Alligoose (rhymes with Pamplemousse)

Here's the Alligoose all put back together by Ryan,
after he varnished the whole head/neck.
I think his plan is to take it off the driftwood,
and have it standing on an old tire, instead.
(there's something too beachhouse/housewifey about driftwood, you know?)






















Here's the neck in progress,
while he was carving it out of spray foam.
Again, Ryan did everything on this project,
I just painted the neck and tongue.
I'm just excited about it,
because I know that it's just the start of many more.
If anyone has crappy taxidermy that they want to donate to the cause,
please let me know.
We'll give it a new life, for sure.

A different kind of 'Painting Monday'

I don't know what other people do on their days off,
but here at Louderhorn Inn,
there's always something absurd going down.
(and it usually involves Ryan)

I spent today doing my taxes and mail art and rogue taxidermy.
Ryan is combining an alligator head with a goose body,
(both from old, broken mounts)
and he had to make a new neck for it.
And since he only does the manliest kind of art-making,
he ignored paper-mâché and clay and latex molds,
and made the neck out of spray foam installation instead.
That actually isn't even the whole story, it's worse than that.
He also used glue and sawdust.
No kidding.
And it looks so good.
But it was all yellow and gross colored,
so he asked me to paint it to look alligator-ish.
I think it came out pretty well,
and I can't wait to see the finished mount.
I believe that after we take some professional glamour shots,
this beautiful creature will be up for sale.
I'll keep you posted.

Empty Nesters (for now)

An entire (busy!) week with no blog post?!?

There's too much to share, so I'll stick with the few things I have photos of.

First, Meryl and I are feeling kind of alone in this house tonight.
Casey packed up (some of her stuff) and left for her bicycle trip Saturday.
She'll be gone for at least 4 months.
Adam from Queens was in town and staying with us over the weekend, but he left early this morning.
So now it's just me, Meryl, and Shamira.
Later this month it'll be an overlapping, overbooked visitor extravaganza, but we'll have some quiet time to prepare.

So I picked up the frozen tattooed skin Wednesday night.
I started the Krowtann 2000 process today, and here's a gross photo of all that:


Speaking of boob tattoos, Caitlin's painting that she gave me arrived from Taiwan on Thursday!
It's super textured, really big, and looks even better in person.
Dead birds are sexy.
Thanks Caitlin!!


Adam was here the weekend Casey arrived, so he thought he'd help send her off as well.
He also decided to get ANOTHER aircraft safety tattoo.



Ryan and Rebecca spent a bunch of time with all of us this week as well.

We collected 100 year old chimney bricks from a gutted house in their neighborhood and put them in my front yard.
You can see some of them used for edging already to the left of the pile.

We got to play on their teeter-totter that Ryan made.

And Adam took this (very) candid shot of us hanging out in their living room.
That's me on the left sitting behind Meryl.