New shiny toy and new work in progress report.

My thousand year old cell phone stopped working.
I don't want some new fangled thingamabob texty toy doodad to make a phone call.
So I took it in, got a new card installed and voila! (as they say in France), it worked.
For about a day. Then it died for good.
Merde (as they also say a lot in France).

So it seemed there was no choice but to get the all singing and all dancing iPhone to replace it.
Not only can I now browse the internet while Meridee takes fourteen times longer than she says she will in the supermarket, but I can check my email in the woods, take pictures of baby lizards if I should find them on the bedroom carpet, and finger paint straight onto the tiny screen (you need the $4.99 brushes app for that, but it's well worth it)!

See what I mean?...


These new fangled phone things are amazing.
You can do a trillion times more with them than you can with your tv remote, and it's three trillion times easier to figure out how.
I still don't know how to use my remote.

Lee is off to make a mold on a life size angel or something. So he'll be on location in Colorado for he reckons 2 to 3 weeks.
So I went round his place yesterday to check my waxes before he mails them overnight to the foundry. They need them by Monday to turn them around for their next drop off back in Santa Fe, which will give us time to get them finished and patinas applied (I hope!) in time for my show at Manitou Galleries on Nov 6.

I'll give the foundry a call next week to make sure we're still in good shape.

I was pretty excited to see my small-ish turtle, mid sized bumper to bumper bits, bottle stoppers, and tree frogs especially.
I've been a frog nut since I can remember.








Once at school the teacher accused me of looking inside a book during a memory test.
We had to bring a book in from home, and read a paragraph and re-write it in class with the book closed. I was word perfect, which is why the teacher accused me of looking, which I of course proved not to be the case by writing it out again. Along with the next paragraph. And the paragraph after that.
Then I re-drew the pictures.
It was of course the frog section of an animal encyclopedia. I had read the frog section about a trillion times at home and copied the frog drawings probably every time as well!

So I suppose I did have a slightly unfair advantage, but it was quite satisfying to be such a smartypants and stick it to the teacher!
(I'm sure I would have hated to have me as a student)...

My website and Etsy store.

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.