This tree stand is modern and traditional at the same time. Excellent!

How cool is that? I have pretty modern sensibilities. I love a clean line and a minimum of fuss. At the same time, I am an absolute sap when it comes to Christmas. I love it that there's a day built right into the calendar that's an excuse to show the people around you that you love them. Because Christmas has so many emotions attached to it, it seems to give nostalgia buffs a free pass to crowd up their homes and neighborhoods with as much offensively tasteless crap as China can crank out. Ewww. No thanks. So what's a sensible minimalist to do with his tree?

Well thanks to the clever gals at Design Boner, I found a solution.

This is the simply named Pine Tree Stand by Maria Håård for Design House Stockholm. The Pine Tree stand is made from lacquered steel and it's available for online purchase through Design House Stockholm. Never fear, they ship world wide and they conduct business across all currencies. The Pine Tree Stand comes in three colors and retails for the very reasonable $75 US.

Although it may be too late for this year, it's never too early to plan for next year. And as they say in Stockholm, god jul!

A microscopic look at some counter materials

Dartmouth College

Another great contact I've made through Twitter in the last few months is the Aspex Corporation in Pittsburgh, PA. Aspex has been in business since the early '90s and they have embraced social media with a savvy and confidence that makes them stand out. The Aspex Corporation makes Scanning Electron Microscopes among other things and that a company in a very technical field and a kitchen designer could strike up a casual acquaintance is a great example of the expansion and simultaneous contraction of the world made possible by social media.

A scanning electron microscope (or SEM) is an instrument for visualizing the surfaces of objects and materials not possible through ordinary optical microscopes. Rather than using a lens to magnify reflected light (an optical microscope) SEMs use a focused beam of electrons to scan a surface.

Aspex Corporation

The electrons bounce back to a detector and the detector generates an image. SEMs can only "see" a small section of an object at a time. So the object being examined is placed on a Sample Stage in the SEM and the stage makes small, incremental movements called rasters. The rasters are then compiled into a complete image and displayed on a screen. It's pretty cool stuff. Most people have seen SEM images of ant's heads or snowflakes and that's a quick explanation of how those images were made.

Well Aspex is running an offer to scan and analyze any sample that can fit inside the chamber of one of their SEMs for free so I took them up on their offer.

I enjoy cutting through marketing speak to an almost unhealthy degree and counter materials are a product category rife with it. For as long as they've been around, I've heard the claims made by quartz composite manufacturers that their products were "perfectly smooth and non-porous." Since this claim is always made during a comparison with the surface irregularities of granite my BS meter goes off.

Quartz composites are a perfectly fine material and I specify their use all the time. In my mind, they are an alternative to natural stone counters but not a substitute for them. They have a very unique look and there are specific times when their use is called for. At the same time, sometimes the over all look of a room calls for granite or soapstone or marble. These materials are not interchangeable and each one has its strengths and weaknesses.

So when Aspex Corporation made its offer to scan any sample I could fit into the chamber of one of their SEMs, I decided to put to the test the quartz composite claims of perfect smoothness and non porosity.

I took two samples that had been sitting on the end of my desk for years and shipped them off to Aspex.

The samples I sent were a piece of Santa Cecelia granite and Sienna Ridge by Silestone. This is by no means an accurate sampling of an entire industry's products. Rather, this is a test of two very specific and very well handled samples. The evidence presented here is anecdotal at best but I still there's something valid to be learned.

photo from Aspex Corp.

Here are my samples upon arrival at Aspex.

photo from Aspex Corp.

Here they are relaxing in front of the PSEM eXpress, Aspex Corporation's bench top model.

The degree of magnification in the following examples is expressed with a scale in each image. The scale is in microns and a micron is another word for a micrometer. A micro meter is a millionth of a meter, put another way, a micron is 1/1000th of a millimeter. Microns are abbreviated as µm. To give you a little more perspective, a human air is 100µm wide and a red blood cell is 8µm in diameter. Salmonella bacteria are 2µm in length and 0.5µm wide.

So here's what my sample of Santa Cecilia looks like.

In this image, the scale at the top reads 200µm. So if you took two human hairs and set them side by side, they would be as wide as the scale.

In this image the scale reads 1000µm. So if you took ten human hairs and set they side by side, they would be as wide as the scale.

Here's another Santa Cecilia granite image at 1000µm.

Now it's quartz composite's turn.

Here's my quartz composite sample with a scale that reads 200µm.

Here is is at a higher magnification, 1000µm

And another shot of it at 1000µm.

Pretty cool, huh? Now, I will grant the quartz composite people an acknowledgement that this sample is smoother than this sample of granite, but I would hardly call it "perfectly smooth and non porous."

So what I take away from this is that I won't be swayed by claims that I should specify quartz composites over natural stone because they are smoother and non-porous (and more hygienic by implication) and I will continue to use composites where they would look best and natural stone where it would look best.

What do you think?

In the meantime, poke around on Aspex Corp's website. You can even send in something of your own with this form. They have a pretty cool contest every week where they invite people to guess what a scan is. Here's last week's:

Care to hazard a guess?

Why it's a Post-it note being pulled back from the pad of course.

Thanks Aspex!

Mammy's little baby loves shortbread

Amid the murmurings that followed Kevin's brilliant post on what used to be a private and quiet Christmas tradition in St. Pete (well, maybe not quiet), a heard a voice calling out for a good Christmas cookie recipe. Well, here's the best one I have.

I love shortbread with something that borders on an obsession and I played around with if for years until I perfected a recipe that produces a buttery, somewhat salty, somewhat sweet and perfectly sand textured shortbread. The ingredients couldn't be simpler, the art to this one comes from the perfect oven temperature and time spent therein.

I used to try to make these with a spoon, but they have to be of a uniform thickness or they won't have the right texture. On a lark I bought a cookie gun one year and it yielded the perfect shortbread cookie. Who knew? Some people call them cookie presses, but I call it a cookie gun. It makes me feel more macho that way.

Anyhow, I bought a Wilton Cookie Press (gun! it's a gun!) Pro Ultra 2. It's perfect --plenty of shapes and it's easy to load and clean.

My Ultimate Shortbread


Ingredients

• 1 cup butter, softened 
• 1/2 cup confectioners' sugar 
• 1/4 cup cornstarch 
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C).
2. Whip butter with an electric mixer until fluffy. Stir in the confectioners' sugar, cornstarch, and flour. Beat on low for one minute, then on high for 3 to 4 minutes. Drop cookies by spoonfuls 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet.
3. Bake for 8 minutes in the preheated oven. Watch  them like a hawk. Pull them out of the oven at precisely 8 minutes or they will scorch. Once they're out of the oven let them cool for a couple of minutes and then transfer them to a cooling rack. Sprinkle them with powdered sugar while they are still hot if you'd like.

That recipe will make enough shortbread to feed an army but fear not. Take the extras, throw them in a food processor, grind 'em up and make an amazing crust for a cheesecake.

Christmas party tricks

Richard Wiseman is a skeptic, magician, author and psychologist based at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. He is also one of my more entertaining heroes. Here is his top ten list of Christmas party tricks. Amuse and entertain your friends with these, putting out candles with a home made batch of CO2 particularly.




The man's mind won't quit and the world's a better place for it.

I'm back from the frozen north

I am back and I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to all of my guest bloggers who have ably held down the fort in my absence. So cheers and thank you once again to Elizabeth, JB, David, Nick, Sherry, Saxon, Kit, Kelly, Kevin, Leslie, Julie and Brandon. There's one last straggler and he'll post at some point next week. So Judd gets a preemptive thank you.

Before I left, I told all of my guest bloggers to write what ever they wanted and not to let themselves be constrained by my niche or my usual way of doing things. It was a real thrill to turn on my computer every morning and to see what that day's guest post brought. They were all great, and I love the personal stories most of all.

I was in Washington DC and points east while I was gone and the primary reason for my break was this young lady:

That's my great-niece and I was in DC to meet her for the first time. I still can't get over how recently her mother was a similar babe in arms. The thrill that she gives my sister (the grandmother) or my parents (who are now great-grandparents) is something I can barely imagine. My break was a time for fond remembering and it was great to see so many of my guest posters engage in some fond rememberings of their own.

While I'm showing off baby pictures, this is me with my favorite year-and-a-half-old, red-headed nephew.

I have multitudes of nieces and nephews and I have to be very specific when I play favorites. Kinship question: If the young man above (who's my brother's son) and the mother of the baby above (who's my sister's daughter) are cousins, what does that make my nephew and my great-niece to each other?

But alas, all was not a pleasure trip. I spent some time with the amazing gang at New Ravenna Mosaics on my way back to Florida this week and I cannot wait to write about the wonders I saw in Exmore Virginia.

Anyhow, for those of you who have kept up in my absence I say thank you. I am resuming my usual posting schedule as of now and I have a back log of blog topics I am rarin' to dive into. Stay tuned.