I die every night in my sleep. 

Or at least when I wake up, I feel like I did. 

In reality, I just sleep like the dead.

As long as I can recall, mornings are a slooooow, groggy, slog of confusion. For about an hour or so. 

I've often stood in the middle of the kitchen, empty tea cup in hand, staring into the distance, thoroughly confused as to what I'm supposed to do with the empty vessel I'm holding.

Sometimes I'm not even sure for a moment what it is in my hand. 

Sometimes I get a little brutze. Cuz while the rest of the day, I'm the first to run headlong into danger, the first to spring to action in an emergency, and the one who keeps their shit together during a crisis, in the mornings, I have the emotional fortitude of a toddler. Who reeeeeaallllllllly needs a nap. At best.

Movement is limited, thinking is difficult, and speaking? That's just right out.

On the rare ocassion I attempt to speak, only Farmboy understands what I say. (Fortunately we've always had the ability to twinspeak with each other). 

After first breakfast, some tea, & second breakfast, a little switch goes on in the brains and I'm ready to go.

I follow this with the energy of a crackhead the rest of the day (even if lately my body hasn't been complying with my brains).

The complete and utter lack of braining ability in the morning makes me consistently surprised that I somehow manage to, most every day, wake up with a random song in my head. Complete as though I'm listening to it on headphones.

Sometimes I even wake up to my feet swaying back and forth to the beat like rolls on forks ala Benny & Joon.

Most of the time, I wake up with a Funk song playing in my head.

But lately, it's been a wild mix. Still one a day though.

Some of them have surprised me cuz they're songs I'm a little meh about...something I don't hate, but would never think to put on a jukebox.

Oddly, despite my clear lack of cognition in the morning, I can occasionally manage to write well enough to take a note or two.

Here's an incomplete list of January's songs:

• Bold As Love: John Mayer
• November Rain: GnR
• Somebody I Used to Know: Gotye
• Hey Ma - Cam'ron
• Holly Jolly Christmas - Burl Ives
• Somebody to Love - Queen
• Dog Days are Over - Florence & The Machine
• Waiting on the World to Change - John Mayer
• This is the Song That Never Ends - Lambchop
• Silver Springs - Fleetwood Mac
• Fire - Ohio Players
• Thunderstruck- AC/DC cover on bagpipes by the Tartan Terrors
• All I Want for Christmas - Mariah Carey
• The Muppet Show Theme Song - The Muppets
• Bold As Love: John Mayer (again)
• Toxic - Britney Spears
• What About Love - Heart
• The White Cliffs of Dover - Vera Lynn
• The Chicken Dance - Every terrible wedding DJ ever
• Stuck in the Middle with You - Steeler's Wheel
• L-O-V-E - it was a girl in my head...not sure who, though various artists have covered it
• Honky Cat - Elton John
• The Nutcracker - Tchaikovsky
• Bie Mier Bist du Schon - Janis Siegel rendition for the movie Swing Kids
• Can't You See - Marshall Tucker Band

We had a bit of a snow on Sunday....

Our house is nestled in a teeny valley with its own microclimate. As you drive down the road on the way to our house, you can feel a distinct drop in temperature, (a welcome reprieve in summer), as you approach our place.

Consequently, we usually get a bit more snow than those even just a few miles from us. We ended up with about 18". 

Patch's thoughts on preparation echoed my own in the days before the storm. 

Despite being relatively isolated on our little property, I could almost feel the anticipation & concern in the air. Many people I spoke to were running amok gathering supplies (and finding grocery shelves well emptied of food & water and hardware stores long out of salt).

Me? I felt a mix of both contentment & mild disappointment.

Safe in the knowledge that we'd want for nothing. Hell, if we were snowed in for months, we'd not have to alter our lifestyle or eating habits in any way. But mildly displeased that I didn't have anything I needed to do...like I was missing out on the hustle and bustle and the electric energy somehow.

My Dad was an Eagle Scout and a Navy man and as such, we were (and still are) always prepared. Not in a crazy prepper playing GI Joe 'the gubbament gonna take our stuff' or 'apocalypse is coming' sort of way. I will lonnnnng have expired while attempting to pet something I shouldn't before anything like that happens...

Just a frugal, stock up on sale, amass over time and then you have no concerns when silly things like snow happen type of way.

The great toilet paper shortage of 2020? Not us. We had a full case to share.

Any weather event or other catastrophe?

Food? Water? Generator? Gas? Way more pellets than we'd ever need in a year for the stove? A fire pit? All the bags of salt? A big 'ol ancient farm tractor with a snow plow custom altered for our steep, bumpy, rocky driveway by a brilliant mechanical genius & metalsmith Farmboy? Check. Check. Checkity check. 

Now, more than ever, I feel lucky in that. Moreso than being someone who has the funds to run out to the store last minute and buy all the milk, bread, & eggs.

There are some who aren't lucky enough to have a Dad like I do (who also happens to be an electrician who gave us his old generator!), or a Farmboy who's not only ridiculously freakin' hot, but truly gifted mechanically. Or to have the security that comes with having learned early, regardless of how broke we may have been, to build an emergency supply. 

All of that made me think about starting to write again for my old blog, The Frugal Hippie. To share the gift my Dad gave me of peace of mind. 

I started brainstorming & outlining and I think I may just do that when the inspiration strikes. I don't intend to start marketing it & turning it into another business, or let it take away from what I'm trying to build with Mountain Woman, but it'll do me good as well to get my brains out of the glass world now and then! 

Speaking of glass (I really can't ever stop thinking about it)...

The Kiln is Set Up & Had His Virgin Voyage

We're not looking for a permanent thing for the kiln to sit on til I find the right something/make something that is going to have wheels & be the most efficient use of space (my studio is tiiiiiiiiiny...the kiln is nooooot tiny).

We were about to set up the kiln on some of the gazillion cement blocks we have saved for this year's garden, but while talking about it, Farmboy and I both, at the same moment, had the same weird thought.

Why not set it on top of the turkey fryer (gas lines obviously disconnected and nowhere near)? The stand is the perfect height for my lack of height, it's meant for high heat, and it's the right size. Aaaaand we got a double burner turkey fryer at a yard sale last year so we won't miss the single one.

So, that's what we did. 

I did my first firing the night before last with just a small, boring, scrap glass butterfly. I expected the first run would be a Womp Womp. 

It was.

It didn't fuse enough so the top right wing popped right off.

Second firing went quite well last night though! I threw in the butterfly again along with several other little scrap glass things for testing. There was some devitrification on the butterfly & an aloe/sun thing. And the paint on some googley eyes bubbled. My birdie came out boring as well, but fused great.

I've discovered that while stained glass is definitely an exercise in patience, fusing may well be moreso. 

In stained glass, there are a gazillion variables. Buuuut, you can see what's getting messed up & know how to address them as you go.

With fusing, you chuck some stuff in the kiln, wait 3240920348203 bazillion years (more like 6-8 hours but it freakin' feels like eleventy billion years), and whatever happened in there, happened.

Sometimes you can fix it with another firing, sometimes into the scrap bin it goes.

Thus, I expect the whole fusing thang to be both fun and absolutely maddening to me. 

On to the next project...

Knowing and yet forgetting is the worst part of playing at trivia.  I did succeed in getting one of these right for the team.  Another was half-right, and a third was written down correctly but scratched out because I thought of a logical reason why it would be wrong.  

What ethical theory prescribes actions that  maximize happiness in total for the people affected?

What kind of animal is Major General Sir Nils Olav III, the mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard?

What highly-viscous fluid is used in the "world's longest continuously running laboratory experiment", having released only 9 "drops" in over 90 years?

What movie earned Clark Gable's only Oscar, which he gave away to demonstrate that the trophy wasn't important?

correct-horse-battery-staple is the "12345678" password for a certain class of human.

I've been feeling... bleh for the last few days about art. It's not all that uncommon, and I know it will pass, and (perhaps more importantly) I know that the only way past it through. Insert reference to Stephen King and doing the damn work regardless, and blah blah blah.

Anyway. Started out doodling Dagger of Cloak and Dagger (in Marvel) and SQUIRRELed to drawing portraits over blorbs. Then SQUIRRELed from that to this. Digital painting sketch.

As always, it's been about 5 minutes, so I already can only see the flaws, but I like the direction it's headed anyway. I intentionally got rid of the lines so that I could focus on painting rather than lines. Challenging, but not impossible.

ETA: I did not get that illustration job I mentioned in a previous post. This is not really a surprise, just disappointing.

Our community college French class is reading an extremely abbreviated adaptation of the "Hunchback of Notre Dame" novel, and I started reading the preface to get an idea of how this particular adaptation was done.  Each of the first two sentences has 5 commas, and the second sentence is 57 words long.  As I was despairing of ever reaching the subject and verb of this sentence, I exclaimed:  "This author sounds just like Victor Hugo!"

Yes, dear reader.  That preface was written by Victor Hugo.

P.S.  "How long is Notre-Dame de Paris" yields "Notre-Dame de Paris is approximately 128 meters (420 feet) long."  The answer I was looking for is "940 pages, in 3 volumes".  We're working with 127 pages, many of which are comprehension exercises.

Who was the most recent person to win NFL MVP as a defensive player?

What island was part of the Ryūkyū Kingdom before annexation by Japan in 1879 and a WWII battle in 1945?

What state gave its name to the Great Compromise of 1787 assigning proportional representation to only one house of the U.S. legislature?

A multiple choice question is never a good choice for the final game-changing question, but this one was particularly bad:  Abscission is the name for A) plants losing their leaves, B) deer dropping their antlers, C) snakes shedding their skin, or D) crabs molting their exoskeletons?

I'm putting together a thing for folks to enjoy. It's a zine of sorts (PDF) with a collection of 'blorbs' (oddly shaped blobs) in very light grey. Print out the zine, and you have an instant collection of games for kids on a road trip, or with a collection of friends at the pub, or... whatever.

Now, I'm just trying to come up with different 'games' you can play. I've done plenty of 'draw faces with the blorbs as their silhouette' myself. Then, you can really insert whatever noun you want in place of 'faces'. Draw trees with the blorbs as silhouette. You get the idea.

But then, I thought - what if you made the page of blorbs into a fantasy map with each of the blorbs as a separate country?

Or, make each blorb into a full character defending their territory against the other blorbs.

Or... I dunno - what have you got? 

(Thanks to Jill "xtingu" Knapp for the term 'blorb'.)

So I decided that I would like a reference place for myself of all the kickstarters that I was involved with for 2025. With the idea that it might be of interest to some of you, I thought I would share that info here.

January

In January, and after our successful Kickstarter Gone Fishin', we decided to do monthly thematic one-shots for D&D.

So the first up was January's Gone Snowballin'. In short: a snowball battle for your D&D group.

February

For February, the obvious theme was romance, given Valentine's Day, so we built out a 'speed dating' one shot (Gone Speed Datin'), and I had a bit of fun with one of the NPCs who might wind up across the table from your character (above) while the cover art was a bit more... tame.

March

Gone Pub Crawlin' was inspired by Saint Patty's Day. We used some art I did a while back for the teaser. I really kinda love that little dwarf. Goes way back to an early post in my Patreon.

Here again, the final cover art was pretty solidly different, but I like these characters, and it feels like they're crawlin from pub to pub, so...

April

April was antiquing themed. I've no idea how / why April is associated with antiquing. 

Fun Fact: The character in the cover art for this one was originally something I started sketching up as another NPC for Gone Speed Datin'. I thought his open shirt, machismo laden body language, and cock eyed smirk made him perfect for lining up across from in a speed dating scenario. But when the guys saw it, they said we had to keep hold of him for Antiquin'. I still don't fully understand why, but was just happy he would find a home.

May

May was Gone Bee Keepin'. I went... a little different with this one. I really worked hard at using shapes to construct the image rather than lines. That's pretty solidly against my normal process and I found it challenging. While I'm not in love with the resulting image, I did learn a lot, and feel certain I could do something much better next time. I also did a bit of homework to figure out what sort of protective equipment medieval beekeepers wore and that's reflected in the final art. 

June

June was the first Wayward Pages bundle. Brad and I have been doing the Location Lexicon for some time now, and we decided to try bundling together  some of them and presenting them to the Kickstarter audience. They seemed to like it, though, in hindsight, we didn't do nearly enough promotional work to make it a real success. More learning as we go. Still, it was nice to see characters and art that I'd been working on for so long actually see the light of day.

It also worked out perfectly because the crew I normally work with on Kickstarter projects was taking the month off for personal reasons.

July

July was Gone Surfin'. I went a little nutty with the cover character's pose, but it was fun, and it seemed to play well with folks. As with most of these, I could tweak this endlessly.

September

September was a busy month Gone Foragin', with the regular crew, and then Matt (the writer / designer of these) did his own separate KS for Beyond the Mycelium.

For Gone Foragin', I again stuck to using shapes far more than lines, and I definitely like the results more than I did for Beekeepin'. Rapid artistic growth for the win!

For Mycelium, I did a whole painted cover, and really enjoyed the process - especially creating characters in a scene that are supposed to be mushrooms.

October

Obviously, October was Gone Scarin'.

Another fun one for me to create, and honestly, I was finally starting to feel like I had the process down for this one. It's a little... open? to me now, but it once again felt like a solid step in the right direction for me as an illustrator.

The large, blank banner eventually held the title of the book.

November

November was Gone Huntin' - with characters in competition to bring in the biggest / best game. Of course, there's a bit of a twist...

I had to hurry through the cover art for this one for 'life reasons', but overall I'm pretty happy with it, and once again I learned a bit that I will be able to use going forward.

December

December was Gone Sleighin' - a snowy race in sleighs pulled by various creatures.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this one was both fun and educational. It felt like my composition and layout game was on point, and I like our elf friend in the front. I made the forest of trees a bit 'generic' in order to make sure they didn't detract from the rest, but looking back, I wish I'd made them a little more unique.

...and that wraps up the Kickstarter work that I did in 2025. That wasn't all of the art that I did in 2025, but this seemed like it warranted it's own separate post / archive.

What's your favorite? What would you like me to have done that I didn't?

I put cheese on everything. (Well, not anything sweet cuz that's disgusting. And sacrilege). 

Mostly cuz any food that's not sweet (except cheese) is gross so adding cheese makes it less gross.

I found a piece of colby jack in my cardigan pocket today. It was partially dried out.

I thought perhaps I had a problem. Though in fairness, this is the first time this has occurred.

And I didn't eat it, so clearly I'm good.