Victoria W's Profile

I honestly feel like an idiot for sending this question now. I'd only been here a week or so and my father in law was talking about how all the fresh food here isn't great and how he grew up eating canned food because that's all they could get. Turns out Anchorage from 40 years ago isn't exactly the same as Anchorage now! Since then I've moved into my own place and started cooking, and I can attest that the lemons here are about the same quality as the ones I bought in Seattle. Thanks for all the suggestions though everyone!

Comments on off-topic AT posts are my new favorite read. Please don't go, snarky commenters, you're my favorite part of this site!

I should mention that it was the recalled exploding dutch oven from Martha Stewart via Macy's, hence needing a replacement. Sigh.

My mother doesn't have special plates, but she does have good silver and serving dishes that we pull out for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and a few other special occasions throughout the year. I'll probably always live near my mother so I have been perfectly fine without a special set of anything. Even if my husband and I move away, I doubt I will ever buy my own set. I'd keep and use hers (which her English parents brought with them when they immigrated) if I inherit them, but I think they'd probably stay with my older sister.

She does have a set of Christmas plates, bowls and glasses, but not in the sense of 'special' that you mean--there are little snowmen around the rims and she bought them on clearance at Target after Christmas years ago. :) They use those starting mid-November until mid-January or so as every day dishes. Their attic is huge so they have plenty of space to store an extra set. I doubt that will ever be the case for me.

The first floor bathroom is lovely. There's no room for clutter and the light is actually on. In the rest of the house though there's so much stuff in such dark spaces that I can't fully appreciate anything. I don't know how you deal with so much stuff on your kitchen counters every day. Not my style at all.

How much light does a fixture like this actually give off? It looks like it would be incredibly limited and only shine down in a small circle. All the pictures are lit with natural light and it doesn't seem like the lights themselves are on. These are beautiful, but are they practical at all?

This is great but honestly I'll probably never use it. I haven't used my printer in a year since I finished school. I bring my laptop or phone into the kitchen with me and the photos help me know I'm doing everything right and keep me motivated to work through a new recipe.

The point isn't that tons of people have five kids and entertain large groups of friends and family weekly, but that people have reasons for owning large homes that you don't know and it's silly to judge without knowing anything about them. Not all large homes are new, not all are grandiose. You'd never guess how big her house is from looking at the outside; it's very unassuming. When you walk in it doesn't feel like a mansion because it isn't. It feels like a home.

Large homes are frequently featured for house tours on this site. People can get design inspiration from anywhere. I don't understand the issue.

It's beautiful! I really love the deck furniture. I hope you got lots of use out of it a couple weeks ago when it was in the 70s. :)

We managed to do this to our pizza stone a few months ago. Not the soap, just the burned-on bits. Some pieces had also fallen to the bottom of the oven and burned on there and i had been a while since we'd last cleaned the oven, so we figured a self cleaning cycle with the stone still inside would do the trick.

BEWARE! It didn't seem like much of the crunchy stuff was still there since we'd scraped it thoroughly, but apparently it was too much because after half an hour we were smoked out of our apartment. We had all the doors and windows open with five fans going. It was terrible. We ended up throwing out our pizza stone and getting a new one. Without the pizza stone in it, the self-cleaning cycle on the oven went just fine the next day. It was so strange. I hope you have better luck than we did!