Molly Bee's Attic

I discovered earlier this summer that finches aren't the only thing that like my thistle seeds. Even though there is a plethora of seeds on the ground, this little daredevil shimmies up the iron pole, tightropes across the shepherd's hook, rappels down the rope and eats them directly from the source!  He's a tiny White-Footed Wood Mouse and I see him most nights when I take Moose out before bed. We chat a bit and then I leave him to it. As long as he stays outside, we don't have any issues.  Since he normally comes out after dark and I have closed the blinds way beforehand, Cooper has no idea that inches from his window seat hangs a potentially tasty hors d'oeuvre.  That all changed the other night when I walked down to Gus's diner in the daylight to meet a friend for supper and didn't get home until well after dark. I came home to this! Come here, little guy. I just want to be your friend.  So close and yet so far...I can't even st...

I can't believe how excited I still get over finding fossils out here. This whole area was submerged in the Cambrian Sea about 550 million years ago, so the ground is mostly a limestone base fulled with corals, trilobites, crinoids and shells. The beaches are full of fossils, as are rocks in quarries and even the landscaping rocks around businesses. I've been here 30 years and you would think I had found a finorkin' T-Rex every time I spot one. It's the little things I guess! I found some beauties (to me) in Algoma. Chain Coral Chain Coral I don't know but the black bits looks like the outline of a small crayfish.  Honeycomb Honeycomb or Petosky. I'm not sure really. The holes are much bigger and darker than the other honeycomb pieces I found.  Here is the other side of it. I'm leaning towards Petosky. Thought this was a lightning stone but it's just a rock with some kind of concretion. Still cool! Crinoid fossil. C...

It's been a crazy autumn around here. I've loved it, but am eagerly anticipating a little bit of a slowdown after the holidays! At least I've got my Christmas shopping done. If I don't get it done by Halloween, I have failed. My dislike of being trapped in the Madison crowds and getting folded, spindled and mutilated at every turn, prevents me from enjoying 'holiday' shopping in the traditional sense.  Thankfully the stores have their Christmas stuff out in August now so I can get a jump on it! Work has been nuts, but I was able to get a couple of days to go up to Door County to see Northern Sky's production of 'Muskie Love'. Friend, Doug Mancheski, was in it. Someone told me that since I love 'Guys on Ice' so much, that I needed to see 'Lumberjacks in Love' (which I did two summers ago) and 'Muskie Love'. The perfect trilogy! 'Muskie Love's basic bones structure kind of lies in  Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About...

I've been spending every free moment studying Zentangle materials for my CZT class at the end of October. I've been practicing the art and method Zentangle for about 8 years now, but I have only been doing what I enjoy so it's time to learn, or at least become familiar with, all of the things I haven't tried. If my company is being so generous with  their money, time, and faith-sending me to class, the least I can do is be prepared! So, I had seen the term 'Zenbuttons' bantered around but hadn't really investigated them. There is a section in the Zen Primer that talks about reticula and Zenbuttons stem from that, so I thought I ought to at least try it. What I saw online didn't grab me that much but I decided to do at least 5 so I could get the hang of it. The first one I tried was with purple and black on a tan tile. It went OK but I wasn't thrilled with the process or the outcome. My outside circle was wonky, the highlighting was weak, a...

Laura's challenge this week was to use the tangle pattern 'NZepple. 'NZepple is one of my Mac and Cheese tangles. It appears in 90 % of my work. It's so relaxing to do and I love the way that, even though the same design is repeated over and over in a grid, it creates a secondary pattern. I love to use it as is...like in the background of this tile. Or make it wonky style and turn it into sea shells like in the bottom left hand corner of this tile. (Kudos to Margaret Bremner who first turned us on to this variation called 'Cockles and Mussels'!) As long as 'NZepple, Hybrid, Quiltz, Mooka, and Zinger exist, all is right with my world! What are your Mac and Cheese Tangles?

Laura's back over at the Zentangle Diva site! I'm so happy to see her! It's been a long, boring summer without her! Her first challenge upon returning is one that gets us back to the basics of Zentangle-dots, frame, string, basic tangles. It's a particularly apropos one for me right now since I will be traveling to Providence in October to attend a class to become certified to teach Zentangle! Since I found out, I have been concentrating on getting back to basics so this challenge is perfect. It uses Hollibaugh, Crescent Moon and Printemps. Thanks for a great challenge, Laura!!!

Although a lot of other groovy stuff happened, the main reason for going to the Mississippi River Museum was to see the traveling DaVinci exhibit they are offering this summer. I'm a huge fan of both his genius and his art so was delighted with the treasures that were available! They took a lot of the sketches of inventions that he had created on paper and put them together in real life.  This is the uber-creepy underwater breathing system he thought up. I think the white makes it more slimming, no? The backpack mounted on the front covers a multitude of sins! did he really envision that the air bell would be a two ton heavy thing made out of wood? I swear I've seen this guy on Doctor Who! Some of the exhibits you could touch and some you couldn't. This was DaVinci's armored tank. You could get inside. I did and tried to take a picture but the resulting photo looked very confusing from that angle! I think the shape sort of looks like one of the lunar space ...

Wanna hug? This is the Pacific Octopus at The Mississippi River Museum. Isn't he a handsome fella? He was doing his morning hot laps when I arrived. He was practically running around the circle of his tank.  He would only stop to investigate that pipe you see in the lower left. At first I thought that it was a piece that had somehow come off the aquarium, but turns out it's his toy. He would stop, stick an arm in it, turn it around a little and put it back down and continue on his way. I must have stood there for 20 minutes watching his antics. Better than the Kardashians any day! I signed up to help hand feed the rays in the afternoon. This picture was taken from the second floor balcony. The kite-shaped ones are Cow Faces Sting Rays. Their noses look a lot like cow noses.  Their wingspan is probably about 3-3.5 feet. They 'fly' all around the tank, using lots of energy so they get fed twice a day. That smaller, rounder ones are Yellow Rays. They are mo...

As I was out adventuring on Sunday afternoon, I saw a sign on the highway that said 'Scenic Overlook', so I pulled off the road and into the upper parking lot. I am a sucker for 'scenic' anything and also for those markers for historic places you come across sometimes. (In Maine we call them 'rocks with writing on them' because the metal plaques are usually attached to huge, usually granite, boulders, but here in WI, they are usually in the form of an actual wooden sign.  But I digress...). I knew it had to be something really beautiful because I was in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin. The Saint Laurentide Ice Sheet never made it down this far in the last Ice Age. The area wasn't scraped clean by the rampaging berg and rushing waters, so it's all the original Cambrian seabed underneath. Lots hills and vales! I also knew, that if the powers-that-be thought it was important enough to build a groovy, and quite obviously spendy, pedestrian bridge over...

I decided that Sunday looked like a good day for adventuring, so I headed over to Governor Dodge State Park for the afternoon.  I've only lived in Wisconsin for going on 30 years so I figured it was time. I had heard that there was a waterfall in the park so of course that was my goal. Turns out, it was just down the road a piece from the front gate so it wasn't hard to find.  The path through the woods was paved, short and very pretty until you get to this part (up at the top): 'Natural Rock Staircase'...my back pockets!!! Climbing down was a lot scarier than these pictures make it look. It's all an uneven jumble of rocks to the bottom and pretty steep. Thankfully there is an iron pipe railing to hold on to or I probably wouldn't have attempted it. Some of the 'steps' are pretty far apart for those of us who are short on one end, but I made it to the bottom unscathed! I was rewarded with this bit of loveliness! Stev...