I got hogs in the pen and corn to feed them on

We are waiting for bookshelves. They are our wedding present from my parents: my father has been building them since December. The plan is to start putting up the first set today and if necessary continue over the weekend until there is finally enough room for me to unpack my books that have been in storage since 2006 and for derspatchel to array his collection similarly. Our house has been full of boxes for months and months. Once the boxes are cleared, we'll know what kind of space we really have. With the shelves on their proper walls, we'll be able to hang art. We might even be able to think about furniture (we have both been missing couches dreadfully) although that's far enough down the chain of events that I'm not exactly picking out colors. Mostly I want my books. I've missed them.

Yesterday was spent at the Boston Museum of Science with Rob and rushthatspeaks, later joined by gaudior when she got out of work. The point of the trip was to see "Innovation in the Art of Food: Chef Ferran Adrià," which we'd been referring to as "the exhibit that isn't about molecular gastronomy." It was more than anything else a retrospective of elBulli's menu. Electric screwdrivers and olive oil caviar. Walnut purée molded into the forms of the original walnut. Shaved things and icy things and things that smoked and ravioli. It was conceptual art. To everyone's relief, the otherwise mediocre food court turned out to serve Dippin' Dots, because we needed something futuristic after that much foam, freeze-drying, and spherification, and nitrogen-flash-frozen drops of mint chocolate ice cream were exactly it.¹ After an interlude in the new Hall of Human Life, about which I have mixed feelings even though it allowed me to measure the efficiency of my customary walking pace (150 calories per hour, requiring 43 grapes to sustain; terrible) and the rate which the temperature dropped in my hands when exposed to cold (started at 58°F, lost three degrees in a minute; terrible),² we ended up spending even more time at "Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture," and after that we were too hungry to think. There were historical Mongolian and Roman recipes in that thing. There was a marketplace in Tenochtitlan and four different contemporary foodways in New York City. I had no idea that France was the center of oyster cultivation in Europe or that there had ever existed an American cookbook from 1952 called Dishes Men Like. We walked to Desfina on Third Street and did not actually order the entire menu, but we kind of tried. I really like bakalao and khorta. Rush pronounced the entire place the best Greek food they'd eaten since Greece. The moral of this story is that museums which intend on displaying exhibitions devoted to avant-garde food science and/or the many cultures of food around the globe should really have a restaurant or at least a food court that's up to the challenge.

Further updates and/or backlog as the day warrants.

1. I know now how the terrifying candy roe were achieved. Alginate in a solution of calcium chloride. The copy of Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks (2010) in the museum store told me the proportions: 1% solution of sodium alginate, 0.67% of calcium chloride. Rush and I successfully titrated potassium sorbate and xanthan gum (separately!) for the coffee syrup in December, so I suspect we can handle these mathematics. And then we will spherify everything.

2. At this point Rush declared that since I plainly did not evolve for life on either the plains or a cold climate, I must belong in the rainforest, and Gaudior proved that biology is not destiny by noting that I live in New England and walk everywhere. I like my cousins.