25 years ago, I was in a fantasy football league that had a live auction.

Each team had a $100 budget.
Bidding competition for great players drove prices up over $65 in some cases, so the guys who won those stars had to scrape together the rest of their rosters with players nobody else wanted.
It was a lot of fun because the tempatation to bid on players I really wanted on my team was strong, but the impulse to save money for the rest of the team was also strong.

The league fell apart because of drama, but the idea of a fantasy sports auction stayed with me.

Then I played fantasy baseball online, but I stopped because I would always have players on my fantasy team that played against the Phillies. Do I root for my guys? Do I root for the Phillies? Plus the statistics and scoring got too complicated, so I didn't play for a long time.

Much later, I was in a fantasy football league at work. The draft was lame, not an auction. The players on my team played against the Eagles all the time, which confused me, and my team was so bad, I was out of the running by week 3 and had no reason to follow it anymore.

January 7, 2026, while eating a Wawa hoagie, I had the idea for a website to host a free fantasy baseball service with:

• A live auction
• Phillies players only
• Scores tallied weekly

So I built it.

The rules and scoring are as simple as I could make them. There are four players on each team, one statistic for pitchers, and one statistic for hitters. That's it.

I made the "One Post Wonder Baseball League", which you can join here.

If you would like to play, click that link, then:

1. Enter your email address and a password.
2. Click "Create Account".
3. Give your team a name.
4. Click "Join league".

If you want to read the rules first, they're here.

I picked 6PM Eastern on Saturday, March 21 for our live auction because spring training will be almost over by then, and we'll have a good idea of what the opening day roster looks like. We'll do an optional Zoom call during the auction for banter and running commentary. If a different date or time would make it so you can join, let me know.

This is specifically designed for people who have never been in a fantasy sports league before, and for people who don't know anything about baseball or the Phillies.

The auction is going to be about 90% of the whole experience. After that, you just check in whenever you want to see how your four players are doing. There's no day-to-day management or anything. 

Anyone on One Post Wonder is invited to join.

I guessed the third one based on a memory of a Peanuts comic, but I can't find it online.  Has anyone seen it?

What American author set most of his novels in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County?

What English poet wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ?

What Austrian composer, known as the "Father of the Symphony" wrote 104 of them?

What last name is shared by a winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine and a British author whose estate sponsors a prize for thriller novels ? 

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'.)