A Stove Story

I recently became enamored of a stove. (And of Google Books, too. You’ll see why below).

On Saturday night after a dinner featuring our first salad taken entirely from the garden, I settled down on the couch to do a little light Web surfing.  It started innocently enough. A little Facebook, a little New York Times, a little Twitter.

My Twitter feed is a little chaotic.  I tried for awhile to keep two Twitter accounts, one for work and one for me.  I spend my days as an editor at the business magazine Forbes and I spend the rest of my time gardening, cooking and being silly. So for awhile I had one for Serious Ann and another for Real Ann. But I couldn’t keep up with both and so now my Twitter feed is a motley collection of musings on Dow plunges, cooking artichokes and Scottie puppies.  Follow with care.

But back to the stove.  On Saturday I noticed a bunch of tweets from a woman I follow about a really cool sounding not-for-profit salvage store in Astoria. In addition to sinks and diner signs and chairs, she also tweeted about coffins and topiary and heart-shaped hot tubs.  So I clicked over and started poking around Build It Green! NYC’s Featured Items.

I immediately fell in love with the historic terracotta tiles from the amazing Sun Building in downtown Manhattan (I would love to redo our kitchen with these). And for some reason, I really like these metal and wood Police desks from the ’80s.  But it’s this 19th century stove that really caught my attention.

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Lethologica

I have very nearly run out of words this week.

The old IRT power station. It supplied power for New York's first subway.

The beautiful, enormous building was designed by McKim, Mead & White.

I’m also all out of big thoughts, the ability to punctuate and good questions.  You see, for more than a week now, I’ve been filling in for one of the editors at work who has been out of the office.  I have slain many hackneyed phrases, deleted dozens of superfluous adverbs and thought very, very hard about the future of sports, the crisis on Wall Street and the new regulatory landscape in D.C., all on top of my regular job.

12th Avenue street art. This whole building was covered with it.

Into The Pan

I have a co-worker, an accomplished young woman, who’s guilty pleasure is reading chick lit.

To her this is a deviant activity.  She was raised by a family of very smart women, is Ivy League-educated and has a rather important job for someone of her not-yet advanced years.  So to her, reading what is the literary equivalent of a pair of fluffy, pink maraboo-bedecked, high-heeled boudoir slippers is a delicious and deviant activity.  It’s a release into a fantasy world where the tough questions life tosses at you include “Manolo or Louboutin?”  “Should I or shouldn’t I?”  and “Champagne or martini?”

I think this is a wonderful escape.  Working in the same newsroom, a place that can make Times Square look like a misty Adirondack lake, I fully understand the need to escape into another world.  But chick lit has just never done it for me.  Nope, I like my literary frippery to have a little more age on it.  My guilty pleasure is historical fiction.

I know, I know, you’re all sitting out there thinking, “Wooooooooo… Wow, that’s so, uhm, indulgent, Ann!”  God, even my guilty pleasures are cerebral.  But, it’s true. When I’m surrounded by chaos, there’s nothing I love more than to sink into a book about another time, far far in the past.