Like for many, this summer has been wild with respect to weather. All the places on the planet who are dealing with drought need to know, all your water is over here, and falling regularly. And while that has upset a lot of our summer plans, it hasn’t been the main thing that’s kept me from sketching and posting here.

The real reason was a “little” project we needed to do. The stairs to the back of our house (onto our deck) needed to be replaced. And so it was with carefree attitudes and a good dose of “how hard can it be” that we ripped out the old with the intent of building a new set. Easy peasy. That’s when our old house became a rerun of that old movie, The Money Pit (grin).

Once removed we could see under our deck and we could see the wall on the other side of it. We could see the supports for the deck. And we could see that both were falling apart from water damage and rot. We were/are suddenly up to our armpits with big jobs that retired research scientists aren’t trained to do. Much reading and many YouTube videos later and I started to understand some of the particulars.

I won’t bother you with the details. Suffice it to say that we’ve spent July and August working hard to keep our house from falling down. I also built a new set of doors for the storage area under our deck. Finally I got to think about building stairs. MyCarpentry.com has been a big help.

The stairs are built and with any luck, we’ll have themthose stairs and an associated wall in place within a week. Anyway, while I’ve sloshed a couple gallons of paint, none of it has been as a sketcher. I do sit and doodle sometimes, though. I spread out some of the pieces of paper strewn around my drawing table for your perusal. Wish there was more. If I can get the stairs installed I’m scheduled to attend art workshops in Montreal with Marc Taro Holmes and Shari Blaukopf as instructors. Maybe they’ll remind me how to use fuzzy sticks to apply paint to paper. I hope so. Sorry the blog has gone dark for so long.