A Modesty Proposal

Modesty.

Without fail, modesty's drug into light around the time the weather turns from bipolar freezing warm, to near perfection and oops you missed it. Here comes the blazing, turkey frying heat of summer. Women, you need to cover yourself up or else all those rabid, chimp brain men who can't control their urges will rape you all because you flashed some ankle. (Maybe we should rethink putting something we believe has less self control than a dog licking its own nads in charge of everything. Just a thought.)

Hyperbole?

Think again. 

Avert your mind, Daughter

Her mother started saying that from day one, before she even was aware of what boys, or people, or shapes were. There might have been a dangerous opportunity; a woman senator railing against a bill to put her back in the cupboard, a doctor trying to offer the freedom to control her own body, a girl wearing a short skirt and NOT being harassed for leaving the house while carrying a vagina.

Temptation can be found anywhere.

I'm sorry, Daughter.

I'm sorry that for a brief moment you got the idea that you could be a fully actualized human being with your own thoughts, hope, dreams, wants, desires. I'm sorry the enemy wants to convince you you can do and dress however you like. I feel badly that we live in a world giving you such false hopes, and that's ready to compromise a woman's acceptance of being a second class citizen.

It's never been easy - only it's far worse now.

Is there nowhere a young woman can safely go?

Perhaps to a nice Atheist Camp. Lots of people can get together and enjoy a hearty spaghetti dinner of their one flying lord. So out my daughter headed.

Most of the young men there were dressed for enjoying the high summer temps and they ignored the bare arm flesh of the girls on display. Lots of knee length denim. Yikes!

I noticed a handsome boy sitting nearby, respectfully greeting a few girls who'd been reading quietly too themselves, asked if they'd seen a condiment, and moved on without pressuring himself into their conversation. Surely he could have made another choice. Looked down upon the girls as if they were created by god only for his eyes. Refused to make eye contact. Spoken over top every one of their requests to let them get back to reading. Inched ever closer into their personal space before pulling one onto his lap.

If he only understood how hard she's trying to do the right thing. For her sake. For the sake of all women who want to walk in the acceptance that you belong to the men in your life, never yourself, and you never own your own body.

If he only understand that the way he acted meant a good woman could hold her head up. She had to turn away from his vision of her being a full human being with the right to wear what she wanted and not be accused of causing someone else to sin. That she was missing out on the chance to really shine.


Because we teach women to bow their heads. Defer to men who want to own them and decide what is and is not acceptable of her own flesh to bare to the world. But what can we as people determined to maintain the status quo do? We can't leave our daughters stuck in a place where there's nowhere to turn.

Let's choose obedience - obedience that forces a woman's true nature rot on the vine of oppression.

For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control. (2 Timothy 1:7)

Peace out Bitches,

Zombie Car Wash

This weekend was our second annual Zombie Car Wash, which actually has very little to do with brainless undead driving cars.

It's our clubs main fundraising source to be able to advertise for the dance later in October to raise money for the capital human society. Let a monster wash your car for kitties and puppies.

I decided to pull out my zombie teeth, paint them and take them on an inaugural run.

I left my left side mostly unmakeuped, so when I'd turn my head people'd get an eyefull of my teeth and freak out. One guy shouted "Jesus!" Another girl had her mother tell her, not to be scared when she came out of the bathroom stall and she slid far over to hide under the hand dryer.

A small girl with a yellow daisy pinned into her hair, watched hypnotized as I wiped down a car. So I walked over and smiled and asked her if she wanted to touch my teeth. Her lips never lifted from a most concerned contemplation, but she nodded and pushed her finger to the clay pieces and glanced up to her father.

My husband got mostly blood and bruises:

The problem with having only one person who does Halloween makeup in a family of two means it takes twice as long to get out the door. I never did get the teeth fully glued down. DAMN YOU SPIRIT GUM! I banish thee back to the hell you crawled from.

For those who can't come out to Nebraska but want to know the zombie car wash experience, it begins with a zombie canvasing up and down the road, waving his arm about.

Then the zombie lights up a stogie and sprays the hose with a borrowed power washer. Zombies had to put down zombie credit card, which is actually a flattened rat. Zombie economy difficult to understand.

Now zombies free to really shine. Soap!

And Squeege!

Sometimes zombie surprised by how scary zombie is in side mirror:

Then you give zombie $10 for hard work (we no long accept dead rat as payment) and drive off in sparkling car not covered in blood. Nope. None at all.

Next Week on Iron Halloween Chopped!

As part of our June Halloween Club meeting this year a handful of us rose to a challenge that should sound familiar to anyone else who's ever camped out in front of the Food Network and wondered where their brain stem went.

Each team was given a bag (basket) full of unknown materials and given 90 minutes to create a Halloween prop. There was a community table of stuff; mostly tools, paint and some building materials.

Every team could bring two props from home. We chose a skull and were originally going to bring a rotating motor but replaced that at the last moment with a hot wire, which I never used. Score!

We had to use three of the six objects hidden inside the bag:

• Clear tubing
• Toothpicks
• Cotton balls
• Plastic Golf balls
• Rope
• Foam (a haunter's staple)

We all set about scurrying with our ideas, throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck, then trying to unstick it to glue it to our undead wasp mummy prop. I was in the middle of painting when the twist came, there must always be a twist or else something something.

On top of the three out of six (or 7 of 9 if you brought a Borg to help), we also had to incorporate a set of plastic curlers and an adorable fabric flower with a big smiley face.

I was too busy in the midst of creating to take lots of pictures so everything is "after."

Oddly, there was very little drama™. No one chopped a finger off, no one got into a major fight over the hot glue gun, no one accidentally reanimated a corpse and had it ransack the studio audience (the only watchable episode of Cupcake Wars.) We all laughed, glued, painted, sawed, and sliced through while encouraging everyone and finished before time was called.

But the props.

I may as well begin with our own. I decided to spray paint the skull a red and go full on demon:

For the golf balls, my husband cut them in half (because I'd have sliced my hand right off) and I painted them red, white and black and turned them into some serious skull bug eyes. The toothpicks were wrapped in duct tape, then stuck inside a cotton ball jammed in the rest of the golf balls and all that coated in duct tape.

This created the hands and duct tape newspaper gave the arms.

The horns were shaped from the foam.

The flower I spray painted a dead black and even gave it a joker frowney blood red face (which you can't see because I'm smart like that), we also cut off the end to reinforce the neck so no floppy headed baby demon.

As for the curlers, well I snapped them in half and boom instant demon eyelashes. Maybe she's spawned with it, maybe it's Maybelline.

A few of our other fellow haunters went in different directions entirely:

Spider and eyeball soup.

 Stabbed skull brain dessert.

 A little subdued Dia de los muertos:

 I, uh, still have no idea. Maybe it's upside down.

But this last one, I took one look at and went op that wins. No amount of skill can top light up eyes, sound effects or motions. It's Challenge rules 101.

Of course you don't get much cooler than that without bringing in something that shoots fire (note, next year bring someone that shoots fire), so we lost to the Bride of Funkenstein.

But much fun was had by all and I suspect we can use our little baby female demon somewhere in our home haunt (in the back somewhere), which is all we were hoping for.

Into the Deep End

I'm crazy.

I know, I know, anyone already wandering aimlessly around this asylum's boards is already well aware of that face. I simply wished to use it as theme setting because I'm about to do something extra crazy with fudge AND caramel sauce.

Despite my third book floating untethered in that nebulous endless plain of not-quite-ready-for-publishing, sent-out-for-querying I've had some ideas and plans for a fourth tale. This one would be much less grander in scope (I'm hoping around 125K less grander words at least) and be a genre masher as it'd be fantasy character but in SPAAAAACCCCEEEeee...e.

November is usually my "crack open my brain, pour out what's inside month" but it's also incredibly full of post-Halloween/pre-Christmas stuff. So, I had a wacky idea to try CampNaNo this year. Which means 31 days of novel abandon in July.

I may or may not have also had this idea because a certain video game could have been coming out in November only to see the dreaded phrase "Fall 2014" flash on the screen. DAMN YOU BIOWARE!

But the point, in less than a month, I'll try sticking my head deep into the quivering jell-o mass of cracking that 50K challenge. I learned that it's apparently a proper past time to create covers for books before they are written. It seems a bit like putting the lasagna before the horse, but who am I to turn down a cover challenge with lots of photoshopping:

And if you only come here for my prop making, soon I shall be delving into trying to craft my own Portal Gun.

I assume there will be many tears, laughs, screams, and boiled potatoes. In fact, I already have GLaDOS all hooked up.

How are you doing, because I'm a potato?

FemShep as Cinderella

Awhile back I discovered that the voice actress for the badass, gun toting reaper killer was also the girl behind the reincarnation of one of the most useless Disney Princesses this side of a pager.

Since then I dreamed what it would be like to actually have a terrifying, do something, Cinderella.

This was the closest I came to a quick mock up.

Tell your friends we're coming for them.