365photochallenge - Day 9

 

Day 9 - The epic costume bra re-do is complete! TOTALLY complete. All the lining, finishing the edges, adding one more coin here and there. DONE. Could not be more happy/proud/relieved. On to the next costume piece! !

Cheese Ball Update 2015. Breaking cheeseball news!

 Student showcase/recital/belly dancer party was fun. I could have taken my costume up a notch and blended in better I think. I guess I really don't own any gold. HAHA! Oh well, I liked my more sedate look.

Didn't get goodies made for some co-workers by Dec. 18th, too much going on, was practicing the damn hip-hop piece I was bold enough to take part in all week. Listening to fucking Justine Bieber over and over. It rocked! We rocked!! I don't like the group photo for that one...I haven't gotten other peoples pictures yet...but whatever, it rocked. We worked hard. It right away felt weird that we were done. That group of ladies had been dancing learning/dancing that piece since first week of October. It became part of life for a while. So, some people missed out on fudge.

The one on the left has nuts, the one on the right doesn't. Both were huge hits. I love this fudge.

White elephant party was a success. Some people brought really lame gifts, but whatever. It was a good team builder/detraction. I was the only one that brought an appetizer. The cheese ball was a hit!!

So, it's Amy Sedaris' Cluster Haven's Pepper Mill, I doubled the recipe, added a little cayenne pepper and a little garlic power to the cheese and pecans to the crust. I was kinda scared it wasn't gonna firm up enough to roll, and I didn't want to break it in two and bring two cheese balls to work...it took about 30mins of chill time to get firm, and it still didn't entirely hold it's shape, but whatever. 

Gonna make another one for over Christmas with family. Sorta. I was ditched by both sisters for either xmas day or eve, so it's gonna be a lot of friends I hope. Though, now going out sounds better cause then I don't have to clean the house.

Ingredients

    1 stick butter
    1 8-ounce package cream cheese
    1 1/2 cups grated Cheddar cheese
    2 tablespoons grated onion
    2 tablespoons coarsely ground pepper (to get really coarse pepper, I put peppercorns in a dish towel and bang it with a mallet on my floor)

Instructions

Combine the butter and cream cheese. Add in the Cheddar and onion. Mix it really well.

Form it into a ball and roll it in the pepper. Refrigerate. Serve at room temperature on a Ritz.

"Perfect and timeless. This lady. This picture. 4-eva." ~Rachel Brice

AMEN!

Better view of the Halloween costume that is actually my belly dance costume.  

A recent study done by The Conversation has drawn the same conclusion that music lovers have known for years: Dancing with others is good for your health. People are drawn to music for many different reasons. Whether it be spiritual, emotional, physical, or cultural, music has been a part of the human experience for thousands of years. The innate desire to move to a beat is a quality that we are all born with. Seriously, even babies do it.
While dancing can be taught and practiced to perfection, every single human has a natural ability to synchronize to a beat. It is one of the building blocks of humanity that continues to evolve just as humans do. As The Conversation notes in their study, “it turns out that when you synchronise even a small movement, like the tapping of your finger in time with someone else, you feel closer and more trusting of that person than if you had tapped out of time.”
The rave community is well-versed in this simple scientific fact. People love good music and love a good show, but what really makes the EDM genre truly powerful is the community that accepts everyone and anyone. When you dance with others, whether it be moving to the same beat or dancing in synchronicity, the individual merges into a collective whole. “When we watch someone else do the same thing at the same time as us, our brain ends up with a merged sense of us and them. It feels like we ‘become one,” the study concludes.
The Conversation took things one step further to test additional benefits of dancing in synchronicity with others. The study took place in Brazil, where 264 young people participated in various dancing activities that were synchronized versus non synchronized and high-exertion versus low-exertion. The study measured pain tolerance and feelings of closeness before, during, and after the dancing activities.

“Not surprisingly, those who did full-bodied exertive dancing had higher pain thresholds compared to those…in the low-exertion groups….we also found that synchronisation led to higher pain thresholds, even if the synchronised movements were not exertive. So long as people saw that others were doing the same movement at the same time, their pain thresholds went up.”

So basically, dancing in any synchronization with others increases your pain tolerance and helps you to connect with others. Music literally is group therapy – a concept that EDM champions Above & Beyond is quite familiar with. Moral of the story? Tap into those primal desires and dance!

It’s good for you.

(source)

Holy fuck it's gonna be one of those days....Just after 10am and I want to stab people already!

To try and focus on the positive here, there were 2 winners for the costume contest at work and I was one of them! YAY! I won AMC movie tickets. So, maybe I get an Xmas date to go see Krampus with my love.

Deep breaths. Don't kill people. I won't like jail.

Half hour lunch today so I can leave early and go dance. We rehearse the Deck the Halls belly dance for Xmas show in Eagle Rock. 

Halloween 2015 coustume

I don't think you guys have seen a picture of me in a really long time, and I lost 17 pounds this year, so here ya go.  That coin bra is a reconstruction of the one I ordered online 5 years ago and never really used cause it didn't fit properly. I can actually use it to perform in now! It took about 20 hours of work so far, and I'm not quiet finished yet...I'll post a picture when I am. 

It says number 9 in the lower corner because this is my entry pic for the costume contest at work.