Molly Bee's Attic

 I had a really nice weekend. I didn't expect to since I had both my Covid booster and my flu shot  on Thursday afternoon. My first of the original two Covid shots put me under the weather for about 24 hours...but I just got a headache from this one and that's about it. And since I get headaches anyway, who knows if it was from the shots or not? At any rate, I was prepared for a stay-at-home-lay-about weekend.  Life is what happens when you are making other plans.  Since I decided Friday Night that I guess I wasn't going to be incapacitated after all, I arranged to go with friend, Donna to Baraboo to the Arts and Crafts Festival. It was really nice and way bigger than I thought it would be. Baraboo is where Ringling Brothers started so there were also circus-y things all over town. So much fun! After the Fair we went to lunch at a little breakfast place and then headed to one of my fav spots, Pewett's Nest, to see the gorge and waterfall. Then we stopped at Sky Hi Ap...

 We've been lapping up these last warm days of autumn here at Chez Bee. I go for walks at least once a day in the prairie park down the street and Mr. Moose wants to go out for more walks now that it's not so hot, but not cold yet. He has a terminal heart condition, so he doesn't go very far or very fast, but I cherish his little Mr. Tudball sojourns around our block. I usually have an urge to do some spinning come October but our 70-80 degree temps have put the kybosh to that so far. I am working on an afghan for our sofa that will be done soon so maybe then I'll feel more like greasing Mabel up and taking her for a spin. Lord knows I have lots of wool to spin even though I haven't been to the Sheep And Wool Festival for 2 years! Aside for that I've been arting-mostly Zentangling and art journaling, but a little watercolor here and there. I want to love watercolors. I love the way they look in other people's work, but so far we have a like/hate relationship...

 Well, lookie here! Haven't checked in here for a while and thought it might be fun to start up again.  Blogger has implemented some changes since the last time I posted and I don't know if this even still works, but I'll give it a go.    So...what has happened in the last two years....oh nothing really....since I've been trapped in my house because of a global pandemic! From March 2020-March 2021 I was oh so alone in my home. I ordered groceries online and  then drove the the grocery store where a young man put them in the trunk of my car. Every three months I went to the pharmacists to pick up meds and that. was. it.   For A YEAR!  No friends, Knit Night, restaurants, movies trips, vacations, holidays or get-togethers.  No coworkers since my company went remote. You would think that I must have been bored here in the nest with nowhere to go...but nope. I had lots of worrying, fretting and stewing to do. During that entire year, my only view...

I was in Sturgeon Bay over the weekend and went to see the Third Ave Playhouse's matinee of Shooting Star with Doug Mancheski and Amy Ensign. It was a great play about old lovers that meet up by chance years later while they are snowed in at an airport. The house was packed-sold out-which was great to see. This is such a wonderful theater and the plays I've seen there are intimate and outstanding!  I'd never seen Amy act before and she was amazing! And of course, Doug was his usual magnificent self! He has such a range of skills. If you've only seen him in his comedic plays, you owe it to yourself to try and catch one of his shows at TAP and see his more serious side. The average age of the crowd at this play was 75+.  It's weird to be one of the 'youngsters' in the crowd at 54! Reminds me of the time I went to Irish Fest on a  Burkhaulter tour bus out of Madison in my 30s. The average age on that bus was 812 and all they adopted me as the naughty grandchi...

When I was younger, I went to Lincolnville Beach, Maine with my family. We were wading in the shallows and I  found a group of starfish on the rocks. I held my left arm outstretched, palm up and lined several of them on the underside of my arm. I showed my folks, and examined them all closely before slowly tipping my arm thinking that they would all drop gently back into the sea-bloop, bloop, bloop. Imagine my surprise, and abject terror as it turns out, when they remained firmly  affixed to my arm. To put it mildly, I panicked and lost my sh!t briefly! I just knew that they were dissolving the flesh of my arm with some kind of slimy, sucker acid. I marveled that I felt absolutely no pain even though I was obviously the first person in all of time to be killed and eaten by a marauding gang of starfish! Someone has to be first...just my luck. I flailed around until I finally got it under control and realized that it was easy to pick them up and gently lower them back down to...

In late October I was blessed to travel to Providence, Rhode Island to obtain my  Zentangle Teacher certification. Southern New England is absolutely gorgeous in the late autumn. The fact that the seminar was held on the top floor the glorious art-deco Providence Biltmore Hotel, and my room was on the 12th floor, was pretty amazing too. The views were spectacular! I always wanted to go to the seminar for the experience, but NOT to learn to teach. I  told anyone that said, 'you should do classes' that was the last thing on earth I wanted to do. I would hate speaking in a roomful of strangers. And I had been to so many classes where there was always that one annoying person that kept derailing the class... and how would I ever handle that without Valium...or a mallet? Nope. Not cut out for teaching. Not for me. Never. BUT...then I got the unexpected opportunity to go-my company generously offered to send me if I would come back and lead sessions as part of our Corporate We...

Wow! Five months since I've written on here! Doesn't seem like that long on the one hand....but on the other, it seems like 5 years!  This has been the longest. winter. ever.  To be fair, not a lot of earth-shattering, blog-worthy stuff has been happening, Maine for Christmas, work, teaching Zentangle, crafting, reading and trying to keep our sanity here at McCurdo Midwest. But it looks like to long months of house arrest are finally over. Our spring flowers are up-crocuses mostly. Once the 5 foot snowbank in the garden melted, we discovered that they had jumped the gun and were already 3-4 inches high under there! Bless their little hearts. With the warmer (relative term) weather and the ice gone, long walks are once again on the docket. Love to take three or four miles through Prairie Park and watch the world waking up again. I have been bringing plastic grocery bags with me and picking up the trash and detritus of winter. That in itself is...interesting. Sometimes the com...

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...