Greenstorm's Journal

At the end of last week some folks from Vancouver and the Island came up for the weekend-- it had been a couple years since I'd seen them. They had come up previously when Thea was little and before I got Avallu, so that would have been late summer 2017. I drove in to pick them up from the airport in the city and we spent some time eating, petting animals, walking along the lake looking for rocks, and chatting before I drove them back Sunday. We went in a couple hours early to have lunch in town before their flight.

Well, as I got into town the truck started flashing a ton of lights: ABS & traction control, 4Hi, & 4Lo. I got us to the restaurant and they went in while I ran the codes. At this point I hadn't tried to do anything like go into 4hi, the flashing had all just started on its own. Well, I turned 4hi off and on again, turned the truck off and on again, and rocked back and forth a couple inches. That part stopped flashing. The code the engine was giving me was for a rear speed sensor. That wheel looked fine, the code cleared and didn't come back. For awhile I was looking into a cab to the airport from the restaurant for folks and a hotel room in the city because I didn't want to get stranded. In the end, because the codes didn't come back and the ABS appeared to be working, I drove folks up to the airport and then myself and Tucker back home in the twilight/dark. We skipped our normal shopping because I was just done for the day: when we got home after that last hour of driving in the dark and snow I went straight to bed and fell asleep.

Turns out that was the right call because this morning we woke up with several inches of snow on the ground and maybe 14" total falling throughout the morning/afternoon. I am so glad I did not have to drive home in that, especially in a vehicle I don't trust.

Turns out that snow is the northern tip of a ton of rain falling on the south coast that's taken out all highway access: basically the umbilicus that connects the interior to the rest of the province and to Canada. A big snow closed these same highways in 2015 for five days but this is a lot more structural damage than snow. Thoughts: Very Happy my friends did not drive up here, concerned to see if Josh can get up at the end of the week, very curious to see what grocery stores do in the next little while. Also this will probably foil my 4th attempt at getting a bank card by mail, so there's that. There are some pretty spectacular pictures of the Coqihalla (highway 5), highway 99, and highway 7 washouts. Apparently there are a couple hundred folks stuck between slides and they're trying to evacuate them through to the nearest town, which itself doesn't have power. I'm feeling pretty lucky with a full pantry and a generator (though no gas for the generator and I need to replace the fuel in the snowblower since it's been sitting which has meant a lot of shovelling).

Exciting times. I'm glad mom lives on a boat, though she said a random boat looked like it was lifted from anchor by the flooding and drifting towards her dock.

After Josh's (hopeful) visit next week is Tucker's birthday, when I'm looking forward to making tasty food appear and watching movies and snuggling. Downtime stuff. It feels like winter has hit pretty hard and I'm ready to hibernate awhile with some good tea, no-cook charcuterie platters, and a book or two.

Talked with Tucker most of the weekend about relationship stuff. Seems like his trip broke a depression, or something. The talks are ongoing but have been really good. I feel like I'm talking with a person again in so many ways.

I took a break from talking with Tucker to talk with Kelsey and that was really lovely. The real North is rough and she's in a profession supposed to help the most disadvantaged people up there so she's having a rough time, as is everyone around her I think. On the other hand she's just really good to talk to. I briefly explained the Tucker situation to her and she asked "what's the best case scenario" which is what I needed to be asked.

I had today off work too, an extra long weekend for me, so I was able to spend the day doing farm stuff and re-centering from the weekend's talks. I combed through my tomato trial and picked and labelled ripe fruits (and trimmed back some extra growth, I'm probably still missing some fruits though), picked the gaspe corn (ripe enough to dry indoors where it won't get eaten), picked a bunch of pickling cukes, and finally finished butchering the last few primals from the kill two weeks ago since they finally thawed enough to work on today.

Right now both crockpots are rendering down soap lard, my soap pan is full of lard waiting to be turned into more soap, the pressure cooker is cooling down with dog food in it, the stockpot is simmering some tonkotsu broth, the canner is cooling down full of carnitas, my freezer is chilling down thickish pork belly slices to be eaten with ssamjang, and there's thin-sliced meat waiting for jerky marinade in the fridge. Oregano is currently in the dehydrator. My chimney is supposed to be replaced next weekend and today, at least, I'm not feeling the lack of heat.

My house feels alive.

I've moved back up out of the basement to the loft room. I get more light in the mornings up there for the next little while, before there's no more morning light. It's warmer up there and the bed is better, though it's much louder. I can't ignore the dogs barking much at all.

Two mornings ago Thea was barking seriously for a long time so I stuck my head out, didn't see anything, went downstairs and put on my boots, stepped out the door, and saw the fattest black bear you can imagine down by the chicken coop. I popped back inside and got the gun and went back outside; Avallu had stirred himself because I was out, and he and Thea chased the bear back over the fence. So there I am standing in giant insulated gumboots and underwear, holding a gun, clomping around in the back of the house to make sure everything was ok. Pretty funny, honestly. I didn't see the bear again this morning and it doesn't seem to have hurt anything or got into any feed, which is good. That was a very, very fat bear and he would not have fit in my freezer, nor would I have had the energy to process him properly.

Tucker and I watched the Brothers Bloom and I thought about mononormativity being strong enough that it needs to get rid of even siblings, not just other romantic relationships. I thought about how personal development happens outside longstanding relationships, you can't maintain a longstanding relationship in those stories and still do personal growth. I thought about how when someone needs to do personal growth they find a girl who has the qualities they need and then date her until the qualities rub off. Then the narrative discards the girl, she probably didn't have interiority or an arc of her own anyhow.

I thought about someone knowing me enough to know what I want.

I'm turning over and over what I want from a relationship, what I need from it, what isn't good for me and what is. I'm turning over and over what I need to trust and what I don't, and what it looks like to trust Tucker to be himself and where that self fits best in position to me.

I will say that I've been doing distance relationships for a long time, since Jan in Germany in my early twenties, and nearly two decades later I may be better at them but I have plenty of them. Distance is for talky relationships.

I feel the need to come at what I need from a values perspective. What does that look like?

( Rough stab at relationship values )

It's stuck around with me all day, and it was pretty sad this morning, so here's my dream:

I was at some sort of big gathering with all the old Vancouver folks, maybe it was a conference, maybe it was someone's big home. I ended up on a couch next to A, who I used to date, and who I suspect it ended somewhat ghostily on both sides with. Anyhow, someone I still care for a lot but our lives are very separate now and we haven't spoken in a long time.

Chemistry started sparking very quickly and a proposition was made and tacitly accepted. We started to get up and head off together. At that moment a group of people including Tucker came by and I gave Tucker a hug before wandering off with A, but during that hug someone came up and informed everyone that Tucker had been exposed to covid shortly before.

Tucker was going to his room to self-isolate so I turned back to A. A was sad, but because I'd hugged Tucker who had been exposed to covid we were beyond his safety threshold. We stood apart looking sad for a moment, then he melted back into the crowd. I knew I probably wouldn't see him or have another chance to be close for a long time.

Then I woke up.

There's a lot of symbolism there: symbolism about intimacy and isolation, about my cometary return period, about what I give up and for who, and about what prevents be from going after things I want.

I also am prone to visitations in my dreams. I have intimacy dreams like other people have sex dreams; my mind supplies what I need when I'm not getting it. The sadness of a person being gone from my life when I wake up, either because they are gone or because they never existed, is so familiar to me.

Between waking up like that and my stitches hurting and doing weird things and being so tired from basically jungle-gymming for a couple hours yesterday bracketed by a hike today isn't the greatest day. I picked raspberries, got eggs, watered the front porch garden, and made myself honey avocado milk though, so it's not too bad.

Let's see how tomorrow goes.

My philosophy around removing things from my life is: replace them with something better first. It's easier to go towards a thing than away from it. It's easier to displace than to carve out an absence.

So I've been reaching out to people.

I reached out to a podcaster about tomatoes. I reached out to my Uncle Dave about how his sending me science books when I was a kid meant a lot to me, and how I'm happy now doing sciencey stuff. They both answered, and I need to answer back. Emails are a demand, even when they're a joy.

I reached back to my mom, who's finally not mid-ocean and who sent me a "happy birthday, I love you, how do you feel about the turning 40 thing?" message. We're texting back and forth a bit. She says her life got significantly happier after 50. This accords with my sense of aging: I get better at doing life, so life gets better.

I reached out to the person I maybe click with best? my friend Kelsey, and we chatted online about a bunch of stuff. It was like the biggest weight possible off. We can talk about important intense things, social trends, suicide, mental health, crafting, the world as a provider. We share values and both really value each other.

I should return the emails; then I can get more back. I should put reaching out to Kelsey in my calendar. I should answer my mom.

This is the web I need and have needed, the one that gives me resilience when the operation to remove a lump on my side is a little more intense than they expected and they have to pump more freezing in midway through while blood runs across my belly (now my tattoo, which is ecclesiastes 3.1-3.13, has strikethrough across "to mourn" which I view as an omen) and then the trailer hubs overheat on the one day I have to get grain and I need to drop it off at the mechanic and find an alternate feed source for a week when all I want to do is sleep.

Just having folks in the background makes it easier.

I've been tapering my pills to one per day and although I'm sleeping a lot a lot more I'm feeling more calm and capable, more like myself.

The weather is bouncing, we're back to warm after a bunch of cold after a bunch of warm after a bunch of cold after a bunch of warm. We've been having rain.

I've been getting a big mixing bowl of raspberries every day and making raspberry shrub.

Tomatoes keep trickling in.

There's a lot more to write about, but the sun came out and I'm tired. This daily write isn't soaring like words sometimes do. Even so it remains here as a monument to my future self: the people I want are there. Make room for them. There's no need to waste mental space on folks who are a poor fit.

This post is heavy. It's even heavy on my hands as I type.

When I moved to Vancouver I slowly networked into a wonderful, vibrant, unconventional, supportive community of folks. For a little while each I was particularly close to two community hub-type people and by bringing them together the community grew. We took care of each other in various ways and though the connections between individuals waxed and waned there was a general sense that someone would have my back and that I could contribute by having someone else's back. It was large enough that there were generally people I didn't know around, but small enough that the regulars could enforce some of the social norms. I was able to act freely in that group with regards to speech, clothing, interests-- I didn't share the main tech-type interests of folks, but I didn't feel policed and I felt that folks were interested in what I had to say.

There were complications in the group, of course. There was a bit of a fresh meat dynamic with pretty manic pixie dream girl types. People moved from center to fringe and back again as they moved to harder-to-reach parts of the city or went head-down into new relationships. Regular group interactions, movie nights a lot of the time, got handed around but there would be fallow periods as folks burnt out on hosting or as Vancouver housing prices precluded big enough spaces to gather. Relationship drama happens in all groups and this group was no different. Consent got bumped around sometimes, as it does; my experience was that these bumps tended to be handled ok but sometimes they were just ignored.

This group was essentially my home for eight or twelve years. It was part of why I believed the world was generally good, that people were generally accepting, that if I was matter-of-fact and open about who I was that it could be normalized. When new people came into the group they got told that when I was topless it wasn't about sex and to be cool with it. That meant a lot. My kind of playfulness was allowed to exist. Did I mention I didn't feel policed?

In hindsight I think the group was pretty full of neurodiverse types, but that isn't so relevant.

Anyhow, I went to school and it took up a ton of my time so I spent less with the group. For awhile I remember we used twitter to make spontaneous meetups happen. Folks began to bleed away from the group, to have kids, to spend more time with other folks. Regular events weren't hosted as often except for big holiday parties and those often felt more like catching up with folks than being inside a living network. Some of the big personalities left or veiled themselves. I went to school again, to university, and had no energy to engage; my world was also starting to diverge.

Eventually I kept connections primarily through social media, even before I left. For years now that's been the main form of contact I have with these folks. I've been thinking of them as a loose group still, as a bunch of folks who share values and who have each other's back. I've been clinging to that.

But it's just not true. When I left Vancouver kept changing at the pace it always had. Of my dozen favourite restaurants maybe one still exists. I could no longer find a transit route or even a bike route from place to place without significant help from maps because the streets and busses just aren't there. And that social group I was part of dissolved, scattered across the country and skirled into little whirlpools of people who no longer interacted much.

Some of those folks went mostly offline and I don't know them anymore really. Some of those folks drifted away in their interests or shut me out. And some of those folks I retained and kept interacting with on social media. And.

My social media stuff has become increasingly... I hate to use this word, but toxic. It's regular for folks there to express glee in the pain of the folks they consider their opponents. One of the values I shared with these folks was concern for inequality, was the desire to help lift and support those who were at the fringes. With that in mind I ignored this shift in social media, I told myself that it was just how these folks presented with the specific incentives of online. It was social media that was the problem, there were still plenty of folks who had my back.

But now I need to admit that the change is bigger than that. Compassion and support have calcified into rigidity and exclusion. The pain of bad groups is celebrated; progress and breakthroughs are not. Deviations from or questions of the received wisdom of the group are not alright. The world is divided into them and us.

I've tolerated all this believing that I had to in order to keep connections with these folks but if this is what the connection looks like it's nothing worth keeping. Maybe it's true that in person, able to read each others' faces, conversation could flow freely and there would be room for diversity and variation. I'm not currently in that position though. It's time to reassess everyone on their own, recent, merits rather than leaning on a decade-or-two old ghost of their behaviour.

I've known it was time to find or build a new community for a couple years now. Before covid I was planning to start harvest festivals on this space; hosting is a marvelous tool for both curation of folks and influencing the tone of the gathering. My pagan community has been excellent when I'm in contact with them, they've been online a fair bit during covid, but most of those people live on the other side of the US border. It's great to visit but it can't be the heart of the community I need.

I need... barter, being able to know who needs help and contribute what I have to help. I need many-hands-make-light-work days where a goal is achieved. I need folks to have joy in their lives, and to be able to talk about that. I need folks who are kind. I need folks who can verbalize their boundaries. I need folks who are capable of celebration of good and action towards grave issues simultaneously. I need a place where there's room for different neurotypes, for different interests, for different skills and philosophical approaches to problems. I need a place where folks know each other well enough to notice and celebrate personal growth. I need to feed people. I need to be able to go somewhere when I'm upset and have someone listen to me. I need a space that accepts nuance.

I thought I had these things.

It's heavy, heavy, heavy to realize I don't.

But.

It's a relief too. I've been feeling lonely and unsupported. That's not just me. It's that-- I am lonely and unsupported in a bunch of ways.

Time to pick out some of the truly lovely people I do know and curate a space. Somehow. What even is a space when we're scattered across a continent?

I always do better once I know what the work is to do. Now I know. Now to figure out how to get started.

Okay. I've been avoiding writing about this because writing makes it true, but: basically the chimney in my house is failing. That is, the system which provides my home with heat cheaply and effectively is not real safe to run right now. When I bought the house I knew the wood stove was relatively new; what I didn't know or guess was that the chimney was probably original, that is not at all new, and had probably had several fires in it. It had also been painted at some point which made both experts I talked to click their tongues and sound unhappy. Now it's inside a vey flammable pine surround.

So I've been doing a deep dive on chimneys: mine is a double-walled insulated one. It would have come in sections of 3' that would have been fastened together, likely screwed together like giant screws. The point of the insulation is twofold: it keeps the heat from coming out and burning the house either through normal use or in a chimney fire, and it keeps the inside of the chimney warm so creosote doesn't deposit in it and block it up.

My house is a weird shape that basically you can't really get on the roof well. The chimney needs to be lowered piece by piece through the roof as it's screwed on, and likely needs to be anchored at someplace in the middle. This in all likelihood involves a couple hours with a cherry picker truck or something similar.

The way my chimney is failing is that the join between sets of pipes is curling back in two places, curling a little bit more every time I clean the chimney. This starts to let heat out through the joins. When wood is heated and cooled repeatedly it lowers its burning temperature. If I were to have an actual chimney fire the chimney might not contain it and I might have a house fire, which is not supposed to happen with a proper chimney.

The whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that we had a soaking wet summer. There were only two weeks without rain; we had rain almost every 24 hour period. Most folks didn't get their grain off. So my wood is damp, and pine is the only real available firewood up here, and so I'm getting a lot of creosote in the chimney. This would normally mean cleaning it a lot, but cleaning it damages it more. The creosote increases the chances of a chimney fire, which would be extra bad in this situation. And so it goes.

I'm looking at options right now. The ground is frozen so running a natural gas line is expected to be at least 3x the summer price, but I could sell the really nice wood stove and replace it with a gas fireplace/stove, both the stove and running the line has a cost and we have a dickhead natural gas company with the highest rates in my province so I'd be saddling myself to them. Replacing the chimney is expensive, likely no one can do it till spring, and my wood is still wet. I could run on electicity until spring but that will be super expensive too and my home isn't really well-equipped with electricity, it's ok right now because we're in a weird warm spell but I'm not sure how -20 or -30 would do. Pellet stoves, well, fibre is getting more expensive and that's not going away; true of wood too honestly.

So I continue to explore my options, talk to contractors, etc etc. I could put in a natural gas stove, run it on propane, and convert to natural gas in the spring when they can run a line but that may not be cheaper than just running the line now. In any case my house is a weird a-frame shape so snow slide down the long sides would shear off any pipes; the gas has to come into the house on the shorter walls. And then I'll have a meter reader on the property, which means dealing with dogs and the gate.

I might make very different decisions if I planned to stay here permanently rather than being uncertain of that.

Bah.

Anyhow, that's been the last couple weeks for me.

On the plus side a friend of mine bought 25 bottles and did a 25-person gin advent calendar, so we've got a bit of a social thing tasting and comparing notes together. I've turned off the woodstove and am running on electricity right now, so I'm a little less anxious about the house. And I'm eating through my preserved stuff from the summer, which both feels lovely and is giving me lots of jars back.

Got another round of straw picked up, though it was raining so it's likely somewhat damp. These things happen. We're going into freeze soon so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Also got sauerkraut into the crock, which always is a nice ritual. I also taught mom to make sauerkraut, including wrapping a leaf over the top of the shreds to hold them down and puncturing it to let gasses through, so she has her own jar to take home.

Now I have a bunch of cabbage, some pears, some apples, and some tomatoes left to do.

The temperature has dropped enough that the woodstove is more comfortable to run, though it still needs to be intermittent. The humidity is dropping down again; normally we get dry summers but this summer it never stopped raining and it never got dry anywhere. It'll be nice to have things dry out.

We've been having a lot of cold drizzle lately, which is not my favourite.

The work line finally called me to schedule a counseling appointment in a couple weeks, so that's good. It feels nice to be remembered and not left.

I've been having intimacy dreams about folks I care about, and thinking a little about dating. My current constellation has involved physical and some domestic/support intimacy with Tucker, but not a lot of back-and-forth discussion about plans or feelings which is a pretty rare thing for me. I'd been talking with Josh a bunch for that aspect, but he's been pretty busy lately and he's also just pretty far away.

I'd been going to meet-ups with some of my former co-workers: we'd get together on the deck for "coffee" (I always bring my own tea) and chat on Saturday mornings. It's been really good, but I missed one for covid self-isolation while waiting my test results and a second for straw pick-up. That helps, I like those people and enjoy the conversations, but I don't fully fully trust them in the way that I could say anything.

Someone recently started a queer BC outdoorspeople group. It has potential. I am super uncomfortable with the term queer, but that's not really the issue with the group. The issue is that northern BC is really, really big with few people in it so getting enough folks in the group to have nearby co-campers or whatever seems difficult. On the other hand, I bet it's the kind of group that could have some camping meetups and those are easier to travel to than day trips.

I've been enjoying a podcast called "Gender Reveal" which is basically a series of one-hour interviews with mostly non-cis folks about their experiences.

So, yeah, I guess I'm lonely? I miss the kind of conversation where it's an extended amount of deep, intimate rubbing your thoughts against someone else's, and where they answer with their own thoughts, and it spirals around for hours. I seem to be fine for casual or passive conversation stuff, and there are folks who will listen to me. It just sometimes feels like talking into the void.

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.

The night before last I slept very late, I was exhausted, and I had a ton of people come visit me in my dreams. It's far enough along that I don't remember most of who, but definitely G, Kelsey, and Heather from work along with a couple others. In many but not all cases there was a definite "Greenie, we like you but we aren't going to spend much time with you anymore" vibe. Which. These are not folks I spend much time with? But I guess my brain was just wrapping that up.

Then last night, same deal. Tired, hard to wake up, and I had a pretty extended dream about hanging out with Adrian E.

I don't normally remember my dreams. I don't normally have visitations by people who actually exist. Normally I slip into alternate worlds, alternate lifetimes, and live them out until I wake up.

I guess "people" are alternative worlds and lifetimes nowadays. Threshold is the real world, from which I semi-grudgingly leave to go to work briefly.

Staying home so much is clarifying for me that, well, I like being here. Travelling to the coast a couple times a year was a holdover from my move: I felt like I could leave the city and keep those relationships intact. Now I know I'd rather host the folks who are willing and able to come up.

The thing is, because Threshold is such an extension of me, I can't be in any other place as my full self. I'm always leaving a huge chunk of myself elsewhere. Up here, when I see someone, they can see me instead of just a shadow, instead of the portable parts only.

So. Maybe for a lot of people that realization is a bit of a parting.

I've had very, very few people over to Threshold since I moved in. To be honest, between cleaning and just liking it here alone I've been pretty good.

I'm making an effort to invite folks up, though. I have a couple visitors planned this spring, and I think in fall I might plan a pig kill event and invite a bunch of folks (day 1: kill & gut, day 2: butcher & cure, day 3: sausage, day 4: soap, day 5: veggie pickling, day 5: veggie canning so folks can come by at the part in the process they prefer). It feels a little bit strange, Threshold is private to me and I don't think anyone will understand it how I do. I need to be able to have folks around, though.

Avallu will be displeased.