Greenstorm's Journal

The cold that I was sorta-hoping to avoid is coming. Weather report says down to -32C by Wednesday, and we'll approach that tonight. The outside water tap was frozen this morning, it was thawed by noon so I fixed the angle of the inside pipe (the frost-free taps require a certain angle inside and mine gets wonky sometimes) and brought in several buckets of water for tomorrow morning, which should be much colder.

The stove is running well. I took the door in to get the gasket re-replaced; I'd tried to do it earlier this fall and apparently had just replaced the previous air leak with a new air leak. Now the fire is much more controllable and I feel comfortable running it as hot as I'm supposed to at the beginning of a burn; this means that so far the woodstove room has been in the high 20C range and the upstairs has been steady 22-24C. Plus when it burns hot at the beginning it's cleaning the glass instead of just creosoting it up. I remember why I loved this stove; it's a workhorse. Also one of the most efficient woodstoves on the market and turns a surprisingly small amount of wood into a surprisingly large amount of heat. This chimney just needs to hold me through till spring, though apparently there's not a lot of insulated chimney to be had right now with COVID and how it's affecting shipping/manufacturing in China.

My ridiculous collection of tomato seeds is slowly assembling. I pretty much have my super short-season corns here. The potatoes I dug this summer all started sprouting as soon as the wood stove cranked up this time around so I need to see what I can do to slow them down, they have awhile to wait until soil. I've been reading my way through Carol Deppe's books on small-scale plant breeding. It's almost time to start peppers and artichokes.

Every time I so much as look at the couch Whiskey the cat runs towards it hoping for petting. He wants hours of attention a day. I'm using it as boundary-setting practice because he doesn't hold it against me when I say no.

I'm simultaneously apprehensive about the end of the pandemic - I don't want to work from the office and didn't even before and I'm very much enjoying a lack of travel - and a little concerned at how even my body's ability to self-regulate seems to be ebbing. As always I think I'd be fine if I could cut the connection to people more thoroughly, or dive in a little closer, but I am getting the worst parts of most people and because work is keeping set hours to "help our mental health" I don't get to go outside when it's light much and actually get things done. There are people I'm looking forward to seeing, or at least to being in their presence again. They aren't all the people I expected, though maybe I didn't really have expectations on that one.

These weekends with Tucker are precious. The moments when I'm present enough to pet the dogs, sort the seeds, or write are precious.

It's a bit of a slog, but things keep moving forward.

Wrote a thing on fb. Copied here. This is a public face but still:

Ok, I can talk about mental health.

I'm an external processor: I talk to figure things out. I have been keeping a journal for almost two decades for some of this, but I also need to talk to actual people to work things out. Lately I've been trying to work out my gender stuff (while being closeted in a workplace where no one shares my gender, sexuality, relationship status, or even lack-of-parent status) and some things about community contribution, entitlement, rooting into a home, and finding good community. Plus I have some issues left over from a pretty bad parenting situation and some relationship harm I was involved in.

During the pandemic.

When I can't find a way forward everything just shuts down. I spent the summer doing chores, working, and watching shows in a dissociated daze: I wasn't present in my own mind, let alone my own body. I gardened for utility instead of fun. I stopped thinking about things I'd like to do in the future.

I had a wake-up call in the late summer where my fear mechanism just turned on. This is probably called anxiety, but my experience was-- you know when you just about fall and catch yourself and you get that jolt of heart-racing? I was getting that for hours at a time, and I still had no ability to do forward motion or change my life. I couldn't move to fix the things I was worried about, all I could do was go to work, do chores, and watch shows. While my heart was pounding.

I felt trapped in my life. That's unusual for me: normally I move forward into the next part of my life with anticipation.

I called my work help line for this sort of thing. It offered one-off phone sessions with counselors, or a total of four consecutive sessions with counselors. The former helped a couple times and helped less other times. I had to call back five or so times to access the longer set of 4 sessions, this felt almost impossible since I could hardly do anything other than go to work, watch shows, and do chores. I did it. It didn't help trememdously.

I called my doctor and got put on an antidepressant. Over several months it gave me access to myself again, not fully but better. I'm able to look forward to things some. I feel things some. I'm able to have mutually supportive conversations with my partners, which was decidedly missing before.

And one of my close supporters has been paying for some counseling with the counselor I've chosen. My work covers less than a handful of sessions. My previous job covered more, actually enough to maintain and sort through some of my issues, but that job is gone. If I were paying for this out of pocket it would have started at 12% of my take-home pay. That wasn't a sustainable amount, so I get by on what that supporter can manage. Every session with that counselor leaves me feeling capable, determined, hopeful, and seen. I can only access it because I have access to a rich-enough person who likes me. This is not in the least fair.

I'm 39. I've spent five years on waiting lists for counseling, back when I was making little enough money that I was allowed to be on them, and I never ended up receiving help. If you have a friend who is on this kind of waiting list and want to help them, offer to call once a month so your friend doesn't accidentally fall off the waiting list. It's hard for folks to be proactive about this when they're hurting or numb.

I've spent maybe on average an hour and a half a week from the time I was fifteen or so researching how mental health stuff works and looking for methods to help myself. I've learned breathing. I've learned thought tricks. I've tried workbooks. I've done the stuff. I still need help outside myself, especially when I'm in an environment that isn't supportive.

I also know a lot of people who are struggling. I know people who self-harm through their words, who repeat things to themselves that society or parents had no right to say to them. I know people who don't feel like they deserve to live, or to be loved, or to experience joy. And I know people who deal with fear by harming or controlling others and who perpetuate cycles of harm through generations this way. I know people who feel like they're unfixable and so they step away from life so they don't inflict themselves on anyone else. These people also need help outside themselves, regardless of their financial or employment status.

My mental health is better enough right now that I believe the future can be better than it is now. I believe people who have to integrate some of the especially stigmatized mental health conditions into their lives deserve so much financial and emotional support, so much less stigma, and they deserve a system that offers those things without having to fight so hard or having to find advocates with the energy and knowledge to fight for them.

I also believe that our society will only begin to improve when we are all able to access mental health care, not just in extreme duress, but as preventative maintenance just like we should be able to access regular dentist and doctor check-ups. People who don't know how to manage their fear and trauma and anger lash out and are a danger; those same people, when given the tools, are the source of compassion and support for others. That compassion and support is how a social safety net is made.

So please, advocate for mental health care to be included in insurance in your workplace. Advocate for it to be included in government health care. Advocate for your individual friends who need help: ask if you can make a phone call for them, help screen possible providers to find one suitable for their needs, read some bureaucratese and translate, walk them to an appointment, drop off dinner on a day when all their energy went towards making it through the afternoon, pay for their treatment if you can.

And when someone admits to you that they're struggling, listen. It's legitimately hard out here. Acknowledge that. And ask what you can do to help.

I've spent a lot of time here with the animals over the last few years. Most of my emotional or intimate contact is with them -- intimate in the sense of showing the self and being shown, intimate in the sense of shared experiences, and intimate in the sense of shared time and daily routine.

Animals know their boundaries and they communicate them. When a boundary is communicated to animals they don't tell stories about what else it means, they just do their thing. It's relaxing to be around. Most people seem to neither know what they want nor what they can't or shouldn't tolerate. People are always telling stories about what other folks' actions mean: they don't love me anymore, they care about me too much, they want or don't want this or that.

This is the source of a lot of healing for me. Being poly, being cometary or intermittent, being gender nonconforming, so much has been put on me in my life. What I want or do moment to moment stands in, not just for what I want in that moment, but for what I'm believed to want on every scale. What I do with my body stands in for what I think about other people or the world. Non-normativity means folks don't have a range of stories from which to draw, and non-normative folks are often cast as fickle villains in the few stories we have.

The cats sleep scattered around me while I'm working most days and I enjoy it. It's good to share space with living things, to watch sides rise and fall with breath and paws twitch with dreams. It's good to reach out and to be reached out for intermittently. It's good to say no and have Whiskey go and sleep on the far end of the couch in a sunbeam and the world does not end.

I've been snuggling with the dogs before bed. They come in if they want it, or if they're busy they'll stay outside or get up and take a few steps away and I respect that. When they're not into it I feel sad, but not rejected. A withdrawal one night doesn't mean they won't come back other nights. It doesn't mean they won't be happy to see me when I come out the next morning to do chores, or that they wont invite belly rubs later on. It just means, not now.

A dog or a cat will be patient for awhile and then enforce their boundaries. Like people, their boundaries are sharper when they're stressed. It almost never gets to that point though: I'm not sure if my dogs have ever growled at me even, and I've never been bitten or intentionally scratched by the cats.

Geese too are seasonal in their affections. During mating season they pair off, just like humans in the throes of NRE, and don't want to be disturbed while they're nesting. After awhile they come back and recoalesce into a social group that murmurs and shouts and shares thoughts unselfconsciously. There is no sense of recrimination after that absence.

So many of the people around me tell stories about their own boundaries that they can't communicate them clearly: they communicate about hope or aspirational self-negation rather than about what exists.

I think it might be hard to go back to that, in the after-times.

This morning I am thinking about how covid emphasizes and intensifies close connections that people already have, and de-emphasizes and prevents new connections and connections outside our existing groups.

I've heard about this in the poly community where primary or live-in relationships tend to be the ones to survive when contacts need to be cut or bubbles reduced. I see this in the way recommendations assume and privilege contacts within a traditional nuclear family.

Today I'm thinking about how this tendency applies to the food system. More people are growing their own food, both raising meat and gardening. Folks who already had ties with a farm when all this began, they seem to have retained and strengthened their access to CSAs etc. Folks who have extra garden produce give it to people through their existing connections.

But especially, folks raising meat have been unable to get abattoir dates. This means a lot more home slaughter, which means no ability to sell meat. So this precious resource, food, flows through friend connections and neighbour connections. Folks without those connections go without.

Problem is, this sort of situation always privileges folks with more connections: the popular people do well, new folks or people who for some reason can't or don't do the social dance as well get less. I hate that system. I hate when it's a medical GoFundMe, I hate when it's food, I hate when anything folks need are given based on popularity.

Conversely I love free bins, take-one-leave-one sites, the reuse shed at dumps up here where folks leave things that are still good, central food exchange locations. Most of those are gone now.

I had a lot of social capital in the city. I have much, much less out here. Even when I was receiving lots through my social networks, though, this system has always felt burningly unfair. I realize this is 12-year-old me speaking, the part of me that was still burning bright against unfairness n the world. I'm a lot more beat down now.

I still don't like it.

Petting cats and brushing dogs while zooming with pagans-who-believe-nature-is-not-just-a-metaphor.

This is good for me.

The seasons are turning. Suddenly all the deciduous are yellow and a little orange-- there are no native purples here, and only the occasional red. We've had regular heavy rains again but often just overnight. Yellow aspen against the blue sky is so lovely. The tires got changed, so now the 4runner sounds like a tank again.

I survived last week. It felt awful, but I did it. I'm feeling more ok right now, out of the guilt spiral enough that I can imagine a future again. I called the work counseling line twice last week for on-demand counseling, one session of which was really good and one of which was ok. I'm supposed to be signed up for a longer term thing - one reason I haven't really wanted to go the work counseling route is that it's supposed to be short-term only, as well as not being able to select for poly-friendly etc - and they were supposed to call me back last week to schedule appointments, but of course they did not. I think out of the ten or so attempts to get counseling I've made in my life, I've actually been called back by 2.

So I need to call them again.

Mom also texted me and asked to come visit, I'm not sure if she just knew through the ether that I felt bad or if she ran out of stuff to do there, but it was a very welcome request. She should be coming up within the next week or so.

The results for the covid test finally came back. I first started trying to get a test on a Friday, got through to the very busy line on Monday, got the test Tuesday, and heard back on Saturday-- a little more than a week cut out at the time when I most needed to be getting hay and straw lined up.

This week I'm in the field making up for not being able to go out for the last two weeks, so I'm super super busy. I guess this weekend or next week I'll be hoping that everyone still has hay and straw left. It's maybe unlikely that they will, but we will see.

Black Chunk (who still needs a better name) finally had her babies. There are 4 little ones out there, one red girl and 3 black and white boys. She's nursing properly and they're lively and dry. The weather is still up around 7C at night. So that's good; I also think there are some folks looking for boars in the area since the other Ossabaw folks cut all theirs, so I'm evaluating them for prospects before I castrate them all.

That's a enough of a data dump for now. I've had a couple real long days and I am going to eat a lot of food and watch youtube videos, primarily also about food.

I hope you're all well.

Here comes the post-crying sinus infection, just in time for my covid swab tomorrow.

Averaged out, each year is better than the last. I'm more gracefully and assertively able to navigate my own life, my own desires, and a variety of environments. I have more faith in myself with each passing year as I continue to show up for myself more often than not, year after year after year after year.

I feel more self-possessed, not in the conventional use but in the literal meaning of the term. I am in better ownership of my self these days, and everything that comes with it.

All that said, these remain hard times. Bathtub Goose died a couple days ago. I planted a Tecumseh plum tree over them, and an Opata nearby. I miss them, they were so snuggly and loving.

Today one of the two new boars plus UV and another gilt of UV's cohort are going to a breeding home. Rounding the last one up yesterday took a ton of work, but luckily the first two walked right into the woodshed. I used a bit of pig psychology for that: I let them out of the pig fence into the yard and the boar went straight into the woodshed. I let him go back out again until he and UV started wandering around together, then he led her right back to the woodshed. I don't think she would have gone on her own-- the other one sure wouldn't.

Now that I know which of the new boars I'm keeping, the other one has revealed himself to be named Oak. I am keeping the bigger-framed one, not the smaller curly one. Interestingly, all my boars have a pretty curly undercoat but I only see it when they shed their bristles so the wooly layer is on display.

I'm putting twinwall polycarbonate on the greenhouse part of the woodshed, it had been plywooded up for last winter. I'm excited to grow in that space next year, and maybe to move the tomatoes into it from my deck this fall for a couple extra weeks of growing time. The twinwall sheets are cheaper (and more delicate than) the single-wall corrugated poly panels I used on the roof. They'll need to be carefully framed so the birds won't hurt them. They have a pretty neat appearance, a little bit like a Fresnel lens, so things are slightly distorted through them.

The americauna chicks are mixed in with the other breeding chanteclers in the henhouse. They're not old enough to breed or lay, but they are well feathered and lovely.

I have several new ducks. Hans the ancona was shooting blanks, or mostly blanks: I put several eggs in the incubator and few to none were fertile. So, I tracked down a new drake who came with the name Romeo and he's in there. The next step is to make sure the ducks are not in with the chickens, since the roosters may be preventing the drakes from mating. But, a couple weeks and I can set those eggs.

I also got a trio of pekins. They are huge beautiful birds and not super smart; they're more similar in size to the Chinese geese than to the other ducks. They've blended in ok, foraging in clover at the bottom of the garden and wandering around with the geese from time to time. They're too young to lay, I believe; I may need to wait for next spring.

The last batch of quail is about ready to go outside. I'd like to set another round of quail, a round of chanteclers (since no one hatched their own eggs this year), and a round of ancona ducks. I'd better get moving because I don't want to be doing that in winter.

It has been and remains very very cold here. It's still in the single digits at night (C), we had hail yesterday multiple times, and now that the incubator is off my house is *cold*. Chimney cleaning needs to go on the to-do list so I can start a fire.

The garden is doing... ok. If we don't get anymore heat the green beans will barely squeak in and the drying beans won't go. I'm starting to get tomatoes off moravsky div and I believe stupice and one of the cherries - maybe sweet aperitif. Cabbages look nice, gaspe corn has ears but I don't know if they pollinated, potatoes are huge and beautiful, zucchini are just starting (!). Beets look great. Raspberries are beautiful bushes and I'm looking forward to the harvest next year - they were just planted last year so there aren't too many berries yet.

Rounding up the pigs for sale also let me confine the pigs in the new field field… oh dear, that's gonna need a better name. The far field? Anyhow, that means their winter area is clear and I can split it in two. I'll need to take down a spruce tree and then I'll have the pig winter field and a field for planting haskaps in. The haskaps on my deck are looking lovely, so they should be good to go in the ground next spring. I worry if I plant them this fall they'll be eaten by voles and frost heave.

Anyhow, then I need a real solid winter fence for the pigs and we'll be good. In winter I can't reinforce the fencing with electric -- I don't get a good ground through 3' of snow -- so it needs to be pretty solid. On the plus side they can't dig under the fence when the ground is frozen.

In other fencing news, I caught the bottom of my 4runner on the slip-wire gate I've been using for a couple years, tore a piece off the car, and distorted the gate badly enough that it doesn't reliably keep the dogs in or out. Given my neighbours, that's a problem. So, proper gates are arriving Thursday and I hope to put them up on the weekend. This is one of the real daily-use life-is-better upgrades since struggling to lever the gate closed a couple times a day wasn't super great.

I think the piece I tore off the car was unnecessary.

So: I'm pretty immersed in my life. It's good. Hope you are as well as you can be too.

Working from home again, it's been awhile since I've haven't had to go in for something whether it be a meeting or a field day. It feels so good to be home. I made some rose cedar soap, canned the last of the rhubarb (after scraping the last of the very very burnt sugar off the bottom of my pot), and now I'll get to go outside. The quail have been sized up to a bigger brooder now that they don't need heat anymore.

Plans for this week include sorting out hay (there's someone doing small squares in town, it looks like), cleaning out the chicken and quail barns and adding cages to the quail house, putting the sides on the woodshed, and figuring out the pig housing/field situation. I've also found a new ancona drake since mine seems to be shooting blanks, but he's a five hour drive away so that'll take logistics. I'm also going to pick up a pekin duck trio for some larger meat ducks that are hopefully a little less independent than the cayugas.

Bathtub Goose, with whom I have bonded really closely, isn't seeming well today. She was limping a little yesterday, so I gave her some nutritional yeast, but she's not walking much today. We'll see how it works when I get her outside.

The potatoes are flowering in dazzling array of colours and shapes. The piglets are fat and healthy. The americauna chicks are growing nicely. There are berries to pick and maybe canning to do.

It's ok.

In honour of Lughnasadh and just generally having mental health, I gave myself a harvest day yesterday. I picked 4kg of rhubarb, a bunch of sweet ciciley seeds, two kinds of mint, a snack's worth of snap peas, some dandelion greens, and some borage flowers. Borage went in white wine vinegar, mint went into bunches to dry -- the dehydrator is great for some things but has no soul for herbs -- macerated half the rhubarb with sugar and cooked the other half down into sauce, and now have to can the rhubarb.

I was also super exhausted all day and had something like 4 naps, but at least I got some stuff done.

Sweet ciciley really is an excellent and generous plant. Hopefully I can naturalize it in some spots. I do really enjoy things that actually ripen here.

On the other hand I'd like to move some perennials out of that space so I can put pigs in to plough it.

The day before I spent some time with Ron - we picked up take-out and sat by the river and chatted. I always forget how much I like people when I'm not with them. That's a lifelong thing for the most part: I fold so contentedly into myself after awhile in solitude that I can't imagine that an outside presence could be pleasant, and then it is pleasant. I mean, I think Ron is a good friend? He cares about me for sure, he knows and has boundaries and respects mine, we enjoy each other's company, and we have some hobby overlap (he's making yarrow salve right now, but also has been doing a bunch of canning and we talked about the texture of canned sausage a bunch).

There's a chance Ron will be hired to a fairly high staff position in my office. It would be nice to feel like someone has my back there, and nice to work in proximity to Ron without him being my boss directly.