Settled in the Maritimes of Canada, surrounded by the forest and Acadian Mountain Chain, I live a simple life of gratitude. This blog is a journal of my art, food, furkids, garden, home, my life and my thoughts. Thanks for reading!
Welcome my Friends, to Thursday's Art and Dinner Date! 😊😊
🎨For our 🎨 Art Date 🎨, today's optional prompt is Haunted House. Please feel free to share any art you've created, we would love to see it! Bugs Bunny is doing his impression of Chip Potts from Disney's Beauty and the Beast! Speaking of that movie, it's so sad that Angela Lansbury passed away, she was awesome.
⬆️⬆️ For today's prompt, I drew Herman Munster from The Munsters...after all, they do live in a haunted house! I loved that show!
⬆️⬆️ 😋For our 😋 Dinner Date 😋, I made some delicious Banana Bread!!! (Recipe and video coming soon!)
⬆️⬆️ I also wanted to share my morning "coffee-cino" with you in my new Jack Skellington mug! ☺
⬆️⬆️ The house is FIXED...the guys did a great job and it cost me next to nothing - I'm so relieved!
On the video front, thanks to everyone for their congratulatory messages from my last post! ♥
That's all for now folks! Please check out the link widget below for more 🎨 artistic 🎨 and 😋 delicious 😋 creations! See you soon!!! 💗
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Upcoming Art Prompts For Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date: click on the links below for a description of the prompt and inspiring images! (Prompts are optional!)
This art and dinner date date is all about creating. For the art date, you can showcase your paintings, drawings, photography, sculpting, poetry...whatever you like! You can follow the weekly themes or post any art you like! 🎨
And for the dinner date, please feel free to link up your foodie post! 😋
Don't forget to add the URL link to your post (not your blog) to the link gadget below to share your wonderful creations! Please revisit to make sure you don't miss those who join in a little late! All spam and non-related links will be removed! The link gadget will be available until the following Sunday at midnight!
I just wanted to send a big THANK YOU to all of my friends who have been so supportive of my efforts with my four YouTube channels! I've fallen in love with creating videos!
I started my YouTube journey as a business venture. I even took a 3-month course on how to optimize your YouTube channel - which has proven to be very successful!
Once my disability pension dries up, I will need added sources of income. Once you reach 1000 subscribers and have over 4500 hours of watch time on your channel, YouTube will "monetize" your videos. This means some ads will appear before videos and YouTube pays you a teeny tiny small percentage of money per minute watched. At first, I'm sure I will make probably one or two pennies per month at most! But as the channels grow, they very well could provide me with that added income I will need in 10 years time!
✨✨ Rain's Kitchen and Garden reached 1000 subscribers this past week!!! And I have over 11,000 watch hours. This was a goal I thought I would only reach in a few years time! This is a big achievement for me! ✨✨
Rain Frances Art is chugging along at just over 100 subscribers. I know that art tutorials are niche, and I'm very grateful for all of those who continue to support this channel! When I started this channel over a year ago, I really thought this would be the one that reached 1000 subs first! Lessons learned!
Rain Frances Art For Kids is quickly growing! I have about 130 subscribers there. This is such a fun channel and I'm so happy I started it!
Spiritual Rain, which is my personal spiritual channel, has started to gain some popularity at just under 100 subscribers. I've met so many beautiful and kind people through the Tarot community on YouTube, it's been such a blessing!
Besides everything else that is going on in my life, I guess this explains why I'm such a busy bee!! 😊
Welcome my Friends, to Thursday's Art and Dinner Date! 😊😊
🎨For our 🎨 Art Date 🎨, today's optional prompt is Lost. Please feel free to share any art you've created, we would love to see it! Instead of a Looney Tune this week, I drew a Disney character! When Snow White is cast out of her wicked stepmother's castle, she gets lost in the woods! That insecure queen turns herself into the witch to try to tempt Snow White into eating the poison apple! Here's a question....what's YOUR poison apple? What tempts you? 😈
⬆️ House Drama...we were investigating a leak in the basement...one of our neighbours is a contractor so he sent a few of his guys over to help us out. He decided to take a look-see under our vinyl siding on one corner of the house...
⬆️ It turns out that the beams and floor sill on that corner are completely rotted from water damage. See that grosse pink insulation? That should be UNSEEN, behind the exterior wall! I went right up there to look, and I could see my kitchen wall - exposed to the outside of the house!!! When the original owners had the power put in, the meter was never water-sealed or caulked so there was a slow leak over the last 20 years that basically rotted all of the wood around and under it.
⬆️ This is one of the beams in a dusty pile by the house. Pete simply put his hand under the vinyl siding and it just fell apart like dust in the wind (😡breathe Rain). Luckily they are making time this week to fix it for us - but it's going to take jacking up the house; and replacing the floor sill, the beams and pretty much the entire exterior wall from roof to floor. I think I want to just hide out for the winter and hope that there will be no more surprises when I come out of hibernation!
Good thing there was comfort food on the menu this week:
😋For our 😋 Dinner Date 😋, I'm sharing my Thanksgiving dinner with you! Canadian Thanksgiving was this past Monday and I made my traditional Thanksgiving Poutine! ⬆️⬆️
For those who don't know, a poutine is a dish made with French fries, cheese and topped with hot gravy - well mine is made with delicious Thanksgiving toppings!
For those who celebrated, did you have a nice Thanksgiving? What did you eat?
⬆️ I then topped the Poutine with curd cheese and Cheddar cheese...and poured hot Chicken Gravy on top! We were eating this for days! I'm going to link up the how-to videos below that I uploaded onto my YouTube channel!
⬆️ The Coyotes are close again. They always get really close to home around this time of year. I was out in the backyard as they began howling! They were just down the road by the stream!
That's all for now folks! Please check out the link widget below for more 🎨 artistic 🎨 and 😋 delicious 😋 creations! See you soon!!! 💗 💗
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Upcoming Art Prompts For Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date: click on the links below for a description of the prompt and inspiring images! (Prompts are optional!)
This art and dinner date date is all about creating. For the art date, you can showcase your paintings, drawings, photography, sculpting, poetry...whatever you like! You can follow the weekly themes or post any art you like! 🎨
And for the dinner date, please feel free to link up your foodie post! 😋
Don't forget to add the URL link to your post (not your blog) to the link gadget below to share your wonderful creations! Please revisit to make sure you don't miss those who join in a little late! All spam and non-related links will be removed! The link gadget will be available until the following Sunday at midnight!
Welcome my Friends, to Thursday's Art and Dinner Date! 😊😊
🎨For our 🎨 Art Date 🎨, today's optional prompt is Masks. Please feel free to share any art you've created, we would love to see it! Bugs Bunny is heading to a masquerade ball tonight. He chose to dress up as Marie Antoinette!
Note: I've changed the link widget time to end on Sundays at midnight. I used to leave it open all week, but noticed come Monday evenings, there were lots of spam links, so I'm going to see if closing it on Sundays will help with that!
Since the Halloween season is in full swing (at least for me!), I chose to draw a scene from the movie Halloween: H20. This is a scene where Jamie Lee Curtis reprises her role as Laurie Strode. She looks up through the window in her door and who's standing right there? A masked Michael Myers! I tried to capture her horrified face with charcoal pencils on black art paper, but she looks a little more stunned than horrified in my drawing!
⬆️⬆️😋For our 😋 Dinner Date 😋, I have a lot to share this week! I've been experimenting with vegetarian food lately. I made a delicious Zucchini and Ricotta Cheese Burger with Herbed Aioli. This was great but it had the consistency more of a fancy omelet than a burger!
⬆️⬆️Baked pasta with broiled Cheddar cheese on top is always a staple here!
⬆️⬆️I've been experimenting with bread recipes lately. I have a large project for my YouTube channel that I'm preparing. It's all about bread baking - it's in the works! This was my first experiment making Old Fashioned White Bread - fabulous!
⬆️⬆️Rain's Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies!!! A mix of dark and milk chocolate for the chips makes the flavour so wonderful. I use Lindt chocolate for these!
⬆️⬆️This is the first time I made a Baked Apple Galette and it was yummy! Perfect for Fall! I found a recipe online but for the life of me, can't find it anymore...but there are plenty of recipes out there that you can try for this dessert! Next week will be all about Canadian Thanksgiving!
Doggie News: Jack is continuing to have eye trouble. He developed an ulcer on his left eye and we had to have a procedure done twice for him. After 6 weeks on antibiotic/anti-inflammatory drops, he is finally started to recover. ♥ Raven twisted her bad knee while playing. She was wearing her brace but her energy levels were through the roof and she overdid it! She is currently on pain killers and anti-inflammatory medication...she's hopping around on one leg...I hope she heals soon! But...this will be an ongoing issue with her. ♥
Frosty nights are here, I wake up each morning with a crunchy lawn! The garden is winding down. All I have left to do is harvest the potatoes from the tires and remove weeds and old plants for next season! I learned a lot about what I can grow here and what I can't!!! Look at my sorry harvest of tomatoes this year! Thank goodness I found that farm for my canned tomatoes! I'm trying to ripen these in my window!
On the video front:
⬆️⬆️ Here's a 10-second video, it's a Little Blooper from my garlic planting video!
That's all for now folks! Please check out the link widget below for more 🎨 artistic 🎨 and 😋 delicious 😋 creations! See you soon!!! 💗 💗
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Upcoming Art Prompts For Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date: click on the links below for a description of the prompt and inspiring images! (Prompts are optional!)
This art and dinner date date is all about creating. For the art date, you can showcase your paintings, drawings, photography, sculpting, poetry...whatever you like! You can follow the weekly themes or post any art you like! 🎨
And for the dinner date, please feel free to link up your foodie post! 😋
Don't forget to add the URL link to your post (not your blog) to the link gadget below to share your wonderful creations! Please revisit to make sure you don't miss those who join in a little late! All spam and non-related links will be removed! The link gadget will be available until the following Sunday at midnight!
This is a scheduled post - see you next Thursday!!!
Welcome my Friends, to Thursday's Art and Dinner Date! 😊😊
🎨For our 🎨 Art Date 🎨, today's optional prompt is Hair. Please feel free to share any art you've created, we would love to see it!
Here is a renovation update. This is a photo of the spray foam that's now on my basement walls. It's an insulating spray foam, vapour barrier and fire retardant all in one. Another plus is that it plugs up all holes, so that insects (eek) can't get in! It almost looks like stucco for those who know what that is.
We spent weeks preparing the basement for this, I think the entire month of August was dedicated to that task. We were lucky to have pretty much a blank canvas down there. After my carpenter friend Doug rebuilt the wall and put the new door and window in, we were ready for the spray foam company to do the job.
The basement was unusable for weeks because it took a long time for the spray foam to "cure" and dry. The smell was a bit overwhelming! The basement is now ready for a floor and walls, but we had to put that on hold because we got a shockingly high plumbing bill - three times the estimate at $1600 plus taxes. After some argument they knocked off $350 but we are still over budget, so continuing the basement renovation will have to wait until next year. 😟 We'd planned to do the entire basement build ourselves, which will save us lots of money, but that plumbing bill put a quick stop to that!
Disappointment: The spray foam company sprayed over all of those new expensive plumbing fixtures, including a valve that turns the outdoor spigot on and off. I nearly cried when I saw this. This isn't something that easily comes off. It's going to take a lot of work to clean these fixtures and pipes.
Here's the thing. Beggars can't be choosers; and I say this because I qualified for a low income housing program from New Brunswick Power. The basement was done at no charge to me. It's a wonderful program and even though they messed it up a bit, my power bill will definitely be reduced. When the inspector came I showed him the fixtures and he said he'd try to fight for us, but we may just have to live with it. But you know what? I got my basement insulated for free! If I had to pay for it, it would have cost about $5000. I'm trying to focus on feeling grateful instead of the plumbing fixtures!
That's all for now folks! Please check out the link widget below for more 🎨 artistic 🎨 and 😋 delicious 😋 creations! See you soon!!! 💗 💗
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Upcoming Art Prompts For Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date: click on the links below for a description of the prompt and inspiring images! (Prompts are optional!)
This art and dinner date date is all about creating. For the art date, you can showcase your paintings, drawings, photography, sculpting, poetry...whatever you like! You can follow the weekly themes or post any art you like! 🎨
And for the dinner date, please feel free to link up your foodie post! 😋
Don't forget to add the URL link to your post (not your blog) to the link gadget below to share your wonderful creations! Please revisit to make sure you don't miss those who join in a little late! All spam and non-related links will be removed! The link gadget will be available until the following Wednesday!
My own tomatoes are finally growing! I don't know if they'll have enough time to grow large and red before the first frost though! I'll surely be making fried green tomatoes this harvest season!
This is a scheduled post, I'll be back in October!
Welcome my Friends, to Thursday's Art and Dinner Date! 😊😊
🎨For our 🎨 Art Date 🎨, today's optional prompt is Harvest Dinner. Please feel free to share any art you've created, we would love to see it! And please share your foodie posts too!
⬆️⬆️ I worked REALLY hard on these next three videos over the last few weeks. I basically recorded myself canning the 300 pounds of tomatoes that I got from the local farm! I decided to do a series of 3 videos, the first is Canning Tomatoes 101. I explain everything from finding your tomatoes to storing them.
⬆️⬆️ In video #2 of the series, I show you How To Water Bath Can Tomatoes from start to finish. 164 pints later...I am all tomato'd out that's for sure! But now I have food for a year! That was my goal and I achieved it! David, it's more than pasta dishes! I make pizza sauce, enchilada sauce, tomato soup, salsa and spaghetti sauce! ☺
⬆️⬆️ In video #3, I show you how I juice the discarded bits and cores to Make Tomato Juice. I got 59 pints of tomato juice from those tomatoes!
That's all for now folks! Please check out the link widget below for more 🎨 artistic 🎨 and 😋 delicious 😋 creations! See you soon!!! 💗 💗
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Upcoming Art Prompts For Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date: click on the links below for a description of the prompt and inspiring images! (Prompts are optional!)
This art and dinner date date is all about creating. For the art date, you can showcase your paintings, drawings, photography, sculpting, poetry...whatever you like! You can follow the weekly themes or post any art you like! 🎨
And for the dinner date, please feel free to link up your foodie post! 😋
Don't forget to add the URL link to your post (not your blog) to the link gadget below to share your wonderful creations! Please revisit to make sure you don't miss those who join in a little late! All spam and non-related links will be removed! The link gadget will be available until the following Wednesday!
This is a scheduled post: I'll be back in October! 💓💀
Welcome my Friends, to Thursday's Art and Dinner Date! 😊😊
🎨For our 🎨 Art Date 🎨, today's optional prompt is "Silhouettes". Please feel free to share any art you've created, we would love to see it! And please share your foodie posts too! 😋
That's all for now folks! Please check out the link widget below for more 🎨 artistic 🎨 and 😋 delicious 😋 creations! See you soon!!! 💗 💗
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Upcoming Art Prompts For Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date: click on the links below for a description of the prompt and inspiring images! (Prompts are optional!)
This art and dinner date date is all about creating. For the art date, you can showcase your paintings, drawings, photography, sculpting, poetry...whatever you like! You can follow the weekly themes or post any art you like! 🎨
And for the dinner date, please feel free to link up your foodie post! 😋
Don't forget to add the URL link to your post (not your blog) to the link gadget below to share your wonderful creations! Please revisit to make sure you don't miss those who join in a little late! All spam and non-related links will be removed! The link gadget will be available until the following Wednesday!
Welcome my Friends, to Thursday's Art and Dinner Date! 😊😊 I scored a few 😊tomatoes this week from a local farm; and I'm up to my eyeballs in canning them! This is the most I've ever attempted, but I think this will keep us very well supplied for the next year!
We ran into many problems with the work done on the house...the roof, the spray foam insulation, the installation of the basement door...I'm dealing with all of that now. Why must it be so difficult? I hope to be back to Blogger in the next few weeks! Thanks for all of your lovely comments and to those who have linked in!! ♥
🎨For our 🎨 Art Date 🎨, today's optional prompt is "Apples". Please feel free to share any art you've created, we would love to see it!
That's all for now folks! Please check out the link widget below for more 🎨 artistic 🎨 and 😋 delicious 😋 creations! See you soon!!! 💗 💗
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Upcoming Art Prompts For Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date: click on the links below for a description of the prompt and inspiring images! (Prompts are optional!)
This art and dinner date date is all about creating. For the art date, you can showcase your paintings, drawings, photography, sculpting, poetry...whatever you like! You can follow the weekly themes or post any art you like! 🎨
And for the dinner date, please feel free to link up your foodie post! 😋
Don't forget to add the URL link to your post (not your blog) to the link gadget below to share your wonderful creations! Please revisit to make sure you don't miss those who join in a little late! All spam and non-related links will be removed! The link gadget will be available until the following Wednesday!
This is a scheduled post! We had to pack ourselves and the pets up and leave the house for a few days while the basement was spray-foam insulated! The great thing about spray foam is that it's also a vapour barrier and a fire retardant!
Hello my friends! 😊 Welcome to Thursday Art and Dinner Date! Today our optional theme is Mazes! As renovations continue, I will be missing in action until mid-September from Blogger. But please join in with your art and food posts and share with our lovely community!
I have scheduled YouTube videos as well for those interested:
That's all for now folks! Please check out the link widget below for more 🎨 artistic 🎨 and 😋 delicious 😋 creations! See you soon!!! 💗 💗
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Upcoming Art Prompts For Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date: click on the links below for a description of the prompt and inspiring images! (Prompts are optional!)
This art and dinner date date is all about creating. For the art date, you can showcase your paintings, drawings, photography, sculpting, poetry...whatever you like! You can follow the weekly themes or post any art you like! 🎨
And for the dinner date, please feel free to link up your foodie post! 😋
Don't forget to add the URL link to your post (not your blog) to the link gadget below to share your wonderful creations! Please revisit to make sure you don't miss those who join in a little late! All spam and non-related links will be removed! The link gadget will be available until the following Wednesday!
