DollsArtCats

I have Halloween decorations I leave up, or rather around, all year. I have a rubber rat by the back door that acts as one of those spring door stops, since there isn't one installed there, and various Halloween magnets and cards live around the house until they just become part of the decor. The toad I have here is new, though, so I haven't quite found a home for it--it spent Halloween on the kitchen table, frowning at a tiny bowl of sunflower native seeds that I finally got into the ground this week, so he's still on the table, where the tiny tabletop tree goes. And he looked kind of ..plain. I thought about making him a Christmas collar, but then I remembered that Cat had made me several small crowns, so I found some festive elastic and now the Halloween Toad is now the Christmas toad. Or perhaps the Sugarplum Toad: Toads are awesome. We have real ones in the back in the summer:

Look at this cutie! He was eating crickets under the rolling trash can, and since last year I ran over a toad taking out the trash, I decided he needed to be relocated to a safer spot. Under the deck are lots of crickets, cool stones to sit on, and protection from birds.. and rolling trash cans. Summer in Chicago is awesome.

This guy was sleeping under the pile of wood that we were storing behind the shed; there were a million ants there as well, so I suspect he could just sit there and eat. We did have to move him to get up the rest of the wood, but he didn't seem too alarmed by us--I was able to get very close to take his picture. He has such a wonderful, lumpy texture! Also interesting in the woodpile was an interior door that had decayed enough to fall apart so we could see what was inside. Cardboard! Not exactly a fire door:

Yes, that is a Dollshe Grant Phillippe, cast up in the Elf Green. He is much larger than I thought he'd be, and he's dressed in paper leaves (outfit by Rachel, who did the dress for Marguerite a few posts back). He looks fabulous! The same person who owns Phillippe also has a Volks Yukinojo, beautifully dressed in Dollheart (he said that he got the full outfit by chance from getting a couple of Dollheart's fukuburu). I always think of this mold as an "Adrian" from JennyNemesis' Adrian :D Here's some of Akutenshi7's crew, looking cute-- from left to right, her raver dryad, a Fairyland Minifee Luka; an Angell-Studio Cassie and a little matching kaiju critter; a Soom Thera; and a Dream of Doll cutie with Soom hooves. This was probably the best photo I took all day because I spent the rest of the time socializing instead of taking photos of everyone, and I also got a lot of blurry ones this time for some reason, including this one, which should have be...

...and it does this. And I was just moving them, as I have no time to paint this week, but I was hoping to set up a place to do it on the sun porch. An hour later it looked like this: I did take some pictures of the koi that I promised K ages ago: I also have ice fish now, courtesy of Ikea: And finally, I was potting some torenia, and I have a large bag of potting soil that has been open a day or two by the barbeque. I reach in for a double handful of soil (and I am not wearing gloves, because it's easier to get the dirt down around the roots without them) and the handful of dirt I pull out feels sort of... rubbery..and then it squirms and hops away--it's a very dirty little toad. I say PTEE or something like that, the cat on the porch levitates, the toad hops away and disappears. He was too dirty to be photogenic, but I am glad I have enough toads that they can just hang around the porch.

I almost threw away his lunch before I noticed the toad!