Greenstorm's Journal

My cubicle window at work faces out over the lake. The sun is low now and comes in even near noon with extra light bouncing off the water. It's warm on my neck above the thick sweater I'm wearing. The water is very low and though it's not frozen yet the ground is. In the mornings when the air is below -10C and the water still holds onto its summer heat the whole expanse, lakes and rivers, steams and smokes with the pink sunrise colouring it.

Outside we skipped fall and went straight into winter. The birch trees didn't have time to drop their leaves and hang limply yellow. My driveway is frozen and mud season is over. Under the deepening crust of hard soil the ground is dry, dry, dry. My little seasonal creek hasn't been full at all this year. We have no snow yet, nothing to insulate the cold from driving into the ground.

My house is cozy and the geese bunch together overnight in a single social entity. In late spring they'll pair or trio off and spread to all corners of the fenced area, but for now they stay close. Every night the moon is bright enough to cast shadows inside my bedroom window and give me a clear view of Solly watching from atop her pile of woodchips. In the mornings I put on the kettle for tea and bring around unfrozen water to everyone while it boils; we all drink together.

Nights come early and hard. By 6 my body is done and can only lie there in the companionship of cats and the warmth of the fire. I do chores before work because I can't make myself move to do them after. Every night I think of the weightlessness of a bath but go to bed instead.

Building a doghouse is waiting for a free day. Clay is waiting for a free day. Snow and freezing rain lurk at the end of the weekly forecast over and over, waiting to surprise me by suddenly approaching closer.

They say winter is a time of rest but it's a time of carrying full buckets instead of hoses, of managing water that will accumulate where it stands until April, of shoveling snow and carrying wood. My mind might like to rest within this rhythm but work won't allow it, though I have a week or two more of walking the bush alone before I need to focus on jumping through mental hoops. Hopefully I'll be up to it by then.

In the meantime I prepare for a week in the field, with sunlight warm on my neck.

It's later than usual for snow but not ridiculously so. October has been warm; this last day or two looks like it's finally going below freezing for good for the winter.

Things I have not done that I need to do:

Pull up the hoses and coil them

Power wash hoses, snowshovel, nets, anything else that's been sitting in the mud for the last two weeks since we finally started getting rain

Put my chainsaw pants on and actually cut up all the logs

Screw together the field fence

Put a roof on the greenhouse

Move the birch wood in

Build one or two doghouses with pallets

Build a roof over the feed area, or build a feed shed

Pick up weird bits from the yard in prep for the snowblower (Solly makes this hard, since she re-scatters things everyday)

Spread the woodchip piles

Put the rototillers "indoors" somewhere

All that said I'm still pretty easily winded from covid, and when I do too much in a day I get dizzy. Yesterday I spent the full day at the pottery studio -- this month Sundays seem to be when it's open, and hopefully that continues -- and by the time I got dinner in me the room was just spinning. I'm back at work now and it's definitely a struggle.

I've got a bunch of tomato seeds fermented and drying, though, the corn's in and there were some gorgeous gaspe x saskatoon white ears with a peaches-and-cream pattern in the mix. I pulled in a karma miracle, sungreen, sweet baby jade x "heirloom" micro, taiga, and sweet cheriette plant to do some crossing this winter, and I need to start some micros.

Pottery is super fun. Having the wheel in my house really helps; my skill is improving so quickly when I'm able to work even a little most days. I still haven't got a slurpee-cup-height cylinder thrown but I'm only an inch or two away. Most recently I've started attaching handles. I have two shapes I like: one is a classic rounded bellied shape and the other is a very geometric conic flare; I can make the former but not the latter. I'm learning so much all the time: besides handles, the most recent bit is that these big pieces need a lot of material left at the bottom, to be trimmed off, for stability. Funny that I've just learned to clean up the bottoms and take extra material away. Each technique has its place.

I've been working with two clays: p300 and m332, both by plainsman. the p300, a porcelain, is like sewing with silk. It does whatever I ask it to do immediately, it holds its shape. The m332 is like carpentry, it has a significant set of physical limitations and strengths. It's sandy and red and has absolutely gorgeous potential for texture, where the porcelain is pure white and smooth and I end up being uninspired by the surface except to cover it with glaze.

Kitten has settled in as a full member of the household. He still sucks on any bare skin he can find, but otherwise functions like a very energetic, exploratory tiny cat. He harasses the other cats, who set boundaries; climbs the curtains and shelves; snuggles lots; and sits on my lap and helps with the wheel. I think he wants to be called Bear or Little Bear. He's also apparently a smoke cat, and not a black one. That is, he looks black but his undercoat is white, and his belly is developing white longer hairs too. Between him and Solly it's feeling very animally lately.

Covid took my sense of smell but not of taste, and I found it remarkably easy to eat for a couple weeks. I think I didn't realize how processor-intensive food is for me until that went away for awhile. There's just so much going on in the whole nose/sinus area. Things are back to normal now, more or less, and I'm enjoying the bergamot in my earl grey tea again.

There's probably more but my cat is sucking loudly on the inside of my elbow and it's distracting. I should talk about eating with people from separate rooms over thanksgiving, but that might need to fade into obscurity.

Might as well update about the animal situation.

Solly and Thea are working great as a team all night. I put them in the front at night (the grain is all there) and Avallu in the back with the geese, Thea I put in the back during the day with Avallu so she can go in and eat and I can keep Solly mostly on her puppy food.

Avallu is getting more ok with Solly, but after two incidents where he was pretty sure she belonged only on the porch we need a little more than current levels of ok. In the evenings we often do cheese o clock, where they all see each other through the fence and get lots of cheese. I think they may have got too much cheese, so I may need a lower-fat alternative for some of these evenings. Avallu is doing well listening to commands even when Solly is in close proximity, but he's also very respectful of the fence. Solly is very wary of Avallu after the last couple incidents but has a seemingly limitless well of optimism and is coming around with enough cheese again.

I've definitely made some mistakes during this intro but I suspect everyone can be convinced to forgive me.

The geese are sleeping right up close to Avallu many nights and spending more time than usual up by the house. I can tell when there are no bears around because they go into the orchard. They've taken care of this spring's goslings well and those are now fully feathered. The orchard is pretty well mown at this point and the geese are starting to gorge on grain to fatten up for fall, they've gone from roughly a quarter bucket of grain per day for the 31 of them to closer to a whole bucket.

I have an ancona drake swap lined up for later this year, so he can cover this last two year's ducklings.

Incubator full of chicks should hatch while I'm gone. Things will be set up for mom to just plunk them into the quail shed under lights. These are mostly chanteclers but with a half dozen silkies. If I'm going to do silkies I might as well do seramas, which are the sweetest chickens on earth, but there are none to be had up here. Also Clyde the new rooster (his previous family got him as Bonnie and when he started to crow had to part with him) is doing well. He's a brahma, so he should get very big, but right now he's young and pigeon-sized with ENORMOUS FLUFFY feet. He's also smart, social, and I like him a great deal. I have not yet evicted the previous rooster from the bottom coop and put him in yet, I'm planning to do that when the chicks are a bit older, so right now he's sleeping under the truck canopy at night and hanging with the muscovies during the day. His crow is growing in adorably; I guess I have a thing for adolescent rooster crows.

The three boars have been shedding, I can scratch them with a rake and all the curly wool comes off and leaves growing-in guard hairs. I think they should move to the back to guard that entrance, though really Baby and Hooligan are the better defenders against bears. Did I mention Hooligan kinda bit me when I was stealing her babies? She didn't break skin or even bruise me, but she put her teeth on me in warning after I'd ignored her barking and other warnings. She is 100% a perfect temperament in this regard: she lets me play with her newborn babies if I'm not harassing them, catching them, and making them scream and she loves being scratched behind the ears but she can gauge situations in which it's appropriate to defend and does so with careful escalation. I'm just very impressed with Ossabaws in general, but also her in particular.

We do have at least two bears back there, one big and one small, that appear unrelated. The big one doesn't mind bear bangers, air horns, dogs, or yelling so I'm worried about what will happen come fall. Two bears in that territory is already a lot and it's only August. When bears go into their super calorie-seeking mode before winter they're less cautious and maybe it's not safe to have the pigs back there then? On the other hand the whole herd of pigs may actually be better defenders than the dogs, at least until the whole pack gels and maybe even after that.

The poor cats are withering away from lack of love and attention since I've been into the office several days the last few weeks. Also Demon is not a fan of a New Person in the house to farmsit and complains loudly when she's not around. I expect he'll come around. They continue to break down all doors into my bedroom to sleep on the bed, to my detriment.

Ducks are ducks. The anconas are in the covered area, and I want to make more covered areas for bear/lynx/raven/fox/coyote protection for the littles in future years. One broody ancona made a nest just inside the chicken house so I can barely squeak the door open and squeeze in and she will not be shifted. Everyone likes lamb's quarters weedings from the garden.

It's good? At least until the bears finish eating my neighbour's chickens and turn more attention on me.

There are a LOT of bears around right now. In town there were 15 sightings yesterday of at least 5 different bears, my one bear on the back has swelled to several of different sizes, etc etc. Not sure if this is because of the drought, of a frost that nipped a lot of the flowers this spring and led to less fruit, or the fires chasing them in close, or probably all of them. Plus the last few years have been really good years for the bears with 3 cubs per sow being frequent, so a year where a bunch starved is definitely due. Starting this early, though-- it's going to be an intense fall as they all go into calorie storage mode. I clearly need to fortify.

Which is an introduction to just saying that last night I woke up at 3am and helped Thea and Avallu chase two bears away ("help" is an overstatement, I held the flashlight. Man those dogs run fast) and then went back to sleep. In my dreams a sow and three cubs came close into the yard and me and the dogs were hitting them with sticks to try and get rid of them and then a friend(?) showed up and finally shot the sow. Then we were starting to allocate meat & fat (I'm more interested in fat, for soap) when I woke up. It was one of those experiences where real life blends seamlessly into a dream, I was wearing the same thing, it was basically just a continuation.

I woke up tired into a beautiful sunny dew-drenched morning and told my dogs they were so, so, so good and came in to work.

We've had several days with lightning and thunder in the afternoons, accompanied by high winds and-- by rain! Enough to bump the fire danger down from extreme to high, and in some places in the district even moderate or low. It's not enough to totally skip watering the garden, but it's enough to reduce the urgency. It's also enough to bring down the smoke level in the air, and it's cooled down here to perfect skin temperature.

Now, it was pretty extreme wind, and it's likely more of the lightning strikes will flare up when things dry out and warm up again -- the last round left three spot fires around the highway -- but for now, a reprieve.

Tucker came up for a week. At one point I'd asked the question, if a lot of what had been going on before was burnout, then what? Well, the "then what" is that he was able to engage emotionally and intellectually with what I was asking, to share his stuff and to be vulnerable and to make long-term plans and be realistic about the likelihood of those plans, to listen to me and be empathetic and loving, and to give me space to make my own missteps so I could overreact, catch myself, and apologise instead of it leading to a spiral. These are new skills for us and we need to be careful not to tear the new skills by overworking them but it was so nice. When my counselor said what I wanted from him might be mystery, it didn't land quite right. He is capable of surprising me, and that's fundamental to longevity of this stuff, but I think what I wanted from him was hope. Hope for visits like we just had: not perfect, but generative and close and loving.

Added bonus I can send some pork down to Josh with him.

In farm news the muscovies are coming out of every corner with babies. First a chocolate mama showed up with 9, then a lavender one with 7 the next day, and the black mama who's mysteriously nesting in the pile of feed bags had one. I've consolidated them all with the chocolate mama in the quail house along with the geese and anconas. I'm pretty sure there's a humidity component involved: when things are dry and the nests are dry I don't get so much of a hatch. Then when it rains or if I soak the bedding around the nests (not in the nests) things move better.

Hopefully I got all the babies off the ground quickly enough that they'll do ok. I think there's a disease in my soil that catches them if they're not taken off it in time, and I've lost a lot to it over the years. I'm considering building more enclosed space up off the ground for that reason. Having the aspen chips is really nice in that regard: it's going to be a brutal season to get straw.

In light of the pottery studio dissolving I'm keeping an eye on kilns. They've hired a studio manager and have mentioned that no personal work will be done in the studio -- I haven't talked to the studio manager yet, this had come through the program director. It's such a shame to have a lovely studio, two brand new kilns, all those wheels and equipment, and only use them for classes and not allow anyone who's taken a class to do follow-up work. And maybe they'll get to that point. But I have re-learned the lesson that, for things important to me, people and organizations are not necessarily reliable.

Mostly looking at kilns is a hobby right now: they can be got pretty cheap because they're super heavy and hard to move, but that money is not in the plan right now. Good to keep an eye on what stuff looks like. At this rate I might be able to go down south for pagan stuff and maybe...

...a very soft and purring cat just came and sat across both my arms. I guess that's it for this update.

Yesterday I went to visit my coworker who ended up in the off-grid house I was considering last fall. It's beautiful up there, so quiet, and the house is so well designed. I picked blackcurrants. She's worried about fire, of course, but it's been challenging to get the area up to speed when there's so much smoke her solar doesn't work well, and her water is somewhat limited right now. I'm glad I didn't end up there in the end, with the animals it would have been too much for me to take on.

Today, as expected after doing anything, I had three naps already. I woke up from the third one at 1pm and it was dark enough I had to turn on the lights. Lightning and thunder started and then some rain. There was one lightning strike across my road definitely less than a kilometer away. I guess I'll be keeping an eye on that. There were also strikes all up and down between me and town, and just the other side of the highway from me. Nervous times. We got a heavy rain but only a few moments of it, enough to wet my shirt and the dog.

Trying to sort out energy to eat now, and then to carry a bunch of stuff out of the livingroom to storage: I've been sorting it into bins and want to wash the floor before Tucker gets here tomorrow night.

I tried being proactive at my doctor's appointment the other day and it worked really well: I came in with some tests I wanted and she went right along with it and suggested some others. I think there was a miscommunication at the very beginning of this journey, or maybe now we've peeled the PMDD and mood stuff off it and it hasn't got better and is, in fact, getting worse. Now there's the wait for specialists. I'm hopeful for some sort of understanding about what's going on.

I'm never quite sure how much "normal" people keep tabs on the world around them. As a land manager there's a lot of input I'm used to about the landscape. So the other night I had open:

https://firesmoke.ca/

https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map

https://www.lightningmaps.org/

windy.com

zoom.earth (less helpful with smoke)

Government weather page

Pages for each of a couple nearby fires as per the wildfire situation map

google maps

I hovered a moment at the top last night, during solstice. I planted more tomatoes -- there are 220 in the upper field, the wood field, now. The day before that I think, I made a deep water culture hydroponics installation on my deck which took 10 more tomatoes, and a few days before that I'd done the 14 pots on the side of the house to bring my potted tomato total to 41 or 42. I have some more to put in but not many -- plug some holes left by the frost on the 18th or whenever that was, fill in a couple edges with the extra-early reds.

I guess I plant in the evenings now. I used to do these things in the morning but mornings are most often difficult now so the evening feels like my stolen time. The tomatoes from earlier plantings are greening up well, and my gaspe corn is maybe 3" tall.

Also my dinner came from here, partly: duck-egg pasta, tossed with blanched lamb's quarters, some feta cheese, and some self-canned tomato sauce all with a squeeze of lime. Half spanakopita, and it made a great pasta salad cold for lunch today.

It's astonishing to see the difference in my indoor hydroponics/aerogarden and my outdoor pots. The indoor plants are a foot tall and putting out flower buds; the outdoor ones are maybe 6-7" tall. Very curious to see whether the outdoor hydroponics split the difference, that's pretty much why I did it. It would also be super fun to make some hydroponics boxes out of marine plywood and caulk instead of plastic bins. They'd want to be raised slightly off the deck so they didn't rot it, or maybe that volume of water would be better against the south side of the house. Maybe in a greenhouse there even...

My house is messy and dirty but I'm picking away at cleaning up after the plumbing thing still.

Oh, and also--

I'm getting a puppy. She's 10 months old, a maremma/caucasian shepherd cross with both parents in a working pack at 100 mile. Like Thea, she was got to be a sheep guardian. Like Thea, she is flunking out of guardianship at the sheep farm because she keeps escaping the fence and going up to the house to get people attention.

Guardian dogs are famous for escaping fences to wander -- one pyrenees the next town over escapes the fence to guard two herds of cows at once over a total of about 400 acres. I want my dogs to guard my property, but my house is the epicenter of the guarding area and I don't want it fenced off from the dogs, so a dog with a strong homing sense is much better for me than one that shows wandering tendencies. A very people-oriented dog is likely to be more easily trainable, too, insofar as one trains guardian dogs (only half a joke; they can only be trained to redirect somewhat, and do things within their character). Plus, a lot of guardian breeds are from lines that don't actively guard, especially caucasian shepherd/ovcharkas who are often bred either to fight and be aggressive, or just to be huge, at the expense of everything else. It's good to know her parents were both working dogs.

Even though she's 10months and not freshly weaned, this will take a lot of work. Caucasians are a handful, they're a more headstrong breed than maremmas generally. She hasn't been trained to poultry yet, though I suspect Thea will do an excellent job mentoring her there. She's already spayed, thank goodness. She's housebroken. But I'm most worried about introductions. We'll see how it goes. I need to do some reading, I'm not even sure if it's better to introduce her to both at once or one at a time. I'm concerned but also very curious - Avallu is a lover of tiny baby things for the most part, and he's a good friend to Hazard the cat. Thea is more friendly to people but I'm not sure how she'll feel about an actual dog in her domain. She definitely disciplines Avallu when he does something she doesn't approve of. I'm prepared for it to take 6 months of separation and management before they are ok being left alone together but I sure hope it takes less time than that.

Her name may or not be Solstice, since that's the day I knew I was getting her.

So that's big news.

Two cool rainy days in a row, much-needed, and now we're back to warm. I hung my laundry on the line late last night in anticipation of the forecast, which is clear and warmer day after day until the weekend. I find the laundry does better outside than in the machine overnight, and the machine needs babying because of the low well pressure so it can only be run when I'm around.

Anyhow, we hit Warm a couple days ago, and 30C is forecast next weekend. For those keeping track, that's warmer than many of our summers ever get. In May. We're still having intermittent frost at night but I'm thinking seriously about planting my corn.

I'm doing this poetry challenge, 30 poems in 30 days, and I started by writing about plants and the land and now I'm writing about global warming. Go figure.

Tilled most of the lower garden before the tiller stopped running. I think I need to check the chain/transmission oil, it may be overheating.

Many of the apple trees have baby leaves, though the new ones don't yet. Some of the seedling apple trees have deep red leaves, I assume they're the offspring of my red-leafed crabapple.

I'm digging raspberries and giving them away, and turning the eggs in the incubator twice daily. It's a good time.

People have been asking me how I am and I’ve been saying things like “good” or “excellent”. It’s been awhile! A couple counseling visits ago I said something like “is it even possible to give a straight, single, non-ambivalent answer to this? Like do neurotypicals have everything average out so they don’t experience both the good and the bad, but just a kind of middle mush?”

Last visit I said, “really good, actually.”

It’s important to laugh at myself when it’s warranted.

So here’s the stuff:

Garden: tomatoes are looking great and I’m starting to acclimatize them to outside. I never did set up my lights, but the thing about seeding so late is that daytime is starting to be warm enough to keep them outdoors as they’re thinking about stretching. We’re still getting freezes at night but they’re still in the “couple hours at a time in the shade” phase so I just take them out once it warms up. I’m thinking of repurposing my chick brooder for a mini greenhouse on the deck so I don’t need to haul in and out.

Meanwhile the apple seedlings are thriving, they’re outside all day and any evening there isn’t frost (only one so far). Peppers had poor germination but I did plant two flats so I’ll have enough to grow. I also had poor germination on ground cherries.

I started messing with the raspberries the other night. Started cutting out last year’s fruiting canes and cutting the east fence one into rows, leaving a stub so I can dig out the extras.

Outside is beautiful but weird. Stinging nettles are coming up, rhubarb is up, sweet ciciley and apple trees haven’t budged yet. Favas are in the ground. The pigpen is almost dried out, it could almost be tilled already. The lake is lower than folks remember ever. They’re forecasting a big wildfire year for the whole province. Eep.

Pottery: so looks like we’re crystallizing into an actual functional group, or at least moving towards it, without me having to shoulder the whole thing. A previous volunteer, who burned out because she didn’t have help, seems to be back. The first kilnload of bisque is currently cooling down, I’ll get to see it on Thursday. We’re going to glaze. The plan is to meet regularly on Thursdays. Hopefully that doesn’t fall apart. I really do want to do a bunch of throwing until I can do it confidently.

Tucker/stupid/mystery: a lot of stuff is percolating on this one. My therapist suggested that what keeps drawing me back is that he’s unpredictable. Or, I mean, she said “mystery” and that’s maybe accurate? Which offers me the lens that his unpredictability throws me off in both directions: I appreciate not always knowing what’s going to happen, but I really struggle without any sense of certainty or agency in the relationship. I also feel stupid every time we go through the dance where he distances, I distance, and then he comes closer after I distance. It is kind of predictable, after all, and if someone doesn’t explicitly commit to me I feel uncomfortably ambivalent about my right to complain when they suddenly don’t act committed: on the one hand they didn’t say anything for me to rely on, on the other hand if someone does a bunch of stuff with typical societal meanings about commitment for years and then stops it was in fact fair to believe they’d go on as they had begun unless they said otherwise. Anyhow I’m chatting cautiously with him again. We’ll see how it goes. He tends to schedule himself pretty full and I’m not great at “I can only talk to you on Tuesdays for the rest of the year except when I’m too busy, then we skip a week”.

Willow: the basketmaking course was nice. I’ve harvested a bunch of willow, some from my property and some from the side of the road last time I drove the highway. It’s supposed to be harvested before buds start to open. I may have been slightly late? And just a week or two later it’s definitely too late. We’ll see if the stuff I got is ok for basketmaking or not when it’s done drying and soaking. I have a couple friends interested in learning too so we’ll see how that goes. I guess practice baskets are fine even if they’re not perfect.

I really enjoy the way the willow smells, and the way it scents my basement while drying.

Poetry:My friend did that wonderful poetry month daily challenge, and I’ve taken up a PDA-compatible “30 poems sometime in 30 days” challenge starting randomly on April 29th. It’s a real joy. I’ve written a backlog of poems to put out one at a time (I did write them all in the first couple days) and in the meantime that frees me up to write new ones without PDA last-minute pressure. Writing feels so good. Manifesting the inside of my mind on my outside is empowering-feeling. Also it’s neat to see what’s on my mind.

Well: my water pressure is a real problem. There’s also sand coming up through the system. I cleaned out a bunch of my little faucet screens last night; the kitchen water had completely stopped and I pulled maybe ¼ tsp of sand out of it, which fixed it. Apparently the sand is a big thing for everyone on my road right now, so for everyone on the couple layers of aquifer. We think it’s because the water is SO LOW right now, and I think on a karst system it shifts around very quickly. Anyhow, my washing machine is struggling – it’s the thing that uses the most water in my house right now, and loads are taking an extra hour or two as the machine fills up so slowly. I need to order a pressure tank and try to figure out how to put it in by myself or get a plumber to come out for an hour. The money is definitely hard right now and I’m waffling between the same sized tank (25 gallons of “useable” water, aka drawdown) or get one step larger (35 gallons of drawdown) to help protect me through power outages. Either way I may need to sell random stuff to make it happen.

Starlink: the provincial government said something about wanting broadband to every rural household in the province in 4 years. This comes 1-2 years after almost removing it completely from some remote communities, and after funding it being put in south of me along the whole highway of tears (which is definitely taking longer than they expected). My internet right now is a hub that runs on cell service, it’s very very slow but it’s reliable and it’s $90/month. It’s getting worse as the local cell towers decay (as with everything owned by businesses, they cut the nonprofitable stuff for small groups and focus on what makes money, which is not rural stuff). Starlink (and the truly awful satellite internet) are the only other options.

I hadn’t wanted to get starlink since there’s the $700 equipment cost up front and if the gov ever does get some other kind of broadband internet up here I don’t want to be stuck with the sunk cost fallacy keeping me on it. However… the other day I learned that starlink is offering its equipment to rural Canada, NZ, and Australia at a very very steep discount ($200) that makes it palatable amortized over even just four years. Soooooo… I’ve ordered it. I am not thrilled to be supporting the organization, I firmly believe it should be a government service, but my government is failing me here.

I am looking forward to making youtube videos again! I wasn’t able to upload them in less than 20 hours or so before. I wonder if IO can find a used gopro or something?
Anyhow, that’s a lot and mostly good.