How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Open Floor Plan

...ining room. And the two closets that share a wall between the two bedrooms used to be one big closet with a window. The window is visible from the outside but plugged up on the inside. I’m pretty sure that the house we live in was a kit offered by the Pacific Ready Cut company. Style #48 in the 1925 Pacific Ready-Cut catalog closely resembles our floor plan with the dining room and living room flipped and the closet in a different orientation. We...

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A Question About Freezing and Canning Home Grown Vegetables

...ia. For some mysterious reason, we get canning questions on our our seldom used Google voice number (213 537-2591). A good question came in this week. The caller asked, “I’ve got a home garden and produce trickles in. Can I freeze it and then can it later?” I called back and confirmed that the question related to pressure canning vegetables. Not knowing the answer to this question, I wrote an email to chef Ernie Miller, who I had the great privile...

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How to Carry Heavy Objects with a Two-Person Carrying Pole

...le would work much better for most other objects. The carrying pole can be used to carry people, a use for which there is a word in English: “litter.” Here’s a carrying pole being used in Guatemala to carry an injured man to the hospital: I’m hoping that the litter version of the carrying poll will become Kelly’s new way of getting around the neighborhood during the hot summer months: In all seriousness, I would like to figure out a way to get rel...

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On the Problem of Food Storage and Hoarding

...the utility room. Those shelves quickly filled with aspirational but never used ingredients such as tapioca flour as well as mediocre food preservation projects that I just couldn’t admit defeat on. Our kitchen’s ample built-in cabinets. When it came time for our painters to work on the utility room we decided to take down the shelves and try to live with the storage built for the original inhabitants of this house. Now I’ve noticed that when I go...

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Saturday Tweets: A Difficult Week

...honor of fall, reupping this story of a Toronto neighborhood activist who used leaves to show how much excess pavement could be recaptured as people space. They called it a “leafy knockdown” https://t.co/I2XRSnuAdy pic.twitter.com/2BQ6UfjsqS — Streetsblog USA (@StreetsblogUSA) November 6, 2018 20th Century: “Cities are created by, and for, traffic.”—Robert Moses, Le Corbusier, et. al. 21st Century: “Cities are created by, and for, people.”—We, th...

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