Happy New Kitchen!

Oh, and happy new year too. Sorry, but all available time and energy for blogging has been usurped by an ongoing kitchen renovation. We've had an unprecedented five days off in a row since we returned from our great trip home for Christmas, and we've spent all of them sanding cabinets, painting countertops, ordering refrigerators (well, just one refrigerator) and otherwise trying to make something out of the nothing that was our kitchen in Greensboro. We came up short of completing the floors, but as soon as that's done I'll post dramatic before-and-after pictures here. Then your new year can really begin.

In the meantime, let me give you a tip that can simultaneously turn a depressing and sad state of mind into one of blissful contentment and save about an hour of reading that could otherwise be spent watching television. I received a nice gift over Christmas of the book Marley & Me by John Grogan, which is the true story of the author's "life and love with the world's worst dog," as the subtitle summarizes. It's quite a popular book, I understand, and it is indeed a good read about how Grogan and his wife acquired and came to love a rambunctious but loveable labrador with a knack for behaving in a humorously anecdotable fashion, but here's the tip. When you first open the book, immediately take a pair of scissors - an xacto knife will also do - and remove all the pages from Chapter 25 onward. This way, the story concludes with Marley slowing down a little bit as he gets older. The end.