Improving my average

I spent some time this weekend going through the drawers of my flat-file cabinet, pulling out piles of drawings and paintings I did in college, and throwing rather a lot of them away, after wondering why in the world I had kept them this long in the first place.  The vast majority of these were quick sketches from life drawing classes, and thus were never intended as anything more than practice pieces in the first place, but I found a number of rather bad watercolors and finished drawings as well. 

James Gurney mentions this process in Imaginative Realism, saying that each poor painting you destroy "raises your artistic average a tiny notch."

Or all the seas with oysters . . .

My mother's dishwasher, it seems, has been eating teaspoons, in much the same way that clothes dryers allegedly eat socks.  Or at least that's one theory; on the other hand, having noticed that while the number of teaspoons in her silverware drawer seemed to be decreasing, there seem to be more table knives in there than ever, I've been wondering for some time if perhaps the spoons are metamorphosing.

Anyway, I got her a package of allegedly "stainless steel" teaspoons at Meijer.  These went into the dishwasher in perfect condition and came out pitted and streaked with rust.  In order to return them I had to get the package out of the trash can, where I had tossed it on the foolish assumption that something as simple as a spoon could be counted on to work as advertised.