Friday: Valentine's day

I've been saving this for a week.

 But it's also Julie's birthday, so I can't just say we should blot the day out of history.  And now I want cake.

I decided last weekend that I was bored with lunch sandwiches, and decided to try lunch salads:

Like this.

 I haven't sorted out the best way to do this.  This one has baby lettuce, sundried tomatoes, slivered carrots, croutons, ham, and that really tasty gouda that WF always has presliced like that.  The problem is the balance between dressing and not having soggy croutons.  I made a quick red wine vinaigrette, but it doesn't coat things very well, and putting the box's lid back on and shaking it around magically does three things:

1. all ham immediately finds the closest ham, and they stick together into a chunk.
2. all carrots and sundried tomatoes flee to the bottom of the box, so once you eat that last bit of lettuce, you find a secret pile of both of those.
3. the dressing vanishes, no matter how much you put in, only to appear again later in a puddle around the edge of the box.

I clearly have some work to do.  I've also thought this would work for a chicken caesar idea as well.  I do need to get better croutons, as the ones I have were designed by an idiot, so they crunch perfectly fine, unless you get one with the solid grains in it, which cannot be crushed by a molar, and exist only to break teeth.

Plus, I've done seafood the past two days:

This soy-honey salmon recipe was a lie.  The sauce did not in any way "form a glaze," and I shortchanged your cooking times and still ended up with overcooked fish.  I guess that's what I get for not marinating it overnight.

WF fish counter crab cake.  I kind of want to do slider week again, and put this in as one of the sliders.

I also came up with a brilliant idea today for a product that doesn't exist but totally should.  I have lots of books.  Like think of some books, and I have like twice that.  Maybe more if you thought small.  However, I have insufficient shelf space for all of these books.  This means, I lot of my library is in stacks on the floor, or in double-packed shelves (one layer of books, with another layer of books in front).  The problem is that I have a limited amount of wall space, and you have to put shelves against a wall.

Instead of doing things like this, they should make filing cabinets that are designed for books.  This stores the books like a normal shelf, but it's perpendicular to the wall. This makes is stick out further than a regular shelf, but you usually don't put things in front of a bookshelf anyway.  Instead of just pulling a book off the shelf, you open the drawer, and then pull the book off of that shelf.  Here, have a quick doodle-y sketch:

It's nearly legible.

The important thing is that the sides have to be kept as hollow as possible, so my quick idea uses a set of six rails to support an open drawer:  each side has a top and bottom one, plus there are two tracks on the bottom.  Since regular filing cabinets don't fall over (due to the trick that opening one drawer locks the others closed), this would be similarly stable.  The slidey bookend doodle isn't something I've made up, my filing cabinet has that, so I assume it's a standard filing cabinet thing.

This would be significantly more expensive than the cheap flat pack shelves that are common, but I think the storage density would help mitigate that.  The other benefit would be that since the books are isolated, there'd be less chance of dust/light/bug damage, so the books would be safer.  In conclusion, I really want to have a filing cabinet style bookcase.

• I read Paul Krugman, so I saw this.  Then I did a search on twitter (assuming this was something recent), and discovered this and this.  The WSJ has had grammatically incorrect advertisements out for two months.  Holy unprofessionalism, Batman.
• Pika-jollnir?
• This title is completely accurate.  There's using technology for good purposes (like cool filing cabinet bookcases) and then there's using it for bad purposes (like building eyesores that inevitably leak because you don't understand what you're doing).  I'm not kidding.  Like all of his buildings leak.  Or try to set LA on fire.  I can't come up with more fundamental purpose of architecture than a) don't let the rain in; and b) don't burn down the fucking town.  You suck, Frank Gehry, and I don't care how many rich assholes you fool into paying for your shit.