Fooling around with watercolors

there is a lot of doodling one must do 

with watercolor paints to get them to work right

There is also a lot of brushwork 

and water distribution

It's that last part that has been giving me the most trouble

to little and the paint skitters over the paper

 leaving skid marks and empty spots

To much and it leaves puddles of color in odd places

that pool and dry with hard edges

to much water will also thin out the pigment 

to almost invisibility 

in an already transparent medium

Then there is the paper itself to worry about

mixed media paper is good to practice brush strokes

and color mixology, which is completely different than color theory 

and your initial water retention on

 

but not good enough for actual pictures

because the paper will suck the water right out of your brush  till it gets pilly and weird

and any attempt at finesse will go right out the window

the leaning curve between too much water and not enough is

proving difficult 

But rewarding

and it tickles my colorbone

I will leave you with a cat 

or two

Kitchen katastrophy a saga in several parts

 So around july 1st-ish My 30 year old gas stove top decided it was time to unalive itself. 

 After a couple months lighting it with matches, because it's first symptom, was the automatic spark stopped working. Needless to say, we needed a new one for a while. We were just avoiding the inevitable.

Yes, it had symptoms, multiple. Over several months.

We thought, as you do, If this is the worst that happens we can live with it....

It wasn't 

Every once in a while you would get a whiff of gas and go make sure all the burners were off and the furnace and water heater were ok, 'cause they're gas too. It would go away and everything would be fine for a while.

Until it wasn't 

We were smelling more gas, more often and then the gas bill came. It was twice as high as it usually was. sooooo, this needed better investigating shoes. 

So I did what you do, I took everything apart washed it all good, because it may be last time I did this, I didn't connect something right, put it back together again, making sure everything was connected right, turned it on and it worked just fine, for a few days, starter and all........OK, then....

A few days later, the starters stopped and a few days after that, we smelled the wafting, again. *sigh*

So that wasn't it.

We took it apart more, switching the burners around and, again a few days of works just fine, followed by the same deterioration. Ungh!

FINE! 

During this time I had not been idyll, I had been researching new stoves , wow are they expensive! And on what planet, do they need to be connected to the internet?

One more attempt to take it apart fiddle with the electrical connectors. This is in the DDH's wheelhouse, My electrical expertise is limited to rewiring lamps and dusting the insides of the sewing machines,  so I sat and watched. This where we discovered there was a limit to the amount of apart we could take the stove. the top and bottom are riveted closed, how annoying!

Anyhow, we put it all back together again, AGAIN, aaaannd you guessed it, same glide path of worksjustfine followed by badness. Well Poo! 

With one BIG exception, One fine morning, I went to boil water for coffee and flames started shooting out of, not just the burner, but the knobs too. EEP! O.O!!

Quick as a bunny, I turned the gas off at the main connector under the stove........... HONEY!!!!

After testing this experience for himself, we finally decided it was dead. I had decided this at chapter FINE! but, well, you know. Anyway, a complete disconnecting and dismantle later we discovered the body of the stove, you know that riveted closed part we couldn't get to?, was full of water !!!!! (insert Flora looses her shit here) WTAF!. Which then proceeded to bleed all over the kitchen floor, Lovely.  -.-

*Grumble Grumble* 

One has now to assume the trouble with the stove started here, with the rusted out bits in the part of the stove that was inaccessible, and nOt where we were trying to fix it. 

*Fuss fuss fuss*

So we have this hole in the counter,where the stove is, now, not. and are waiting for it's replacement. With baited breath.

August 15th. This was the soonest we could get ANYTHING close to what we wanted,as  everything else was October.....November..... when hell freezes over..... this all happened around july 1st, so -.-

14 more days. 

I bought an electric kettle to boil water for coffee......