Random Items from the Junk Drawer of my Mind #23

It's been a while since I did a Junk Drawer post, so let's get to it! 1. Our kitchen cabinets are finished! WooHooooo! I'm so glad that mess is all done. Truth be told, I didn't mind them before. They were nothing special, but I didn't hate them. J did though - hate them, that is, so he spent lots of his free time in the past couple of months making all new doors and drawer fronts, re-facing all the cabinet structures, and changing all the hardware. He used some lumber left over from when he built the cabinets in our last house and that lumber was recycled in the first place - it started out as an old redwood privacy fence. Someone tore it down and got J's dad to haul it away. Then J took it and used a planer and sander to get all the old paint off - well, most of it anyway. We left some in the cracks because we thought it looked cool and we liked the nail holes too so we deliberately left some of those instead of trimming them out. Then we put a clear-coat on the boards to make them shine. We (yes, I helped) put the last coat of polyurethane on a few days ago, so it's all done! Yay!! Here's how the kitchen looked when we first built the house nine years ago, using standard oak cabinets: Here's how it looks now using the recycled redwood lumber: And here's a close-up so you can see the cool swirly handles I found on eBay and the variations in color in the wood: I think that pretty much finished up our remodeling projects until J gets another wild hair. Oh yeah, I had a purge and clean session in the pantry this week too, just to make things extra tidy. It looks purrrrty. :-) 2. I mentioned Schrodinger's Cat in my "S is for..." list and my friend Morven found this poem that explains the concept. It's informative and hilarious - a great combination! Thanks, Morv. 3. According to this story, Forbes has just released some rankings of various things and has declared Cincinnati the Number 1 city in the US for Nightlife. Uuuuhhh, yeah. When I think "nightlife" that's certainly the first city I think of. NOT! I just...I...um....I have no response for that. Oh, wait a minute - maybe by "nightlife" they mean "crickets!" Now THAT would make sense. 4. I haven't forgotten those of you who asked questions in the RSR Virtual Press Conference and I'll get back to it soon, pinkie swear. I'm going to try to address a question asked about how I did the Creative Clones photo too, sometime in the next few days. 5. Here's today's DAT: "Sunspots" (clickable if you want to see it larger in a new window)