The Couch Chronicles, Volume IIX

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One of the best aspects of shopping for furniture at Su Casa is the convenience of having several professional interior designers on staff who are available to consult on anything from finding a small accent piece to designing an entire house floor to ceiling.

Aside from being the design face of Su Casa, Mary, Derek, Leslie and Heather also fit about a thousand other tasks into a typical workday- one of which is writing and maintaining the Su Casa Design Blog. In it they cover everything from traditional to modern pieces, original artwork, holiday decorating and more. How could we not love a blog that seeks to marry fashion and home decor?

Su casa chairs

The current view of our living room, with Su Casa chairs as the centerpiece.

Back in January, owner Nick Johnson even contributed a post himself telling people to Shop Anywhere. Just the same way we wouldn’t want to dress head to toe from any one fashion retailer, we couldn’t quite fill up our whole living room from Su Casa. We got our biggest pieces there, but in the end we wound up sourcing things from other furniture chains, from the mall, from antique/boutique shops, from thrift stores, and even from Etsy. And hey, we’re not even done yet. So while we wait for our new couch to arrive from Pad any day now, we’re going to show you some of the non-Casa items we’ve added to the space.

West Elm Carved wood coffee table

This coffee table is an ideal match with our Surya rug, since they were both hand-made by artisan craftspeople in India. Initially we were exploring coffee tables with some sort of storage feature or at least tiered shelving underneath the table surface, so even we were surprised when we settled on this one. It’s pretty hard to not love it though.

The solid, hand-carved mango wood is pretty rustic, although the lines are actually quite modern. The recessed legs lend it the appearance of floating above the carpet, and at just over a foot high it’s much lower than a typical coffee table, although everything else we’ve chosen has a low profile, so it fits nicely into the room.

A nice feature of round coffee tables that we hadn’t considered before is the fact that it’s almost impossible to walk by it in the dark and bash your shins on it- great for a smaller space like a rowhouse.

West Elm Carved Wood Coffee Table

Did you catch that? We moved the table from the first picture across the room. We’re going to be doing a lot of re-arranging in the next six weeks or so, figuring our where things look best and feel most natural. Depending on how it shapes up, we may buy another one of those little console tables. Maybe two more, even. They’re so slim and minimal they can serve almost any purpose in any room.

When we first encountered this sort of table we were instantly impressed, and knew right away it was what we wanted for our room. Unfortunately the store where we found it had it listed at $499, which is a bit much even for a piece that’s handmade by a family-run shop in Minnesota, which this is. It took quite a bit of searching, but we eventually found this one for a very reasonable $179. So if we want to buy a second one it’s nice to know we can actually afford it.

TV stand and coffee table

It was extremely important to us to choose the right size television. When Roommate lived here he had a 47″ flatscreen, and we actually had to talk him down from getting a 60″ model. It was just too big. We really only sat a few feet away from it, and when you factor in the TV stand and his massive collection of DVD’s it stole half the space and made the room feel small.

We settled on a 40″ screen, which is big enough to look big but not so large that it takes over the room.

Only after that did we start shopping for something on which to keep it. Su Casa provided some inspiration for us with their reclaimed wood factory cart. It’s an impressive piece, but it’s just a bit more industrial than we wanted for our space, so we found a somewhat more subdued version in a small boutique store.

It’s proven to be a great choice for us in that it not only matches the steel of our console table, but also fits nicely against the stairs. We knew we didn’t want a traditional entertainment-center type piece, but we had to find something that could manage the all-important task of keeping cords and cables hidden, and this cart does a pretty good job of that. Take it from the Chop- nothing will ruin a beautiful room design faster than a mess of cables splayed all over the place.

herringbone armchairs

Some new pillows for our Highland chairs.

Here’s the part where we come in under budget. We had long had our eye on this particular fabric pattern from a snooty design studio. The problem was that we didn’t want to pay snooty design prices for pillows. Since we can’t sew much more than a button, we took to the internet to find someone who could. Rather than pay $80-90 each for designer pillows, we tracked down an Etsy seller who sews pillows from designer fabric and sells them for $15.

We also saved on a pedestal table by not buying an actual table. Instead we discovered this solid wood stool on clearance and ordered a separate glass tabletop to protect its surface. The end result is a very unique piece, topped off with a few thrifted mini-vases which cost us only a buck apiece. The accents on our console table were thrifted as well.

We’re still (ahem) ‘on the edge of our seat’ waiting for our new sofa, but for now the living room is finally beginning to feel more like an actual living room than just some empty space we walk through, and the Chophouse is starting to feel like home.

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This post is part of our entry in the Test it, Blog it, Win it contest. For the rest of the posts in this series, click here.

Today: Facebook IPO Will F You in the B

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Happy Facebook Day everybody! This post is being published at 7:00 am, and odds are that even at this early hour you’re already completely sick of hearing about Facebook’s IPO and how they have a billion users and are worth a trillion dollars etc etc etc.

We’ve certainly got our opinion of the IPO and of Wall Street in general, but we’re going to skip over all that. Today we’re taking this as an opportunity to talk a little bit about why we quit Facebook, and the many ways in which the world’s most successful website has failed us over and over again.

First, we should say that when we use the term “quit Facebook” we mean that we have deleted our personal Facebook account. This blog still has its own Facebook page. You can be our friend if you want, because it’s a personal page, even though it’s not our personal page. You can’t ‘like’ us, because we’re not a page-page, but you can still like us in the way you liked stuff before it was possible to ‘like’ stuff. Fair warning though, we seldom use that account for anything but posting links, and are considering deleting that one, too.

And that last paragraph, in a nutshell, is the whole problem with Facebook. It took more time and energy just to clarify our ‘status’ than it’s worth. To make this easier, here’s a bullet pointed list of some of the reasons we’re not on Facebook anymore:

  • The IPO. Today is the day that FB goes from being responsible for itself to being responsible to shareholders. Exactly the same way Myspace was done for when it was bought by Newscorp.
  • Timeline. Every ‘improvement’ Facebook has ever made has been terrible. The site may as well be in Mandarin Chinese it’s so hard to read now.
  • FB is taking over the entire internet. It follows you around the web and sees where you go. Some (fairly large) sites don’t even have their own logins and comments anymore, but rely entirely on Facebook data.
  • FB tries to be all things to all people. They saw that foursquare was successful so they added checkins. They saw Bandcamp start to grow so they added band pages. They are threatened by Twitter so they added that ticker box and subscriptions. Instagram got huge so they just bought it. All the while, they’re forgetting how to be Facebook.
  • The privacy settings are meaningless. We don’t understand the privacy settings and neither do you. Any ‘social media expert’ that claims they do is full of shit. Even if you know how they work, they are constantly changing, and what you thought was safe is suddenly an opt-out.
  • Can’t filter out junk fast enough. For fuck’s sake, we don’t need to see everything every friend ever did. Every time someone reads an article or plays a game or pins a Pinterest it shows up. Even when you tell it not to. And all different settings for mobile.
  • Babies and wedding rings and shit. Just stop it already.
  • FB shows us things from people we’re not friends with. And not subscribed to. Just because we have mutual friends. Facebook’s algorithms don’t know how friendship actually works. People don’t want to ‘add as friend’ the ex that just dumped them.
  • Facebook decides what’s important. Hey guess what? We don’t need to hear only from our 4 best friends, cause those are the ones we actually talk to. Quit burying the news from those second tier friends who are actually interesting. Just cause your pregnancy pics have 50 likes doesn’t make them interesting. Also, quit burying our status updates. Drinking raki and watching Hot to Trot is important, damn it.
  • The whole thing is unnecessary. Since we quit, our life is exactly the same. Maybe slightly better. That cover story in the Atlantic was pretty spot on. The only feature we kind of miss is event invites, but FB is slowly ruining those with unnecessary changes as well.
  • We want our own web presence. That’s one of the main reasons we started this blog in the first place. Even back then we envisioned a day when we would be totally sick of Facebook, and not willing to adopt what came next. We may too one day get sick of our twitter (although not anytime soon) and no matter how many sites we quit, we’ll always have our own site on which people can find us and we can post our ‘status.’

When we tell people that we quit Facebook, we get the exact same reactions that we get when we say we’ve quit eating meat and driving a car: people are curious and even show a bit of admiration before starting to make excuses and justifications about why they could never do that. ‘Oh, but I’ve got family out of state.’ or ‘Yeah, but I need to be on there for work.’ No you don’t. There are other ways. You’ve just become apathetic.

So good luck with your IPO Facebook. Enjoy your trillion dollars and your long slow slide downhill from here. For years you’ve made us socially lazy and promised things you could never deliver. That stops today.

Peter’s: No, The *Other* Peter’s

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Walking around and looking for a drink in downtown Baltimore can make you feel a little like Goldilocks. The Inner Harbor bars are too touristy and overpriced. The non-touristy places, like Midway Bar are too sketchy (and overpriced). But if you look hard enough, you can find a bar that’s juuuuust right.

Most people have never heard of Peter’s Pour House on Mercer Street as it’s officially known and located. But almost everyone can recognize it as one of those places they’ve gone past a million times but never actually seen the inside of. We’ve seen the inside of Peter’s, and we’re here to tell you it’s a pretty great bar.

The main thing that makes Peter’s a great bar is the fact that it’s a bar-bar, or a bar with no discernable theme. Even better than that, it sits square in the center of downtown Baltimore, but resists any tendencies toward becoming a Baltimore-themed bar, á la Nacho Mama’s. You won’t find a ton of Oriole birds and Mr. Boh’s plastered all over the place which is a welcome change from a lot of places around town.

Peter's

Unlike most business/lunch hour places, Peter's is open until 2 am.

Peter’s clientele is made up of roughly equal parts downtown office workers, locals on their way to or from the stadium, and hotel/convention type people staying nearby. The one thing that all these people have in common is beer and their love of drinking it, and Peter’s doesn’t disappoint in that regard. Their House Specialty is a 32oz domestic draft for $5 every day/all day. Thirty two ounces. That’s 2 2/3 beers. It’s made Peter’s a pre-game favorite of ours during baseball season, and we’re not too proud to drink Coors Light at that price, but their dirty little secret is that you can also get a 32 oz. Shiner Bock for another fifty cents. That’s an upgrade we’ll buy every single time.

For those of you who are even pickier than that about beer, they make the most of their taps balancing the macros by offering Harpoon, Yards, Resurrection, Fat Tire, Sam Adams Seasonal, and two selections from Fredrick’s Flying Dog Brewery.

The bar-bar theme even carries over into the food, and Peter’s serves lunch and dinner with daily specials whose Maryland origins come through on the palate and not in some sustainable locavore manifesto printed on the menu. You sit outside in their awesome covered outdoor seating area for happy hour and you get some steamed shrimp or a hot roast beef sandwich with your giant beer and you can see just enough of Light Street to think ‘Man. Look at all those suckers stuck in traffic. They are there and I am here. I must be doing something right.

The Baltimore Yellow

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So, we’re not sure if we made this up, or just picked it up along the way some place, but we’re going to go ahead and take credit for it because it appears that we are actually the first to publish it on the internet, and as everyone knows the internet is like the official hall of records or something.

Today we introduce into your lexicon a brand new phrase (unless, you know, you’ve heard it before). And that phrase is:

The Baltimore Yellow n. The period of time built into traffic signals during which the lights facing both (or all) directions are red at the same time. This period, usually about two full seconds allotted for safety, occurs between one light turning from red to green and the next light turning from red to green. It is common practice in Baltimore to treat this period the same as a yellow light.

Example: ‘That cab driver was great. We got to the Ballpark right in time because he made every Baltimore Yellow.’

taxi running a red light

Cab drivers have perfected the art of the Baltimore Yellow.

Even if you’ve never heard this particular phrase before, it’s a pretty good bet that as a Baltimore driver you’re familiar with the phenomenon itself. Any local driver that doesn’t look both ways before stepping on the gas at a green light is almost begging for someone to come barreling into one of their doors. It’s just a habit you get into if you’re actually a good driver (and not just someone who insists for no good reason that they can drive well).

As car owner, we’ve been on both sides of the Baltimore Yellow, and now that we’re a former car owner and a full time cyclist, we’re even more painfully aware of the (ahem) unwritten rules of the road. Hell, we’ve even been pulling this move on a bicycle from time to time: looking for traffic behind and taking the lane in the intersection so as to be seen clearly by cross traffic during the Baltimore Yellow.

It’s not unsafe, per se, as long as everyone understands that this is how our streets work. Some people have been known to rant and rave and wave middle fingers and lay down on horns when they see other drivers taking advantage of the Baltimore Yellow, but whatever you think of it one thing is certain: the Baltimore Yellow is not going away any time soon, so we may as well give it a name.

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(Hat tip to local blog Raising Baltimore for capturing an actual photo of a cab hitting a Baltimore Yellow.)

It Could Be Worse: Out of Town Fans Invade Camden Yards Part IV

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Anarchist baseball

If Occupy Oakland had their way, this would be the new A's logo.

It’s a Tuesday home game today and that means it’s Ollie’s Bargain Night. All upper deck seats at the Yard tonight are $10, which is the cheapest you’ll ever get a ticket for a so-called “prime” game.

If you’re like us, you scoff at prime games and laugh a little at the idea of charging Yankee and Red Sox fans extra and are happy to watch on TV and wait for the next homestand to buy tickets. If the Orioles are serious about luring back hometown fans for division series’ we’d like to see them go as far as the Nationals did recently, banning out-of-state group sales and offering a pair of free tickets to anyone who buys a pair of tickets to a Phillies game.

Until they do though, we here in Charm City should count our blessings. New Yorkers and Bostonians may be a bit abrasive, but as we’ve said before it could be worse…

The Oakland Athletics. It’s hard to find a proper A’s fan anywhere outside the Bay Area. Partially that has to do with simple geography, but mostly it’s because the Athletics suck out loud. They suck so badly that they had to invent a whole new field of mathematics just to quantify how terrible they were and how to get better without any talent or money.

Oakland may be short on fans, but one thing the city has in spades is left-wing troublemakers. If they showed up in the same numbers as Yankee fans it wouldn’t be a baseball game, it would be a full-on Occupation. The jerseys and caps of normal fans would be replaced by the flags and banners of Occupy Oakland, The New Black Panther Party, Code Pink, Earth First! Black Bloc, Wobblies, and every other manner of unwashed rabble with its own ideological manifesto in hand.

Of course, you wouldn’t have to worry about Oakland people taking all the best seats since their goal would clearly be to occupy the playing field itself and force a shut-down of the game. On the bright side, it would be interesting to see if the Orioles’ new brigade of on-field security are up to the task of beating, macing, tear-gassing and fire-bombing them like the mayor of Oakland did.

If we ever needed to ‘Protect the Yard,’ we need to protect it against the Athletics. Given its own way, Occupy Oakland would make sure the starting lineup was proportionally representative of gender-queers, black Muslims and blind-midget-Bolivians. Admission to the ballgame would be free for all, but the National Anthem would be replaced by a 20 minute Noam Chomsky lecture. The Patriarichal PA system would be demolished and all players would be announced by the human microphone. The balls themselves would be made by the crafts committee, and the bats would be organic fair-trade Indonesian sustainable bamboo. There would be a collectivist farm growing in right field and hot dogs would be replaced by roasted parsnips. Players would not run the bases individually, but instead would march around them together in solidarity.

We can’t let that happen, Baltimore. Peter Angelos may be a greedy capitalist pig and all, but he sure beats the alternative. The next time you see a pack of Jeter jerseys walking down Pratt Street, just be glad that they’re not carrying bullhorns, sleeping bags, and tents.