Project Management

I haven't really produced much since last Thursday. I started on another Tree Fairy vase, but didn't get any further than just making the actual vase. I was feeling too low and tired over the weekend, and now that I'm feeling brighter my mind has moved on to other things. That is often a problem for me - I have too many ideas and my mind is actually too active for me to settle on one thing, so I end up doing nothing and just spend all my time thinking. Apparently this makes me an artist! :)

I've been absolutely fascinated by Octopuses recently (this is the most common word used for the plural of Octopus - although the correct plural term is actually Octopodes, to use this term would make me pedantic, apparently). I had actually never seen a real photo or video clip of an Octopus before, until I went to this website and my jaw just fell open. I don't know why I never looked them up before. They're amazing!

Things I didn't know:
I didn't know that Octopuses have two rows of suckers on each arm (and they are arms - not legs or tentacles). They use these suckers to grip and also to taste.

Octopuses are very strong. They have no skeleton so they are all muscle. They can squeeze their bodies through incredibly small spaces, since the only hard part of their body is their beak. Yes, beak! I didn't know they had a beak! It's actually underneath, in the centre.

To camouflage themselves from predators, Octopuses can not only change the colour of their skin, but also the texture.

And how they reproduce is... bizarre, and so sad. I saw this clip of a male Octopus trying to grab the attention of a female Octopus and I thought it was so cute and romantic! But the male Octopus literally gives his right arm to mate (well, one of them), since that is where his sperm is, and then he dies within a few months. The female lays up to 200,000 eggs, and spends between one to ten months caring for them and guarding them (depending on the species and the source of information). She doesn't leave them for a second, and she gets so hungry that she has been known to eat her own arms! By the time the eggs hatch she is exhausted and she dies. But she doesn't die from starvation - she secretes something from her eyes. So I suppose you could say she cries herself to death. Maybe because she knows that only 1% of her babies will live to adulthood. Well, they have three hearts so that's a lot of heart break!

Wow, aren't they amazing? So bearing all this in mind I decided for my next project I'd like to make a Whale...