There is no type of food store where the treats for sale are as colorful as they are in a candy emporium. This was my first time in The Sugar Cube in Old Town, and I was impressed by the quality and selection. They also have a variety of kids candy making classes, which I will need to investigate further. The Sugar Cube had a mix of artisan candies including chocolate bars and salt caramels, as well as old classics like candy corn.
Antique Scale
Digital measuring tools are not only binary in their guts, they are binary in function. They either work or not. When the batteries die on our digital scale or thermometer, they become useless pieces of plastic.
Analog measuring tools are different. They may loose precision and require calibration, but it takes a lot to break them.
There is also beauty in this hanging scale that my digital kitchen scale will never have.
Antique Hanging Scale
Industrial Tools
The tools of the computer age are typically just methods to represent information. Programming languages and data structures are the hammers and wrenches we use today to create much of the world we inhabit. These information age tools lack the tangible aesthetics of industrial age tools.
The photos below were taken at Carbon Industrial Design in Alexandria, Virginia. Carbon recycles parts of old factories, as art and as furniture. I love the heft of the old tools, and the sense that they have done real work, building things of permanent substance, not things that can disappear with a key stroke.
A Brace of Wrenches
Long Pipe Wrench