Huh

Lotta people complaining about fireworks, but no one in our half of the province is doing fireworks -- or even parking on dry grass. The fires are slowly blowing up here, we have more 30C on the forecast, and the long-term forecast for July/Aug/Sept is 100% above average. We even have some 13C nights forecast! There's no sand coming out of my well. I am so so deeply grateful for it.

My favas are flowering, my garlic is not yet scape-ing (though other folks in the neighbourhood are), the tomatoes are starting to take off. I feel glad to have planted that extra corn the other day and figure I should be planting greens once a week or so at this point. And maybe one extra set of corn this weekend, just in case?

I have sprinklers set up for the lower garden and a lot of drip hose for the upper, though some will still need to be garden sprinkler/hand watered. I'm trying to do a little bit of that every day, rotating.

I'm waiting for some tree-friendly straps to arrive for my hammock, and I finally dug out the hardware to put my porch swing up (I'd put it away because the deck was falling off) though I haven't finalized where. This year my space really feels like it extends into the back, the now-orchard, and I want seating and places to sleep out there.

I'm in debate with myself over whether to plant larches and pines in square formations, so I can easily hang hammocks or beds from them, or in natural curves. I guess a double row would solve that?

For the first time I counted ducklings and found an extra instead of one fewer. I'd rescued a little duckling from the big turtle pond (they can't climb out on their own) and brought it to the mother who'd natural-hatched 8 ducklings a few days earlier-- and it turned out to be #9. That was nice. They have their own little water and food are inside, with the water in a paint tray so they can climb out. Hopefully they stick inside until they're a little bigger. I should also start putting rocks/floats in the ponds again.

Solly is trending towards settling down a little, maybe because I have a bit of a routine now. Thing is I'm away at work in the field so I can't take her out back every couple hours. I was expecting her to be explosively energetic but I think the routine is stabilizing for her. She's also got more used to the food I'm feeding her, her stomach has stabilized. She's quite a chewer right now, which is about right: I still have my baseboards chewed from when Thea was little. I would give her chunks of 2x10 about a foot long. I need some things like that for Solly, since I'm sure chewing up a bunch of plant pots wasn't great for her (she didn't seem to eat them though).

Walking slowly in the field seems to be good for me, but I'm making a lot of mistakes around thinking. I'm enlisting the summer students to double-check things, showing them how, and it's both a useful skill and hopefully keeps me on track. I have them all this month and the goal is to get most of the fieldwork done before those areas catch on fire. At the same time if I keep making mistakes I'll have to pull myself off and really look into something like disability. There are significant legal and safety ramifications if I make the wrong mistake. I've been enlisting the summer students to drive, so that takes a ton of pressure off my concentration, and there are two of them so they can trade off if there are issues.

Found a moose head by the side of the road in town, very fresh. Must have been first nations folks-- they're allowed to harvest whenever, and this had just been harvested. Bad time to be dumping meat in town right by the rez though: we've had a lot of bear sightings lately, and one back bear that's limping after it got into a fight with a grizzly and it's been getting skinnier.

Mornings are very very hard, wobbly and blank-minded and queasy, and nights are some weird pain and night sweats have started again (both of those seem to be mitigated by the birth control pill so I'm gonna start it again). Seems like if I stay out of the office I'm kind of ok though? Fingers crossed.

(no subject)

I've always known that birth comes only out of death
Rebirth
After dark times.
So much of my life has
Felt like
Been
Dying. So many moments
I walked into death
And out the other side
Into what lay beyond. New.
Newly born.

Never before have I asked,
If I'm on a machine
Bring my dog to me to kiss me one last time
And turn it
off.

Never before have I asked,
Let my stuffed animal,
The only object which has stayed all my life,
Let her be with me at the
end.

There's no immediacy
Not the pain I always walked into
Born young and young again
Just the obscuring swirl
Of muddied waters
That drop their silt so far out at sea
I may never see them clear.

Tense

There's a fire 5-6km just west of the highway between here and Everywhere Else. Even if it doesn't threaten my property or the town, they tend to call evacuation in when access to a town will be cut off, for perhaps obvious reasons. There is a rough backroad out of town but I think parts of it are currently washed out, and there's a longer road that leads into Mackenzie but I think that goes through several fires, and if not it is at least a very slow logging road with lots of loose gravel and dust. So.

Good: it's getting cooler because it's evening, there's a lake right there for the firefighters to use, they'll prioritize it because it's right close to us.

Bad: it seems to have grown roughly 30 hectares in a couple hours, everything is so so dry, there are so many fires right now.

I can hear the planes heading back and forth, I'm not far from the little local airport they use to refuel.

I do not currently have a way to transport my animals properly: I could take the dogs, the cats, and some geese or ducks or chickens. It's way too hot to put them in the utility trailer and I don't have a proper livestock trailer.