J.B. Sommerset

"Winter of 25" (c) J.B. Sommerset 2025 Welcome back, and bring on the fall weather! There's a chill in the air today, and it feels great! Especially up here in the mountains where the air is a little cleaner. As promised, here is part 10.  To catch up, here's Part 9: The land lord pilgrimage, and 30 second showers.   And if you need more than that, here's the start of all this, Part 1: "How I wound up on this mountain..."   If you are current, below is Part 10 , the part where the advice starts dropping, good advice, on how to build in remote locations.  I'll be up front about the moral of this part of the story, it's a simple one, check the codes in you county before you sell your house to build. Especially what kinds of houses can be built, permitted, financed, and insured. Also, where they can be built and what kinds of zoning is required. This is the first step, be honest with yourself and answer the question: "What kind of house do I wa...

"Fire Sun" (c) 2026, J.B. Sommerset Welcome back, and big sigh of relief, we made it through fire season! Well most of us did, a lot of people lost their homes this year, especially over there in Spokane. The worst part was that one of those fires was started by an arsonist. As promised, here it is more of my story.  To catch up, here's Part 8: To homeless or not to homeless...   And if you need more than that, here is the start of all this, Part 1: "How I wound up on this mountain..."   If you are current, below is Part 9 , it gets weirder, not as weird as "American flag Speedo man", but still pretty damn weird.  After the pilgrimage to Clarkston, and the handing over of $3500.00 to someone who had way more money than us, we were given the keys and the lease agreement, which was month to month (kind of unheard of, and very  nice in this day and age where subscriptions and fiscal chains are all we know), we were set to move in. We closed around 3 days ...

  "The Sunflower stow away" (c) 2026 J.B. Sommerset Welcome back again, it's been a minute. So, here it is more of the story about me and the mountain.  To catch up, here's part 7: " "The toilette paper-apocalypse and the lung-butter that comes with it." " And if you need more than that, here is the start of all this, Part 1: "How I wound up on this mountain..."   If you are current, below is Part 8  of this odyssey, my journey to get away from people because most of them suck. I mentioned in the last post that one of the things that helped us build up here in this remote location was that I landed a GIS job working on "cadastral mapping", now before you say "Jesus dude, hike you glasses up a little further you fucking nerd!", let me explain... Okay, never mind that's fair. Here's the TLDR on what that means.  Cadastral mapping is the detailed recording, defining, and mapping of property boundaries, land owners...

"The Road" (c) 2025 J.B. Sommerset  Welcome back ya'll. This is the story of how I came to be living up here in the woods on this mountain.  To catch up, here's part 6: " "The toilette paper-apocalypse and the lung-butter that comes with it." " And if you need more than that, here is the start of all this, Part 1: "How I wound up on this mountain..."   If you are current, below is Part 7 . I honestly have no idea how long this unrefined drivel will continue. The only way to find out is to continue. Here's where we're at, back in the day, which wasn't that long ago, but feels like it was. It may have been a Tuesday, these things often happen on Tuesdays. In "the day" houses used to be at the very least a little more affordable. You know, "I can afford it now that I'm 40 affordable".   The kind of affordable that you know in 30 years, if you are still alive, you'll have paid off. Just in time to retir...

"The Little Shroom that Could" J.B. Sommerset (c) 2026 Welcome back readers, to the story of how I came to be living up here in the woods on this mountain.  To catch up, here's part 5: " Serious conversations, room mates, and existential dread... " And if you need more than that, here is the start of all this, Part 1: "How I wound up on this mountain..."   If you are current, below is Part 6 . Well, we all know what happened next. The Pandemic, the "VID 19", the cough that stopped the world. If anything, it affirmed why we wanted to move out to the woods and live in a cabin hidden away with the animals.  It all started in the east, the far east, or so we were told. In a wet-market in China. A place where you can buy all kinds of unsavory meats, perishables, and things that can go bad in horrible ways. Chronic, explosive, diarrhea sort of ways. Anyway, some idiot caught the bug that fucked the world up, not sure how accurate that might be. Som...

  Garden Cat Spider (c) 2026 J.B. Sommerset Welcome back readers, to the story of how I came to be living up here in the woods on this mountain. To catch up, here is part 4: " How to get rid of Winnebago prostitutes and Tupperware meth. " And if you need more than that, here is the start of all this, Part 1: "How I wound up on this mountain..."  If you are current, below is Part 5 . After we got rid of "American flag Speedo guy" and his "Winnebago prostitutes", we started having more of those life changing conversations about what we really wanted and how to get there. They were the "long into the middle of the night conversations". We both knew we were no longer happy in our little corner house, and we were also not feeling safe.  Just after the lot was vacated, a drunk driver had been traveling east-bound and flipped his car into the neighbors house. They were okay, but the house had to be repaired leaving them with a boarded up hole ...

"Boozy the Bear" (c) J.B. Sommerset If you want to get caught up on the story so far you can read part 3 here:  "Foils in the yard and meth out back" PART 3 , or if you'd like to start at the beginning you can go here: "How I wound up on this mountain..." PART 1 . Back to the story at hand. Where was I, oh yes, American-flag Speedo guy. It was that summer I discovered the depravity of people and how much they will lie to your face in order to keep a scam going. If some of these people worked as hard at an honest job, like they do at scamming people, they'd have some serious, and well earned cash. But some people just can't put their best foot forward no matter how many opportunities they are given. Their default setting, their prime disposition, just happens to be self sabotage. My wife called these dispositions "personality disorders", and she is qualified say to make such a claim. American flag speedo guy sure couldn't resist a ...

The Lonely Cougar (c) J.B. Sommerset 2026 Continued from PART 2: "Hey hon... some dude tried to stab me out in the yard, is our insurance up to date?" Over the next few weeks we talked a lot about that old dream. The one where we sell most of our things and move to the woods. A dream in which get away from it all and make a new life with the wild animals and the trees. We were still kind of joking about it, but also kind of not joking.  After the tattooed miscreant had tried to stab me, "the dream" became a standard conversation in our house. One that got more and more attention as the world became "enshittified" under the Tangerine Mussolini's first attempt at ruining the world. At the time, it wasn't going too good for his diapered ass. Congress and his own incompetence had stifled his forward momentum. But that didn't mean things were hunky-dory, all "gorsh and good times" and shit. No, they were far from that. Most people could fe...

  "Moose and calf" J.B. Sommerset (c) 2025 Continued from Part 1: "How I wound up on this mountain..." We used to live in the city, back so long ago on that proverbial Tuesday I previously referred to. This story actually starts then, in 2016. I and my wife had just sold our previous house. We got bored and decided to start over again in a smaller more manageable house with less electrical issues, newer plumbing and a bigger yard. But also, we wanted a nicer neighborhood. At first, that little place had everything we wanted.   We bought that small house on a busy street corner. When I think back to how much we paid for that house I get a little teary eyed. It was in the "before times". Our mortgage was $700.00 a month. This was pre-COVID, things were better back then. However, at the time, the mortgage on the new place was more than the place we left, mostly because it was a double lot with a detached shop in the back. For the most part we were doing alri...

"Bear in the way" (c) J.B. Sommerset 2026 This all starts with a gang member, an attempted stabbing, and the follow up fentanyl foil in our yard... Wait, wait, hold on...  What is this story about? Well, as it turns out, its about how I wound up on this mountain and why I chose to live here, in the middle of the woods, thirteen miles from town. I figure this one has several parts, so strap in and buckle up and stay locked in, there are going to be a number of these. This is going to be a longer story, so lets back up and start in the "way back then" so the context will be firm and in place before we arrive in the "here and now". Lets go back to the beginning of this and then I will walk you through the process that led us (me and the wife) to where we are.  Context is everything, so lets define that context, bare with me while I walk you from through a few years of my life. This part, or more specifically these parts, are my origin story. Everyone has that...

It's all too often that I try and switch up my drawing styles; I like variety.  Below is a more recent doodle I did on my google tablet. I find drawing on a tablet to be easier than drawing on paper. There are never any eraser marks, I can layer it, I can select specific parts and delete them, I can paint without the mess, and so on.  However, it's for the same reason I find that real skill comes from pen and ink on paper. It's more a challenge to create on paper. Also, there is a tactile sensation that can not be replicated by any kind of device. Especially the feel of good paper as the pen glides across it.  It's been hard recently, as a musician, writer, or artist. We are all being replaced by A.I. generated slop and soon we will have to rely on our small communities who still appreciate "man-made". And those communities are growing fewer and further between. I am generally very careful with my art, in fact I make sure that most of mine are water marked. An...

I woke up this morning, in march, after a very minimal winter to see a foot of new snow on the ground. This was very surprising, and also a little concerning. For years I have watched as the weather has changed. I should say the climate has changed. This winter has had around a foot total- for the whole winter.  When I was a child, a light winter in the state I live in, was four feet. I have watched this over the past three decades, it has changed. Specifically the last ten years. It seem rare that we get snow down in the low lands. Up where I live on the mountain the average cumulative snowfall is around seven feet, or at least it used to be. We only had a week of snow this year. And most of that was in March.  It got me thinking about climate change. I know, I know, a lot of you people here in the states think it's a hoax- well spoiler alert, most Americans are idiots. Even If I didn't know what it was, I would suspect that something was happening in our environment. The gra...

Here in the US, we are dealing with a lot. And as you overseas know, what the USA does will affect the rest of the world. And oh, boy, it's some new shit show every day. Our country is currently imploding. I am hoping we survive to "politic" a different day but currently the prognosis isn't great. I am not looking forward to "Gilead", and maybe it won't get to that. Hopefully the people will pull their heads out of their asses long enough to figure out how to deal with these "brown-shirts" and their psychotic over lords. It has become more and more apparent to me, that with each day that goes by, we slide deeper into the dumbest apocalypse ever conceived. If you'd asked me what the end would look like 10 years ago, I never would have said: "A slow death-slide into stupidity, racism, bigotry, greed and gaslighting, led by an idiot with dementia who paints himself orange and inserts his tiny littler pecker where it doesn't belong....

So, I do a lot of art, it's sometime that takes me away from the current state of affairs. Me, being an introvert (for the most part), need to recharge. Art is a perfect way to do that, so I do mandalas to relieve stress from time to time. I am starting to amass quite a portfolio of these things. So, I decided to start posting them here. These are my original works, any if I get enough feedback, I might start selling them. So email me if you think that would be a good idea. I hope you enjoy them.  "Crosshatch Mandala- (c) 2025 J.B. Sommerset Cheers!

Last week, a crazy man, I will not mention his name, was giving a speech at a Utah college campus. He has been known for a lot of hate speech, ignorant rants, bigotry and values consistent with an angry little German man with a odd mustache. He felt that woman should do what their told, have babies, stay in the kitchen, and never vote or question the authority of the white gentile. Children should be seen, never heard. Slavery might be a good thing and he believed that people of color and diversity were a blight upon the earth, he also believed that gun deaths were a necessary price to pay so that we could  have guns. He spread those ideologies everywhere he went. Not just online, but in person, in front of crowds, and for sponsor money.  The right, with all their "godly" values, idolized this man. By now you might have guessed who I am talking about.  The problem is, the man who shot him was also crazy. One crazy man shot another. The world is now down two crazy men. One...