|
|
|
if I left it looking too hideous
Sunday, December 30 2018
This morning, before I'd eaten anything or even drunk any caffeine, I resumed work on the electric oven installation project, which was much more difficult than it should've been due to the thickness and shortness of the wires in the old 240 volt outlet box. The new oven only required 10 gauge wires, though the wires for the range were made for 50 amp service and consisted of stranded copper conductors as thick pencils. Just capping one of those big wires required an enormous blue-type wire nut. Had those wires been a little longer, I could've screwed the nuts on from outside the box. But the wires were short, meaning the wings on the wire nuts kept running into other things in the box as I tried to turn them. Eventually, though, I managed to make all the necessary connections. Then I had the problem of adding a box extender to the old box so it would stick out of the wall far enough for the fat romex cable to come out of the side. Unfortunately, the old box was installed badly askew in the wall, and getting the extender (actually another box lacking a back) onto it was pretty much impossible, and I had to secure it with a big screw sent into a nearby stud at an angle. Since the hole around this box was such a mess and made me sad, I put some effort into tidying it up with bits of sheet metal, spray foam, and drywall joint compound. Though it would all be hidden away in the back of a corner cabinet when the kitchen was completed, one of my concerns was that Colin would think I'd botched up his craftsmanship if I left it looking too hideous.
I'd neglected to mention that yesterday afternoon I'd gone into the forest with my big Kobalt chainsaw and cut down a mid-size skeletonized chestnut oak about a third of a mile from home along the Gullies Trail. Since this was farther from the house than any of the other wood I've salvaged this season, I brought it home in smaller backpack loads. Yesterday I'd brought home two loads (the first of which was a bit too heavy to be carried so far). Today, though, I only brought home one. This was probably plenty to maintain the stockpiles of immediately-burnable firewood in the living room for the the next several days (if not week).
My old Mercy For Animals colleague Allison recently asked around in Slack if anyone knew any animal-rights-friendly artists she could buy art from in order to jazz up the barren walls in her apartment. Since I'm in the best financial shape I've ever been in and she has hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, I told her I would donate art to this cause. I'd actually begun a painting of one of her rabbits, one that has since died. So I thought I'd finish that up and throw in a brand new painting as well. The reason I'd never finished the rabbit painting is that I don't really understand how their bodies fit together. Even in photographs, they don't look real to me, what with their too-far-apart eyes and long floppy ears (domestic rabbits always seem to have floppy ears). But I did what I could. An animal I do understand is roosters. I know them so well that I can paint a prototypical one from memory. So the other painting ended up being a rooster set against a blue sky streaked with yellow.
Today's paintings and some cloned-tile versions:
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181230 feedback
previous | next |
