respite after I get the drywall fixed and the circuits split off. The phone wiring is pretty antiquated and nasty, but it’s not a critical issue. I can’t stand the countertops in the kitchen — sort of a mottled 80’s with a hint of purple, gah! — but they can wait. So drywall, finish the electrical, put up more bookshelves and finish unpacking the books to free up the garage, and I’m taking a break. There’s work to be done at school, after all!

I’m recovering from Thanksgiving and a two week cold/flu which leaves me oddly uninterested in food, so this is also the first Thanksgiving on record where I actually lost weight.  But it’s time to start making turkey sandwiches before the shelves in the fridge bow under the strain of all the leftovers.  Friends and family came up for a first island Thanksgiving this year, bringing an accompanying dish or making one here.  But somehow none of them took leftovers with them on the exodus south. 

The turkey was a nice 15 pound free range bird, which I was able to find locally – a nice surprise.  I shortened the brining interval this year; not quite as much as Alton Brown’s six-hour brine, but I started it late the night before this year and gave it a good 12 hours in the brine.  The brine, as with last year, was two gallons of straight salt/water, with another gallon of apple cider added and a cup of bourbon.  To this I added black peppercorns, star anise, a couple of juniper berries, red pepper flakes, and a few bay leaves.  It seems to work quite nicely, and given the temperatures lately, I kept it out on the deck in a cooler and it worked well.
 

Earlier in the week, I’d made a double chicken stock, and reduced by 3/4s this formed the basis of our gravy, seasoned and slightly thickened via the slurry method.  I’d also made a cranberry orange sauce (with lots of fresh ginger), as well as a cranberry-tomato chutney.  The latter was everyone’s favorite, and I’m kind of wondering why I bother with a sweet version every year.  The chutney (which came  from Allrecipes), also makes a great turkey sandwich later on, so I quadrupled the recipe and made several pint jars’ worth. 

My friends brought garden potatoes, cole slaw, roasted garlic mashed sweet potatoes, and a north African sauteed carrot dish, and Scott made a cranberry sausage cornbread dressing for the turkey (no stuffing the turkey!).  I complemented this with a salad of sliced golden and red beets, marinated in sherry vinegar & walnut oil, with blue cheese crumbles and Beth’s glazed spicy walnuts.  Served with 1998 Dom Perignon (this marked the end of my "month of Champagne" birthday) and the 2000 Mon Coeur from J.L. Chave, the dinner was spectacular and very tasty.  A very nice holiday at the new place. 

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

That pretty much fits. In this short Bay Area trip, I’ve bought books at Borders on Union Square (surprisingly amazing as chain stores go, giving many independent stores a run for their money), City Lights in North Beach, and Black Oak Books (well, two trips to BO. their new section on the history of ideas just can’t be missed). UPS now has two boxes of the proceeds, hopefully trucking their way expeditiously north so I can peruse and examine, if not quite immediately read, the fruits of my expeditions.

In the full flower of my bibliomania, however — a condition which often seems to strike me in the Bay Area — I want to reflect a bit about what makes a truly good bookstore. Because I think they’re a dying species. I think we may only have one in Seattle. Or one that fully qualifies, and a couple that try hard. And, as previously mentioned, Cody’s on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, long an icon in my bookish universe, is closing. So the entire subject deserves pause, and reflection.

When I walk into a truly good bookstore, I can tell immediately, through long association and almost a kind of “steeping” in the spoor of other bibliomaniacs. We’d run in packs, except that trawling the stacks at a good bookstore is a solitary kind of hunt, if only because the shelves are too narrow to admit the herd. Or perhaps it’s simply that we don’t want to share the spoils.

A truly good bookstore is staffed by other bibliophiles, and hopefully a bibliomaniac or two.

For example, let’s take City Lights on Columbus, in San Francisco. Perhaps an unfair example, because you’d probably expect any bookstore which was the spiritual home of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and the Beats to be a serious bookstore. But let’s be honest, that was half a century ago, and the staff ain’t nearly that old. So whatever is going on at City Lights isn’t “primary,” it’s culturally passed down and kept alive by a committed staff.

And committed they are. Three years ago, I found all three volumes of Morris Kline’s History of Mathematics on the shelves at City Lights, and immediately bought them, and enjoyed much of the first volume sitting outside Caffe Trieste and the Tully’s at Pacific and Fillmore. Today, all three volumes of Kline’s masterful history of mathematics are still in stock at City Lights, waiting for someone else like me to stop in and want something besides Beat poetry. That’s bibliophilia.

Or take the example of Pierre Bourdieu, the social theorist who is often shelved with sociology, but occasionally with philosophy. Honestly, there’s an argument for either, and when I walk in to a book store wanting to find The Logic of Practice I know to look in either section. At City Lights, Bourdieu’s more theoretical works are found under philosophy, while his more empirical works, such as Distinction, are found under sociology. That’s not random…that’s someone who thought carefully about where Bourdieu might fit in the human sciences, and where people might look for various of his books. I want to meet that person, because I have a feeling we have things to talk about…if only how we can possibly fit more bookshelves into our respective homes.

Obviously I have no idea whether City Lights really thinks about this stuff as deeply as I’m imagining, but if they’re faking bibliophilia, they’re doing it convincingly. Regardless, I find it heartwarming and reassuring that places like Black Oak Books and City Lights (and Elliott Bay Books in Seattle) still exist, whether or not I still order from Amazon. Amazon’s algorithms may be good at suggesting things I haven’t purchased yet, but they can’t capture the kind of thinking I saw on the shelves today at City Lights.

Enclosed find the Brandenburgs that I mentioned something like 17 years ago. They are the best. F**k the rest.

The story begins in the summer of 1987, at the University of Washington’s Archaeological Field School on San Juan Island. My friend was a staff member, and I was a student on the field school. He, in his wisdom, had brought a high-quality CD player and CD collection to the island, and we discovered mutual interests in classical music, partying our way around the island, and honing our expertise in “field bartending.” At the time, his Bach collection was serious and well-stocked, except for an obvious hole with the Brandenburg Concertos. His answer was that he wouldn’t buy the Brandenburgs until he found the perfect recording. Pinnock, Hogwood, all good conductors, all good recordings, but the best was an elusive recording by Karl Ristenpart. It remained elusive, and my friend’s collection lacked a copy of the Brandenburgs, all these years.

Until now. He found the Ristenpart recordings in France, and waited 9 months for the boxed set to be shipped to the United States. And today, I got an envelope with the Brandenburgs, as performed by Karl Ristenpart and the Saar Chamber Orchestra in 1960. What an amazing pleasure it is to hear them, after 17 years of anticipation.