Greenstorm's Journal

It's cooler out than expected and breezy, every leaf shimmering with movement. We've had a relatively hot several days so the cool is welcome; it gives me time to get more water into the ground before another round of heat. Forecast temperatures of 2C above the recorded highs for the area have shown up, though they keep the same distance day by day, pushed back from Saturday to Sunday to Tuesday as the week progresses.

They've had a weather station here for over a hundred years. The only temperatures that were really close to the forecast were in 1941. It's a good year to be growing tomatoes outside the greenhouse, and to try to grow melons and squash. It's a good year to have a good well. It's a good year not to be surrounded by the concrete of the city.

The wheat is knee-high, as is the barley: the tillering seems to be over and it's shooting up stalks but no heads yet. Flour corn is 6-10" and growing almost visibly; the cabbages and brussels sprouts are also shooting up. The flint corn is slow even though it was planted first, or rather: the gaspe corn (super short, knee high at maturity) is growing well but the cascade ruby-gold isn't doing much. I'm considering planting through it and kind of giving up. I know that bed has a lot of aspen roots but I don't think that's the reason. I guess I try it in a different place next year and see what happens. Tomatoes have settled in their roots and are starting to rise, as are the greenhouse cucumbers.

The melons are growing so well, vegetatively. The squash are a little bit stalled out and I think they need some mulching; I just need to carry bedding from the pighouses over.

I work outside in the garden until 10 or 10:30 most nights and resent the fading light that signals I should come in and have dinner and do people things. This will only get worse now that we're past solstice and down the long slide into winter dark. Granted, after work and chores I don't tend to get out there till 6 or 7 or even 8 sometimes.

The cats miss me; they are becoming resigned to having no lap to sit on in the evenings.

Work is blossoming into field days finally so I get to spend at least some workdays outside. That's important.

My recipe book habit has led me to a pretty fantastic set of drink recipes called "the boba book". So many recipe books are full of things I could have come up with on my own or that are too fiddly to ever do; this one is full of inspiration. It's got, not just drinks with pearls or toppings but such a variety of solid tasty liquids that I suspect it will get me through "the summer is too hot to eat anything other than salads" that seems to be popping up on the warmer days. I'm not ultra thrilled with premade pearls but apparently with some tapioca flour and a thing called a "bait roller" this is solvable.

The rhubarb was so mild earlier this year; now it finally tastes like rhubarb. My wine plans have been encouraged by an older dude I met at a garage sale who gave me some bottles of his several-year-old rhubarb wine.

Group househunting is picking up again; I think we're beginning to refine our understanding of what everyone wants. That's a bit of a relief. It's good to be doing this in a hot dry summer; it's a reminder that Kelowna and Kamloops in the southern interior are semi-desert and both water and heat will be a distinct concern there. On the other hand, Vancouver Island is full of rich white people who hella trigger my class issues. Both are... a little iffy on water on a ten-to-twenty year horizon. We shall see.

Work towards indigenous reconciliation, at work, by government, and somewhat in society generally here has reached a pace I never expected to see in my lifetime. The discovery of mass childrens' graves probably appears to be a precipitating incident but I know that in government this has been a significant project since 2017. I can't guess at what governance or society will look like here in a couple decades and I'm very interested to find out, and cautiously optimistic. I'm hopeful but less optimistic about what this will mean for the areas of social progress that apply to me more specifically: as the Nations rise I hope the combination of christian indoctrination and near-universal experience of molestation from the residential schools can be healed enough to leave room for my relationship style, gender, and sexuality in the future world.

When I lived in Vancouver I figured I'd do my time in the city working on as much one-o-one activism as I could, then I'd eventually feel like I'd done my part and would go live on my own in the woods somewhere. I moved out here a little sooner than expected and it garbled the timeline, but I really do think a break is in order. I miss volunteering and really would like to pick up something like a shift at the food bank again, but I think I'm done trying to convince people that it's ok for me to live in the world. I used to be good at it. I can't, anymore.

The butcher comes on Saturday to reduce my pig herd some. I need to plug in my extra freezer in preparation, and bleach all my food-grade buckets, and do a dump run. I also need to make some decisions: how much to cure, how much to freeze? How many chops? How much sausage? I can manage most of it myself but I really do not want to cut chops myself. Anything with a bone saw I prefer be done by a pro. Then I'll be prepping for a big batch of ramen stock for canning with leftover bones.

Tucker leaves for a week and a bit this weekend, and Josh comes back from his nine day trip out of cell service with the problematic metamour. I should be reaching out to my people to resume contact, but.

The house really is a perfect temperature right now. I'm going to do some work reading, maybe sticky-note the best recipes in the boba book and make an ingredients list, and enjoy the cool breeze on my legs.

Well, that's been a week.

Socialized in-person with someone who's not a partner for the first time since last fall.

Got a job offer if I am willing to split my time between anywhere (remote work) and Fort Nelson (way further away than I am now) with lots of $$$ but also lots of time and effort attached.

Heavy emotional stuff of varying kinds with Josh and Tucker as we move out of covid-normal and into whatever lies beyond.

Dog/neighbourhood issues. Being called by random lawyers asking about my past employment. Chasing a mama pig around for hours.

Two days in the field for work, one with pretty strong wind and some snow/sleet.

The wheat is up, a good 3" tall and growing fast. Cabbages/brussels sprouts are in the garden. The melon and squash transplants really want outside, the squash and the tomatoes are enormous and happy. I put down a turnip/clover mix in the parts of the winter pig field that I'm not going to plant with corn, squash, or tomatoes.

It rained hard for several days and any road that's not paved is very sketchy. Some work folks have sunk in up to their axles in places.

Got plumbers, chimney people, and hopefully roofers coming next week.

Butcher is coming on the 19th to do as many pigs as we can get done in a day, so I also have another freezer coming and I need to clean out the carport to have somewhere to put it.

Yesterday I felt pretty emotionally terrible but spending today in the sun counting little trees for work has helped a lot.

The crows have ripped open a garbage bag full of pig ribs and my front porch looks like a horror movie. I guess that's where I start this evening when I get home.

First sunburn. I'm blaming the vaccine for this one, I've been outside the same amount of time (over work lunch) every weekday for the past couple months, there's definitely something going on with my body not renewing itself properly.

At least my hands have mostly stopped hurting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roko and German fingerling potato planted.

Things I should do this summer:

A few more sheds/animal houses (pig wintering home in back, move front A-frame to the side, and put a shed in front?)
AT LEAST fence off the front yard, the plums, the apple strip, and a piece of the far-back
Front gate?
Buck the wood in the woodfield
Build gates between pig field and wood field, pig field and back field
Reinforce existing fields with pig-proof wire

Swing, swing, swing. My mood is all out of kilter lately. I'm going to blame total lack of physical contact. I think I may prioritize seeking out a snuggle/sex person up here over, say, making rosepetal jam or sewing; fewer (the correct number of) hours in a work-week mean I do have some time to decide with.

I guess I've found myself in a distance relationship. I haven't been in a proper one since way back, when I was seeing Jan. I dug up the album Jan gave me then, downloaded it and looked at it in the music player and felt the sharpest and most physical manifestation of pain and quickly put on a different song by a different musician. That was a couple of hours ago, while Dave was out on a date and I was about to shower after my weekly two hours' lawn-mowing. Just now, as I sat down to write, I put on one of those songs and everything feels familiar.

I was speaking with Graydon the other day about the persistence of self of lack thereof, about continuity of personality. The conversation was about death, but I was telling him that I don't/can't remember what it was like to be me ten or fifteen years ago. I can go read it in this journal, but I can't immerse myself in what it felt like.

I was wrong. This music and this situation can do it. I remember this feeling. I remember how many years it took me to decouple the experience of love and pain, to feel them separately and not as one singular emotion. I have not decoupled them. I have merely sought out the rare, rare circumstances where I don't feel them both at once and spent long enough there that one does not necessarily echo the other.

Necessarily.

I want to tell you something, but I'm not sure how to word it. I guess it's this: I know what I want out of my life. That thing changes, the knowing flickers brighter and dimmer, but the things which guide my knowing remain. I know what I like when I experience it. I know what's good for me. I want the things I like, the things that are good for me.

I also want to cast things which hurt away from me. Or, back up. There are two kinds of hurt: bruises and well-used muscles, adversity that feels good. And there's suffering that doesn't feel good and leaves lingering wounds, pain to no purpose, broken hopes and disappointment and self-imposed loneliness and capricious meanness. I want to cast that second kind out of my life; I go away from it automatically a lot of the time now. But it's not always clear which is which, and it's also not always clear when a little of the latter must be endured to get the things I like or need.

I'm circling my subject. I always do that. I tell stories, speak of the conversations which initiated my thoughts, wander through generalities, and eventually I even get to the point sometimes.

I'm in a long distance relationship with Dave. I initiated that by coming up here and not ending the relationship. But, this is my job, my career, it's what I'm doing. So. I need to have a conversation with him about what happens next. I also need to have a conversation with myself about what happens next. I've thought it might be nice to have seasonal relationships, six months away makes the next six months together so much sweeter, might fit my migratory tendencies pretty well and keep me from sealing my life too closely to someone else's and drowning them too. I need to play with these ideas. I need to maybe try them more fully.

I'm proceeding on my career front up here, but I feel like I'm waiting on my home and relationship front. I'm dawdling along, existing, not pushing anything, just waiting for things to happen to me. That's not my best position to be in.

I should do something about that.