“When you’re a mountain person, you understand the brilliance and beauty of contradiction…

The way land can be your greatest teacher.  How something can be both grounding yet elevating, intoxicating yet soothing, wild yet serene, intensely primal yet patient, and cycling yet predictable within the shifts, and rhythms.  Mountains keep us on edge yet wrap us in the sensation of safety all at once.  I don’t know of anything sweeter, or more magic inducing than that.”
– Victoria Erickson

The G:  And now for a couple of mountain stories because this country is full of glorious mountains.

“Females are strong as hell”

The J: Quote from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt which is just a good show and an enjoyable song:

It was The Day of the Girl on October 11 and I’ve been meaning to write a little about gender relations so here we are (better a month late than never). I will start with the most recent example of women being very strong that doesn’t include the daily strength of my wife being more than me. That event would be stacking wood. Forewarning there is a lot of back story to get to the actual women being strong part. I apologize as it is mostly due to the whole not blogging for two months thing.

Perhaps you knew this but maybe you didn’t, winter is coming (dimri po vjen in Shqip). As such, due to a major heating source being wood burning stoves, we have bought three cubic meters of wood to burn this winter. Now luckily for us we can store it outside and just cover it with a tarp instead of stacking it in our small apartment. We made a nice three meter stack in the park like other families. Though I must admit we were yelled at in the first ten minutes for stacking it in the wrong place – aka in the woman telling us we were in her spot.