A few weeks ago, the folks at The 100 Day Project sent out an email with the subject line “You get to define success for yourself and your project,” and I was like, “Yes. Yes, I do,” and felt all “I am woman, hear me roar” about it, except then some days I end up defining “success” as “Did not hide under the covers all day.” (This inevitably reminds me of Fear’s great line from Pixar’s Inside Out: “All right! We did not die today! I call that an unqualified success.”)
All this is by way of saying: I took a small hiatus from The 100 Day Project.
But I’m back now, and I’m defining that as a success.
Recently, I’ve been going back through my sketchbooks for inspiration, looking for half-thought out ideas which didn’t end up going anywhere at the time, which I could complete now.
The drawing above is one, an idea I wanted to incorporate into our 2018 holiday cards:
Raccoons hang out around our house, irregularly. Raccoons can be aggressive, and a nuisance, and I have a friend who I think would like very much like me to point out, as a public service, that they can carry disease and pestilence.
(I’d add that you should never try to approach, touch, pet, or pick up a raccoon; make sure your children know this. And if you see a raccoon acting strangely, call your local animal control office and let them know.)
But raccoons are also very smart, and OH MY GOD, THEIR LITTLE FACES, and thanks to that combination of cleverness and cuteness, I find it hard to get seriously annoyed with them. (Our garbage cans are reliably raccoon-proof, and I do draw the line when they try to nest in our eaves. The raccoons, that is, not the garbage cans.)
So, anyway, I originally thought that it would be funny to put a raccoon at the end of the cookie assembly line — to the right of my husband — enacting the time-honored tradition of savoring the holiday cookie dough left in the mixing bowl and on the mixer beaters.
But the holiday cards got more complicated than I’d anticipated, and for reasons of available space and time, I nixed the idea.
But it still appeals to me. So I drew it.
I now appreciate just how difficult it is to draw mixer beaters. (It’s super-difficult.)
I should, however add — again, as a public service — that you should not offer raccoons your leftover cookie dough, in bowls or on mixer beaters.
Much more seriously — and it breaks my heart to tell you this — but the Centers for Disease Control and the FDA both point out that raw cookie dough is really, really, really, really bad for people, as well. You should not eat it.
I promise to be way more fun tomorrow.
Notes:
–We do not actually let our cat Archie roll out cookie dough.
–You may have noticed that our 2018 holiday cards came in three different variants. Later this year, I’ll share all three versions, along with some downloadable content.
Kelly Komics 
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