After three or four months you look down at the handkerchief and the sodden remnant of flaming pink raccoon tail you just sneezed up, and your first thought is about the fly tying “15 minute rule” and whether you’re allowed to recover and rebag it once dry …

Thirteen “pillows” of fur isn’t much to show for four months work, given the nearly 20 additional colors completed in theory, yet lack any physical manifestation.

14 actually, I started “Dreamy Mint Julep Caddis Carapace” this morning.

It’s the sum of every rainy weekend, all the frosty winter mornings, evenings after work, and why you should have listened to Poppa when he mentioned college – and how if you were as smart as claimed you’d be using head instead of back …

In the current economic environment, especially since both Tripoli and Wisconsin have fallen to revolutionaries, it’s a bit of a comfort knowing that I won’t be pressed into service as a short order cook, given my second career and the vast potential it holds.

Making little ones from big ones being a cornerstone of the US penal code, so I’ll have plenty of company with a single misstep.

Many of you participated in this experiment, and I owed you an update. Some picked colors and offered feedback, some fiddled with textures, most experimented with it, and at some point it will be available. My initial attempts at automation have failed miserably, so everything above has been made by hand.

Looking at all that dubbing makes me think of Edwin Teller, and the amount of suffering a handful of raccoon’s backside could mean to most of the major watersheds in North America …

… and how easy it’ll be to sleep at night, given the circumstances.