Waddaya think cookies grow on TREES?

"Sophie and I would use her Christmas break to make 

homemade treats from our very own kitchen.

I mean, if thousands of meth addicts can do it, why can't we?"

-- Celia Rivenbark, 

You Can't Drink All Day If You Don't Start in the Morning

Self portrait 12-20-13

 "They were almond cookies,

although they could have been made of

spinach and shoes for all I cared.

I ate eleven of them, right in a row.

It is rude to take the last cookie."

-- Lemony Snicket, Who Could That Be At This Hour?

"The measuring and mixing always smoothed out her thinking processes --

nothing was as calming as creaming butter --

and when the kitchen was warm from the oven overheating

and the smell of baking chocolate,

she took final stock of where she'd been and where she was going.

Everything was fine."

-- Jennifer Crusie, Maybe This Time

The holiday candy has really been piling up around here, and nobody was eating it.

And the pool where I swim is closed for re-painting, so I had the morning clear.

So I chopped up all of the candy into chunks -- chocolate bars, chocolate candies, six little chocolate Santas from last year, an entire Whitman's Sampler -- some filled with nuts, some filled with caramel, some filled with peanut butter, some filled with toffee. I chopped up two chocolate turkeys, a chocolate cornucopia, some chocolate covered Oreos, chocolate covered pretzels, and a little bit of leftover Halloween candy (i.e. one fun-size Nestle Crunch bar, and a mini $100 Grand Bar). If it had anything to do with chocolate, it went under the knife.

I had a pretty big bowlful of chunks.

Then I mixed up a double batch of my regular chocolate chip cookie recipe, but substituted the bowlful of chocolate-covered everything for the chocolate chips. So they were sort of like candy-bar cookies. Not quite chocolate chunk. More like chocolate junk.

And lemme tell ya, my house smelled pretty damn delicious.
(And baking is pretty effective therapy. Maybe that's why so many people bake during the holidays.)

Because people keep giving us plates and plates of cookies, and fudge, and bags of Chex Mix, and peanut brittle, and homemade candy, and ... well, you get the picture. It's the holidays, so people feel compelled to bake. And even though such gifts might appear to be gestures of kindness and generosity and good will, I'm starting to think these desperate folks are just trying to keep the crazy at bay.

(By the way, a note to anyone who has the urge to drop off any more sweets at our door: we'd rather have wine. Wine is also pretty effective therapy, with fewer calories and fewer dishes to wash. And just for the record, I am not leaving Santa Claus cookies and milk on Christmas Eve. I'm making him a Manhattan.)

Anyway, since we are all carbed-out around here, I popped my Chocolate Junk Cookies into the freezer for another day.

Costume? What costume?

Casual Friday

"A squirrel is just a rat with a cuter outfit."

-- Sarah Jessica Parker

Self portrait 11-16-13

casual Friday
noun
"Friday designated as a day on which employees are allowed to dress less formally than on other workdays."

-- Dictionary.com

So, maybe I packed a jam sandwich and a thermos of decaf and spent my Friday lunch hour enjoying a lovely fall day a the park.

Self portrait (2) 11-16-13

Wearing a squirrel suit.

Then again, maybe I didn't.

But maybe I did.

Probably I did. 

OK. I did.

I definitely ate lunch at the park.

It was the end of the week and I was feeling a little squirrelly. Besides, it was casual Friday, so.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, "squirrelly" is an adjective that means:

1. Tending to move around a lot

2. Very odd, silly or foolish

Guilty as charged, your Honor.

This park is a common ground area in the middle of my neighborhood. There are swings, a merry-go-round, a slide, tennis and basketball courts, and the whole thing is surrounded by houses.

I was in the park for about half an hour, in full squirrel regalia, doing my thing.

Nobody noticed. Or if they did, nobody cared.

I think it's because I blended in so well with my surroundings. Squirrels can do that.

Nice wig, Janis. What's it made of?

"Medusa is your mom?" he asked.

 "Dude, that sucks for you."

-- Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena

Self portrait 10-19-13

"Naturally curly hair is a curse, and don't ever let anyone tell you different."

-- Mary Ann Shaffer, 

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

"She's fabulous, but she's evil."

-- Mean Girls

"Versace, Versace, Medusa head on me like I'm 'Luminati."

-- Drake, "Versace"

In my dual-purpose quest to come up with an October full of "disguise" faces, and come up with a good Halloween costume, I made myself this neat Medusa wig out of rubber snakes from the toy store!

Mad props to the nice clerk at my local Toys R Us, who helped me dig out all of the snakes they had in the way back on the bottom shelf of the store's "dollar deals" section.  

Beautiful monster

"She's a monster, beautiful monster

Beautiful monster but I don't mind

And I need her, said I need her

Beautiful monster but I don't mind."

-- Ne-Yo, "Beautiful Monster"

Self portrait 10-9-13

"Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me,

in the cavern that's where my heart should be,

and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin ..."

-- Jodi Picoult, Handle With Care

Self portrait (2) 10-9-13

"We all have a Monster within;

the difference is in degree, not in kind."

-- Douglas Preston, The Monster of Florence

Self portrait (3) 10-9-13

The Monster:   You, make man ... like me?

Dr. Pretorius:      No. Woman ... friend for you.

The Monster:   Woman ... Friend ... Wife ...

-- The Bride of Frankenstein

My month-long "October-Faced" challenge-within-a-challenge has a dual purpose.

One is to celebrate the month of October by making it a special faces in disguise-themed project.

The other is to figure out what I'm going to be for Halloween.

I almost always dress up and stand at the end of our driveway to pass out candy to the neighborhood trick-or-treaters. Usually my boys dress up with me. Sam has been Michael Jackson in various iterations for several years. Leo has been wearing the same Cookie Monster costume since he was a little kid, which is hilarious now because he is over 6 feet tall and the thing fits him like a tiny, fuzzy, blue plush shrug with a Cookie Monster head on top. He wore it to Chipotle last year and got a free burrito.

I've been a bull rider, Elastigirl, Maid Marion (with my husband as a super-cute Robin Hood), a witch. The year I was a witch, my friend Maria brought her little grandsons by. The littlest one, who couldn't quite get his Ws in the right places, was scared of me and clung to Maria saying "I don't wike dat cwazy bitch." Of course, Maria encouraged his fledgling, accidental profanity. 

Maria: "Who is that, Ryan?" 

Ryan: "A bitch." 

Adorable.

Anyhoo.

This Bride of Frankenstein costume (well, makeup and wig so far) might be a front-runner. I still have a couple more ideas I want to explore. But this one is definitely in contention. Stay tuned.

Cheap entertainment

"This mug of mine is as plain as a barn door. 

Why should people pay 35 cents to look at it."

-- Spencer Tracy

Self portrait 10-6-13

I bought this nifty paper eye mask at the costume/party store for 35 cents.

I had my son Sam as a designated driver, so I wore my new mask out of the store and kept it on in the car.

I wore my new mask while I ordered my triple decaf Americano at the Starbucks drive thru.

There is a cute little barista there named Allie who we always give a little gift after we visit the costume/party store. Once we gave her a balloon with a bunny face on it. Another time we gave her a paper camouflage mask. This time, we gave her a zombie finger puppet. (3 guesses what tomorrow's face is!) We also gave a zombie finger puppet to our other favorite barista, Terri, who said we made her day.

Yay! Making someone's day feels super-terrific. And it doesn't have to cost a lot of money. And it doesn't have to be anything monumental or heroic or expensive.

For pennies, you can brighten someone's dreary, rainy afternoon.

So go ahead and do your part to make the world a happier place.

Put on a paper skull and eyeballs mask, get out there and give away some zombie finger puppets.

October-faced

"I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me."

-- Roy Lichtenstein

Self portrait with hand-painted Lichtenstein mask 10-2-13

I'm still feeling a little bit inspired by the Pop Art movement, so I painted this Lichtenstein-inspired mask.

It's just paint and ink on a cheap plastic blank mask from the craft store.

The ink that I made the dots with smeared a little bit, but that's OK.

It was just an experiment.

I learned from my mistakes.

I do want to try again and make a better one. Next time I'll use something a little more indelible.

Oh, and I came up with a name for this month's "disguise" themed portraits:

"October-Faced."

Get it? It sounds like "October fest" but with "faced" instead of "fest."

Oh, forget it.

Ahhh-ctober!

"I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers."

-- L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Self portrait 10-1-13

"I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes 

every day of the year, not just on Halloween. 

Wouldn't life be more interesting that way? 

And now that I think about it, why the heck don't they?

Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year? 

Think of all the people you'd meet if they were in costume every day. 

People would be so much easier to talk to -- like talking to dogs."

--Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

Maybe it's just me, but September seemed to last a long damn time.

October has been impatiently standing by the door checking its watch and jingling its keys for a while now, waiting for that other bitch to take the hint and hit the bricks.

But it's finally over, and I'm pretty excited.

It's no secret that I like to dress up in costumes and disguises all year 'round. I do it "for my art." At least that's what I use as my excuse. But in October, it's OK to dress up and wear disguises without any excuses at all.

That sounds pretty good to me.

I can pull out all the stops and let 'er rip. 

As I try to figure out what my actual Halloween costume is going to be, I think I'll try several out here on the blog and make it kind of a loosely themed "disguise a day" costume challenge nested inside the over-riding "A Face A Day" structure.

So I'm getting the greasepaint and the spirit gum ready.

I'm unpacking my masks, wigs and silly glasses.

Time to pick up some fake blood and vampire fangs.

Hey, October. What took you so long?

Aaaaaarrrr! A pirate's face for me!

"Life's pretty good, 

and why wouldn't it be?

I'm a pirate, after all."

-- Johnny Depp

Self portrait 7-17-13

“A taste for adventure is by no means a masculine monopoly.”

-- Lloyd Alexander

“I do not see, for there is no I to see. 

That is what the pirates know. 

There is only seeing and, 

in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.”

-- Kathy Acker 

"I have a pirate fetish --

 I just always thought eye patches were sexy."

-- Michelle Branch

So, remember how yesterday I said I might start wearing an eye patch to hide my fluttering, twitchy eye?

To quote myself, I said,

"I'm thinking about wearing an eye patch.
A really cool-looking, bad ass eye patch.
It could be my thing.
I could be that cool, bad ass chick with the eye patch."

Well, I went one step further and made myself a bad ass pirate eye patch.

And once I'd made the pirate eye patch, really the only logical next step was to actually dress up like a pirate and wear it for a self portrait. Besides, it was a perfect excuse to try out my tarantula neck tattoo.

Granted, I don't look much like a chick, but I still think I look pretty cool.
Pretty bad ass.
And that fluttering eye thing?
You can't even notice it behind the skull and crossbones and dozen metal spikes.

I totally love it that my kids don't even flinch when I do shit like this.

While I was finishing up this costume, my 18-year-old son, Sam, came home from his responsible, normal, grown-up, big kid job.

I should have been fixing supper, but instead I was upstairs blacking my teeth when he came into my bathroom.

He was like, "Hey, whatcha doing?"
And I was like, "Dressing up like a pirate."
And he went, "OK. Do I have time to mow a couple of lawns before supper?"
And I was like, "Sure."

I love my family.

I mean, you know, when I'm not at sea, swashbuckling and avasting ye hearties and plundering and getting booty and lots of other super-adventurous, dangerous pirate-y stuff.