How to get killed on a mountainside cliff for a $20 used table

 If you need adventure in your life, get yourself onto your local Facebook Marketplace group.

This morning I had twenty dollars in my wallet, and I was on a mission to stuff a dining table and four chairs into my hatchback before it was time to be at work. The lady selling the dining set gave me her address, adding “steep turn to get into the driveway, down by the water, red house.”

I overshot the driveway and had to turn around. My map app pinpointed a steeply-turned driveway, and I could see a big red house at the bottom of the hill. The driveway was covered in snow, with no sign that anyone had been outside to shovel in the two days since the storm. I hesitated at the top of the hill, because I was pretty sure it was a bad idea to go down a steep hill over three inches of snow, but a) there was no room to turn around where I was, b) I didn’t trust the car to have traction to back up on the slope, and c) there was a truck with a plow parked in front of the house. Well shit, they live here, they wouldn’t have all their vehicles parked down there if they couldn’t get them out, said my first thoughts. Especially with a cliff going straight down to the ocean at the end of the driveway, said my second thoughts. Which is why they are spending the winter somewhere else and it’s your stupid ass heading down the hill to your death, said my third thoughts.

I slowly crawled to the bottom, backed up, and parked next to the truck. “I think I found you,” I texted the table lady, “Red house with a plow parked out front?”

“No, that’s my neighbor, I’m one driveway over.”

My first thoughts began cursing, my second thoughts started calculating angles and velocity and snow density, and my third thoughts composed a funny epitaph for my headstone. I aimed for my own tracks, because at least those parts were compressed, but only made it about 10 feet up the hill before my wheels spun and I began sliding backwards. Managed to stop, pulled the hand brake, got out, and had a look at things. It was not good. Gave it one more shot, and this time started sliding sideways towards the gulch. ABORT. I cranked the hand brake again, got out, floundered through too-deep snow banks to the front door of the big house, knocked on the window, and looked around at the porch. Gardening things. A bag of frozen soil. No shovel, no salt, no signs that anyone had been home all winter. FUCK.

The table woman walked over from her house with a plastic shovel. “Um, I have to go to work,” she said. “You okay, you got this? You can leave the shovel in my driveway.” Okay SURE.

I shoveled that 30-degree incline for almost an hour, down to the ice underneath. I chopped at it with the plastic shovel and scraped gravel over it, hoping the weak sun would melt it enough for me to break it up, then got overheated in my parka and finally stopped to call my coworker at the college. Do we have a plow at work? No. Do we have salt? Also no. She gave me the phone number for the local rescue-plow guy, but he was out of town helping the power company access some downed lines. I was standing there at the top of the driveway, imagining breaking into the house and surviving the winter on canned goods (or, you know, walking the mile back to campus), when a snow plow suddenly pulled into the top of the driveway to clear the area around the garbage bins. I sasquatched up through the snow, waving the shovel, and he stopped. My hair was in full werewolf mode, and my face was sweaty and red, “Hi! I did something really stupid and I need help!” He looked like he was trying not to laugh at me as I explained the situation, and then told me to stand aside.

VOOM. He plowed on down the driveway, to the top of the steep hill. I ran and shoveled the frill of plowed snow away from the bit I had cleared, and showed him the ice. He looked at it, looked at my car, looked at the cliff, and said, “Yep, you’re gonna need momentum. Gotta back up all the way to the edge and then go full throttle.” He saw my face. “Want me to do it?” I really did. 

He slowly backed the car up to the cliff, and I wondered if I maybe should have taken my purse out before it took a plunge into the ocean, but then he stopped, aimed, and accelerated. The car fishtailed briefly, but he got it under control, hit the gravel, sailed over the icy patch, and growled all the way up the freshly plowed driveway to the main road. I ran behind, cheering. I told him he was amazing, and offered to give him the twenty dollars I brought for the table, but he waved me off. “No trouble, darlin’. There’s more snow coming tomorrow, mind.” “I will be staying safe at home and not chasing tables down strange driveways,” I promised.

Safely back on the road, I returned the shovel to the driveway next door (100 feet away, damn your eyes, Apple Maps), and finally made it to work, an hour and a half late. I broke down laughing at the front desk at the look on my coworker’s face when she caught sight of me. My cardiovascular system is part clown, I go completely red except for bloodless white circles around my eyes and mouth. It’s the main reason I was on the swim team instead of the soccer team in high school - face in the water, goggles on. It was bad enough being one of the only white kids on the team; being the only translucent one was just asking for it.

And so I did not get a table, but I did get a lesson that will maybe save my butt some day: keep a shovel and a bag of salt in the car, and stay the fuck off of unplowed hillsides, stupid.

Money is imaginary and stress makes you bald

My hair is growing back. I've got a little lunatic fringe when I push my hair back, and it's gone bushy and wild again. It's in flyaways around my ears, and sticking out around my neck when I tie my hair up. I look like a werewolf, but it is better than when it was coming out in handfuls in the shower a couple months ago; when I looked in the mirror at my limp thin hair, I always heard Amy from Little Women say, Oh, Jo, your one beauty.

I don't know how I managed not to hit myself in the face with a hammer or get a nail through my leg while I was prying up baseboards in the studio, but I still have a chance to get a fresh tetanus shot when I crack them all into garbage-bag-sized pieces this week, since there is no bulky-item pickup this month and I'm not burning wood covered with boat paint and cigarette tar. My career as an electrical engineer screeched to a halt when I came up against a situation that was beyond my 2-light-fixture skill set: one of the lights in the studio is just an empty screw-in socket that had been partially dislodged from the ceiling; I turned off the breaker and switch, unscrewed the socket fixture, and found two stiff black wires, two stiff white wires, and a weird taped bundle of filthy wires of indeterminate color, with no visible grounding wire attached to anything. I began to suspect there was no light bulb screwed into it because Himself knew it would catch on fire, probably after he shocked himself and left it unfastened to the ceiling. I looked it up on YouTube and found a video of an electrician helpfully examining the same kind of setup I was looking at - and then he sighed deeply and explained that he'd have to remove the entire casing from the ceiling and rewire the whole thing. I am not going to be doing any of that without having a second adult present who is strong enough to kick me off the stool when I become the accidental grounding wire. It is just going to have to dangle from the ceiling until I talk to the electrical engineering instructor at my school. Maybe he can send some students over to get some experience with ancient electrical death traps for extra credit.

The man and my mother sent money for Valentine's Day, and I was able to order a cheap couch and a toaster oven (a money saver, not having to heat the whole oven for two biscuits). I'm down to my last hundred dollars in the world, with a week to go until payday. Plus 9 dollars in coins in my purse if we need milk or something. I'm trying to get some paintings ready to upload to a print-on-demand art site to try to generate some extra money, but I have to say that even broke, I am so goddamn happy. I am an actual librarian instead of a public toilet attendant. I have spent the last few days researching obscure scientific journal articles from the 70's-90's about ice-structure physics, printing them out and binding them into professional little booklets with neatly typed labels on the covers for one of our instructors. The rest of the time, I fix spine labels, re-cover books, help students find full-text articles, and compile acquisition lists. Today we had free pancakes and bacon for Pancake Day. Nobody has yelled at me, called me a racial slur, made me clean up blood, gone on homophobic rants about picture books, or asked me to check if someone is dead in two months. And look! I have hair again! 

Zenny chose the photo

Oh shit, it's letting me post photos again! Picture dump while it still works! 

 You could say she has an aesthetic 

View from the loft at sunset

 

What the fuck is that molding, I ask you. Don't tell me it's antique and valuable, because I already ruined it. I installed that track light in the corner! Criminal light socket not pictured; it's directly over my head. Got the ceiling and upper walls painted, working my way down. I'm not a big fan of the grey but it was what was cheap and pre-mixed, I can paint over it later, it's better than tobacco walls. Behind that door is a urinal to nowhere. They just peed into it and it went behind the shed. Maybe I can install some plumbing in the future and make it a real bathroom.

 

That's it for the kid's bedroom decor so far

 

Used desk is the dining table for now, chairs from the shed, giant bird feeder in background

 

Soon to be prints

 

 

More view from the loft

 

Blue pot of victory 

Hammer and drill took care of this shit

Valentine's day cookies

Zenny knitting in the thrifted chair. I took down the striped curtains that came with the house after this photo because I irrationally hated them.

 

We're getting there. 

How to get murdered by a guy selling a couch on the internet

It took 4 days for the nicotine poisoning to wear off. I feel less guilty about buying a big clawed hammer to violently pry the shelves and molding off the walls. I don’t know what kind of leftover refuse they used for baseboards, but it is cut out in u-shapes that collect every bit of soot and dirt and dead bugs in the room, impossible to clean. I could bang 2x4s on there and that would be better.

The nesting instinct has a grip on my neck, I can’t shake it, even with my tiny bank account. I scraped out some cash and went questing for Facebook Marketplace used goods. I met a pregnant woman for a $15 Victorian tufted chair. I met a woman doing renovation and hauled away a beautiful $30 desk. I squinted my eyes at messages from a guy who was pressing to meet up to take money for a couch set, sight-unseen. Hmm. “If I disappear this afternoon, Devin did it,” I texted family, and after work I drove down past Smuggler’s Cove to meet the couch guy in Burin.

I have listened to too many murder podcasts to be murdered by a guy with a couch, I told myself as I pulled up behind a car in an empty gravel lot. 

A rangy young man in a plaid flannel shirt got out of the car. “You want to follow me to my workshop? I’ve got them stored down there,” he said. He was cute, in a high-school-weed-dealer kind of way, with blue eyes, a shaggy mullet, and a wispy youth’s mustache.

I could take him in a fight, I told myself as I followed him to a second location.

We walked down to the water, where three rotting wood planks made a bridge from the shore to an old garage on a pier. “Just in here, mind the soft spots in the wood,” he said, walking gingerly across the bridge, the boards bending under him. 

I could survive hypothermia if I fall into the ocean with a couch on top of me, I told myself as I followed him across the planks and into the structure.

It was immediately apparent why he was hoping to do the transaction before I saw the couch set. The chair was torn and mildewed, the couch was filthy and damp, and the ottoman had a fatal oil stain which he had tried to wipe off with a wet rag. He offered to knock off another $20, looking hopeful. I considered the furniture. The couch could be saved with cleaning and a cover, but the other two were a loss. He seemed really keen to make a sale, so I shrugged and said, “How about we see if it even fits in the car?” We each took an end, he pivoted so I wouldn’t have to walk backwards across the planks, and we hauled the couch with little creeping caterpillar steps across the bridge and up to the car. Best efforts couldn’t get that thing into my Subaru, thank god.

“Well, it was a good try, but it’s not meant to be,” I told him, and we carried the couch back to the garage. “It was worth it just for the drive down here, though, it’s so beautiful.” It really is. I had veered off the road a few times, struck with awe as I rounded curves and saw the view of the bay, with its islands, craggy snow-covered mountains, and ducks flying over the water while the light turned gold and pink. I have lived in many rural places and driven through nearly every state in the US, along with half of Scotland and Canada, and the drive to Burin is right up there with the road to Hana and the mesas in Northern Arizona. Wild beauty, terrible poverty.

“Ah yes, I’m blessed to be born here,” he said, smiling and turning his blue eyes up to their highest wattage. I might have given him some money anyway, if it had been in smaller bills. There’s a line in one of the Sookie Stackhouse books that has always stuck with me: Folks here are the same as folks anywhere; some are poor and proud and good, and some are poor and mean and worthless. Maybe I can hire the boy for a painting some time. Poor and proud and good.

In Herself’s efforts to renovate the house for selling, I can guess she let Himself buy some clearance light fixtures from Canadian Tire, and that is why the walls are tastefully painted and an ugly silver three-headed track light ended up on my bedroom ceiling. It’s not bad for the studio, though, so when school was canceled for snow on Thursday I shoveled our way to the car and we spent the morning at the house, learning to install a ceiling light. I have seen Mike electrocute himself enough times to know what not to do, and managed to get the fixture switched out on the first try. Zenny and I jumped down from our chairs, flipped the breaker back on, turned on the light, and crowed about our electrical engineering skills. 

“And people think that’s a man’s job!” she said.

“If anyone says that to you, you tell them that if they’re using their penis to install a light, they’re doing it wrong,” I told her.

Now I want to do every light in the house.

Our beds should arrive this week, and some silverware. I’m itching to take the hammer to the studio and do some painting this weekend, with promises to christen the oven with cookies for Valentine’s Day. I finished a couple paintings in the evenings last month, and now that they’re dry I’m going to prepare to upload to a print-on-demand art site, so I can hopefully sell a few prints to help pay for things. If anyone is in the market for Dutch-style floral paintings with Tim Horton’s donuts and Mary Brown’s chicken sandwiches, they are going to be in luck.

Kidnapped by model ship enthusiasts

Weirdly, the threat to shut down made the bots stop. If that’s someone I know out there, stop being weird and just email me (except you, Sam, get off my blog). My stats don’t show who’s who since vpns became standard on everyone’s devices, they just show unique vs returning visits and country code. Calm down with the shuffling vpns, it logs dozens of separate entries instead of just one and it only stands out more.

The latest word on Robert is that he didn’t have a bullet wound. The gunman shot the engine, and Rob’s last act was to maneuver the falling helicopter away from homes. He and Tish are Mormon, and believe avidly in an afterlife, so their family is finding comfort that he’s back with loved ones. I’ve been unconscious too many times to believe in consciousness after death - but then, we were all dead before we were born, and we got better. It could happen again, why not?

 

New place, new crew, new injuries

On Friday I ran into the loft, pushed Zenny into the car while she was struggling into her coat, and we peeled up to the lawyer’s office to get the keys to the house. I found two heavy old wood chairs and a flimsy card table in the shed, and carried them into the dining room. We ate Subway sandwiches, looking at the ocean and crows while I fought with a chatbot on my phone, trying to set up power service and home insurance. The house is empty, but it’s ours, and we were so excited to open all the cupboards and find the small items the sellers didn’t take with them. A dehumidifier. Two 5lb dumbbells. Adult diapers. A cat toy with treats. Two old tea cups with “Himself” and “Herself” on them in Irish calligraphy with shamrocks. Clues about a life lived in these walls.

On Saturday morning, I picked up armloads of cleaning supplies and paint rollers at Dollarama before stopping at the hardware store for floor paint. When the helpful man in a vest asked , “Looking for something in particular, or just want to be left alone?” I showed him the video of the studio floor. “Ah, you only have one choice for that, here you go, don’t get it too dark or you’ll see every footstep. That place looks familiar, where did you just move to? Ah, well you’re my neighbor! I owns the store here. Here’s a picture of my house, just up the road from you. Aw, yes, there’s my horses. And there’s my goat. Now, I’m also on the city council, and you says you’re a painter? Lots of artists here, you’ll be in good company, beautiful place to paint. Now, the council has been looking for someone to do art classes with the kids at the Model Ship Museum, try to get a bit of revenue going, is that something you might be interested in? My buddy Jim helps us run the museum, he’s a painter, too. Hey phone, call Jim. ‘Jim! I have a young lady here, just moved into town, she’s an artist, we might could get her to do some art classes with the kiddies. You gots the keys? I’ll send her over.”

I paid for the paint and the bottle of mineral spirits he recommended, feeling that it was money well spent, and drove across the road to the museum. The museum is housed in an old Dollar store, and Jim was there unlocking the doors when I walked up. He shook my hand, opened the sliding door, and turned on the lights as I stepped inside. It was huge, filled with historic artifacts, intricate model ships from all through the past century, and original art on the walls. There was a large space for classes, with a taxidermied Newfoundland dog. “He’s popular with the kids,” he said, “especially the little ones who still sees it as a doll, but myself, I don’t really go in for the taxidermy. I wouldn’t be able to do that to my dog. Maybe my nan - prop her in the corner, bring her out for holidays - but ah, not a dog.”

We walked through for about an hour, talking about art and boats and model making and Our Flag Means Death. When we made our way back to the front door I wrote down my contact information on a post-it note, for planning summer art classes. He took it and said he’d love to get the other artists together and go out to paint, once the weather warms up, and he’d introduce me to them. The other artists are a group of about five old sailors - one “very old but tells a good story” - who get together to paint, talk, and drink. Yes please, I want to be in a crew of drunk painting sailors. I got back into my car feeling like Dirk Gently. I am a leaf on the stream of creation.

At our new place, I dumped all the painting and cleaning supplies in the studio and picked up the shovel to dig out the house. Almost put it down again when I realized I wasn’t wearing my smart watch. What is even the point of exercising if you don’t get credit for it? It took me two hours, but I cleared off the patio, leaving a nice neck-breaking sheet of ice where the snow had been, and put “giant sack of road salt” on my shopping list. My list is out of control. We don’t even own forks, let alone beds and furniture, and I have to change all the locks before I’ll feel safe sleeping the night, even if I do have friendly neighbors and a murder of crows who guard the house. The crows show up every afternoon at 4:30 and watch the back door, which is another clue about the people who lived here. Zenny asked to buy a bag of peanuts, and we dragged out the big heavy bird feeder we found in the garden shed. 

We went back to the loft at supper time, ordered cheap beds and pricey locks (you don’t skimp on door hardware, get the good ones the first time), and talked to family for a bit. I slept like a corpse that night, and woke up after 7am on Sunday, feeling not-unpleasantly like I had been beaten by a bag of rocks. Bought road salt, and ceiling paint, and food for my kid (who told her she could eat while I’m hemorrhaging money?), and drove back to the new house.

I am not spending any more money until payday, I told myself. I lied. It took me two hours of cleaning and scraping and cutting myself on splinters in the studio before my spray cleaner was turning to ice on the walls and my butt was frozen. We took a sandwich break (Zenny crawled out of her closet, where she had been reading on the floor in a nest of old sheets she found in a cupboard) and we drove back to Walmart for a space heater. Once I could feel my fingers again, I unscrewed all the ugly boob light fixtures, wiped yellow tobacco tar off the entire studio ceiling, and broke my box cutter trying to chip paint off the screws holding all the cheap old shelves on the wall. More clues: while Herself was feeding crows and playing with the cat, Himself was smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and dropping beer caps down the sink with the b'ys in the shed. Instead of cleaning, he just painted over everything every ten years or so. I could trace a path of where the men stood; someone liked to stand by the window, and two liked to sit in chairs next to the wood stove, because the tar was so thick it was dripping like resin from the walls and ceiling. Their lungs must have been made of amber.

By evening, the ceiling was painted and my arms were aching. We drove back to the loft for sausages and apples in the slow cooker, and I expected to drop like a log into bed again, but I had fitful dreams and woke up at 3am. My head was swimmy all day, and at work I wondered if I was overtired or having a stroke. It's only just occurring to me right now that I might have absorbed a few cigarettes' worth of nicotine throughout the course of the day. Calming? CALMING? I feel like I ate a caffeinated weed gummy, but without any of the fun stuff. Hoping for sleep tonight, how long does this shit stay in your system?

 In case I wasn't done draining my bank account (tomorrow is payday), I stopped at the insurance office and my favorite car insurance lady hooked me up with affordable homeowner's insurance. I'm totting up all the bills in my head, and thinking I just might be able to afford internet, too, if I stop buying coffee creamer and fresh meat. You can do a lot with a potato, you know.

 

 We'll have mattresses to throw on the floor and locks for the doors in 11 days.

Done, did it

Nonstop bots again! Gonna shut the blog down to shake them off, but popping in first to say WE GOT THE HOUSE.

Going to throw some mattresses on the floor and be hobos for a while, sand the studio floor, watch YouTube tutorials on how to fix loose glass and cracked fire bricks in a wood stove, paint, eat off a card table with old chairs from the shed, shovel two tons of snow, learn to wire ceiling lights, and figure out how to get rid of fallen trees. Really happy. Get ready, tight pants, this is what you were prepping for.

I’ll figure out how to post pictures again, meanwhile catch me on Instagram.

Robert

Our cousin Robert, a rescue helicopter pilot, was killed yesterday in the line of duty. If anyone tells Tish he died doing what he loved, I am going to punch them right in the face when I get over there. Nobody becomes a first responder because they want to die violently. He saved a lot of people over his career, and he was a funny, kind man. He never said anything cruel or stupid when I spent time with him, he was sharp witted and gentle mannered. He and Tish bought the house grandpa lived in for the last years of his life (and they’re letting Drunk Wife remain there now). Robert regularly rescued injured hikers from the Grand Canyon, and he went down trying to save people during an active shooting in Flagstaff. 

I’m so sorry for Tish, and their son. 

Also, I see you, bots, creeping back in. Kindly fuck off.

Hail the conquering hero

I got the Dutch oven, bitcheeees. Everyone in Burin has one of these now. You won’t trust someone unless you visit their house and see the blue pot of victory on their stove. And they offered double stickers because it’s the end of the promotion, so I got the brownie pan, too. Feeling like I have brought down a large animal for my village.

I’d post a picture, but Google has decided not to allow me to upload until I fulfill some magical combination of specific browser + data harvesting permissions, but it won’t quite tell me what they are, and I don’t want to anyway.

Call the authorities

You guys, THEY RAN OUT OF ENAMELED POTS. I have all the stickers, and the very hassled cashier said a new shipment is supposed to come in today or tomorrow, so now I have to go stalk No Frills and vault over all the storm-prep shoppers cleaning out the potato chip aisle and trying to get their frozen little hands on MY DUTCH OVEN.

Forward, through shot and shell, here we go into the mouth of Hell.

Pray for me.

Gouache

(Turned my blog off again because the bots were back.)

To distract myself from yet another real estate delay, I have been getting busy making friends at work. It’s going well. Except that, in one case, I’ve done that terrible thing where you forget someone’s name and then wait too long to ask, and now it’s weird. I’ll find the right moment eventually.

Them: and that is how my entire family died tragically.

Me: *nodding sympathetically* so what’s your name again?

Other than that, I’m doing great with the friend-making.

And I have been painting, slowly working on a couple of still life setups and illustrations for a picture book. I’ve started messing with gouache again on my lunch breaks because the almost-not-hypothetical house has a view of the bay, and I thought it would be nice to wake up with little 20-minute color sketches of the view, the way Nathan Fowkes painted the view from his office from day to day. Painting the same scene over and over will force me to work out my problems with landscape painting, probably.

(Not this scene, this is just the view from the parking lot at work.)

I got my first full paycheck, and… well, I knew it was going to be tight, so no surprises. But it’s like my grandfather always said, Happy is the man who earns one dollar more than he spends. I’ll make it work. It’s just as well; I finally tried to put on a pair of jeans I knew would be honest with me, and couldn’t quite get them buttoned up. It was inevitable, the way I’ve been enjoying things. I can’t afford new pants right now, so my “more” philosophy is going to have to include more frugality with the chocolate biscuits. And more snow shoveling. I guess I’ll be getting the soup when I go out for Chinese food with my coworker today. Joke’s on you, poverty, I like soup.

In unrelated news, the high school classmate who’s been in my DMs lives in Minnesota, and he got shaken down by four ICE agents right after the shooting, they scared the shit out of him while he was just trying to get gas. I might not be interested in dating ever again, but this kid and I used to sneakily hold hands while playing Oregon Trail when we were 14, and I am all the way pissed off. I hope every one of those racist cosplay assholes gets frostbite on their balls. They could be whittling spoons and baking bread and living a whimsical little fucking life, not harming anyone, and THIS is what they chose. Drive off an icy overpass, assholes.

Look at these cute little dysentery victims

Now I am going to go eat some soup and empty the rest of my bank account onto the lawyer’s desk so I can get a damn house to live in. Still happier than ever, but in an angry way, too. 

(4 more stickers for the enameled pot.)

All the world is Marystown, and the past is a fever dream

My family has finally settled on a day in July to have my grandfather’s funeral, and now I need to save up to go to Arizona, which does not feel like a real thing a person can do anymore. I traveled through a wormhole and popped out in a snowstorm in alternate-universe 1996, and now they want me to go to Arizona?  I am pretty sure Arizona does not exist in this timeline. Oh, but first I am supposed to drop off Zenny in Hawaii to visit the cats. HAWAII? What in the science fiction bullshit are they even talking about? I am very busy over here collecting grocery store stickers to earn an enameled cast iron Dutch oven, and they want me to do quantum physics to realign the dimensions. I am not going to Hawaii, it will suck me into its gravity well and I’ll be stuck there for another 30 years. The cats are going to need to learn to be time travelers.

I’ll see what I can do about Arizona, though. 

A storm blew through yesterday, and we spent the day baking bread, drawing, doing very bad yoga, and watching terrible movies. In the evening, the storm let up enough for me to go to the store, crawling slowly over the dark roads with sheets of snow skating across the ground and blowing up into whirling ghosts. It was really beautiful. 

It was still beautiful this morning when I woke up in a panic because I had slept past 7am and there were no school closure announcements on my phone. We threw food into our faces and I ran outside to excavate the car, get it warming up, haul the trash up to the bin, and grab snow-covered packages from the porch. In my rush, I lost my feet and went hammering down the stairs into a snow bank. I hope the landlord got it on cctv. My kidneys are mad, but I’m pretty happy because one of the packages was art supplies. The other was a gift from my mother for emergencies: a solar flashlight. I think she has forgotten that the sun doesn’t live here during emergency weather. I could club someone with it in self defense, though, so I popped it in the glove box. She also sent an electric kettle, an upgrade from the little burbling plastic one that came with the loft and spits boiling water all over my hands. In all; worth a bruised kidney.

I’m getting the hang of things at work, appreciating my tidy little library and cozy office even more after spending some time in the ransacked public library. I’ve been trying to find information on the regional library board so I can befriend/overthrow them, but they seem to be some kind of secret society that doesn’t like maintaining a website. I’ll be nosy and ask some questions when I pick up my holds and buy a big bag of .25 paperbacks this weekend. I can’t spend the academic budget on thrillers and romances, but I can spare ten bucks out of pocket to set up a nice rack of honor-backs for the students to read while they’re snowed in.

My cortisol levels are back to normal after years in survival mode. I’m sleeping the whole night without help. I haven’t woken up crying or fighting the air in a week. I haven’t started gaining weight yet, but I should probably start working out again; it’s easy to restrict yourself when you need something to have control over, and I’ve been over here making cookies and bread and chowders like the happy cottage witch I’m becoming. And I don’t intend to stop, so it would probably be a good idea to get some thermal hiking pants and go find pretty places to paint. I’m not looking for less anymore - less stress, less secrets, less calories, less worry about a hand on my shoulder at night - right now I want more. I want to feel full with good things. I will bake the bread and eat it, I will go walk in the woods and feed the crows, I will watch movies with my kid and read books and still have time to paint. 

I am getting to know this life and who I am in it, and I’m really liking it so far.

(14 more stickers for the enameled pot.)