Questions that Go Unanswered

I've been away from this site for too long, partly because I manage it from my home p.c., have never really gotten the hang of dealing with it from my laptop or New York Times computer, and in recent weeks I wasn't home much: a major kitchen redo turned my apartment into a dusty, disheveled wreck. Like most Manhattan-ites, I don't dwell in a huge amount of space, so having to clear one room of everything and distribute its contents to other rooms renders much of the apartment unusable. I've been toggling between the homes of others. And slowly losing my mind.

I mention the new kitchen because it really isn't that far afield of themes in "Born Round." I want to cook more, I want to cook better, I want to enjoy my time in the kitchen, and for all of those reasons --- plus the aged, decrepit state of my old kitchen, where the tiled floor was coming loose in a way that made walking across it like crunching on sea shells and sea glass on the shore --- a kitchen renovation made sense. I think I avoided cooking in the past because I thought: let's not find a NEW way and another way to obsess about food. But that was before I realized, both prior to, and during, my critic says, that an obsession about quality can be a healthy redirection of an obsession about quantity. Now I'm ready to cook.

But that's not the point of this post. For anyone who's made it this far, I want to apologize for any questions submitted to this web site that went unanswered. That "Ask Me" function attracts hundreds of Spam messages, and at times they so outnumber real ones that the only thing to do is a blanket deletion, during which some real questions from real readers may wind up expunged. I have to talk to the designer who set up this site; in the meantime, my apologies. Now that I have more regular access to the computer at which I manage these things, I can check the questions every few days and weed through the Spam. It's only when I turn away for weeks at a time that the forest of Spam gets so thick I can't take the time to separate the trees, so to speak.

The kitchen's not done yet. But the dustiest part is over. Within a few days the cabinets will all be in, and I decided to buck the trend and go with a very dark-stained oak, so now I have to decide on countertops that brighten the whole deal up quite a bit. I feel certain I screwed the whole thing up. In a few weeks, when it all comes together, I'll know.

And I'll cook.