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...

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. 

Yars and yars ago, I recall the more seasoned women in my family sitting around my gran's table, discussing the joy *ahem* of their cronehood: retirement, menopause, enlarged pores, wrinkles, chin hair...ya know...the good stuff.

Having been in my maidenhood at the time, these joys seemed a verrrrry long way off. 

Fast forward to what feels like exactly 4.3 seconds later, and here I am, looking in the mirror, watching my foundation as it takes up permanent residence in the ever increasing crevices that surround my eyes, thinking about the impending doom called menopause (while not even remotely close to retirement).

I find myself displeased at the notion that my next search on the google will include terms like: 'how to make one's face not look like the surface of the moon' and 'where to buy rubber bed sheets at 1 a.m.'.

But I'm not going to take this lying down (in a pool of my own sweat).

In fact, I'm going to file a formal complaint with the Home Office on behalf of females the world over. Feel free to peruse and add any additional grievances. I will amend prior to sending.

Dear Home Office:

Back fat should be illegal. Period. It is a particular sort of cruelty when one's back boobs are of a size to make their front boobs jealous.

Speaking of fat...pouches are for kangaroos. We are not kangaroos. There appears to have been some confusion regarding this distinction. Sort that out.

Apparently confusion is contagious as our head hair seems to have lost its way and ended up on our chins. Please advise it to return to its proper location. On its way northward, perhaps it can reverse the effects of gravity and pull our skin back up to its original location as well.

Wrinkles serve not a single purpose and are therefore completely superfluous. Kindly release from employment whoever designed them...they are inefficient and suck at life.

Adult acne. Seeeeeriously?! How is it possible to have acne and wrinkles at the same time? If it is an absolute requirement that you plague us with some sort of skin flaw...Freaking Pick One! You can't have both. That's just nonsense.

Which brings me to the girly parts.

We spend our lives hemorrhaging half to death like clockwork, often doubled over in excruciating pain, our favorite underwear running for their very lives.
​​​​​​​
And the offered reprieves?

Carry a bowling ball about for nine months and then push it out of a hole the size of a quarter (go on...do tell us about the stretching...and then kindly explain episiotomies hmmmm?).

Or...we may wait til we have wrinkles and back fat and then we can alternate between randomly hemorrhaging half to death, and stewing in a pool of our own juices whilst cooking from the inside out.

Shit options, those.

The engineer in charge of that entire debacle deserves a flogging. With tampons.

In short, we of all stages and ages of womanhood hereby demand a complete overhaul of your ridiculous system.

We look forward to an expedient resolution.

Thank you and fuck off.

:)

-Women