Thursday, August 30, 2012

SANDY RIVER, ENTERING THE COLUMBIA GORGE

Cascade Melody
24 x 18

This studio piece is a melody to send me off for a week of painting en plein air in the Columbia River Gorge, this Friday thru Tuesday.  There will be lots of painters there, and I'm looking forward to doing nothing but painting.

PACIFIC NORTHWEST PLEIN AIR 2012

You are invited to see me paint in the Columbia Gorge:



Pacific Northwest Plein Air 2012
Columbia Arts
215 Cascade Avenue
Hood River, Oregon 97031




http://pleinairhoodriver.blogspot.com/

Monday, August 6, 2012

A CELEBRATION OF INFORMATION

This post is not about painting.  It's about information.  About how much information we have available to us, if we only look for it.

For as long as I can remember, our bathtub has drained slowly.  I had always supposed this to be because of some clogging or other.  Also, the tub drain trip lever wouldn't stay down, so you had to sit in the tub and hold it until the tub drained.  I devised various methods of wedging washcloths on top of it so that the tub would slowly drain in my absence, but it still took forever.

Recently, very impatient with the extremely slow draining, I dug out the drain filter and pulled up all the hair I could reach in the drain.  And the tub stopped draining AT ALL.  There was nothing else I could do at that end, so I sat staring at this:

Tub Drain Trip Lever
Those big screws have to be for SOMETHING.  If this were a Myst game, I would happily unscrew them and see, but this was a real live bathtub with no do-overs and I am surely not a plumber.  So I got on the internet and started watching tub repair videos.  And sure enough, about my fourth video, there was a video on what goes wrong with the tub drain trip lever, and how to fix it.

So I unscrewed the screws, pulled out the parts (now that I knew what I could pull out and how not to break it) and took it to the hardware store, got a new one, and installed it.  EASY-PEASY.

The tub drain now works perfectly.  I am so happy!  

I know, not all fix-it jobs are this easy, or even possible to do without a lot of skill.  But some are, with just a little information.

Information is out there!  It's on the internet.  It's surrounding us in the expertise of our friends and acquaintances.  It's available through empirical testing.  It's in multiple other modes of interaction with the universe.  And here, in this time, there is so much of it (sometimes too much of it) that we can easily reach out and touch the piece we want.

All it takes is remembering to look.