Little Time for the Kitchen and Music Creation – Thoughts from October 27, 2025

Life has torn me in several different directions recently. As usual, it’s mainly my fault. We’ve been working on the kitchen on my days off. That, along with grocery shopping, doing lawn work, and watching as many shows as possible, my days off are full. I’m used to that at this point. Having only a few hours of daylight to work on the kitchen cuts even my days off short. You might wonder why daylight affects your kitchen work, but a large part of the kitchen renovation involves outdoor wood cutting. Running a saw outside in the dark is both dangerous and rude to our neighbors. If I don’t need to saw any wood, I can work as late as I feel like working.

Working on the kitchen around our fridge, I was reminded that the water line going into the fridge came up from the floor. Because it is just a copper pipe sticking up from the floor, I found it bent one day. I bent it back to keep it from stopping the water from flowing. Recently, I walked into the kitchen to find a puddle coming out from under the fridge. The copper pipe had a leak. It wasn’t surprising, but it was annoying. I don’t have any tools for working with copper pipes. Luckily, the waterline coming to the fridge had its own shutoff. I shut off the water and ordered a pipe cutter with a pipe extender. The hope is that it will be easy to fix, but I know the reality is not usually what I expect.

When I think back to before I started working an hour away from my house, I remember I had time on my days off to work on my music projects. I can work on them now on my computer, but it requires connecting my computer with an external hard drive and other equipment. Working on music takes time and is much less of a straightforward process. Playing piano, guitar, or singing are out. I miss just being able to create directly. Ideas can no longer just freely flow. Singing used to be the one thing I could still do when I was driving, but my throat problems prevent that.

Besides being out of practice with playing and singing, I find having to enter notes manually in the computer difficult. I never learned to read music, so translating the rhythms in my head is slow and frustrating. Currently, I’m working on old songs for which I never recorded the vocals. They may exist on the hard drive that crashed in 1997, but I only have the memories of them and lyrics for the songs. The lyrics were the biggest proof that I had sung the songs once. I usually remembered how I sang the lyrics when the music played. Again, not being able to sing the lyrics was frustrating.

Speaking of the lyrics, I’m probably going to replace them with new ones for at least two of the songs. One song was called I Don’t Love You and another was basically called Life Is Horrible. The original lyric documents say they were last modified about 30 years ago. That’s years before I was married to Patti, so it shows what state I was in before Patti came along. We were married in 1997. Yes, the same year of the hard drive crash, but there’s no connection between the two. If I were superstitious, I might think the hard drive was trying to tell me something, but I’m not. My backup routine has been my constant obsession ever since the crash happened. I will never lose years of data ever again. That bar is pretty low. Perhaps I should say I will never lose more than an hour worth of data again. Realistically positive!