Monday Musings for February 5, 2024

 As I was stuffing wood in our stove this morning, I was trying to remember if I had done a Monday Musings post last week. I keep thinking it's further along in the month than it actually is, maybe because this month already feels like it's lasted a year? 

I'm on day 7 of 10 of taking daily progesterone to help with some of these awful and debilitating perimenopause symptoms, and the side effects of the progesterone are definitely starting to kick in this morning. I was reading the first chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer this morning and just SOBBING into my oatmeal. Last year, my ob/gyn said that getting to the post-menopause stage would be "a blessing" for me, and I can't agree more right now. 

So since today might be a zero for me, I'm cuddling up with a couple of good books and a uke and I'll see if I can get a couple of new wire wraps made. Depending on how bad the brain fog gets as I go about the day, I'll try to brainstorm some new ukulele content for the blog and I know I keep promising it, but I'm going to look into how to make a couple of videos, too. I am not the world's best video editor, but I'll give it my best shot. 

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A couple of ther things going on in my life right now... A couple of weeks ago, I started a new website where I can sell my finished wirewraps, Wise Woman Jewelry. I just decided to keep it simple, keep it small, no more than 50 products at a time on there. That seems about right for the time being. 

I also started sending email newsletters again, and if you're at all interested in Tarot or jewelry as well as ukulele stuff and anti-capitalist nature-based spiritual practices, you can sign up here. I pinky promise to never spam your inbox or sell your email to third parties or any of those other annoying things that email marketers do. 

And speaking of anti-capitalist, holy hell, has anyone else noticed that it feels like we're being squeezed and nickel and dimed to death everywhere we turn lately? It's ten bucks to get a Big Cartel online shop with 50 listings, Etsy costs even more, Shopify costs at least $40 a month (unless you spring for a full year, and then it's like $360), if you want to use Zoom for more than 40 minutes at a time that costs $17 a month, even MailChimp costs money to do anything really meaningful with it these days. All these platforms are great for someone doing an online business (like me), and I get that companies gotta make money, but damn, some days it just feels like plain ol' greed. Like one day someone is going to take a step out of their front door and take a nice deep breath and some dudebro CEO in a suit is going to be like, "Hey if you want to breathe it'll cost you $70." 

Everything seems to cost money these days. Everywhere. Is this really what human beings have come to? We've just reduced ourselves to mere commodities and potential earnings statements? 

Too deep for a Monday morning?

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Anyway. There's probably a song or two in all of this, and I'm going to finish my motherwort tea and then maybe go outside and talk to a tree, and I'll be back later this week with some more musical blogs.