As I mentioned last week, we started painting our "bar room" blue. The picture above shows the new color—and why we call this room the bar room.

The kitchen stove is just on the other side of the doorway, but the extractor fan is about six feet left of the stove, over the sink. The kitchen was remodeled and expanded in the 1960s; I believe the original stove was under the extractor fan. One con­se­quence of this is that, over time, bottles and glassware in the bar room become greasy.

I cleaned all the bottles tonight. Some of them needed it quite badly.

We have a sizeable collection of liquor and liqueurs, but we drink very little of it and we drink it slowly. Aside from the whiskies, I drink mostly beer or wine, as do most of our guests. I found about 10 bottles that we were given for our wedding shower—in 2000. We’re having a Yule party on Sunday. We’ll be urging our guests to drink some of the liquor, and to take a bottle home if they really like it.

We also have a sub­stan­tial collection of cookbooks, which were stored on book­shelves below the booze. Half of these books were hidden by a table and thus rarely used. Time to rid ourselves of many of them.