Hoodrats and the black hole of doom!

I'm having a Sprightly mouse modified to put on the hood of my car.
So I'm calling my hood ornament a hoodrat. Ha ha. Funny me.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to supply Miles with a wax sheet with Sprightly's feet marks and tail mark in it, molded to fit on my hood and trimmed to a nice shape for a base.
He will attach a wax Sprightly, beef up the legs, cast it, drill holes and weld bolts to the bottom, and I'll fix it to the car.

So luckily for me I was off to Frank's (Advanced Casting) to pick up some bits 'n' bobs, and since Frank has literally everything somewhere or other, he was able to find me a 1/8" thick wax sheet.
I chopped off a piece, warmed it up in some nice hot water, sprayed some mold maker's release agent on my hood (thanks Lee) and pressed the wax, and a bronze Sprightly into place. I etched my website address into the wax and drew an outline to cut around.
So then I carefully cut around the line and replaced them on to the hood for a sneak preview...
Miles has the wax part now, so I'm pretty excited to get the casting back so I can do the patina and mount it to my hood.

Meridee heard a strange noise in the garden today, and thought someone must be on the other side of the wall, shuffling about. Every time she got near, the noise stopped.
Very suspicious.
Turned out a bunch of lizards had got themselves stuck inside a black buckety thing and were frantically trying to escape.
I counted nine, and I have no idea how long they were in there.
Luckily they were all alive and well, since the black bucket of doom wasn't quite as bad as the lizard version of the black hole of Calcutta.
So I tipped them out.
Here's my foot for scale.
Since I thought they must be quite thirsty (it's started getting pretty HOT lately), I gave the area they scurried off to a quick watering.
My guess is they were attracted to the warmth of the plastic in the cooler evening, and just got trapped inside!
If I don't keep a careful eye out for buckets with water in after it's rained (hardly ever happens), the odd lizard has been known to fall in and drown.

This blog post will now self destruct in ten seconds.