Lucy the art room dragon

Earlier today (when I was supposed to be completing my requisitions for next year) I started to do a new blog entry all about Lucy, when I discovered that I had already posted her whole history, back in June!! I know many of you were not yet reading my blog back then, but I don't need to re-post the whole story since you can find it, complete with photos, right here: http://plbrown.blogspot.com/2010/06/story-of-lucy-dragon.html. I even mentioned Dan (the Monster Man) Reeder and his book The Simple Screamer in that post! Why didn't I remember that I had written that?
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Sadly, things haven't gone well for Lucy and baby Sparkle. First, I knocked the baby off the shelf where she was sleeping, and she suffered serious damage. She really was just an illusion anyhow. Made out of tiny samples of an air dry clay, she had a head, a tail, and a claw to dig her way out of her shell, but she had no real body; it was all planted into the fuzz in the egg. I was actually most proud of her egg, which was broken on purpose when I created it and still actually seems OK. But the clay claw and tail both broke, so there's not much left to her. I may have to make a new baby.

But Lucy's own problems are worse. Being rather large, she has never really fit ANYWHERE. I have a small Victorian house with little rooms and strange broken up spaces and no place for a 5' dragon with a 5' wingspan, so she has been at school for a few years now. For a while she lived on the floor behind my desk, but she was very inconvenient and intrusive there, and being a klutz I was always tripping over her.

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So then she moved to the top of a cabinet, but I was told she was too close to the ceiling for fire codes and had to be moved lower. Since then she's been on top of a drying rack cabinet. But she's wider than the cabinet so I took off her wings and propped her sideways against the wall.

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Yesterday I decided to take Lucy down for the first time all year, to take some new photos of her. She's gotten quite dusty and because of her rough texture and jewels glued randomly between her scales it's almost impossible to sponge or dust her off. (I tried.) So her rich color and glossy sheen is definitely muted with a year of dust. Ugh.

I tried to put her wings on, and the metal rod that support one wing broke right through it. The wing hung down bumping into Lucy's head. Since the wings are already upside down and backwards anyhow, and were never attached in the correct place on her body to begin with, this just made them look worse :-(

And then I realized that leaning her on her side for so long had seriously warped the 2 legs that had supported her. She used to lie flat on her belly, with her feet and tail also on the ground. Now her front wrist is bent and cocked backwards, so it looks like she is going to awkwardly grab something, and her feet and tail hover slightly above the table surface, looking very awkward.

I wish I had a good end to this story but I really don't know what I'm going to do with Lucy now. She'll probably go back on top of the drying rack for now, but after that - I don't know. The realization is that she is not fixable. So maybe this summer I'll need to try to build another dragon...