There are times when I like being silly. Actually, there are a lot of times like that! I was feeling silly when I did this painting and named it, "Don't call me, ED!" You see Mr. Ed, the talking horse, was not a black paint horse but he "talked" like this one does. So this guy wants his own name. I have a weird sense of humor, I admit it.

Luckily for me, I found someone else who saw the same thing in this painting. The person who bought "Don't Call Me Ed!" said this about it-"What a fun little painting! I'll definitely look for more work from this artist."

So that leads me to another topic. I found so much joy in this ladies comment and this was the reason why, I create my art, hoping it will reach out to someone and make them happy. I want to share the feeling my art gives me.

When I recieve a comment like this lady wrote, I feel rewarded in doing the work that I do. I've created something that gave another person a feeling of joy and happiness.

On another topic, it's 14 below zero here and we have a foot or two of snow. I guess winter has certainly arrived. We took our wood stove and put it into an empty fuel tank. This sounds crazy but we're glad we did it. Robert cut out the front of the tank, we set the stove inside it and hooked it up. We get twice the heat out of the stove as we did last winter. The walls of the tank barely heat up as we have a system of fans that contantly blow the heat out of the tank. The wall behind the stove never gets to where it feels "warm" to your hand.

We're about to cut a hole in the top side of the tank and run a heat duct into the house through a wall, the stove is out in the back porch right now and the heat is coming into the house through the open back door. We'd like to be able to shut that door, keeping any cold air that comes into the porch there, and just run the warm air into the house. We have an unused cupboard under the two kitchen ovens that's right in line with the place the duct needs to go. It should work perfectly.

When that's all finished, we might hook up a water jacket to the system, so we have hot water in the hot water lines all the time. We're working at getting a more efficient system!