Another Halloween...

...another terrifying costume.

Don't you even TRY starting something with me, young man!

It's that festive time of year again...

...time to whip up a batch of WORLD DOMINATION SUGAR COOKIES! Yes!

And then decorate 'em up so they look like this:

Cute, delicious, AND world-dominating! Who could ask for more?!

Well, I'll give you more. Proof positive that sugar cookies will put even fiends in helpless thrall!

Beauty and the Beast

I'm a huge sucker for romantic musicals. There, I said it. And one of the first live Broadway musicals I ever saw was Beauty and the Beast, so I have a particular soft spot in my heart for it.

Naturally, when the touring production came to Seattle, seeing it was sort of a moral imperative.

Yay!

Convincing Miss V and Captain Midnight to come along wasn't very difficult.

I mean, it's the Paramount! It's beautiful inside, even before the show starts.

On the way in, I heard another theatergoer refer to it as "the palace." And it really is.

Here's the proscenium arch.

No, there will not be pictures from the actual production, because I take the whole "no flash photography" thing pretty seriously. But I'm not above linking to my favorite song from this musical, sung by my favorite Beast, Terrence Mann:

Oh my poor heart.

Pseudowords

Tonight I came across something fun: a fake word generator. I'm always curious about word etymology, and even fake words like these can be sussed out in semi-logical fashion and given reasonable meanings based on their structure, since they're made up of real prefixes and suffixes.

Here's a few of my favorites, in no particular order:

• Novanoid
• Luezoid
• Feandra
• Claster
• Frorealm
• Moderock
• Felsither
• Yodacloud (hmm, tut tut, rain it looks like, yes!)
• Pentwist

So if you had to assign meanings to these words, what meanings would you choose? Which word would you want to catch on the most? (I like "Claster," a portmanteau word of "clash" and "plastered" and meaning "one who frequently engages in drunken brawls," especially if it later becomes a surname.)

Meet Roxy

This is Roxy.

She's a domestic shorthair with tortoiseshell markings, six months old, and on Saturday she joined the household.

Roxy was adopted from a local cat rescue shelter. She is very curious, playful, but also quiet, shy and skittish, and likes to explore the house to find new places to hide. (We're going to have to get used to looking into closets and so forth before we close doors.) Oddly enough, she also loves to snuggle and will lie in the crook of V's arm for hours, relaxing and purring. Her drug of choice is the laser pointer. I'm not kidding; it's like kitty cocaine.

We expect it to take some time for her to adjust to us (and vice versa), but in the meantime she is bonding with Miss V, who has made taking care of Roxy her primary responsibility.

And yes, she knows she's pretty.

The Doom That Came To Sally Beauty

So Miss V and I were having an Epic Afternoon Beauty Product Run, pretty much just picking out mascara and minding our own business, when a woman came into the store... bearing a snarling, writhing, vicious basket of death!

As Miss V approached the basket...

...this menacing month-old monster lunged at her. But Miss V is made of stern stuff.

Insensate to fear, she grappled boldly with the furry menace.

Even when it threatened to lick her to death, she stayed strong.

The terror! The terror that is a Maltichon puppy! Aaaaiieeee!

...nah, I can't. Everybody do it with me: d'AWWwww.

This puppy is still too young to be away from his mother, but in about a month he'll be ready for a new home. Miss V is pressing hard for that home to be HERE, but we're not really set up with the space for a dog. Or, for that matter, the $ this guy is going to cost.

Still, super adorable little puffball. Uh, I mean horror! HORROR!

On being "girly"

While I was growing up, I had few close female friends. Most of my buddies were boys. Not that I was a tomboy; I liked to play with dolls, wear dresses, and so forth. But boys just seemed easier, friendlier, more straightforward, more trustworthy as friends. And other girls usually seemed so, well, catty to each other and to me -- and as I got into junior high they wanted to do things I thought of as tedious or stupid, like shopping for clothes, gossiping about boys, going to the bathroom in packs or discussing who would get her period first. (I was frankly befuddled over all this useless mystique surrounding a biological function; to me it seemed akin to obsessing over the need to urinate.) By high school I had puzzled out the vaguely proto-feminist idea that being "girly" meant being vapid and useless, and it held little charm for me.

I'm still not particularly girly by nature. (Big revelation, coming from a chick whose alternate nickname is "The Pirate King," ne?) Shopping for clothing is still a chore, and I can't see the point of owning more than four pairs of shoes. Most TV is banal; I'd rather spend time online or reading a book. Captain Midnight and I can pack a week's worth of clothes into a single shared suitcase. I've determined that aerobics are really a huge, ongoing sociological experiment based on the thesis that people will do practically anything if they think it will help them lose weight. I don't have a Pinterest account, I don't have a thousand pairs of earrings, I don't obsess over what to wear, and I don't have any concerns about my bust size. And I prefer to go to the bathroom all by myself, thank you.

Despite my lack of interest in being girly, there was a time when these traits used to worry me. I was afraid that my dearth of girly qualities would drive people away, even after I met CM and got married. But then I started to meet and make friends with women who were undeniably feminine, but who didn't fit into neat little pigeonholes of girliness. Yes, they did some traditionally feminine things, but they were just as comfortable geeking out in front of a computer, or getting into anime other than Sailor Moon, or discussing the kind of literature that will never make bestseller lists, or passing around good science fiction and fantasy. Watching my friends, I began -- finally -- to relax into the set of interests and behaviors that make me feel happy, excited, contented, creative -- in other words, fully myself. I've found that, happily, I don't have to be some kind of Überchick or squeeze myself into an ill-fitting stereotype to be considered "girly enough."

I guess it just took me a little while to figure out that I'm not a girl. I'm a woman.