Sprightly mouse hood ornament - The hoodrat rides!

Ohh, the excitement...! My hoodrat has arrived...
Just got to take care of the patina...
Some enamel paint on the base...
Bingo! Finally installed onto the El Camino via some bolts which go through the hood and some big old metal washers and hefty nuts underneath.
Sprightly can fearlessly zip all around Santa Fe with a firm grip on the hood!'Wwwhhhheeeeeee!!!!!!'
Thanks again Miles (a top choice if you need any small stuff cast), nice job! I love my Sprightly mouse hoodrat!

Hoodrats, Darth Vader, and the tree snake of death!

Time for the next exciting installment of Sprightly the hood ornament for my car...
Well, in our last thrilling episode I mailed off a wax piece (as seen above) to Miles.

True to form, thrilling installment wise, it changed color and now appears pink!
Actually Miles made a mold of it since he was toying with the idea of doing a nickel plated one, so he'd need to be able to use it more than once. Since it's lost wax casting, if your original is wax, and you cast it, you lose it!
Darth Vader showed up and had to choke Miles into giving up the mouse, using only the power of his mind. As that pesky Darth is apt to do.
Favoring the dark side, Darth proceeded to waterboard poor Sprightly into revealing anything he might know about cheese, with particular reference to its potential uses as a chemical or biological weapon.

Darth is a shadow of his former self, taking on part time mouse torturing jobs between terrorizing whole planets of actual people these days. Seems Wall Street has had an intergalactic reach.
It's the silver sniffer! Now it just needs boxing up and sending to me for its next round of transformations...
Speaking of sniffing, this bird and nest were snapped outside our window a few days ago. Not sure what bird it is, but it was making a racket so I thought I'd see what was up.
And that brings us to the sniffing part.
A bull snake was up the tree having a nose about, making the bird very agitated.
I watch animal planet, so I know that snakes are deaf.
The bird is too busy hunting about for food to be bothered with tv, so it didn't realize it was wasting its energy in vocal protests at the snake.

The snake is kind of a pet of sorts, in so much as it seems to live in our garden (we spot it once or twice a year), and I like snakes.
Anyhow, since we also liked the idea of seeing baby birds growing up I popped outside and tried to get the snake down with a putter, but it shot straight up into the very spindly branches.
Really fast. I was a bit stunned.

The long pole for changing light bulbs too high to reach did the job, directing him down until I could grab him and drop him on the floor, where he slid under a pile of brush.

A day later the bird had left the nest, and after peeking a look inside via a makeup mirror taped to a stick there were no eggs either. So I guess the slithery fiend returned to claim his meal. Easier to catch than mice I suppose.

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.