Actual world

[greenstorm]

The thing that happens every year has happened: it was cold, then warm, now it's cold again and Thea is outside the fence in the morning. I flagrantly gave Avallu, who was inside the fence, a steak and ignored Thea. I will go out and give him another steak in a minute. She's waiting for me to let her in but she can get back in her own damn self. I want her to know her job is to be inside the gate when I go out. Will also need to think more on this. I haven't been sleeping well of late, and I've had a bunch of stress, and my animal handling isn't the way I'd like it to be.

Meanwhile I'm working on the garden a little bit at a time. I'm trading for a bunch of peppers and ordering a couple more. I also want to contribute to some seed banks and things, maybe do some old or rare grow-outs.

I also need to set up my grow lights and shelves soon. This means doing a bit of excavation, which has been keeping me off it, but it needs to be done soon. It's getting late, but I'd like to do a couple tomato crosses in time to grow out the F1 in spring. And, depending on temperatures, it's actually about time to start thinking about starting peppers for real.

Seeds are slowly arriving and being received into the spreadsheet.

My little seed thinger I bought (a plastic 3-drawer one) is insufficient. I need to get better dividers and figure out how to keep the big seeds in glass (corn, favas, beans) in a different location without losing either the ones in glass or the ones in paper. Right now, when I pull out a drawer that contains glass, the whole unit falls over.

Piglets are still doing well, and still isolated with mama Black Chunk. I need to set them up a creep area so I can feed them, then let everyone out. I suspect the second-youngest set of piglets will rob milk as soon as they have access to mama.

Talked with my friend A a bunch last night. We've set up a tentative visit in the spring. I may be in the role of "something to look forward to when he's between relationships" for him for a bit, but I don't feel resentful or bad in any way about it. Besides, he's effectively filling that role for me too, this time. This means I really need to sort out my spring planting stuff, including how I'm tilling things and whether I can get spoiled straw for potato mulch. Last time he was here he was pretty helpful at pounding fence posts so maybe we can get the gate in the upper field cut. That would be really great.

Since the mortgage is renewed I really need a good basemap of the property, and I think I want to give things slightly more official names. I wonder about sketching up the layout and then commissioning an artist to draw up a map, together with 1) names of each field and building 2) a little cartoon next to each field/building name that reflects the name and 3) the square footage of each field/building. Honestly doing that every 5 years would be pretty great. Hm.

Either way I still need a basemap, and this spot is basically impossible to get a basemap of. I should take my laser measure out and see how that does, just to compare it to the vertex & transponder, measuring tape, google maps, and airphoto maps. I mean, why not?

Comments

[yarrowkat]

that's a great idea about the map. we took a google earth view of our land and applied labels for all buildings and spaces to it in photoshop. since the land is a really long rectangle (250' wide at the front; 150' wide after the front acre, and 1010' long), it made a really difficult object to print out, and things keep changing - we move animal housing around, we moved the dome, added garden spaces, etc. i'm supposed to update it for this year and we'll print a larger version but i haven't gotten around to it. a drawn map might actually be a lot easier to read. and jenny's been super into the epistemology of maps lately. hmm.

[greenstorm]

Oh that is awkward, unless you have a really nice wall space for it, like along a hallway.

Drawn maps are always superior to imagery unless you're looking for something-- they allow you to control the data you see and not have to handle, say, tree shadows instead of fencelines. Then again, I make maps (partly) for a living. It's like how deliberate writing is better at capturing a situation than leaving a tape recorder on the table and transcribing sound-for-sound (I am reminded of https://greenstorm.dreamwidth.org/851318.html )

[yarrowkat]

yeah, it's in the dining room so also the wall-space situation isn't amazing. i am going to suggest to Jenny that we do something like you're thinking of, here! i think that would be way more useful for volunteers who need to find a thing. especially because we have named everything, and not all the names are obvious. the volunteer camper trailer is the Nest, terra's RV is Elysium, the houses are the Cottage & Mahazda, etc. the greenhouse dome might be the Gnomedome.

[greenstorm]

In the ideal world, my map would be a whiteboard and take up a whole wall. But my bones are changing too quickly right now for that to be feasible.

I've had the woodshed (which is where the birds live) for the longest time, but now there's a wood pop-up shed (the "wood tent") so I've started calling the woodshed the goose shed, which... confuses everyone. And there are a couple candidates for the far field, apparently folks tend to think the wood field is the far field, but I think there will be a new far field this year anyhow and I build fencing.

So, yes. At least I don't have volunteers!

[yarrowkat]

the volunteers are mightily helped by a good long tour the first day with loads of Q-and-A, and by the group Slack where they can ask anything anytime. and i walk people around constantly their first few weeks "oh, the thus-and-such? it's in the X shed, let's go there" the new shed is the Bee Shed because it has a mural of bees; there's the "hay barn" which has hay in it but is not a barn - it's a roof and a half-wall on the south side of the actual barn - but the actual barn doesn't have animals in it, it's a woodshop... right. i think this kind of thing is just aprt of organic projects! they grow and move and nonclemanture moves with them - or it doesn't, and the "chicken coop" now houses turkeys and we all have to correct ourselves and we start calling them North Coop and South Coop because that won't change no matter how many times we move birds.

if the goose shed has geese in it, that makes sense to me! our most mystifying one for folks is the "carport coop" - which is the west half of the turkey coop, where it's possible to separate that half from the other by closing a couple interior gates. it's an old carport that we moved and fenced in for a coop. it's a great roof for the birds, especially in summer when it's broiling hot out.

[greenstorm]

To some extent I want the maps so I can look back on them over the years and say "oh! Weird! I remember when the orchard was the woodfield, and the trial garden was the orchard but then the pig field!"

[yarrowkat]

i love retrospectives! i do it with photos - stand in the same handful of places every year and take as close to the same shot as i can, and then i can line them up later; here's what that space looked like in 2008 and in 2018 and my how different. it helps me keep our substantial accomplishments in perspective when the work feels endless.

[yarrowkat]

some of the photos in this have broken, and i don't have time to fix it today, but - https://www.sunflowerriver.org/10-year-retrospective-photo-post/

[squirrelitude]

I'm getting a real "turn left where the Tedeschi's used to be" vibe from this—the way long-time residents give directions that are kind of useless to out-of-towners. :-)

[yarrowkat]

maybe a month ago, forgetting the name of the street, i told someone to take the left fork at the 5-way intersection where Emack & Bolios used to be. :facepalm: it was an ice cream shop and hasn't been there for probably 20 years.

[squirrelitude]

yessss hahaha

[greenstorm]

We make fun of this sort of thing, but it's the tip of the deep-knowledge-of-the-land iceberg that humans are able to do. Knowing what was where, and when, and whether it tends to happen again; remembering those atypical years; generations of that sort of thing are recognized by Canadian courts as meaningful Indigenous knowledge. There's super interesting work I haven't delved into too deeply about how the landscape acts as a map, or a memory aid: if you moved away and never came back, would you remember that ice cream shop ever existed?

It's just like modern life that we're more likely to recognise and communicate about an ice cream shop than the swamp with the moose salt lick.

[yarrowkat]

i love that way of thinking about it. i have the sense that there is work happening locally around land/maps/storytelling/indigenous knowledge, but i'm insufficiently familiar with it to be able to cite specific writings. Leslie Marmon Silko's writing comes to mind, and Joy Harjo. maybe Linda Hogan's poetically-lovely essays too.

i don't know that i would remember that shop, but i know i would remember the neighborhood. when i go back to the place i grew up (which i left in 1994), my mother is all the time giving directions based on street names i have only the vaguest memory of. i think she thinks i shouldn't need to use google maps to navigate Prescott but i do, except in the core of the area i grew up in. (also town has expanded quite a lot and that still breaks my brain a little.)

[greenstorm]

I think the first thing I read with it was talking about how indigenous Australian folks had stories tied to the landscape, so walking through the landscape was a reminder of the stories (along the lines of, this rock used to be a woman who did x and y and was turned into a rock because she something social convention, or whatnot).

I even find walking through Vancouver, where I lived for so long, is like this: sure, I know the neighbourhoods, but if I walk down the street I'll remember that corner where I used to live much more often/vividly than if I never go back to the city. Likewise the pigshed contains the story of when Josh and I finally learned to communicate about ad-hoc and fast rather than built-to-specification, and the main garden will always hold the story of Tucker wheelbarrowing soil with me, and a million others.

[yarrowkat]

that is exactly what i have read about the Puebloan relationship to place. that stories are maps; Cabezon butte is the head of the giant that was slain by the Hero Twins (sons of Yellow Woman) and the ancient lava flow of what is now called Malpaís is the giant's blood, and so on. possibly I read all of this in a collection of Yellow Woman stories. which are beautiful and fascinating in themselves; a roadmap for women's social transgression. now i want to go find Luci Tapahano's gorgeous Yellow Woman poem, "last year the piñons were plentiful" and re-read it.

[greenstorm]

Yes, exactly. It seems like our memories work much better with a bit of jogging; putting important stories into the landscape and then using the stories to remember the landscape and the landscape to remember the stories is so elegant.

Perhaps you'll share the poem with me if you find it?

[yarrowkat]

absolutely. it's not online but i have a book of her work, and then some anthologies that other bits of her work are in. i'll pull out Yellow Woman Stories tonight. i think you will like it.

[greenstorm]

Oh excellent, thank you. I do like folks who write about their relationship with land.

[yarrowkat]

so, leapfrogging to include last night's conversation - the whole paper (the two i re-read last night, that both include analysis of that poem in particular) turn out to be really gendered and kind of dated - the anthology was published in 1993 - and also fervently ecosexual, tying the whole web of these stories to a spiritually and erotically significant connection to the land in no uncertain terms, and then centering the importance of that in definining an indigenous relationship to land. so that was fun to read. both of these papers co-authored by Paula Gunn Allen & Patricia Clark Smith, who were both of indigenous descent. i took a Native American Literature survey course with Pat my first year of grad school; she retired a year or so later and is dead now.

[greenstorm]

Uuuuuggggghhhhh. Goddammit, western society, there are ways to value and connect beyond sex or gender roles (and make no mistake, measuring everyone by level of compliance to gender is enshrining gender harder than anything). There are meaningful relationships that do not fit the nuclear family mold. There's also space for fertility and lifebringing beyond eroticism and woman-ness. Ack. Argh. Ow.

I am so glad that tide is turning.

[yarrowkat]

for sure. and the story arc that encompasses Yellow Woman includes many stories where a male human is approached by a female kat'sina/ nature-spirit/ embodiment of the mountains etc and the fertility of the land in the form of abundant harvest & game is the result. so it's not just placed on femaleness, since the results are the same with both types of pairings.

[greenstorm]

In my case I *know* my ability to access this stuff is harmed by my past experiences of being a "pretty girl" cast into roles where my highest use was sexiness. Yet another case, I guess, of stories that should be told but shouldn't be so multitudinous that they obscure all the other stories.

I'm going to go listen to that poem again and I'll feel better.

[yarrowkat]

i'm sorry. i think my attempts to pull out what i'm seeing in this have been harmful and i apologize.

[greenstorm]

Oh, not at all! I don't feel that anything you've shared here has hurt me; the way you've shared just let me feel safe enough to express some ambient frustration that I carry around normally. I apologize for not being clear on that.

[yarrowkat]

oh! thank you for clarifying. if we were in a room together, body language & inflection would have given me more context, but, alas, here we are on opposite ends of the continent. :) and, i am really glad i can speak in a way that creates safety for you. that is important to me.

[greenstorm]

"if we were in a room together, body language & inflection would have given me more context, but, alas, here we are on opposite ends of the continent."

I wonder if internet plus pandemic, which both cause this effect but don't buffer the speed of an answer, are part of why there's so much polarization these days? If, in fact, there is more polarization (I just realized this may be common wisdom rather than actually true?)

[yarrowkat]

that seems very likely. i have observed more polarization in both my instagram feed (fringe progressive leftist queers, mostly, bleeding-edge political opinions that i may or may not agree with but am regularly exposed to) and in my life, where i'm watching people be less tolerant of certain types of difference, particularly political and religious.

[greenstorm]

Also that narrowness must make you especially intimate with your neighbours?

[yarrowkat]

we have one neighbor on the north, a great guy named Robert. we buy hay from him. he's got a 45 acre alfalfa farm and he raises race horses (i know. but he treats them really really well while they're on his farm at least?). his farm manager Manuel is also a great neighbor. on the other side we have 6 neighbors, of which we are on good terms with 4, no terms at all with 1 (we've never met her, in 14 years, though apparently she was upset that one of our volunteers strung a hammock up out back, and she told *gawain* - the TEN YEAR OLD - about that? so inappropriate! anyway we're all kind of trying to meet her now, because she should speak with an adult about whatever her concern is and also anyway our volunteer was harmless? he was reading in a hammock and enjoying the sky? argh). and then there's David Padilla, neighborhood grumpasaur, totally butt-hurt that he didn't buy our property before we did and still holding that against us even though we knew nothing about it until a year or two ago. he's a headache.

the rest of them are great, though. :)