New visitors to the feeder today included an Eastern bluebird (mmm…blue!) and a male cardinal, which even I can identify without the use of a bird book.

There’s also this little brown critter that looks like a nuthatch, but is…well…brown. It’s not a brown capped nuthatch, since its whole body is brown, and it has white stripes running back from the eyes and a stiff upright tail, but it creeps along the treetrunks in a very nuthatchy way. I am tentatively guessing “brown creeper” (such descriptive names they have!) but I mean, it could be a pygmy seed-eating condor for all that I know.

Today, working on more Digger, got the Ironclaw cover three quarters done, still waiting for functional net before I start takin’ more work. My studio is semi-unpacked, and polymer clay calls to me. I have an insane desire to make sheela-na-gig coat hooks. James tells me this is just Not Right, but that’s unlikely to stop me. (Sheela-na-gigs are a type of Irish gargoyle featuring a dwarfish female figure who is…ah, how to put this…well, you know all those Freudian analyses of vagina-as-entry-to-underworld? Sheela-na-gig is holding the door, as ’twere, and it’s a rather large door. (Oh, just google it already, if you’re not at work.) Anyway, they’re very hard to find these days, because the early Christians obliterated them all with extreme prejudice, so the only ones you can find are generally in out-of-the-way unreachable spots.) I don’t know why I think that would make a great coathook, but I try not to question these things. Maybe in a week or so I’ll get my studio together and be able to try it…

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