On the 22nd I picked up an 18" John Boos end grain walnut butcher block cutting board. It's about two, maybe two 1/2 inches thick, and apparently sells for $250 new. It was on the clearance shelf at a local Big Box Kitchen Store, with no tag or wrapper. Someone probably left it there because it weighs about 25lbs. I took it to the front counter, where I asked if it should have been in clearance or if it was a mistake. A frantic, harried looking woman pointed to another girl there and said "I have to ask her. I don't know, but she will."

She then asked a girl who looked about five years younger than me (read: probably college student who doesn't really know anything about the store, but needed a job for the holiday season), who said "I have to check the computer." This girl then pulled up the Box Box Kitchen Store's web page and looked for "cutting board". It listed about 90 products, with photos. None of them were this board. I suggested she try "Boos" and go from there but she pooh-pooh'ed me (I am just an old man who doesn't understand computers, after all), and said this was everything. She then said that since she couldn't find it she'd have to find something similar.

While she was off looking, I searched for "Boos", found it, priced it (EXPENSIVE), and closed the browser window. She returned with a tape measurer and said "I think this is the one on sale but I have to measure it to be sure". Getting a rough diameter, she then said "yeah, this one is $49.95." I just smiled, and offered to carry it to the register for her.

Someone is getting hollered at during inventory, but it's not going to be me.

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Additionally, the local cutlery shop sold me a slightly used Global 3" paring knife and a nameless, but vintage, carbon steel paring knife for $10 this weekend past. The carbon steel knife is a clipped point knife set in a wooden handle with a half tang, going back probably 20 or 30 years, and is in remarkably good shape. The blade is tight in the handle and the pins through the tang are still solid. No cracks, no pitting, and just a slight carbon steel patina.

In fact, the more I look at it, the more it looks like a more expensive version of the Victorinox Forged Professional line of solingen knives (which, by the way, I have already raved about because they're excellent European knives at a fantastically affordable price).

For the record, if you find a local cutlery shop which carries the Victorinox line, you'll often find it discounted deeply beyond MSRP. You know, if you're into saving money.

Not pictured are the baozi we made with some leftover char siu pork.

I've got a lot of things that I want to write about, but right now I've just popped in to mention the following snippets while I expand other ideas into proper paragraphs

• If an apartment is in a building of condos, and the condo association doesn't allow pets, that I understand. It's landlords who own their buildings outright and simply say "no pets" without a willingness to talk about it that irk me. Yeah, your apartment will eventually rent but you're still going to have to shell out to have it painted and repaired when the tenant moves out. If you'd let me move in, I'd have probably done it for you, as well as spackled your walls, changed light bulbs, mopped the floor, and fixed that broken kitchen cabinet that you've been meaning to put a new hinge on for the last decade but just haven't found the time to touch.

• Avoid the words "quaint", "charming", "cute", and "cozy" when looking for a new apartment. They are all synonymous with "horrible".

• The Perry Bible Fellowship book is every bit as awesome as you'd expect.

• The Chronicles of Wormwood is a surprisingly thoughtful story from Garth Ennis. Yeah, it's all drinking and swearing and weird sex. There are no surprises here. But to me, this is the most direct statement about what it should mean to be a modern Christian vs. what most people actually do.

• Kikuichi knives are deliciously simple to sharpen because the steel they use is so good that it just needs a few quick passes over a 1000 grit or finer stone to remove the slight dullness that you might maybe possibly somehow have managed to wear into the "cut off your fingers without actually making you bleed" blade. Good luck finding one at a reasonable price though. The weak dollar-to-yen exchange pretty much guarantees that you're not finding anything from them for as cheap as you'd like.

• While I'm babbling about knives, the Victorinox Forged Professional line is possibly my current favorite line of german cutlery, but so incredibly hard to find in stores. They feel like a perfect marriage of Japanese knife design (little to no return or finger guard on the bolster, allowing the blade to be sharpened all the way to the end of the edge) and European style (thicker spine, flatter top, curved tip) with Solingen steel. It's designed like a Wüsthof or Henckles knife, but actually worth the cost. If the spine of the knife was rounded off for you already, it'd be the perfect European chef's knife. As it is, the 10" chef's knife is the first knife I turn to for large jobs, like this last years Thanksgiving dinner.

• Absolutely unrelated, I miss having a web-hosting account that I could run Simplelog on. While it hasn't been updated properly in almost a year, I really miss having a simple, easy to use and easy to maintain app that I'm comfortable hacking around on pushing my horribly abrupt and disjointed ramblings out to the world.

• Also, it bears mentioning that for the most part, I agree with both Zed Shaw's vitriolic shovel-spade-name-calling (because his points are usually at least in the ballpark when they're not spot on), and his points about things that the Rails "community" is doing to smash its own toes in.