Scattered Thoughts . . .

T he past few nights have been frigid in the sub-zero range but the days haven't been too bad...  until today, that is...   Fortunately, we have no need to be outside today.  I think we have some significant snow headed our way tomorrow night so we'll need to be outside on Monday to move snow and rake the roof so hopefully the weather will warm up a bit into the teens or 20s by then.

T he remainder of the plumbing parts I had ordered for our new kitchen sink installation project arrived last night.  This was good news because they weren't projected to arrive until early next week.  I successfully jumped on what little still needed to be done first thing this morning.  Now the new sink is fully functional! I needed some additional plumbing parts to connect the drain of the smaller sink basin to our waste plumbing so that delayed me in finishing up this relatively easy project.   The drains of our new sink do not line up exactly the same as our old sink so that was the first difference I needed to resolve.  The other difference is that the basins of the new sink are two different depths while both basins of the old sink were at the same depth.  The large basin of our new sink is at nine inches deep while the smaller basin is only eight inches deep.  The different depths really screwed up connecting the new sink to the drain.  I thought this would be quite easy to

You'd think that after two years of a pandemic, I'd have a large collection of new paintings to show but I don't.  Much of my pandemic time was spent reading and researching as I recovered from long term virus inflammation.  I'm still having problems but I am off my crutches and cane and I am now able to do some physical therapy everyday again so that is good.   Any time that I am in a lot of pain, I find that the pain significantly affects my ability to be creative and definitely affects my ability to sit still long enough to paint.  Actually, this sort of pain really drains me of all energy very quickly but, even putting that aside, the pain is extremely distracting which makes concentration and creativity nearly impossible.  That being said, I have occasionally worked on two paintings, on and off (mostly off), during this time period though.   First, I feel the need to point out that these are just small digital files of these rather large mixed media paintings.  I n

I replaced our broken quartz kitchen sink yesterday.  Once we removed the broken sink it was very easy to see how shattered it was when we viewed it from the outside of the larger basin.  What a waste of time and money that quartz sink was for us.   One would think that any kitchen sink would be more durable to dings and bumps.  Needless to say, I will never recommend a granite or quartz kitchen sink.  I'm not even sure about granite or quartz for a bathroom sink...  what if someone dropped something fairly solid and it hit the bathroom sink?  I don't think I would take the chance.  Just avoid granite and quartz sinks altogether...  same with ceramic/terracotta and glass.  Hmmm...  I'm just thinking...  we do have ceramic bathroom sinks now and we have yet to have a problem in there so perhaps granite and quartz would be fine for a bathroom sink.   To cover it again...  back a few months ago...  maybe a year or so ago...  a heavy cast iron Dutch oven was bumped into the si