Happy Halloween from Misty May and friends

 For the troops of course!

 Fighter Pilot

 Pirate 

(although now I'm thinking that he may have said he wanted to be a Pilot also, but he doesn't pronounce his L's that well.  Arrrr-gh.)

 80's Popstar.  Like totally.

 I did a similar outfit when I was about her age, but I can't find the picture to do a split screen, so here is an 80's popstar with her mother who can't let go of the past. 

This is the scene BEFORE we even got to our first neighborhood to Trick'r Treat.  4:08pm. Yikes.

 Time to wrap it up.  8:15pm.

Important question - what do you do with all that junk? (Obviously junk does not refer to peanut m&m's, junior mints, reeses, kit kat and twix, (i will take care of those thank you))  Any suggestions?  Do you let them gorge themselves until they are sick of it and hope it teaches them a lesson, or do you let them have one piece a day until next spring?  See Halloween poll.

* I just found a great option for the candy question, and an idea that is totally endorsed by Misty May herself: send the candy to the troops.  Some dentists are even collecting candy and shipping it.  To find a local drop off point near you go here.

6!

My face.

 No.  I'm not going as Freddie Krueger for Halloween.  Although I may want to consider it.  Yesterday I donated my face to science.  And here are the results.  It actually looks much much worse in person.  I wish you could see it.  No, actually I don't.  No, actually I do, or I wouldn't have taken half a dozen photos of myself and put them online.

I've donated plasma, been a hair model (not like in a Pantene commercial, but as in if you let them do whatever they want to your hair, the color is free!), a mystery shopper, a taste-tester, and pimped myself out in various other completely voluntary ways, but this one is worth documenting.  It started off as an opportunity to get a scar blasted by a new laser that the staff in Ben's office were training on.  The scar is on my forehead over my right eye.  I put it there myself while testing an Ecuadorian herbal product that removes moles.  It works.

But, as happens when you go to a plastic surgeon's office (or to a Vietnamese nail salon) you get more services offered than you had planned on getting...or felt you needed.  Actually the latter part is not completely true.  I have plenty of melanin that has worked it's way up to the surface that I would love to jettison.  So when the opportunity presented itself, I capitalized.  Plus I think these procedures are really expensive.

The pictures below are from yesterday, right after the procedure.  I am intrigued by the pattern, which looks as if I fell asleep on a miniature honeycomb.  A very very hot one. I didn't get to see the laser doing it's thing because then I would be blind (or have 20/20 vision), but it felt like a fine point pen was applying molten lava on my face, accompanied by snapping and popping and the smell of burnt something...skin I guess (not chicharones).  They had kindly applied lidocaine to my face prior to, but I'm not sure it made a difference, because they hit a couple places that hadn't been numbed and it felt the same.

Yesterday it wasn't so bad, except that I looked completely ridiculous with 2 cm of Aquaphor on my face.  I would like to blame the petroleum jelly for my awful hair, but no, that's just how it looks in general.  The photos below are from today.  When I asked the doctor how much "downtime" there would be, he said only 3-4 days and you will just look like you have a sunburn.  Uh, yeah, if I lived on the first rock from the sun. But pain (and ugliness) is just hyperpigmintation leaving the body.

I had been planning on going to the gym this morning as usual.  But in an effort to not make people feel uncomfortable, I stayed home and had an ice cream bar to kick off Miles' birthday.  If my face gets worse I will make sure to let you know. 

Day Three Update - Not much better. Maybe worse. And I didn't get the 20/20 I had hoped for.

Day Five - Almost out of the woods.

Day Six - Flaky.  Not sure if my skin is better than it was 7 days ago or if it is just relatively better from a few days ago.  Ben says the results continue over a course of a few weeks.

Mt. Rainier

     

Around here, if you can see Mt. Rainier you know it's a good day.  It's amazing that such a huge monolith spends most of the year shrouded in grey and we almost forget it's there.  And the fact that everyone gets so excited to point it out when it's visible attests to just how scarce the view of her majesty is.  And while it's fun to see from afar, the sub-alpine meadows that surround the mountain are breathtaking in their own way.  I didn't realize until I got there that I hadn't been in over two years and I regret that (except that I was probably enjoying being somewhere else ;)).

We were there the day after 9/11, which is why I am guessing that the flag was at half mast, or it could have been for the recovery of some climbers that had been missing since January.  What it probably wasn't for is in reverence of Lance Armstrong getting stripped of his titles, which is what I had originally thought that the headline "Flags at half-staff for Armstrong" referred to last month - yeah, that was actually for Neil Armstrong. 

 Inspired by a Rick Steve's sketching your travels class...

Inspired by the possibility of blueberries on those branches...

                               

Cruz loved to tell people walking by "I hiking!", followed by some dramatic shortness of breath.

 These days Cruz can't take any pictures without saying "one, two...statue" and then freezing in a pose.

 Alta Loop hike topped off with delicious Rainier* blueberries - just like their tart cherry cousins they are a superior fruit!

*I don't know if that is the actual varietal, but I don't know how to categorize them otherwise.
** Actually they are called wild Mt. Rainier blueberries and you can buy them here.  I bet the Mt. St. Helens ones are good also, I wonder if those come roasted?