cookie swap

Warning! After viewing the following photo, you may feel a surge in your blood sugar level:
That's right, this past Friday was the annual Michigan Lady Food Bloggers' cookie exchange!

I brought lavender lemon shortbread and molasses raspberry cookies (on the big white platter in the photo).

It'll be a little easier to name the cookies with the photo below, which contains the quantity I brought home, minus the cookies I ate while at Patti's, minus the cookies I ate in the car, minus the cookies Brian ate when I came through the door... (The cookies I brought aren't in this photo because I gave all of them away at the swap. I froze some extra dough so we can have some once we deplete this vast quantity of sugar and fat...maybe sometime in April...)

Starting with the top left corner and working vaguely clockwise we have: apricot and raspberry linzer cookies, white chocolate cookies, pecan snowballs, ginger snaps and molasses cookies, three different kinds of 'bastards': Oreo bastards (the white ones), lemon bastards (the yellow) and peanut butter bastards (the chocolate), raspberry rugulach, Hanukkah dreidels and stars, Spritz cookies, mini carrot cardamon muffins, date walnut spirals, anise cut outs, chocolate crinkles, and chocolate macarons.

I love this tradition--it is the best way to get variety in your cookie selection and I get to hang out with a bunch of cool women for an evening and I don't get guilt-tripped by my critters for ditching them for an evening. When they saw this platter of sugary bounty their eyes went all round and they started treating me like God.

New problem: hat head

Since I filled up a trash can at my hairdressers with the bulk of my hair recently (quick way to lose 5 lbs) I have felt the liberation of the short haired.

I'm loving the short hair but, with the newly nippy weather, have now encountered a new problem: hat head. It's not something you have to worry about with a ponytail, but with short curls that are kind of wiry in the texture department, putting on a hat is like sticking my head into a weird hair mould--pointy hat=pointy head, bowl hat=bowl head, etc.

So I've been on a quest for a knitting pattern for a loose warm hat that won't smash my curls or make me look like I have a muffin on my head.

I knit this one (pattern is available for free on Ravelry if you are a member):
It treats the curls well, but isn't very warm due to the loose knit and the shape (it only barely covers the tops of my ears.)
If I pull it down over my forehead, my head looks like a big moss covered boulder. Not really the look I'm going for. So this will do for a brisk fall day, but I hear that a blizzard is on the way and this hat does not have the chops to keep my noggin warm.

So I also cast on to make myself a fish hat like the girl critter's. I tried hers on and it is pretty loose but able to be pulled down low to cover most of my head. And I don't look like a muffin-head; I look like a fish is swallowing my head (but that's intentional, right?)
The colors are all wonky in the photo; I'm making it in the subdued tones of grass green, dusty blue and black. Because subdued is really the quality I'm going for with a fish on my head...(really I chose them because they were a) in the stash bin b) all wool so hopefully warm c) passed the squish-up-against-my-forehead-not-itchy test).

Does anyone have ideas for other patterns that might work for non-curl compression? Please send me any ideas because I have a feeling I'll be in some situations this winter where a fish might not be totally appropriate...