Respite

Yesterday was cool with almost no smoke. I was able to open the windows and little breezes played through the house. It was lovely, especially since I was cleaning house for Tucker's arrival. I even washed all the squished mosquitoes off the bedroom and bathroom walls! It's been long enough since I was a housecleaner that I begin to forget how much difference those little things make to the feel of a place: cupboard fronts (which I did not wash), walls, light switch plates, baseboards. It makes a house look newer and lighter.

I'd got these tiny tiny pouches from the grocery store trash run that said "add to 1L of water, let dissolve, and spray" and they were a bathroom cleaner. They worked surprisingly well, and even more surprisingly the scent didn't bother me. I guess the format is meant to reduce the number of spray bottles and weight of water that gets shipped around. I have a couple more to drop into cleaning buckets of hot water (not how it's meant to be used, I know) for big wall-cleaning days. I continue to be grateful for my vacmop.

Today the smoke is creeping back. I'm in the office to figure out what's going on with this summer: my fieldwork is a no-go, since more than half the road-accessible area of the district is under evac alerts or orders for fires and at least a couple of the blocks I was going to sample are probably on fire. Between the smoke and the alerts fieldwork is probably counterindicated.

This morning I put on my "neurodiversity is beautiful" shirt and wore it to work. Previously I've worn autism-coded symbols but not anything with the word. I figure I may be dizzy, tired, and disoriented but that's the best time to pull off representation - when I'm too occupied by living to overthink it.

Wish me luck on scooping some good work out of the pile today. Contracts all summer will destroy me. I can't even put correct names on itineraries lately.

(no subject)

Sunbeams?
Who needs that tired old trope?
The garbage truck rumbles downhill
Silks to a stop
And glides through a left turn into a perfect opening
On a busy corner.
Up top, sunglasses and messy bun:
As she rumbles on with traffic
We exchange victory grins
Brighter than the sun.

Place of refuge

The saskatoons are huge in town, the size of grapes, and they're bending the bushes over. Mine were like that last year but without water this year are much more scarce. I wonder if the roots go down deep enough to drink from the lake water table in town? My hands are purple from eating them on my walk from the mechanic's at lunch.

It'll be interesting to see how they're doing out away from town. Bears are already showing up in town, or rather never left. The little one in back of my place has stuck around too. I hope we have a good salmon year. We've had a couple significant bear birthing years in a row now - lots of triplets- and it's no good having a bunch of starving bears converge on town, though it will inevitably happen sooner or later I think.

I've been enjoying the bird app. Lots of swainson's thrushes, song sparrows, violet-green swallows (though the salmonflies hatched and they fledged and I think a bunch of them went to the lake) and a while bunch of other sparrows, some swallows, some robins, the red-winged blackbird, some flickers. Amusingly it thought one of my ducks was a heron, and my young chickens were goldfinches. It can be hard to find a time when ducks, geese, pigs, dogs, and fire helicopters are quiet enough so I can hear the actual birds with the app, but every second day or so there'll be a moment when I'm walking Solly out back.

Did I mention I've been using the hammock out back daily to several times per day? It's by the newly planted orchard, which with the heat, the new dog, the new trees, and the garden I've been spending a bunch of time in. Even with the smoke I do take the dog out back (she's learning not to chase birds and cats, so she needs supervision still) and on my bad days I'm pretty wobbly by the time I get out there so having somewhere to sit/lie is amazing. It's a double hammock and set pretty low to the ground, so I can lie sideways in it or longways. Next step is to pop some sort of high-tech piece of warm-but-compressible fabric into a drybag and hang it on a branch for the cooler days out there. Goodness knows I won't get around to sewing all my warm bits till winter. I walked 8k today dealing with getting the exhaust fixed on my truck, so I should be good for it, but it's just so nice not to have to worry about staying upright so many times per day.

Still enjoying a little interlude of cool and kinda damp breeze before the heat is supposed to pick up again. The evac alert and order on the fire by my house is currently rescinded, which is lovely. As always, an unpredictable season and more so than most this time.