I just want to garden but it's all snow out there

[greenstorm]

Warm again. We're supposed to have a stretch of warm + rain, which of course is on top of what was 3' of snow and is maybe a little closer to 2.5 now. The dogsled race happened on the weekend: I normally love it but last week's forestry conference kept me busy through the start of the long races, and I was in a pretty bad place mental-health-wise on Saturday, and then on Sunday I just wanted to stay in controlled environments and not jeopardize feeling ok. That said, Tucker's apartment was across from the lake where the event was held, so I could peek out and see the dogs in the sunshine.

Warm again and the new piglets got castrated, pushing the edge of the 10 day/2 week window when I'm comfortable doing it at home. Well, comfortable is a tremendous overstatement but it had to be done: they get castrated or they get eaten very young unless I can source that immunocastration drug. They seem to be doing alright this morning; because my anxiety is running so high it's fixating on everything, and one of them having adverse reactions to castration and bleeding out or something is one of them. That hasn't happened to me. I did castrate one with a scrotal hernia once and had to put him down immediately, which was very traumatic, but they all went cleanly here so far. I'll go out later today and watch them all pee but they're sleeping now with Mama Black Chunk, who's been let out of isolation with her babies. Actually it's pretty cute: when I went out the boar was spooning her, and she was spooning the babies.

I sold the 4runner to mom, which is basically the best news. I love that truck and didn't want to see it go to someone who wouldn't care for it. Mom lent her car to someone who had an accident and didn't know to leave insurance out of everything so they decided to scrap it because it got a dent; she was in the market for something new and I had this 4runner which I need to get rid of because I can't keep two vehicles. I'm so glad it's staying in the family. I need to get the windshield redone (they put sand/gravel on the roads up here in winter for traction, since it's too cold for salt, and it's pretty normal to replace your windshield every year or two since rocks fly up and crack them) and replace the battery and pull the farm junk out of it. First I need to shovel it out the rest of the way from under a snowdrift.

The peppers I planted back in January are up and the other peppers are ordered. I've also ordered some black plastic flats, which-- these are supposed to be extra heavy duty so they don't break every year. I keep wanting to get enough of a carpentry shop together to make myself some wooden ones but that hasn't happened yet so hopefully these last a couple years. I need to get the rest of my peppers into soil. I've also put artichoke seeds in. We'll see how they go. I'm starting to rattle what goes where around in my head.

I've also got start dates for most things on my garden spreadsheet; I do need to go through and winnow out what I'm starting this year and what I'm not. Especially, when I have multiple accessions of something from last year I probably want to grow saved seed rather than bought seed, etc.

I really do need to shovel my way out to the greenhouse and A-frame and start grouping out the geese.

I'm kind of tucking this here at the end but Saturday was pretty rough. I think my brother is going to manage to do what nothing else has, and drive me substantially off the social internet. I need to decide what to do about that: block him? Some other workaround? Gracefully let go of those parts of the internet? Hopefully my counselor can help me come up with some ideas this week. He's definitely infuriating and deep into DARVO right now. He spams the family chat with links about the "freedom convoy" and the constitution, ignores any facts he finds inconvenient, does the two-step "you can't trust media to report the science correctly/reading academic papers too closely to decipher them is some kind of trick or gotcha" and most recently "people are too specialized" (I it's think code for scientists are wrong) followed by "are you familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect" which is basically like being trapped in some sort of horror sitcom where someone who doesn't believe in science tries to use a science idea that explains how non-experts think they know a lot to explain why he, a non-expert, knows more than other people.

Horror sitcom is not my favourite genre. Maybe a laugh track would help?

Anyhow, being almost totally offline for the latter half of the weekend meant I watched Leverage with Tucker and had some time to think about a particular scene that had been picking at the back of my mind. In it a dude is flirting with a woman across a counter, and she is flirting back. At one point her hands are lying on the counter between them, he puts his hands on hers, she looks slightly uncomfortable, he lifts his hands away and says "the hands, it's too much, right?" and she nods and says yes and they keep flirting but he doesn't reach out to touch her again.

This little snippet of interaction has stayed in my mind, and I've finally dug out why. A lot of the male-assigned folks I've engaged with sexually would have had trouble getting all the way to the end of the four parts of this: 1) try something 2) collect feedback based on body language 3) ask for clarity if they detected something amiss and 4) course-correct and continue to enjoy the interaction. If they were actually willing to try doing a thing they'd be unable to assess for feedback, if they assessed for feedback and detected something slightly amiss they'd spiral into self-loathing and be unable to clarify and course-correct. Obviously this prevents meaningful feedback; anything other than positive feedback drags the whole experience to a screeching halt. I wonder if this is linked to protect women from even a hint of bad feelings/women are delicate flowers who should never have a moment's dissonance in their lives? I wonder if it's linked to a model of masculinity that's about prowess and always being right the first time? Or what's going on? Anyhow, that bit in the show made me happy.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

yay for the 4Runner! that's a great outcome. and peppers, already! what's the method you use for castrating the pigs? we band the buckling goats and it doesn't appear to be particularly painful for them; vastly less than disbudding anyway (burning the horn nubs off with an iron...on a 3-day old baby.)

my friend Pamela lives in downtown Ottowa, and her apartment/neighborhood has been blocked in by the "freedom" convoy. she's seething mad, of course.

this sucks, and it is not easy to do to family, but personally, i'd probably block him so that i could enjoy social media in peace. it sounds like he's adversely contributing to your peace of mind and you deserve and need better. and i recognize that blocking people is another way of polarizing/preventing nuanced discourse. but there doesn't sound like room for that discourse anyway? urgh.

that tv scene is remarkable! i don't know if i've ever had a man respond that well in a similar situation. they take it personally and get mad at you and make passive-aggressive, or outright aggressive, comments. yay for that show modeling a better world!

[greenstorm]

Last year I started the peppers March 1st, I think, but many of them are going to stay in pots forever so those ones can be started anytime; they also are a lot slower than tomatoes once the woodstove goes off and my house drops from Very Warm to Pretty Cool.

Pigs are castrated by slitting each side of the scrotum, pushing the testicle out through the slit, and pulling (not cutting) it out of the body until the cords snap. The incisions are pretty small and fast-healing, so they're not stitched up. I have body-memory of the feeling of the cords snapping (if you cut instead of pull there's a higher chance of problematic bleeding) and there's always the chance that a loop of intestine is outside the abdominal wall in which case it comes out too. So there's disinfection, scalpel, a little but of blood, and it ends with a pile of body parts.

It's complicated; I'm really hoping this doesn't bring about more legislation or court precedent that can be used to shut down protests generally but on the other hand having a ton of antimask antivax humans led by a bunch of retrograde white supremacist etc folks is super worrying, even without some of the more practical issues or the difference in treatment between various kinds of protests up here.

I'm not actually sure if I can block him and still do the family chat thing. It's definitely occurred to me. It's good to have someone to discuss with. Can I get neutral about seeing the links he posts and just grey-rock him? Do I feel like I have an obligation here, and that's why it bothers me so much? Gotta figure out what's going on.

I'm actually quite pleased with the way the show treats gender after the first season of getting settled in, given that it's as old as it is and as cartoony as it is. Sexual harassment and objectification is occasionally but not universally a trait of villains, is called out as bad when it happens, and the majority of humans don't engage in it; women are capable of a bunch of different things and it's not constrained by gender; dudes sometimes have feelings and cry and talk to each other about it and when they don't their friends are concerned about them and see it as an issue; people in relationships get snippy or lose it a little bit at each other and then figure out ways of doing boundaries or caring. I don't feel gross after watching it, though some of the creator's commentary is definitely off so I'm not entirely sure how they landed it so well (including an autistic-coded person, a geek who has good people skills and is well-muscled, and a muscle person who is heart-centered and emotionally balanced). Apparently it's a bit of a geek cult classic show so it's especially nice to see stuff well-modelled.

[yarrowkat]

oh that's an intense procedure, with the piglets. eep. i hope they all heal up well! i know goats can be done that way and i've heard stories, but general consensus is that for small farmers, banding or a "burdizo" (which sort of smashes/fries the bit of skin in between the testicle & the body - not unlike what happens in a human tubal ligation surgery, except this is external) are the simplest and are almost entirely successful. we decided on banding because the tools are cheaper, and the boys handled it just fine last year.

[greenstorm]

It is intense. I've done two or three dozen so far and I really don't like it. Sadly pigs don't have enough stretch on their scrotums to get bands between the body and the testicles; they're like cats that way. The only alternative is this immunocastration drug but it seems like folks don't use it much because no one wants food that's been injected with "chemicals", especially chemicals that have any bearing on fertility.

[yarrowkat]

oof, that's rough. people are so *weird* about fertility. and what are the odds of eating a few pork chops from a pig that received such a drug having a meaninful impact on human fertility? which anyway is profoundly overrated.

[greenstorm]

Yes. An of course it comes from folks who want to stay childfree or have already had the kids they want as well. So much of the way folks handle their bodies these days feels like all temple, no gods.

[yarrowkat]

all temple no gods

nailed it.

[yarrowkat]

many of the same types of problems around protests are happening in the US, too. it is complicated, and also deeply worrying. fascism seems like it's trying hard to arrive here. argh.

(i'm breaking the topics out into their own threads for coherence.) :)

[greenstorm]

Yes, it's very much linked, folks here will carry American or hybrid American/Canadian flags or have Vote For Trump stickers. The UK isn't immune either. And there's also a culture of deep contempt and dehumanizing in both directions which isn't just "I'm enforcing my safe boundaries around discussion" but is more like "I hope they all die" which I really struggle with. I guess it's part of what's driving me away from the broader internet and to look for community elsewhere.

[yarrowkat]

grey-rock takes energy, to be sure. i kept trying that with my ex and only succeeding partially/occasionally, because the whole thing was so far under my skin. i hope the figuring-out is helpful!


i put that show on my list! i'm slow with TV, but i do get around to things eventually. "geek cult classic" is a solid reccomendation, and the rest of what you describe sounds downright healthy.

[greenstorm]

The main male/female flirtation in the first season was like nails on a chalkboard to me, super stereotypical/gendered, so I set the show down for a year or two. Apparently I set it down about wen they wrapped that dynamic up, though, because when I came back to it they'd changed the dynamic.

The show is also fun? Which I think can be hard to find.

[graydon2]

That sounds hard, re your brother. Sorry.

Re men and self loathing: I think men struggle to live with the (fairly natural) parts of their sexual and relational desires that are not socially polite or beneficent, but rather crude, selfish or even malign, given that we live in a society with widespread social framing of male sexuality and relationality as inherently somewhat predatory, violent or abusive. In other words I think there is a bunch of socially unexplored dark matter between healthy/normal ruthlessness and problematic ruthlessness and it is easy as a result to conclude that one is simply rotten for having any but the purest of desires.

(As a recent awkward example: men have lately been told on social media at some length that the “nontoxic masculinity” role model to aspire to is Mr. Rogers, a perfectly nice but also abnormally — even artificially — benign man, clearly not someone many of us can actually be without … lying.)