Happy Halloween to you and yours...

... from the Fairy Princess Mermaid.

Why be just one thing for Halloween when you can be three?

I love this look of pure Halloween hysteria.

We had a great day. We carved our pumpkins (I know, lame to do it the day of), made hot dog mummies for lunch (hot dogs with roll dough wrapped around them and baked — totally healthy), had soup and hot bread for dinner — and waited for the rain to stop so we Anna could go trick or treating. It did stop. Eventually.

The upside of a rainy Halloween? People practically begged us to take their candy, since fewer kids were out. This is Anna's loot after stopping at maybe 15 houses.

One neighbor actually told Anna to take seven candy bars. SEVEN!

I also love that Anna is getting more and more creative with her attire, the older she gets. (Hence, the 3-in-1 costume this year.) It takes me back to when I started coming up with my own costume ideas, however lame. Like the year I was a die (as in dice — yes, I wore a giant cardboard box with armholes) or when I thought I had achieved ultimate Halloween genius by dressing as Mrs. Claus. And then there was the time I dressed up as a business man, only to have my trick-or-treating plans foiled by the flu. Ah, the memories.

What were you for Halloween, this year or in years past?

Annacdotes 11

Today's photos are brought to you by a trip up the canyon last week.  I love autumn.

1. Anna and I were doing a little Hot Lava scenario as we were walking/hopping down the hall to the bathroom. Once in the bathroom, I said, "Quick, get on the rugs to save yourself from the hot lava!" She then told me that the bathroom tile was not, in fact, hot lava — it was "ripe, boiling, rotten beehives." That blew mine out of the water.

2. A segment from a recent prayer: "Please bless Mom and Dad. Please bless everyone else on this earth. And even our cousins. Please bless even a single person on this earth. And please come visit us [quiet burp]. Amen."

3. When Anna has a sore throat, sometimes I make her some honey lemon tea. On one occasion, she had waited a bit too long to finish it and it was cold. On her way to the microwave, she said, "Mom, I need to warm my tea a little upper." I think she's on her way to making some excellent spoonerisms.

4. Out of the blue: "Mom, I'm glad my nickname is Annabelle and not Potty Hands."

NO idea where this came from.

5. Once upon a time, I got a baby doll probably the same year my older sister got an American Girl doll. After some quick research, I found out it is called a Bitty Baby. Huh. Who knew? Anyway, they had several to choose from and, back in the day, I chose this one:

The doll's outfit in this picture is way more updated and girly than the one I had. The outfit on mine was white and blue, which we all know means only boy. Anyway, Anna now plays with it and loves it. And she named it Jonath. If you make the mistake of referring to him as Jonathan, she will correct you.

Can you guess which gang sign she's making?

And I don't remember what happened to warrant this face, but I love it.

Friday Funny

A few things that made me laugh, of late. Happy Friday to all.

1. I just saw on my blogger stats that someone ended up at my blog after searching for "Hilary Banks hot." Funny, but I think Ashley was even hotter.

2. The fact that "premonish" is, indeed, a real word. A verb, meaning to warn beforehand. Huh. And not slang (or even communicating vagueness) in the slightest.

3. Finding this picture on my camera. One morning, I hadn't seen Anna for a while and decided to track her down. I found her outside, in her pajamas, playing "tennis" with pink fuzzy gloves and a baseball. (I stealthily took the picture through a window so that I wouldn't disturb the creature in her natural habitat.)

4. My dream a couple nights ago: I was sitting in a high school Physics class, making super lame Physics jokes to the kid next to me. (I don't even know enough about Physics to make Physics jokes, so this part of the dream was actually quite a feat.) And who was my teacher? RuPaul.

That's right, I said RUPAUL.

And what was RuPaul wearing? A v-neck sweater and a self-rhinestone-bedazzled jean skirt. Of course.

My achilles heel

I'm here today to discuss my achilles heel, my personal kryptonite (or one form of it, anyway). This is the kind of thing that, once you're within five feet of a batch of them, your short term memory gets erased and you lose all ability to properly judge how many is an acceptable amount to consume. I've already had 5 in a row? How about 15 more? Sure! Sounds great. I think I'll take the biggest one, for starters.

Yes, October is here and 'tis the season for

p u m p k i n  c o o k i e s .

In fact, I don't even need it to be October. We make these year round at my house. But even so, I had some leftover pumpkin in the fridge after making some pumpkin waffles a few days ago, and I could not let it go to waste. So it became necessary for me to bake some pumpkin deliciousness today.

In my mind, this is the best pumpkin cookie recipe ever. There are many versions, so to each his own. But as for me and my house, I like lots of chocolate chips, just a hint of cinnamon, and they're not complete until they're topped with a delectable cream cheese frosting.

Pumpkin Cookies

1 c. pumpkin

1 c. sugar

1/2 c. oil

1 egg

2 c. flour

2 t. baking powder

3/4 t. cinnamon (scant)

1/2 t. salt

1 t. baking soda dissolved in 1 t. milk

1 c. chocolate chips (or more)

1 t. vanilla

Combine pumpkin, sugar, oil, and eggs. Stir together with flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt; add to pumpkin mixture along with dissolved soda and mix well. Stir in chocolate chips and vanilla. Drop onto lightly greased cookie sheet. Bake at 375 degrees for 10-12 minutes until lightly golden brown.

Cream Cheese Frosting

(this is very vague, so feel it out)

2 oz. softened cream cheese

2-3 T. softened butter

2-ish c. powdered sugar

1-2 T. milk

1/4 t. vanilla (to taste)

Mix until smooth.

And don't be fooled by the size of this recipe. We're so hardcore here that we often triple the recipe so we can use an entire large can of pumpkin (including the extra 1/2 cup of pumpkin—maybe that's the secret weapon?). Sometimes we freeze some cookies for later, sometimes we don't and eat way too many over the next few days. 

Oh the humanity, I think I've probably eaten 100 today. These pumpkin cookies are probably only second (as far as the memory-erasing, judgment-paralyzing power of temptation is concerned) to Satan's Bait: my mother's rolls. But that's a recipe for another day.

Child Prodigy

Usually I'm talking about Anna when I mention anything about youthful brilliance or unusual intelligence. But not this time. That's right, this time it's about me.

I was talking about writing with a friend a while ago, and somehow I dragged up from the depths of my brain the memory of how my sister Jen and I, but mostly Jen, used to put out a family newsletter . . . in 1995. So I went home and rummaged around and found copies of what we churned out. Get ready for this.

Name: The Scoresby Tribune. Tagline: "The news you need to know." Amazing.

I think we must have gotten a new version of WordPerfect, or something, around this time and decided to put some newsletter template to good use. You can imagine the columns and the fonts and amazing graphics we had at our fingertips. We maybe printed two or three editions before we realized how lame we were, but it was fun while it lasted. Jen was the publisher, editor, and writer, and I was simply a guest writer and maybe a consultant.

Jen wrote a letter from the editor about how "CHRISTMAS IS ON THE WAY!" (this headline was in all caps in a cursive font that should never be used in all caps), spotlights on family members, an event calendar, and random newsflashes. She was incredibly thoughtful and diplomatic about all of this. Here's a "Flash!" from the November 25th issue:

Stephanie [another sister] finished her paper for her sociolinguistic class. (Whatever the heck that is) She just wanted me to put that in. (Like anyone cares)


[flying crane clip art]

While the whole newsletter is an absolute treat, it was my short story that triggered the memory. I think I was telling my friend how I didn't really know I liked to write until much later in my life, about halfway through college. Much later, it seems, than the stereotypical writer. I was telling her how I wasn't writing volumes of poems and stories as a kid (that's what Jen did, actually) — only to stop short when my guest spot on this newsletter came to mind. And the memory of it made me laugh. For several reasons.

This short story was probably the first non-school-related fiction piece I ever wrote. And when Jen commissioned me to write it, I remember first considering what I knew about "good literature." I knew it was somewhat depressing (if a bit sterile), it often didn't make a lot of sense, and it was sometimes about something you totally didn't see coming. And this is what I came up with, five days before my 14th birthday (just as a frame of reference):

I started to cry as I saw her walk down the snow-covered sidewalk and get into her car. Tears streamed down my face. I sat and watched the snow fall.

"Would she really do this to me?" I thought to myself. "Would my own mother do this to me?"

I cried and cried for a long time. No one was home and I was scared. My mother would never come back and I would be alone forever.

After a while, I got hungry. I went to see what was in the fridge. I saw some leftover apple pie and some Kool-aid. I ate that and went to watch some TV. I watched a show about a mother and daughter who went to the park.

"Mother!"

I started to cry again and didn't stop until I heard a loud noise outside. I ran to the window and looked out.

It was my mom! My very own mother!

I ran outside to meet her and slipped on the ice. I broke my ankle, but my mom was home!

She ran up to me. She knew that I had broken my ankle and wondered why I wasn't crying. I told her that I was just glad she was home. Then she told me that she had just gone to the store. I started to laugh and then felt really embarrassed and ran into my room.

The End

Riveting, right? If only I had remembered, when trying to decide on a major, how successful my brief stint at The Scoresby Tribune truly was. I would have declared "English!" faster than you can say apple pie and Kool-aid.

It was prophetic, really.