greenstorm | Entries tagged with north

I had to take Avallu in to the emergency vet last weekend.

It's difficult here. There are basically no vets. There's a daytime emergency vet 2 - 2.5 hours away and no nighttime emergency vets. There are no farm animal vets, except some which do horses.

So if a dog or cat is not doing well I need to make the call early enough that they don't die in the 20 minutes of "first you need to pay for a virtual vet to diagnose and certify an emergency" and "then you need to load the animal and drive them into the vet".

I'll spare you the details but Avallu is ok. It was maybe a slipped disc and a UTI compounding each other? But I was afraid. He loves me so much and wants to do what I ask, but he was in a lot of pain. Loading him was rough.

The vets were great with him, though, and very good with my "he's dog reactive and person selective". They were polite to him and he was polite to them despite his pain, and they were adept at blocking all other dogs from his sight.

They were very busy, though. I ended up sitting in the car for six hours in 2.5AQI 200-300,mostly around the top end. That is where there's enough smoke it's hard to see the end of the street, and ash accumulates on the car in a visibly speckled layer over six hours. I'd left without a mask so by the end not just my throat, sinuses, and eyes were burning but also the skin on my face.

I'd also left in "shoot the neighbour's home, better cover up when I step outside to look at the morning" booty shorts, without putting on real pants. They show the bottom of my tattoo, which I think invited a young woman to give me a card and invite me to her church.

Oh well.

Pup is feeling better on painkillers, though he's noticably whiny when they wear off. He's moving though, and able to lie down, even on hard surfaces. He's also taking his pills well when they're encased in duck confit.

It's been a long time since I felt that level of adrenaline in my body. Over time, living here on my own, I've been allowing the barriers that keep me functional to wear down. I'll let feelings make me stop, let them alter my behaviour. Maybe I'll hug something. Maybe I'll cry. Maybe I'll go be curious about something. That all seems to be at the expense of calm, quick, measured behaviour in an emergency, though. I am not ready to lose Avallu and it took me a bit to get myself together when it became apparent there was a problem.

Money played into that too, but that's a different post.

Anyhow, pup is home and very loved and is not in big danger.

I think I'm figuring out that work right now is really emotionally intense.

It's an intense fire season in North America. I'd say historic, but it's actually ahistoric: this is the worst on record by a significant amount for both area and intensity of fires. I've been talking for years about global warming to ecosystem change and now the tactical-level science is coming out: "regeneration failure" (the forest doesn't recover into a forest, or at least not a similarly-functioning ecosystem) is influenced in the short term by the intensity of fires, so if we can keep the intensity of fires low we can keep our forests closer to how they were for a little while longer, until climate change more fully catches up with species range.

I'm never sure that's a great goal, to preserve what was there. On the other hand humans have a terrible track record of deliberately intervening in ecosystems. Our culture is particularly bad: two that came into conversation this morning were "stream cleaning" (straightening a stream and removing all woody debris from it to help salmon populations, turns out that's counterproductive) and national parks (removing indigenous people, preventing indigenous practices, and doing fire suppression all to make a "natural" state which it turns out creates megafires and other large-disturbance issues). On the other hand we cannot pretend we have not and are not intervening in everything -- that's why it's the anthropocene -- and so we have a responsibility to do those interventions in as thoughtful, research-driven, and future-based ways as possible.

We cannot do nothing, that's not in our power, so throwing up our hands and pretending that what we normally do is "nothing" and that anything we haven't done before is overreach is disingenuous. So I think we need to be very active and do deliberate interventions, but carefully and at hopefully non-disastrous scale.

In this context I'm one of a handful of land managers with jurisdiction over one of the larger chunks of actively and structurally/deliberately managed land there is. Canada has a huge proportion of "crown land", land managed by the state. It is of course complicated: there are many players, including indigenous people who are having their rights slowly re-enshrined; settlers who also live on the landscape; government groups of many kinds, including those tasked with increasing carbon, wildlife, firesmarting, biodiversity, recreation, and housing; large and small industry; people who have never been to this area or to the country but who feel strongly about management in different ways; and groups that overlap those categories.

(I am sitting in my chair at the office at work and trying to formula this while the room literally feels like it's spinning around me, I may have to come back to it).

The state's inclination is to move cautiously and to include careful discussion and many stakeholders, possibly now leaning towards finding ways to prioritize indigenous input, and it's a big slow machine. Indigenous inclination is varied, since these are varied groups of people with varied types of governance and varying opinions, much like any group, but culture, power, comfort, and safety play into their motivations. Settlers on the landscape are also varied but tend to fall into two groups: transients and people with deep attachment, though those groups aren't exactly always separate, and many of them value access to the land. Industry has a variety of hands but at heart is driven by shareholder value over the short term, usually quarterly. People who aren't from here quite honestly I'm pretty bitter about some days, but esthetics and simplicity of narrative play into their desires.

My personal, western-educated and paganism-animism-informed preferences don't significantly align with many of those folks pre-discussion. I sit much more in the rewilding and novel ecosystems camp than most typical environmentalists, but I'm also much more cautious and less one-size-fits-all than many of the new tech-based environmentalists or industry. I'm significantly more pro-science than some indigenous groups, and pretty much more pro-humans-on-the-landscape (including indigenous and settlers) than nearly anyone. But I'm also deeply in favour of the kind of education and contact indigenous folks promote. And there's a bunch more I could say there.

But in the end my formal job is to consider perspectives and align with the laws. The laws are somewhat contradictory, for instance now that we've adopted UNDRIP there's active contradiction between typical practice, legislation, and direction from folks with various forms of enshrined and/or functional power. Making anything harder for anyone with power is frowned upon but can be done with care and skill.

It all makes me wish I could still think and write clearly. It might be worth figuring out accommodations for speech-to-text at work if I actually want to dig into this.

But I'm not sure how much I do or can dig into it. I'm more aware of what the next fifty years will look like on the landscape than almost anyone, but it's just as difficult for me as it is for anyone else to live with that knowledge of change. Your personal relationships are very likely to outlive your relationships to the ecosystems you know, though some level of normalizing will help shield you from awareness of that. If there's a set of ecosystem relationships you're attached to, especially the further north you live (warming happens faster at high latitudes, though actual change has some breakpoints around tradewinds, glaciation, and ocean currents) you'll be saying goodbye to them instead of them saying goodbye to you. If you're buried there your ghost will be resting with their ghosts, not in the landscape eternal you might perceive it to be.

And I am a part of the landscape. I don't know that many people have this same sense. I know the Christian separation of animals and humans, the concept of dominion and even stewardship woven into our society, it runs deep. Maybe I lie closer to the indigeonus concept of the land as kin, but also I think of myself, as I think many sciencey people do, as (one of) the land's ways of knowing itself. I am itself, an expression of the land as much as any mountain or tree.

"Climate grief" is a term that gets a lot of press recently, and sure, the fact that things are changing can be a cause for grief. Lots of people are in very legitimate fear and many of us will die for reasons in varying places on the "act of god" to "no social support" spectrum. Those things are important to the human part of me but I'm not sure how much I live in the human part of me.

What I feel is more like jumping out of a plane with a parachute and something between mother and child in my arms. Threshold- it's easy for me, life linked to it as it is, to cradle and comfort and protect and learn to the best of my ability in that situation. But when I'm holding a sort of diffuse whole of the Stuart Nechako forest district, well, that's a lot. Doing it civilly in the full sense of the word, within the constraint of law and in partnership with so many different perspectives from commodity to spiritual ownership, well.

It might have been better to do when I was younger, and believed more in people's shared values, and when I had more energy to change the world.

I'm still thinking about the landscape here.

Part of love, for me, is knowing something deeply. I love things that reveal themselves to me. I love being aware of patterning, of uniqueness, of what differentiates the beloved particularly from others of its kind.

When I left the coast I had a sense, not just of the ecology of the landscape, but of the ecological history and much of the geology. When I walked there I had a sense of the depth of sediment in the Fraser Valley underfoot, of the thick layers of sand out by point grey and laid down by an explosive reversal of the Fraser River, of the old edges of the ocean that etched flat places into the north shore mountains as the weight of glaciers lightened and the crust rebounded in fits and starts. I could feel the tall ghost cedars from the past marching around me in the city streets and the echoes of millions of wings and bird cries in the now-drained migratory stop in the wide sweep of wetlands now cut into suburbia and fields. Knowledge of the landscape lived within me, I was a part of it, and I loved it.

The north was so overtly a shock in not being able to recognise the plants around me that I didn't think of the landscape at first. There are so many plants here that I've learned through visuals and physical interaction first, and many of them I don't know their names yet even. The names get hitched on to my knowledge of the plants easily when I see them now, and regardless of names they're becoming old friends.

But plants are not the only thing here. The landscape is so present. One of the reasons I love it here is that the sky and the vegetation are in balance: unlike the prairies there's a definite topographic and vegetative presence, and unlike the coast the sky is actually visible through trees and hills.

That's not what I was trying to say.

What I was trying to say is that I can read the landscape here reasonably well now. A glance at the vegetation, at the soil texture in a road cut, and I can see into the past to the old edges of glaciers receding and dropping gravel, to under-ice rivers of sediment carrying and sorting gravel into sinuous wrinkles. The silhouette of the top of a black spruce, that little bulbous knob, speaks of rock ground to the finest dust and then left to settle in ponds left by chunks of lingering ice. My own land, Threshold, has deep rich clay from the huge lake that stretched for a huge swathe of the interior before it poured out towards the coast and made what we know now as the Fraser River.

I'm learning to know the land. I'm learning to know it in the back of my mind, without thinking about it, cataloguing knowledge that I can pull out later if asked.

As I know the landscape it becomes part of me. It becomes as much an extension of me as anything, maybe not as layered with connection and interaction as Threshold but certainly the cradle of time and space in which I am rocked, held, loved. The north welcomes people in a way that the coast never did in my experience, maybe because it was so disfigured and damaged by development down there. Those forests shudder at the continuous lines of hikers snaking through every green space, trailing urine and trash and compaction and status-seeking fitness experiences through every bit of every type of ecosystem that's left intact. Here? The land draws you in, revealing little pockets of this plant or that soil or a scar on a tree to indicate an old oolichan grease trail. We remade the lower mainland in our image; the north remakes us slowly but surely in its own image.

It's not to say I'm done learning here: there's more to learn than one or even a thousand lifetimes can encompass. It's to say I'm a person of this land now, our traditional frame of ownership reversed if you will, it will always live in me and it feels so familiar now, like perfectly worn-in clothing. Like home.

They did a backburn and they're not currently worried about the highway out of here. Phew. I really am always amazed by what the fire folks can achieve. The planes and water bladders and all that look so miniscule compared to those fires, and more often than not they'll have the fire walk right up and then drop their line however they do it and preserve, like, every single structure on a landscape that's otherwise totally torn up.

Got the truck stuck at work today, or at least the summer student who was driving did. It's funny, the whole district is tinder-dry and we got buried up to the axle and then some in liquified muck. We were also a three hour drive away from town/the office, and off the maps of known roads. We called it in something like 1:00, it took work till 2:30 to send someone out (the office is pretty sparse lately), but he made good time and got to us by 4:30 so we were home by a little after 8. That is a long day. It was especially a long wait in potentially the densest cloud of blackflies I've been in since 2015, blackflies being the ones that bite you and leave a bloody swollen bit and also that fly into your nose and eyes. Luckily I was dressed for it -- headscarf etc - but the summer students weren't super happy. They were still good company though.

That part of the landscape was like an extreme version of the whole area up on the omineca. Glaciation is so recent: everywhere is either a pile of glacial debris which is mostly super-dry wiggly gravel bumps with kinnickinnick and pine or douglas-fir and birch, superfine clay dropped by remnants of glaciers as they melted and left behind that impermeable layer which became a swamp with black spruce, grassy open swamps ringed with willow and browse species left by filled-in beaver lakes, or gently-abraded slopes of the troughs that glaciers flowed through full of dark marching spruce with balsam-fir (not balsamea but lasiocarpa, foresters are weird) on the tops and aspens forming dappled clearings. The soils are so young, they haven't complexified yet even in the bogs full of peat.

Anyhow, all that is to say I used my bird app and realized that the sound I hear in the evenings is a snipe winnowing. That means the little remnant glacial swamp across the road from me, that I can see from my bedroom window, is a relatively healthy and functioning wetland. I never thought of it that way before, it's so small, but it makes me really happy. People worry about old growth but wetlands are even rarer and more damaged.

Look up the sound of a snipe winnowing. It's pretty neat. I guess the sound is made with the wings?

There's a fire 5-6km just west of the highway between here and Everywhere Else. Even if it doesn't threaten my property or the town, they tend to call evacuation in when access to a town will be cut off, for perhaps obvious reasons. There is a rough backroad out of town but I think parts of it are currently washed out, and there's a longer road that leads into Mackenzie but I think that goes through several fires, and if not it is at least a very slow logging road with lots of loose gravel and dust. So.

Good: it's getting cooler because it's evening, there's a lake right there for the firefighters to use, they'll prioritize it because it's right close to us.

Bad: it seems to have grown roughly 30 hectares in a couple hours, everything is so so dry, there are so many fires right now.

I can hear the planes heading back and forth, I'm not far from the little local airport they use to refuel.

I do not currently have a way to transport my animals properly: I could take the dogs, the cats, and some geese or ducks or chickens. It's way too hot to put them in the utility trailer and I don't have a proper livestock trailer.

People have been asking me how I am and I’ve been saying things like “good” or “excellent”. It’s been awhile! A couple counseling visits ago I said something like “is it even possible to give a straight, single, non-ambivalent answer to this? Like do neurotypicals have everything average out so they don’t experience both the good and the bad, but just a kind of middle mush?”

Last visit I said, “really good, actually.”

It’s important to laugh at myself when it’s warranted.

So here’s the stuff:

Garden: tomatoes are looking great and I’m starting to acclimatize them to outside. I never did set up my lights, but the thing about seeding so late is that daytime is starting to be warm enough to keep them outdoors as they’re thinking about stretching. We’re still getting freezes at night but they’re still in the “couple hours at a time in the shade” phase so I just take them out once it warms up. I’m thinking of repurposing my chick brooder for a mini greenhouse on the deck so I don’t need to haul in and out.

Meanwhile the apple seedlings are thriving, they’re outside all day and any evening there isn’t frost (only one so far). Peppers had poor germination but I did plant two flats so I’ll have enough to grow. I also had poor germination on ground cherries.

I started messing with the raspberries the other night. Started cutting out last year’s fruiting canes and cutting the east fence one into rows, leaving a stub so I can dig out the extras.

Outside is beautiful but weird. Stinging nettles are coming up, rhubarb is up, sweet ciciley and apple trees haven’t budged yet. Favas are in the ground. The pigpen is almost dried out, it could almost be tilled already. The lake is lower than folks remember ever. They’re forecasting a big wildfire year for the whole province. Eep.

Pottery: so looks like we’re crystallizing into an actual functional group, or at least moving towards it, without me having to shoulder the whole thing. A previous volunteer, who burned out because she didn’t have help, seems to be back. The first kilnload of bisque is currently cooling down, I’ll get to see it on Thursday. We’re going to glaze. The plan is to meet regularly on Thursdays. Hopefully that doesn’t fall apart. I really do want to do a bunch of throwing until I can do it confidently.

Tucker/stupid/mystery: a lot of stuff is percolating on this one. My therapist suggested that what keeps drawing me back is that he’s unpredictable. Or, I mean, she said “mystery” and that’s maybe accurate? Which offers me the lens that his unpredictability throws me off in both directions: I appreciate not always knowing what’s going to happen, but I really struggle without any sense of certainty or agency in the relationship. I also feel stupid every time we go through the dance where he distances, I distance, and then he comes closer after I distance. It is kind of predictable, after all, and if someone doesn’t explicitly commit to me I feel uncomfortably ambivalent about my right to complain when they suddenly don’t act committed: on the one hand they didn’t say anything for me to rely on, on the other hand if someone does a bunch of stuff with typical societal meanings about commitment for years and then stops it was in fact fair to believe they’d go on as they had begun unless they said otherwise. Anyhow I’m chatting cautiously with him again. We’ll see how it goes. He tends to schedule himself pretty full and I’m not great at “I can only talk to you on Tuesdays for the rest of the year except when I’m too busy, then we skip a week”.

Willow: the basketmaking course was nice. I’ve harvested a bunch of willow, some from my property and some from the side of the road last time I drove the highway. It’s supposed to be harvested before buds start to open. I may have been slightly late? And just a week or two later it’s definitely too late. We’ll see if the stuff I got is ok for basketmaking or not when it’s done drying and soaking. I have a couple friends interested in learning too so we’ll see how that goes. I guess practice baskets are fine even if they’re not perfect.

I really enjoy the way the willow smells, and the way it scents my basement while drying.

Poetry:My friend did that wonderful poetry month daily challenge, and I’ve taken up a PDA-compatible “30 poems sometime in 30 days” challenge starting randomly on April 29th. It’s a real joy. I’ve written a backlog of poems to put out one at a time (I did write them all in the first couple days) and in the meantime that frees me up to write new ones without PDA last-minute pressure. Writing feels so good. Manifesting the inside of my mind on my outside is empowering-feeling. Also it’s neat to see what’s on my mind.

Well: my water pressure is a real problem. There’s also sand coming up through the system. I cleaned out a bunch of my little faucet screens last night; the kitchen water had completely stopped and I pulled maybe ¼ tsp of sand out of it, which fixed it. Apparently the sand is a big thing for everyone on my road right now, so for everyone on the couple layers of aquifer. We think it’s because the water is SO LOW right now, and I think on a karst system it shifts around very quickly. Anyhow, my washing machine is struggling – it’s the thing that uses the most water in my house right now, and loads are taking an extra hour or two as the machine fills up so slowly. I need to order a pressure tank and try to figure out how to put it in by myself or get a plumber to come out for an hour. The money is definitely hard right now and I’m waffling between the same sized tank (25 gallons of “useable” water, aka drawdown) or get one step larger (35 gallons of drawdown) to help protect me through power outages. Either way I may need to sell random stuff to make it happen.

Starlink: the provincial government said something about wanting broadband to every rural household in the province in 4 years. This comes 1-2 years after almost removing it completely from some remote communities, and after funding it being put in south of me along the whole highway of tears (which is definitely taking longer than they expected). My internet right now is a hub that runs on cell service, it’s very very slow but it’s reliable and it’s $90/month. It’s getting worse as the local cell towers decay (as with everything owned by businesses, they cut the nonprofitable stuff for small groups and focus on what makes money, which is not rural stuff). Starlink (and the truly awful satellite internet) are the only other options.

I hadn’t wanted to get starlink since there’s the $700 equipment cost up front and if the gov ever does get some other kind of broadband internet up here I don’t want to be stuck with the sunk cost fallacy keeping me on it. However… the other day I learned that starlink is offering its equipment to rural Canada, NZ, and Australia at a very very steep discount ($200) that makes it palatable amortized over even just four years. Soooooo… I’ve ordered it. I am not thrilled to be supporting the organization, I firmly believe it should be a government service, but my government is failing me here.

I am looking forward to making youtube videos again! I wasn’t able to upload them in less than 20 hours or so before. I wonder if IO can find a used gopro or something?
Anyhow, that’s a lot and mostly good.

My coworker takes guesses at breakup every year. It's been as early as April 6 and as late as I think May 16 in the last twenty years. He has a neighbour identify a particular strip across the lake that has to be ice-free. This has been a long cold spring; I guessed May 12th. The prize is bragging rights, which is why my PDA self can participate. I have serious issues with competition.

The long cold spring hasn't stopped it being a dry spring. The ground was dead dry last fall and we got a normal amount of snow or just barely above normal. There are spots on the mountain where we did controlled fires last fall and it seems like with snow off them they're still smouldering this spring. Uncomfortable.

It begins.

The first trickle of running water down my driveway showed up yesterday. Four feet of snow has sunk to three. Somehow, I never know how, the earth under the snow is warming: my house is staying much warmer in the basement even when the thermometer temperature is low, and streamlets are running down the sides of roads and puddles and small floods are gathering in the inner elbows of the highway.

It's not yet slippery, there's still enough snow for grip.

At solar noon the sun is finally reaching a height within the bottom range of what scientists argue may allow skin to produce vitamin D, though it needs to be a little higher to reach the consensus level.

Geese are squabbling and pairing off and there are eggs starting. The dogs are working hard at night over the whole perimeter.

It's almost time to put seeds in pots.

Against this backdrop I'm sleeping a lot. When I'm not working, and sometimes when I am, I'm lying on the couch with 2 - 3 cats and sometimes a dog or two right there in front. The woodstove is on, light comes in through one window and the other is entirely buried under snow. I'm still wanting to sleep a long night and 3 - 4 naps during the day so I think the medication I'm on needs to be adjusted. With all this sleep and quiet animal companionship I feel like I'm slowly healing in some ways. For most of the winter I was on birth control drugs that put me in the worst part of my cycle. For some time before that my natural hormone response was drifting more and more towards that state. I had no skin. Every thing that happened, every tiny interaction with living things or with the environment, raised crescendos of usually negative, corrosive, painful sensations in my head.

Sitting there quietly, kept loving and concerned watch over by the five house animals, occasionally venturing out and responding to the geese with old instinctive goose chatter: it's giving me practice at the world not hurting me. Cats acting like cats, dogs acting like dogs, geese acting like geese, ravens acting like ravens, and pigs acting like pigs: it's ok. It's becoming ok for the world to exist. It's a small world and it's going from a refuge to a womb. After a couple weeks I started experiencing love again in little flickers while looking at a sleeping animal that has been seeking me out and caring about me this whole time.

It's healing, yes, but my capacity is almost zero. I am incredibly tired all the time, I think from the sertraline. I barely manage to stay awake on my office days; on work-from-home days I nap at lunch, on breaks, before work, and after work. On weekends I sleep. My home is suffering since I can barely drag out the trash, let alone tidy things. I'm eating sandwiches and freezer meals.

And... I still don't have my passions, my enthusiasms, back. I feel indifferent towards my hobbies: cooking, butchery, pottery, even gardening just hold no interest for me. I'd be fine watching shows with the animals and going to work and coming home and watching shows and going to work and coming home for the rest of my life. Talking to Josh or Tucker is nice in the moment but not something to seek out. People aren't something to seek out. I just don't really care. Things are fine. I'm going to do my best to start seeds because I think future me will appreciate it, but it seems unnecessary.

Of course, that's not fine. I'm reasonably sure it's the medication, and obviously that needs to be tweaked. Luckily I set up doctor's appointments for next week before I started on the meds, because between sleeping all the time and not caring I wouldn't have done it while on them.

These are significant issues, of course, but I am at least safe and healing and the first whispers of spring are here.

My laptop died, 28 days after the warranty ran out. My previous one lasted ten years and I wasn't really prepared.

That means that at home I have, for communication and writing: my phone. Period. My phone is getting old and slow, and it's interesting to think that if it died I'd have no way of contacting the outside world or being contacted: not by call, email, text, IM, anything. My truck is throwing an engine code right now, so I'm two devices away from "walk 12 km into the library and hope they have public computers". Honestly I'm not sure I can afford to fix the truck AND replace the laptop, so we'll see where we end up when the shop gets back ot me.

During the workday I'll pop onto here on my work laptop but I won't sign into anything else, or do much; anything I do on here is subject to FOI requests and "what government workers are doing with your tax dollars" news articles.

So any research I do about a new laptop would be on my phone, as would buying a new one. I honestly can't bring myself to dive into that right now. Computers do not work like they used to and I can't deal with relearning it all right now.

Also in the evenings I'm not watching anything, writing emails, participating in forums, or having chatty conversations with folks since typing on my phone is not enjoyable nor is using the screen for video. I'm also not updating my plant spreadsheets, planning for gardening this summer, etc. I have gone back to paper lists for some garden planning, and I reference my old spreadsheets often; no doubt if I don't transfer all this into a 2023 garden spreadsheet I will regret it.

But, between that and doing some canning and being really tired lately, I've been mostly absent and will likely continue to be pretty erratic.

A couple potential jobs have come up recently.

One is in the area somewhat west of me-- same employer but a different area, so a different set of supervisor/management structure/decision makers (each region is basically a fiefdom). Housing prices there are a little more expensive than they are here; there doesn't seem to be an equivalent low end to the housing market, but the homes one step up tend to have a lot of useful stuff: heated studio or workshop, coldroom for hanging meat, pond, artisan or gravity-feed water, barn or pole barn, things like that. The area also has more of a farming community, including a multi-farm shop and farmer get-togethers, and it's where I take my geese to be processed. There's also an airport in the region, a nice music festival, more people and some nice restaurants including nice sushi restaurants, a lovely downtown, and fiber optic cable goes along the highway so some homes close enough may have it. New cell towers were built in the area. Plus a fairly significant white supremacist movement, social polarization, a very very contentious relationship with First Nations, and it's pretty much not accessable from the city in one day. I could almost certainly get this job. The posting closes at the end of this month; I haven't yet contacted the person in charge of that team to ask questions. Some good questions might include: what is the actual work (sounds like there might be a big monitoring component, which would be fabulous), what is the relationship of the work to the Nations, who else is on the team and what do they do, what is the policy on remote work and flexibility (could I work from over here until I can relocate, and if so how long is that expected to be).

The other is for a Nation that's heavily partnered with a large forestry company, I'm not sure if my credential is sufficient. The Nation is pretty remote but have an office in the biggest city in the area; I imagine the work would be fairly significant telework with an equally significant element of travel. This would be an extremely different employer; obviously a smaller company with I think no other foresters. Small companies, especially "family" (/band?) companies often run very very differently and I suspect I would be able to work to my own hours as I much prefer. Probably I could relocate throughout the region as I chose. I suspect I would be a really significant jack-of-all-trades and that would be challenging with a steep learning curve and no mentorship(?) but might also let me follow my interests a little more. Some questions I should ask: what are the goals or outcomes of the position? How are the decisions which this person will implement arrived at, and how often do they tend to change? Who manages this position? How much travel is expected? How does this position relate to the forestry company with which the Nation is partnered, who does which parts of the process (operational, strategic, landscape)? Will my credential be sufficient? How much mentorship and training budget is available?

Possibilities. None of them are clearly perfect. I probably can't actually afford to move, in the end. But maybe I should talk to some people?

So a thing I've been worried about for awhile happened.

Whatever is going on with my mind for the last couple years, it's included some things like forgetfulness and more difficulty holding thoughts and daily tasks. One of my daily winter tasks involves the woodstove, and that's really a string of tasks: I open the air, open the catalyst, open the door, put wood in, put the de-sooting agent in, blow any shreds of bark or wood off the ledge and gasket seal of the stove, close the door, if the stove is hot enough I close the catalyst (it pretty much stays hot enough all winter), wait until the moisture is driven out of the wood and it's burning super hot (depending on the ash bed, dryness of wood, species of wood, and my timetable this hot-burning period lasts anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour), then close the air down, sometimes in two steps.

I'm always pretty cautious about the hot burn phase. This is one of the two points the chimney will catch fire if it's going to, but also between the catalyst which intensifies the heat, the length of my chimney which creates a blowtorch effect, and the size of my woodbox the stove could overheat, or overheat the chimney, if I left it open to burn a full load of wood from beginning to end. If I'm in the room with the stove I will definitely notice: the fire roars and the room gets extremely hot. If I go upstairs or go outside during this time I am very careful about time, and go back and check every fifteen minutes or so.

Yesterday morning I forgot to close the catalyst. This is relatively minor, as these things go: I got home and saw smoke coming out the chimney, which the catalyst normally eats and spits out as more heat. The stove had burned through a 24-hour load of wood in roughly 12 hours and the house temp was a (welcome, it's been warm out) degree or two cooler than expected. I'd never done this before but it was fine, it just means the chimney soots up a little faster and I use up more wood for a day.

Then, during the hot burn phase last night, I stepped out to load grain into buckets for this morning and kind of shrugged off coming in to check on it for about half an hour. The birch is often slow to catch, but still, this is longer than I normally leave it. I came back in to a very, very hot stove (it hadn't been up that high since last winter I think, or maybe my first fire this fall), a very very hot room, and the chimney clanking and groaning with heat expansion and probably burning off whatever small fragments of creosote that were inside it. Luckily the chimney had just been cleaned a couple weeks ago so there was nothing to catch in it. I turned it down and monitored the chimney and it was fine, but then this morning I woke up and the house was still very warm- I hadn't turned it down enough for the forecasted temperature overnight. I've been adjusting the stove to the forecast automatically for years.

So. I get that doing tasks in what work calls "upset conditions"-- when one thing has gone wrong -- makes those tasks more likely to become an issue. So the one moment of forgetfulness, leaving the catalyst open, means that I'm putting in wood in the evening instead of the morning, so that throws the automatic parts off and makes it more likely that I'll do something like leave it in hot phase too long, and then enough is disrupted that my habit of turning down the stove before bed is thrown off. But. The stove is both very dangerous and is lifesaving here. It's the heartbeat of my home but it's also what keeps my pipes from bursting and my everything alive in the cold spells. I need to be able to use it, and I need to be able to use it in a safe way.

Last night, when I was checking the chimney after the second stove mishap in 24 hours, I asked Threshold if this was its way of telling me it's time to leave. I was talking to a chimney, there was no answer, and there was no major omen unless you count waking up into an extra warm house this morning.

I know I'm overloaded here right now. If I take some of the load off (fewer animals, finish up sewing, scale back on visitor scheduling uncertainties) it might help. But I am thinking about what happens if I don't develop a good community here in the middle term, and exploring options for that; not to lock in place, but to have available.

I'm writing about sewing again, but this is really a post about clothing in general.

Most of the time clothing is at least a little uncomfortable for me. It can be a problem in several ways: it can restrict movement, which then limits my abilities and can also be hard on my muscles and joints since I have to do movement workarounds to accomplish what I need to. It can give me distracting or painful sensations, anything from full-on hives or shooting pain in my legs to just low-level static that I don't notice which takes up some cognitive load to manage. And then, it can fail to keep me protected from the elements so I'm cold (or whatever) (and then can still have those other issues).

Clothing has always been uncomfortable for me so I don't think about it much. I grew up in a place where clothing was necessary for comfort but not for survival and most of my clothing was from thrift stores; it kind of fit, it was made from whatever.

When I was just out of high school, I remember my mom trying to get my brother go to for walks. He lived with dad, and he wouldn't. Eventually they realized that his shoes were too small, so it hurt him quite a bit to walk with her. I remember thinking at the time that limiting comfortable clothing was such an effective way of controlling someone, of limiting their ability to take joy in the world outside their home.

When I first started summer studenting up north I had more freedom to get myself clothing than I'd had before, ever: I was making some money, and it was important that I spend some of that money on clothing that enabled my work; you don't go to the bush in jeans. I bought into a mostly-proper layering system, on sale so weird colours and kind of cobbled together from merino or standard waffle knit skin layer pants with used army pants over them; a wicking running sock with wool oversocks; thin quick-dry tank tops with either sheer cotton men's dress shirts or my one prized brand-name moisture-moving thick wicking long-sleeved shirt; a brand-name slightly puffy zip jacket. I wasn't entirely new to this sort of thing, since I'd been working in landscaping for years, but in landscaping I could work harder when I was cold and soak a headscarf with a hose if I was too hot. It was in landscaping where I started wearing a headscarf, which is possibly the best extreme-weather-mitigating piece of clothing I've found. In timber cruising it was full speed ahead through effectively an obstacle course, lifting legs to step over hip-height or belly-height logs, bending down and slithering under, all that jazz. Then, once I got to the plot, it was standing still and taking very careful measurements for an amount of time, writing it down, and starting the whole thing over again. My clothing also had to deal with unconventional movements: lifting my legs up to belly-button height to climb over logs, or bending to squirm under them.

I more-or-less got the right clothes. This is where I started to learn that clothing didn't have to be uncomfortable, but I didn't fully realize it at the time. I was living in a cold environment so I couldn't use the clothing workarounds I'd used before, light unconfining dresses and tank tops. A lot of people wore this sort of bush clothes to the bush. Cold in the north just didn't affect my body as much. I did notice just a little that when I went back to the coast for the winter I felt freer outside but I just thought I was in better shape, or didn't think too much of it.

Fast forward seven years and a lot of those clothes have worn out. I'd sewn a batch of similar stuff my second year in the bush to supplement what I got on sale the first year; it's much cheaper to sew with fancy fabrics than it is to buy already-sewn objects. I've spent the last couple years buying the cheapest versions of the more obviously-necessary layers (merino long underwear wears out fast, especially the cheap stuff) and my outer layers have been slowly degrading and I've been wearing whatever is to hand overtop: stretch jeans, socks meant to be an all-in-one system, long underwear tops with a scarf since my fancy light jackets have been seriously compromised at this point. My favourite non-farm boots wore out and the new pair, bought more cheaply, is still insulated but doesn't breathe as well so my feet get damp and then cold, especially without a two-layer sock system.

My world gets smaller.

And I don't just mean I'm not as good in the bush. As I conserve that fancy expensive wear for bush work I wear lined jeans or cotton shirts with a sweater in the house or to work, and my world there is smaller too. My house is really unevenly heated, so I avoid sitting in the cooler parts of it. The waistband on jeans or bought long underwear doesn't fit as well, so it does that weird thing where when I sit for too long my legs get jumpy and painful. I spend less time outside since it's usually colder. I spend less time bending and stretching since my clothes have far less range of position than my body does, so I avoid activities that ask for bending and stretching; I sew a little less, I garden a little less, I never spontaneously break into dance in my livingroom. I don't go outside and get down on the ground with the animals as much because the warm stuff I have left is more like conventional sweaters, and it picks up dirt and straw. I'm less likely to go for walks with folks at work because my boots are more slippery on the bottoms than my old ones. My warm gloves wore out so I just don't touch things in the winter as much; not as many projects get done.

And not just my movement is limited. My expectation of comfort reduces as well. Little by little I tune out the scratchy itchy whine of my skin when there's cool pressure put on it, or the hot prickle of bits of straw that aren't excluded by the loose weave of cheap long underwear or by an outer layer that I go without as often as possible because it bites into my upper hips. Little by little I associate being too cold with being out of bed and going about my day is tinted with shoulders lifted and tensed against that discomfort.

None of these are huge impositions. I'm not shivering in a corner over here; if I was I'd get a blanket. I can bend down and touch my toes better than most people even in jeans over long underwear. I don't know whether this is a sensory sensitivity thing, if most people just don't experience this kind of limitation from their clothing. I don't know if this is a poor thing, if most people allocate a larger percentage of their budget and are more able to regularly get clothing that suits their needs.

I do know that it erodes my quality of life.

So this winter I spent a bunch of money on fancy fabric; military surplus and off-print technical fabric to cut down on price. I spent enough to buy maybe even four fancy outer garments. I'm slowly working my way through sorting patterns to fit my body, and then I expect to turn out several years' worth of garments. This post is being written in my second tester shirt; the first one I wore, unfinished and not quite the right fit, three times in the first week I made it. This one I put on to test the neckline (need to adjust it) and I haven't been able to bring myself to take it off. It's comfortable.

I'm looking forward to being warm again, and being able to move again?

But also as I do this I'm feeling so grateful to what allows me to take on this project: some days off over the winter, and lots of time to myself in the evenings. A storage container supplied by a friend that allows me to have enough room to store things outdoors, which allows a clear sewing table indoors for a couple months and which will allow for stored extra fabric. A sewing machine I had the luxury of toting with me through over a dozen moves, and another machine given me by a friend. A lineage of women who sewed: my grandmother's sewing machine that I learned on, my mom's patience and willingness to explain principles and then allow me freedom to play on the machine as a child instead of making it a chore I was doing wrong. A short course in high school that contained a sewing element. An explosion of sewing videos on youtube, which help me understand the flippy funhouse-mirror spatial aspects of constructing shapes out of other shapes. And the time, patience, and cognitive function to think through my plans, to test things, to problem-solve those tests, to try again and again until I understand what's wrong, fix that thing, and manage to do it right. These are all rare in life, luxuries that support the luxury of my fancy garments.

Clothing is one of those things humans do; it allows us to adapt to so many environments. The right clothing allows us to adapt better to environments, sometimes in surprising ways. Tonight I'm thinking about how different my experiences of that adaptation have been, and wondering just how much quality of life could be improved if everyone could access comfortable, suitable clothes.

Outside you will die
In minutes, if you're not
Protected by the warmth of other people's hands
Their labour
The works of their lives

Inside you will die
In decades, if you're not
Protected by the warmth of other people's vulnerability
Their kindness
The communities they build and strengthen

Inside and out we will all die
That's why we mark midwinter
With a fire that dances valiantly against the dark
Against the cold
But every spring the fire goes out

A goose honks protest out in the cold

My heart determines to seek lower latitudes

Hunkered down against the cold all night - my bedroom is pretty comfortable - but when I got up the wall thermostat came on, and when the sun came up it was -36C on the deck. That's Too Cold, and the temperature isn't rising with the daylight as we'd hoped. I was waiting for the temperature to rise a touch before I checked the animals -- no one is up and about out there, they're all staying in their warm shelters -- but it doesn't look like it's going to to that. I am displeased.

The house is making loud sharp noises from time to time. Some of them are icicles breaking off the chimney and falling onto the roof; others are just things shifting and settling. It's over a 50C temperature differential between in and out so I can hardly blame it.

I can see where all the draughts are this morning: the north window has ice on a spot on the frame, the crack between the patio doors (which to be fair always freezes like that) has frost for an inch or two on either side of the bottom, and the dog door seals at the bottom but not at the sides so frost creeps in there too (and the plastic gets a little stiff at this temp, so the outer of the three flaps doesn't always close perfectly, which is non-ideal). It's not cold enough for ice on the inside of the downstairs doorhandle yet.

I cut back the big peppers by the patio door and drew that side of the curtains, which I think means putting a light under the desk for them. Next up will be filming the north window so it can stop blowing cold air onto the sofa. It's a -- do you call it a dormer if it's got a flat top? -- kinda bay window thing and from the ground it looks to not be sealed under the eaves so well either, a piece of wood and some spray foam may go a long way out there. But, not at -36.

I also popped an oil heater in the downstairs bathroom, which doesn't have its own heat, and made sure the dryer vent flap was closed (lint tends to accumulate and prop it open a crack, so I gave it a good clean-out the other day, it does seem to be closing well now). That whole laundry room could use better insulation, including the 6' of dryer vent that I am certain has ice on it right now and including the plywood that the fuse panel is set into (but that's challenging because there are a lot of wires and I'm not sure how to insulate around them).

Work discourages outdoor work below -20C (must work in pairs, etc) and forbids it below -35C. I have to say, it does make me a little nervous to go far in this weather. If something happens I won't have my phone, because the battery doesn't work at these temps, so little things can quickly get big.

Having said that, it's not getting any warmer so I'd better go out and take care of those animals in the scary cold. Bets on whether the water tap is frozen? If it's not, my little polar fleece sewn faucet cover gets "object of the year" award.

A book I've seen recommended and would like to get my hands on eventually: "At The Bridge" by Wendy Wickwire.

https://youtu.be/mQwkB1hn5E8 may have been what was recommended today, as well.

I grew up in a huge (albeit cold and unfinished) house, 4000 square feet and 5 acres for 6 people. There were always places both indoors and outdoors I could go to be alone, private, and safe. In the house if I didn't want to be in my room I could climb through the undrywalled bathroom, over the pile of contruction lumber and down the not-yet-or-ever-wired hallway, into the sauna-without-electricity which was basically an unheated unwindowed cedar room full of spiders, dust, and peace. It felt like the tombs of Atuan, known only by touch. Or I could go upstairs, through the library, into mom's office where she was never to be found during non-school hours since she was doing chores, making dinner, and taking care of my brothers and I could take a book off the shelf and hide under her desk (which faced away from the door). No one could find me and it was warmer in there.

When I graduated from highschool me, mom, and one brother moved into a 42" boat. The boat had three rooms plus a toilet room: mom's room with the shower in it, the front V berth, and then the galley-slash-salon with a couch in it on which I slept as long as I lived there. There was no privacy at all, visual or sound or anything, except when my brother was at school and mom was at work (and she didn't work in the office every day). The boat was (illegally, since we lived on it) moored in the city's downtown and I learned to live in public spaces at that time: the new library, the new plaza next to the transit station, the acres-big park with a bike path encircling it and swings, the big cheap clattering chinese restaurant with a million things on the menu which I could even occasionally afford.

I had no money at this time, I was working a very part time job for minimum wage and I was supposed to be going to school. I'd go to the university and use the computers there but I failed out of my classes pretty quickly; I was too afraid to talk to adults to ask them for help, and too poor to afford the textbooks. I tried to get a job following mom's advice ("just go in with a resume") but through some combination of the early 2000s recession, being too afraid of adults to talk to them, never having been raised around non-abusive adults and not knowing what to say, having no idea what working actually entailed since mom was a college professor and had hoed beans as a kid and dad hadn't worked, being deeply depressed, and being autistic I had a two year job search that failed to get me more than the occasional month or two at part-time minimum wage. At that point it was clear I wasn't doing well in university, and to motivate me mom kicked me out: she said I either needed to pass classes (which I needed to pay for myself) or pay rent on the boat. I wasn't able to do either.

Luckily my boyfriend had started working at a nice job at his mom's workplace at that point, and we could move in together to an actual apartment.

(This is so painful to write about)

For awhile we lived together in a couple of what were probably fine apartments, but that felt amazing to me: carpet! that was less than twenty years old! Smooth, drywalled, mudded, sanded, and painted walls! Molding at the base of the walls! Doors that fit their frames and frames that were finished! Showers with curtains! I felt rich. I was not rich. I was living with someone who we thought we would be together forever, but I was still only working the occasional stint in call-center jobs. He worked at a regional airport, so we lived deep on what were then the fringes of suburbs whose population mostly commuted to the city. He could drive, I could not. The busses to the city took a couple hours, and they did cost money. I grew tomatoes on a south-facing deck, walked to a yoga class and to the local nursery where I hung out, and spent a tremendous amount of time online.

It didn't feel unusual for me to be dependent on my partner, to not be able to leave. I'd never had the option of leaving while growing up, of living on my own. I'd never had enough money at one time to make up a full rent cheque even if I were to take every cent in my account and the change in my purse and spend it on just that one thing.

That was at least two apartments in the suburbs. Long story short we moved to a third apartment in the city to be closer to another couple we were dating. A year or two more went by, maybe more, I'm really uncertain of the timeline at this point. I was completely unable to get work in the city; I volunteered at the botanical garden for years, sold knives door to door for a bit but didn't have the network that business model relied on to sell to all my friends.

Finally one of my friends from the polyamory group had to go on maternity leave; she owned a cleaning business that she'd built and wanted to pass it on to someone. I started cleaning with her and I was completely terrible in the beginning, but she was patient and trained me up for months, introduced me to all the clients, and then eventually left it in my hands.

As soon as I had enough money to pay my own rent, my first partner said he needed some time living apart. I believed him. I suspect he believed him. The last time we ever had sex or an intimate date was in our shared bed, though, because once I moved out he made excuses about not getting together in private, got married to part of that other couple we were seeing, that person vetoed me with him and my other partner (the other part of that couple), and every time we got together for the next several years he'd express what seemed like real interest in meeting up but never actually follow through.

Anyhow, when I moved out I didn't know any of that. I found a room on craigslist in a house full of gay dudes. It was a beautiful old house, immaculately kept, with a big fishtank in the livingroom. At this point I'd developed some social skills but I still didn't spend much time in the shared areas, just up in the little attic room I had my own rights to. I kept my rats in there, my own fishtank for a little while, and my bed: that's all that fit. I wasn't home much: I spent a bunch of time at the home of the couple we were dating (I didn't really know I wasn't dating the one partner yet, and the other was still seeing me), and then my commute to work and back took a couple hours each way on the bus if I wanted to be on time. I learned the city's bus system intimately.

This is when I was first buying my own food. I remember buying a frozen brick of masago, the cheap orange kind full of msg ad sweetener, and eating about half of it on rice, then not eating any again for months. I couldn't leave anything in the kitchen, not even a dirty glass overnight, and friends didn't come to my place.

My home at this point was really the home of the couple I was dating, and my time was spent more there than at the room I rented. I'd swing home, hang out for a day, feed and play with the rats, and swing away again for a day or two or even three, depending on how much the rats were eating/drinking. In the other house I had no bedroom or anything like that, not even a drawer, so I lived with my bag full of housecleaning supplies including little vaccuum on one shoulder, and my big hockey bag full of clothes and books on the other. The other house meant stability though, it was people who loved me at the time, who cared for me and who I spent time with, and I (and partner) had been spending time there for the last several housing moves so it felt stable. It felt like home.

Then came the veto, and that house was no longer mine. I'd planted things there: a pawpaw tree, elephant garlic, raspberries, saskatoons. I'd built a greenhouse. I built a greenhouse in the backyard of the house I was renting a room from too, with the help of my other partner, and one of my roommate's friends offered me a job working with plants. I took it, and for the first time was, not full time employed or anything, but was actually employed by another person in a job where I could pay my rent.

A kaleidoscope of homes and partners follows: I moved on average once every six months for awhile, in with partners mostly but sometimes with roommates. This home had a hole in the floor that let in daylight and then the ceiling collapsed. That home we moved in as a group, lived there for six months while the landlord was always going to install floors, then got evicted when he finally did. This home was a studio space that one partner's brother let us live in for awhile, then kicked us out. That one I couldn't afford when the relationship ended. This one was really too much of my income. That one was a friend's place she rented me while she lived elsewhere, but I got the boot when she moved back in (that one was really lovely, and it's where I was the longest aside from here). There were sublets and sublets and sublets. I kept a PO Box in town, paid for, because it's the only way I could do all the legal documentation things you needed to receive mail for. When I needed to recover a password on the phone to do my taxes I ran through three or four possible postal codes when they asked what mine was.

I played ATM fishing every week, putting in two dollars so I could get at the extra 1.50 in my account and thus debit 3.50 at the store for groceries.

I remember moving my things in a wheely suitcase once in the summer, a gift that my aunt had got for me to pointedly suggest I should move out from living with mom before mom kicked me out herself. It was summer, and they're not made for that kind of use: the wheels melted right off.

If it was the right time of year I always planted things, if there was any outdoors at all. I tried to alway s be somewhere with outdoors. I could afford rent and mostly food, I always paid my rent, and sometimes I'd buy plants. I'd plant them where I was living. Years later I'd see them sometimes, flourishing if they hadn't been removed. I watched the saskatoons in front of that one house grow huge and full of berries.

I never stayed anywhere long enough to pick fruit. Tomatoes, a couple times. Mint, in very different types of locations, yes. I hauled pots of plants from home to home to home on the graces of friends who could drive and were willing to help me move.

I got so good at moving. I only ever had one dresser of clothes. I kept things in steamer trunks and books lived in boxes. The plants were awkward, of course, but there it is. I had a moving company I liked and that I eventually paid for; luckily I had a strong visual style so people would give me clothing they thought I'd like and I didn't have to pay for clothing; I could afford to move. Moving was my poverty hobby and my most expensive hobby.

Eventually my stuff went into storage. I don't remember when, or what spurred it; I think it was the breakup of a relationship where we were living together just the two of us, or maybe it was my decision to go back to school. Everything I loved was in a 10x10 box in an inaccessible part of the city (that is to say, busses didn't really go there) and I was in another box with a moldy futon on the floor, a rabbit, and a dresser in a house that was probably a negative 500k value on the multi-million-dollar lot.

Years later it came out of storage. I'd been at threshold a couple months by then, my own house, this house that I own. I'd been rattling around in it with a set of dishes I got on a facebook sales group, a week's worth of work clothes, a bed they'd left behind, and two of those tall barstools that are impossible to sit on. When all my stuff arrived on the truck it was like Christmas is supposed to be (did you grow up with nice Christmas presents?), all the things I wanted curated by someone who loved me and knew me well: my pottery wheel. My sewing machine. The mirror I liked. My lounging couch. My marshmallow mattress and the bed I can hang clothes on the frame of. Dishes I'd made. Festival clothes, fluttery silk and good for nothing but pleasure. Steamer trunks full of costumes and sweaters and kink gear and unfinished skirts. Boxes of books, and shelves for the books to go on. Old spiral bound notebooks. Booze I'd made and bottled in the hope of someday being able to sit somewhere and drink it.

People who place little value on stuff inevitably have enough money to get what they need, or a corner of their parents' basement where they still have stuff. People who say "it's just stuff?", I have no time for those folks.

Five and a half years ago I moved here, to Threshold, and my stuff came, and it was a completion. Three pieces clicked together: the land, me, and my nest of things. The next year we were evacuated for fires and I had one of the bigger trauma responses I'd ever had in my life: I was displaced, temporarily in someone else's home and unable to spend much time at my own home where I had put in a garden. My other partner was ghosting me and gaslighting me about the ghosting. I spent the weeks of evacuation in a dark dissociated haze where I could barely hear sounds; even with someone who loved me there, even with my animals close to me.

After that it slowly got better. When I came home the greenhouse had grown so much I couldn't get into it; Josh had set up automatic watering while I was gone and things had flourished. Winter, summer, winter, summer again: the seasons continued to come. The apple trees, here before me, bloomed every spring. Every spring! Ice locked the house and slid down off the roof and sheltered it in a cradle of white peace, while inside the woodstove breathed its heartbeat of full to empty, blazing to smouldering, over and over and over and over.

Last summer I was given a couch and put it in the basement, in the woodstove room. The room has a rack of squashes I grew for seed (I mean, also to eat) and is stacked with dairy crates of corn drying for seed. The dog door opens into this room and three cats and two dogs wander in and out freely. I spend so much time here now, sitting on the couch with my feet up on a suitcase (hard-sided, so I can set a drink on it if I need and my back to the firewood rack holding the next few days' heartbeat of heat. The wood stove creaks occasionally beside me, topped with the hum of a little heat-driven fan, and when it's windy I can hear the chimney singing. Outside is the winter's worth of firewood, right outside, the future sitting there in solid form and every week I split it and carry it indoors. Sometimes I go upstairs and get a jar of applesauce from the pantry, from the apple trees that where here before me, and I eat it.

This home makes demands of me and every demand is: stay, interact with me, I'm here, stay, you can't ignore me, stay. These demands feel like love.

I haven't opened every box from the moving years but I'm getting closer. Last night I took a rubbermaid of various things, noticed it was mostly winter gear, and I hung two dairy crates near the door. Shelves are beyond my budget, but dairy crates? I have a source. I labelled one "hats" and one "scarves" (considered, and discarded, "scarfs") and put the combination of work toques and unicorn toques in the one and the scarves from the box in the other. I took some other scarves off my coathooks and put them in too, which let the coats stretch out a little more.

The rubbermaid isn't empty but I'm one step closer to being unpacked. I have years of "important papers" to go through, mostly no doubt taxes and government correspondence about permanent residency and citizenship and paystubs that were so desperately valuable and so desperately hard to manage with all the moving, but can go on the fire now. There's another box labelled "ancestry" sent by my cousin on my unknown dad's side, and I think some sort of catholic baptism thing? My US birth certificate may even be in there somewhere.

Scarves and hats, two steps closer. In the summer I can reverse the crates and put pocket-vests and sunhats in them so I have somewhere to put eggs when I find them. Closer and closer.

The pottery wheel is out.

I've unboxed my sewing machine and ordered the part that got broken at Josh's place in 2016. I've made a spreadsheet of fabrics and put my patterns in one place, together, in one rubbermaid. I've assigned fabrics to patterns, pending toile making (I can't actually sew until the part arrives and I can fix the machine). I've cut out the base patterns, and much to my cat's delight have rolled out the big roll of paper to copy the patterns onto for useable templates.

I carry water every day for the animals.

I split and carry wood once a week for the house.

I move through my kitchen, through my livingroom and its current sewing space but sometimes its butchery space, its soapmaking space, its seed-saving space, for myself.

The wood shifts in the fireplace. The dog exhales and shifts in her sleep, head and limbs akimbo. Outside the geese honk quietly.

Last night there was something that could help me living in my house and I just did it, powerdrill was there to hand, screws were there to hand, I knew what the next months would be like and where I would need something, I put that thing there without it being a wasted effort or a ding on my damage deposit. That's the story. As you see I can tell you stories all day. The stories are just the setup, though, the context and feeling of chaos and kaleidoscope and helplessness and slow inching towards healing.

The noun to all these verbs is me, the person to this home, sitting next to the fire and beside the dog and typing thoughtfully on my laptop. Me, in the same home where last night I hung two dairy crates from an unpacked box, where four years ago I came back to find my garden overgrown and remnants of wildfire smoke still in the air, where five and a half years ago I rattled around on the floor in this basement with a puppy.

Somehow I'm still here.

Somehow life is still allowing me to unpack my boxes.

And you better believe I'm still planting things.

So my internet out here has been a wireless hub that runs off cell signal. It worked pretty well in the beginning, but it's pretty awful now - I stopped doing youtube videos in part because I can't upload them at all anymore, and now I'm beginning to lose video quality. I'm paying $100 for this, and the company that provides it has no interest in assisting.

Much as I dislike Elon Musk's whole thing, and much as I wish the government had gotten in on this, the only other options I have are getting a landline and dialup ($75 or so) or starlink ($140 plus the unmanageable startup cost). I could try getting a cell booster (same cost as the starlink startup equipment but for a much slower and less sure outcome).

I need to pay down a couple thousand dollars of feed debt from the animals, so I don't really have the ability to take on an extra $40 plus the nearly a thousand to get the unit right now.

I may just... go into work instead of working from home for awhile and get rid of home internet, with an eye towards maybe doing starlink once the feed is paid off. There's a touch of data on my phone.

I've been chewing on this one awhile but it's really coming to a head lately. My work stuff still runs, barely, but I don't know for how much longer. I'm pretty upset about the whole situation - the gov is paying companies a whole bunch of money to run fibre down along the southern highway but it isn't coming up here. My understanding is our cell tower is degrading and no one is interesting in maintaining it, which is why it's getting worse out here.

Bah. Infrastructure is so bad out here. Capital investments, but no taste for maintenance. They're putting in a new hospital but they can't staff the one we have, they keep closing the emergency room down from lack of staff.

At very least, the current internet situation is not a disincentive for moving off-grid.

There's a 160 acre place near town. It's off-grid, tucked up against the mountains with it front to the broad valley full of hayfields. There's a roughly 1.5-2km driveway to get there, accessed from the driveway of the house below, which is basically on the road. This drive goes through woods, pops out into a field, pierces into woods again, and then opens into the little clearing in which the house and its 5 outbuildings sit. It's tidily kept, despite the fact that its inhabitants are dead and its current owner lives abroad.

Rumour is, it has a pretty good push-button generator/solar system that the gentleman who lived there made for his wife.

Rumour is, it has gravity fed water.

It's certainly beautifully quiet, remote in a cozy secluded way rather than a frightening way.

It's not currently on the market but when I mentioned having too many neighbours to my friend, she said she thought it may be looking for another owner.

There's a barn and a chicken coop for sure. I've only driven up the driveway and left but the people at the bottom of the driveway, who care for it, may be willing to show me around.

I don't think one can get a mortgage for an off-grid place.

I could bike to work from there, it's on the road to the dump so it avoids the problematic part of the highway I currently avoid navigating. It's 10km to work instead of 13 or so, but not all paved.

I'd said I don't want to do off-grid since it would be too much work, but right now my only grid umbilicus is the power line. My water comes from on-site, in the well (a mechanical powered system, not gravity fed). My sewage goes into my lagoon. My internet is wireless (I'd need starlink up there, I bet).

So it would be learning another electrical system. It would be paring back some electric use, ditching active hydroponics and maybe most grow lights, not sure how much a freezer draws in summer (I turn mine off in winter anyways).

Something something fencing.

Roughly 3 acres cleared and groomed currently, about what I use on Threshold.

SW slope at its back. Olie Creek (the map says) goes along the base of the hill behind it. It would be colder than here, shorter season by a little, I think.

Receiving slope on SBS dw 3, technically.

I could have people there without being watched. I could go outside without clothes and feel comfortable again, which I haven't since the neighbours across the way moved in.

I would not regret having planted the trees here if I moved.

I have no need to move. I can explore this slowly and gently and see what I think.

I do not understand how I can have so much trouble with most transitions, but also do so well with seasons. Still, I do well with seasons. I love the seasonality of this place. I'm fully ready for each season in turn to shift my focus and my activities. Maybe it's the predictability, the feeling of processing through familiar sets of activities and so I can improve or alter what I did previously but don't need to start again from nothing. Maybe it's the feeling of building on last season's work so I never feel disconnected from the past, and knowing next season will build on this season's work so I don't feel that abrupt slicing loss of transition.

Either way, gardening is pretty much over and I'm ok with that (!?!!!???? !! ? !). I have turnips, the last of the soup peas, and some beets to bring in. I have the favas to look over, and the beans to see if any pods ripened. It's been too dry for me to plant winter grains, I daren't run the tiller or I'll turn my soil into dust, so I'll till once the rains start and wait to plant grains till spring. Maybe I'll do a test patch of barley. I've dug one hole for next year's as-yet-unordered apple trees, and I'll try and at least half-dig the holes for all of them, so when they arrive in the thick of spring planting I can just bang them in the holes and be done. The freeze/thaw will loosen the soil at the edge of the holes and help prevent circling roots in my clay, too, and I won't have to remeasure my circles of protection.

I do still have a couple roses to put in the ground, and the garlic that isn't yet arrived, too. But still, hoses and nurturing and watching and trying to guess what'll happen-- that's over. I have a half-dozen dairy crates of corn drying in the woodstove room. There is another dairy crate of corn (saskatoon white) waiting to be shucked, and a crate of melons (none ripened on the vine, but I'm going to let them ripen as far as they can and take seeds from those that have fully formed seeds), and maybe 4 flats of green tomatoes (many of which ripened in the last couple days, gotta get on that). I have two shelves of squash, and outside there is half a bucket of beans and a bucket of cucumbers that need to be pickled.

The barley crop is in, a fact that needs its own post to describe how much of a joy and a relief it is. I don't grow barley but the farmers one town over do; that's why I mostly fed my pigs until this year's shortage. Straw is available, $55 per large bale (that's the 3 x 3 x 8' bales) and I'll be getting some the week Josh comes up and we'll figure out how to unload (normally it's tying the bale to a tree and driving the pickup away from the tree, but I'd like to stack them two deep).

With straw comes the ability to lay in my king stropheria mushroom bed for next spring. I need to put it in the shade, somewhere that doesn't flood. Problem is, the shade is what stays frozen till late in the year, I might split the block and try two places.

With the barley harvest comes barley. Rolled barley, or barley and oat chop, is $450/ton this year. The bagged feed I've been using is $1100/ton, and in the last month I went through a ton and a half of feed. So, just financially, this is a relief. I've been running a negative balance on my credit card the last couple months, just absorbing the higher feed costs, because I can't not feed the animals and I couldn't butcher while it was hot.

It's also a relief to have the barley, and soon the barley and oats, because feed makes a big difference to the texture of the animals' fat. Barley and oats make a firmer fat, while the bagged feed make a softer fat. I prefer the firmer fat. I've read a bunch on this, I guess feeding on acorns makes a softer fat which folks like more in prosciutto but which is not so great in bacon, for instance. Acorns also supply tannins, which keep the fat from going rancid as quickly (smoke does the same thing, which is why so much rustically-preserved pork is smoked). Soft fat is hard to manage for slicing thinly, it's hard to butcher with, and I'm not as fond of the texture for eating. I'm of half a mind to give the pigs a full month on barley before I butcher so the fat can convert a little, rather than get the butcher in as soon as possible. Honestly I may not be able to get the butcher up sooner anyhow, it's a busy season. And my mind may change once it starts freezing enough to put the hoses away and I need to carry water by hand for over a dozen pigs.

I also have four little uncastratated suckling pigs I need to slaughter as suckling pigs shortly. Three of the four are living in the lean-to greenhouse and associated enclosure in a life of luxury as of yesterday; I need to catch the last one and put him in there. I do hate catching piglets, they scream at just the wrong frequency for my nervous system and then the whole herd of pigs starts barking and grunting menacingly and following me around trying to rescue the babies. I understand why the bears stay away. I wouldif I could, my heart is always pounding by the end of it and it takes awhile for the adrenaline to dissipate.

I always tell myself I'll set up a big carrier with feed in it just outside the main pigpen so the escapee piglets get used to it, and then I can just close them in and carry them away. Maybe I'll actually do that this time? There is a new set of piglets this week, and one mama sow I'm very impressed with, she'll be a keeper.

So I suppose this is the season where my attention is turning from garden to animals, from harvest to slaughter, and then from there to seed sorting once the seeds are dried.

I'm also feeling the pull towards sewing, towards warm snuggly clothing. It's still a fairly recent revelation that clothing doesn't have to hurt my body as long as it's made of the right materials and tailored right, and I'm looking forward to playing around with that this winter. The gears are in motion for me to approach that activity in a seamless transition, nosing around at patterns, clearing a table for a sewing table, cutting out patterns, making a mock-up for loose leggings and one for a short sweater or wrap dress to wear over leggings, just a little bit of something every week as the snow comes and everything else subsides.

Meanwhile Tucker is here. I had wanted to do a bonfire with him, as I've intended to do every year for the last five or so, but the burning ban is still on despite the frost -- did I mention it's dry out? -- so maybe we'll try to just arrange the pile for his next visit. In the meantime I get snuggles and doubtless a shared brunch of two, which are much-needed.

Dead dark by 8:30

Getting hard to see the yellow kilometer markers against leaves turning yellow on the forestry roads.

Said roads crawling with hunters anyways.

Bears around every corner, coming in.

House groaning with food.

Cats swarming me as soon as I sit down.

Turning on the big outside light every night to help the dogs with the bears.

Everything burning more calories than normal.

Geese and ducks in ultra-gorging mode.

Piglets everywhere.

RVs everywhere.

Frost in the mornings, outlining leaves on the open slopes.

The slightest resurgence of blackflies.

Where do I put all this stuff?

So much to do before snowfall, how do I prioritize?

Plants everywhere indoors.

Time to excavate the woodstove, it's not a sidetable anymore.

Watching the fieldwork days dwindle as I check off the samples completed.

Thinking of roofs, all the time.

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greenstorm

June 2025

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Greenstorm's Journal

watching the cycle: leaves to mulch to soil to leaves

Entries tagged with north

Sometimes we want eternity

Ok, but work

North

Snipe

Tense

Good, actually: plants, pottery, and internet

The two faces of breakup season

Landscape

Umbilicus

Movement?

Not the worst case

External adaptation

Solstice

Sunlight

First Nations/Work Recommendations

Routine, settling in, and approaching things sidelong (actually just the word home over and over)

Problematic

Away

Every season is the best season

Fall