Devotions

It doesn't seem to be covid.

I was most afraid of this, being here sick, weak, and tired with no one to help me. I survived a couple days of sleeping 18 hours a day and I'm still too weak to lift a full feed bag, but I'm clever enough to split the feed into several buckets to carry and it's still hose season so I don't need to carry water. It was fine. There are ways of being sick I couldn't handle but I made it through this one.

Today I had enough energy to get to the pharmacy for a covid test and even walk all the way to the chicken house 3 times. Tomorrow I might be able to make it up to the garden.

I'm still very grateful for the vacmop. My floors are at least not part of what's making me uncomfortable.

Past self made some interesting tomato crosses and I planted the seeds for those F1s today. Yesterday I pulled out some microdwarf tomato seeds and I planted those today too. I also made a list of the crosses I'm missing. I love my tomato work, and that is available to me even if I can't make it up to the garden.

A friend has offered to lend me his hydroponic setup so I can do more tomato and pepper breeding setup this winter. I'm super excited.

Tucker has been watching Elementary with me in the evenings, remotely. It's nice, when I'm too sick or tired to think, to still have a way of being companionable. At this point in my cycle I'm looking forward to seeing him.

I'm so glad I cleaned my sheets before I got sick. I've been spending a lot of time in this bed.

I'm grateful for Josh. He mentioned that he'd looked up declarative language that I'd mentioned as helpful for PDA and was trying to do that. <3 He also supported the idea that PDA is a real thing that explains my stuff when I was feeling a bit weird about it.

I'm grateful I've constructed a life where PDA can be such a low level hum that I can sometimes doubt it applies to me, at least some of the time.

I'm glad to think of my corn growing up there in my garden.

I'm also quite fond of all the little ducklings. There are many.

And that's the end of my energy. Be well, and goodnight.

"No"

Well, this is PDA hell.

My employer has decided that the province I live in requires in-person home safety checks in order for us to work from home. Please note all the people who work remotely in this province, many of whom I know personally, do not have this requirement.

They've already used the safety card to say they are going to come to folks' homes if we're offline for more than an hour. That really gets my back up, but I've been handling it. If I print something out to read for work, I just set a timer and move the mouse every once in awhile or something. It's incredibly stupid but now it's been eclipsed.

I really don't want to let anyone into my house. There are tons of reasons, of course.

I feel super unsupported on safety in the first place: this is an employer who pays to dispose of ergonomic office equipment rather than allow us to bring it home (ergonomics is the safety they're inspecting the house for) and who does lip service to mental health but doesn't provide mandatory mental health anti-bigotry training or money for more than three mental health provider sessions per year. They've mentioned pulling training opportunities if I'm going to take extended sick time.

I don't like people in my house in the first place.

I don't trust my boss (!) coming into my house not to make discriminatory remarks until the end of time based on what he sees.

I don't like the look of being forced into a private space where I can't access help with a dude. It's not that I think my boss is gonna sexually assault me; it's that I don't like an institution which requires me and everyone working from home to put ourselves in a situation where that may occur.

But also I do not like being forced to do things that violate my body, and my house is my body. I might choose to allow things I don't like, but this isn't being presented as a choice.

My PDA is SCREAMING right now. I'm going to go into the garden and cry, come back in, cry some more, scream and rock and squeeze my nails into my palms and wander from room to room wailing. Then I'm going to look very calm, wipe my eyes, sit down, log into my work computer, and read the email again. I'm going to write a polite clarification: "is there a way to do this by video or through pictures, I don't feel comfortable with my employer in my home" or something. Then I'm going to go back into the garden and cry and stare into space and not even see the garden. I might dig a hole and plant something.

People don't usually see this part of me. In some ways my PDA doesn't allow them to; knowing I'm like this is a kind of power and I don't like people having power over me, especially people who have no empathy, no understanding, and have not shared vulnerabilities of their own. I'd mask; I'd smile. If I learned about this at work I'd say nothing and just be silent but when I got home it would bubble over.

And here's the thing. It literally feels like dying, or honestly worse than dying. It is the most extreme fight-or-flight response you can imagine. It feels like this will destroy me. And even if work comes to a compromise around allowing video or pictures I'll still have gone through this truly terrible feeling.

I'm so grateful I'm called in sick already for the ongoing whatever it was this week. I can process this, but on the other hand, there's no processing it. There's no thinking it through, rationalizing it, anything like that. There's just enduring the sense of helplessness and violation and threat until it's over, then trying to forget it ,all while trying to live my life and smile at my friends and eat dinner and whateverthefuck else people do.

This isn't a super rare experience. This is what PDA at its medium trigger feels like. This is my life some of the time, and honestly not an insubstantial amount of the time. I could lean into it and get self-righteous but that only makes it worse when its forced to happen anyhow. People supporting me and saying, "yeah, that's bad" makes it worse. Everything makes it worse. That's why I go to the garden.

Edited to add: I can do none of the above now because I wrote that I would do it, which translates it into a demand, and I have zero ability to accept demands now. Isn't this fun? This is my actual life.

Paying it forward to myself

To shake off a bad day I went into the garden and did a bunch of manual tomato crosses.

The garden had my first ripe tomato, an orange promiscuously-pollinated one with light green speckles on it. That's kind of neat, since the plant next to it has still-unripe fruit that are pale green with darker green speckles; this one was dark green while growing and ripened into the speckles. I think they're quite fetching. The flowers on the plant weren't deeply exserted, but the anther cones were open and a little reflexed and the end of the stamen was visible.

I should probably test its neighbour for ripe-when-greenness. It's really where having this many tomato plants falls apart: I don't handle the fruit until they show colour, so I don't know when they're ripe if they're green-when-ripe.

Anyhow, the crosses from today are as follows:

Mother	Father
Lucinda	Minsk Early
Lucinda	Taiga
Mikado Black	Minsk Early
Silvery Fir Tree	Taiga
Silvery Fir Tree	Uluru Ochre
Taiga	Mikado Black
Taiga	Minsk Early
Uluru Ochre	Mikado Black
Zesty Green	Mikado Black
Zesty Green	Minsk Early
Zesty Green	Uluru Ochre
Minsk	Zesty Green

The minsk early/zesty green one is questionable, it was a weird flower with a bunch of catfacing and so I couldn't emasculate it properly, and then the minsk early has regular leaf red fruit and zesty green has potato leaf green fruit, both of which are recessive, so I won't really know in the F1 whether it crosses properly. Oh well.

Everywhere

I've stopped hand-pollinating the corn because the saskatoon white is in full flower and cascade ruby gold and the glorious organics painted mountain (and some of the sweet rock painted mountain) and atomic orange and even a little of the assiniboine flint corn are in full bloom, dropping pollen everywhere. I assume there's enough in the air that it'll get where it needs to be at this point.

A couple gaspe and saskatoon rainbow have four(!) ears, though I'm not sure what's inside the husks, maybe just nubs.

I can't wait to open the ears at harvest, corn is one of the few plants that you can tell if it's cross-pollinated by looking at the seeds.

I don't think cascade ruby gold is going to make it before frost, it's really only starting to put out silks now. It's magnificent though, super tall. Maybe next year? Maybe if frost holds off till mid-sept? Magic manna, by the same breeder, is much shorter and has its silks out earlier despite being planted later.

It's really beautiful out there. Gonna need to water again though.

Devotions

Enough energy to get up to the garden and to give the pigs lots of water on this hot, hot day.

Water from my well, cold and minerally.

Dogs who let me know when they need more love.

The meetingplace in the middle, where all my connections live.

Tomato breeding.

A riot of corn pollen.

The ability to clean my floors so quickly.

The show Elementary, where I could see myself in so many ways, and could see myself in someone who was loved. I almost never see myself in someone who continues to be loved and accepted as themselves.

The guy on fb who just went off on autism awareness day because it doesn't contain autism acceptance and autism care. I hope he gets so much love and care his whole life.

The super dapper duck combination of cayuga and pekin, which results in big black ducks with white tux fronts and flashy white wingtips tucked over their backs. Beautiful and a nice size too.

I don't want to jinx it, but some muscovy ducklings that are still alive.

Downstairs, which is cool, and which has its couch.

Modern medicine, as far as it goes, and someone to take me to my "don't drive home or make financial decisions or sign contracts that day" appointment on Tuesday.

The range of restaurants growing up in PG. There are enough that, given how seldom I go in, I am always conflicted because there are more nice places than I can try.

My brother reaching out to say happy birthday.

Seeing Tucker tomorrow.

Sending Josh garden pictures and having them mean something.

My garden. Still and always, my garden.