Scattered Thoughts . . .

A s expected, we had a great time with the kids and grandchildren here at our house for Christmas!   We celebrated on the day after Christmas Day this year.  We went back to our already established tradition of starting our day with breakfast once everyone arrived.  This year, however, it was a late breakfast.  We had an egg casserole with a French toast bread base, maple and brown sugar sausage links, bacon, and cinnamon buns.  I didn't get much food and, actually, I didn't get a single cinnamon bun but what I had was very good.  For the most part, all the food was eaten so it must have been good.   In this blog entry, I included photos from this fun day and I closed this blog entry with a video which does a better job at showing some excited grandchildren.   The house was quiet earlier in the morning before everyone arrived as Gee and I filled the living room with presents...  stacks and stacks of presents... The stacks of pr...

I am planning to get (well, really, hoping to get ) a few videos of me at the piano recorded, edited and published so I can share them here.  Right now we have too much noise from outdoors entering our living room for me to do any music recording in the house so I'll have to wait until the weather is cool enough to block out all noise (which means winter).  Closing all the windows and doors will mostly resolve this issue.  In the meantime, I'm playing around with settings and editing techniques in preparation of that project.  I haven't shared a video in quite some time and, unfortunately, a bit has changed since that time.  I'm quickly realizing that there are significant changes with my blog's formatting, with video editing, and with my video hosting website.  This means I have a bunch of new stuff to learn. I need to point out that it is incredibly and too often needlessly exhausting for an unhealthy person to keep up with these types of constant change...

Although I spent a solid two weeks renovating the playhouse this June, this project really started at the end of last summer.  Last summer, we added an outdoor kitchen to the back of this little playhouse.  I tied the roof of the playhouse in with the roof for the kitchen.  That was a project in itself.  The old roof on the playhouse was partially collapsed, leaking and in generally poor condition so it was time to replace the roof anyway.  So, last summer, I installed a new roof on the playhouse to include adding a homemade skylight and replacing more than half of the roof framing.  I built a dormer roof off of the playhouse roof that would extend out to posts to cover the outdoor kitchen area.   I never did finish the outdoor kitchen last summer before the snow arrived so even that project wasn't finished.  The grill in the kitchen was usable through the winter and I had a nice U-shaped kitchen countertop but the cabinets were not finis...