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Mind still bad, but I have an appointment on the 27th with the gyne. That's the day I drop Tucker off at the airport and pick Josh up. Luckily it's a phone appointment so I just need to be in phone service.

Refilled the wood stand in the house, I think last time I refilled it was the 5th, so that's 9 days? Not bad.

Very cold coming up, -34C or so. My upstairs is so draughty/leaky, it's a real problem. I guess I can just bake things all day or do some canning. It's the point where if I wash the windows to put film on them, they'll just ice over (maybe the cloth will freeze to them, depending) and they probably won't dry. Inside the house is warmer than that, but windows just aren't that insulative even when double paned.

Made my potluck dish for work tomorrow. I'm trying the spanish lemon goose recipe on pork, it seems to be pretty ok. May make for a good canning spice inspiration. It can also hang out in a crockpot, which is key.

Hoping tomorrow goes ok. People are a problem right now. In-person people will probably be more ok. At leaat the landrace forum is a nice place to spend time-- that goodness they're moving to a free, reasonably-constructed site.

PS Avallu was sleeping by the fire and ...howl-crying in his sleep? It was a bit eerie. I eventually woke him up and gave him pets.

Check-in

Nov. 25th, 2022 10:56 pm
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So far this winter is about sitting on my new-to-me downstairs sofa more often than not, surrounded by a changing kaleidoscope of sleeping animals. Right now it's Hazard, curled up on his side with his teeth in the air, and Demon, sleeping up on the woodpile behind me with one paw draped over the edge. Half an hour ago it was Avallu on his blanket which serves the function of a carpet in front of the fire and Whiskey on his side with his head resting on my foot.

We've had really variable temperatures. It's swooped from a couple degrees above freezing to -20ishC once already, warmed up, and it's about to do it again. We had some snow, then some fluffy snow, then some wet snow, then some rain, then it froze, then it melted, and froze a couple times, then it frozen-rained. My driveway has about as much friction as wet glass: I should have snowblown it when it snowed, even though it was so few inches of snow each time it didn't seem worth it. Now I have something that would probably be nice to ice skate on.

Hazard has flopped most of the way onto his back and is clearly twitching and dreaming, and he just yowled in his sleep. It was a weird yowl but he's a weird cat.

Speaking of weird cats, last night Someone knocked a squash off the 4" high shelf and rolled/carried it about 8" into the alcove beside the woodstove. The dogs wouldn't go in there, which leaves... the cat Demon? He does tend to knock things off shelves, but I haven't seen him carry a couple-pound squash before.

Both Tucker and Josh are

(he just looooooong mrowled in his sleep again)

coming up around Christmas at different times. I will try to enjoy taking full advantage of the intervening time to sew. I was going to cut out fabric for mock-ups tonight but I put on a pair of half-sewn pants from the last time I did a round of sewing, to see what was up with them. It looks like I hadn't put cuffs or waistband on them, probably because I hadn't finished sewing up one leg, probably because the bobbin ran out of thread mid-seam and I was on a timeline to make stuff for the Cape Scott Christmas backpacking. I pulled the pants on to see what was up and they were so, so, so comfortable that I just sat around spreadsheeting and didn't want to get out of them.
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The first night Josh was here I went to the other bedroom and hung out feeling super sick (with a bucket, just in case, since my bathroom isn't nice enough to hang out on the floor by the toilet) and I was honestly a little concerned. My random nausea hadn't been that bad previously. Then at 6am or something I realized that I'd been at a friend's house the day before, and she had pot plants outside. I'd given them a ten-foot berth minimum, and figured I was outside and I'd be ok, so I didn't think of it as an exposure event but I guess it was. Good to know.

Despite that, and a little bit of residual tired from that, it's been really nice having Josh here. He brought up a ton of produce and I've been making a lot of hot mix pickles (cauliflower, green beans, carrots, hot peppers, a touch of celery, a light brine with 1/3 cup salt and 1/2 cup sugar per pot, which is my preference) to complement my charcuterie meats. I'm always looking for a replacement for my store-bought pepperoncinis, they need to be appropriately spicy and gently salty and have the right texture. Maybe these will be that! Either way, more pickles to have with charcuterie are always welcome; there's nothing as nice as variety in a no-effort (or no effort at the time) meal like a charcuterie plate.

Work is less stressful because last week was the silviculture conference, not the office, and this week is vacation. I'm also making an effort to interpret the rules in non-autistic ways, so when they say "that's not allowed, but you can do it, just don't let anyone know or do it too much, but it's ok to do, but it's not allowed, and don't tell the wrong people you do it" I'll just... do it and not tell anyone, rather than trying to avoid it. In an ideal workplace there wouldn't be rules like that; in a non-ideal workplace that could accommodate me I could ask for what it means, does "not too often" mean once a week? Every two weeks? In a non-patterned way? etc. Being autistic usually means taking people at their literal word and being considered inhuman because of it. There's a real art to managing the space where everyone does something but kinda just says they don't, and I'm not great at it, but we'll try. Either way it helps relieve the stress of ridiculous rules that no one will change because no one follows them anyway so they aren't an actual problem.

I painted some signs last night for many of my perennials: the roses and the gooseberries, mostly. I'm putting little signs on stakes in next to them since all my other labelling methods have failed. A wooden board screwed to a stake is too big for crows or ravens to carry off, and hopefully the paint won't fade (the new formulation of sharpies, I've learned, isn't colourfast in the sun anymore so I lost my labelling this year. Frustrating, because the labels from last year are still colourfast). I wish I painted in a nicer font, but it's still a kind of charming effect to have things labelled.

Josh found a bunch of cascade ruby gold corn ears that were both not frosted and pretty ripe, so that's excellent. I should do a separate farm post for that and the new piglets.

For some reason it's only now, after more than five years living here, that I've realized my basement bathroom fan... doesn't have an outlet on my outer walls. It *may* feed into the sewage siphon tube thing that lets gas up, that comes out my roof, but that's a narrow tube three stories up from the basement. So I guess I need two additional throughhulls in the house: one for a vent hood over the stove and one in the bathroom downstairs. Both of them only need a five or six foot run to get outside, so that's not so bad. It also explains a lot about moisture in that bathroom. Those things are, unfortunately, on the list after the deck (currently collapsing). On the plus side, if I wait a little maybe I'll also replace the awful shower down there.

One day

Jun. 11th, 2022 11:00 pm
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Morning with the landrace gardening crew online, too short as always. Day in the garden working with corn and the tiller and discovering my soils. Evening dinner with J, duck breast and potatoes and caesar salad and music and conversation and hugs.

It was a very good day. I miss my people, but it was a good day.

Now for some sleep, and a morning I don't need to get out of bed early for.

Dislocate

Feb. 24th, 2022 03:44 pm
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The house is empty.

Last weekend we went into the city to pick mom up from the airport, so that weekend was away from home and busy. Then there was the greater part of a week with mom here and sometimes Tucker. During that time the house was busy: mom was in the livingroom teaching a pilates class at 7:30 every morning, we took apart the downstairs and put in some shelves and sorted many things into labelled boxes on the shelves and put down vinyl tile in the downstairs bathroom and emptied a bunch of yoghurt containers and just generally, even when I was at work on my laptop, something was going on. Meanwhile at work my employer is majorly restructuring into multiple units and A & E were viewing a place on Vancouver Island for us all to share and I was scrambling to find feed and get out seed wish fairies and trades. Even when the house was almost-quiet, when mom was writing or hanging out in another room, my attention was more than fully taken up.

Mom left this morning. Tucker started his new job this week. A & E put an offer on the place they viewed (!) and now it's waiting time. Work has given us the larger structure but not operationalized it yet or started posting jobs.

There's a space, a silence. The house is even visually quieter with more things on shelves and fewer things in piles.

I had been settling into some spring routines and those were disrupted and have yet to come back. There's a space where habit used to be. There's a space where planning the next five years in this home used to be.

It's very slightly unsettling but it's not bad. Threshold is inviting me into her liminal spaces, she's pulling me out of the abstract and into the present she's pulling me out of the concrete and into this... space. We're here together.

Even my breathing is silent.
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Bubbles for bubble tea are cooking on the stove. Behind me the aerogarden that I bought to function as a humidifier/sofaside lamp is casting its light. A cat is playing with a jingly cat toy beside me. The dishwasher is humming along, taking my kitchen towards tidiness. A gloom-grey sky is dimming from bright moonlight to daylight outside. I have just eaten a cheese-and-tomato-and-Worcestershire-sauce sandwich on light sourdough rye from the abattoir trip.

Last night Josh got into Vancouver at 8pm, that's a 15-hour drive, and gave away meat for an hour in a McDonalds parking lot in one of the less-great but extremely transit-and-drivable parts of downtown. Everyone picked up; during meat pickup I took a photo series of removing breasts from a duck, wrote it up, and posted it on fb for folks with cooking instructions for how I do my favourite goose preparation. Today I need to do bacon write-up; honestly making those bacon kits was pretty great.

It feels really good to know my food is out in the world, people are excited about it, it
s going to be eaten with respect and reverence. That is why I do this; it's what makes the work and the sacrifice of lives worthwhile; well, that and continuing the breed.

It feels good to be self-willed for a bit, to just do what I want when I want without observing folks in my house and using that to steer my behaviour.

It's hard to know I'm coming up on the time Tucker will leave. It hasn't been addressed between us, not really, and certainly he hasn't addressed it. While on the one hand there hasn't been a good time to do so, on the other he hasn't reached out to schedule that time, just like when he said he'd like a regular relationship check-in and I agreed that would be good but that he'd need to lead the scheduling he did not do that. He likes the idea of these things in theory--

Here I am, centering his perspective again. I'll allow myself time to do that but the time is not now.

It's hard to know I'll be missing Tucker; it's hard to know I'll be alone up here; it's hard to know I won't have anyone nearby for support (who do I put on emergency contact forms when they ask for someone local?). It's hard to know I'll slip away from people a little more and then be annoyed when I have to mask up, to act human, when they want back into my life periodically. I suspect that's one reason I want a local anchor/daily/domestic person: to be my tie to the human world.

The real cold is starting to set in. Water freezes fast and does difficult things. The pigs have deep straw in their beds, the waterfowl are all locked up in the woodshed (I need to run them out some water) and the chickens are also confined. It's hard to work without gloves. The outdoor water tap has been frozen for days, which surprises me a little; something must be wrong and I need to poke at it. Meantime I've been filling buckets for everyone in the bathtub. The fire is down to a 12-hour cycle; if we get much colder it'll be an 8-hour cycle, which means splitting a lot more wood in the cold. I unplugged the outdoor freezers last night.

Cold is the time of year when infrastructure really matters. Having a frost-free standpipe out by the pigs or chickens would be great. Some sort of water de-icer that they couldn't wreck would also be great. The woodsplitter is great. A good coat and decent gloves and a good toque and good boots? They make everything better (are they infrastructure? I think so. Mobile and consumable infrastructure?).

My routines have been disrupted. Whatever I do now will set into new routines; it's an important space that shapes what comes next. My job now is to center my needs, to do what I need to keep the rhythmic stability of the farm seasons which I love, and to keep gently building on community.
greenstorm: (Default)
Bubbles for bubble tea are cooking on the stove. Behind me the aerogarden that I bought to function as a humidifier/sofaside lamp is casting its light. A cat is playing with a jingly cat toy beside me. The dishwasher is humming along, taking my kitchen towards tidiness. A gloom-grey sky is dimming from bright moonlight to daylight outside. I have just eaten a cheese-and-tomato-and-Worcestershire-sauce sandwich on light sourdough rye from the abattoir trip.

Last night Josh got into Vancouver at 8pm, that's a 15-hour drive, and gave away meat for an hour in a McDonalds parking lot in one of the less-great but extremely transit-and-drivable parts of downtown. Everyone picked up; during meat pickup I took a photo series of removing breasts from a duck, wrote it up, and posted it on fb for folks with cooking instructions for how I do my favourite goose preparation. Today I need to do bacon write-up; honestly making those bacon kits was pretty great.

It feels really good to know my food is out in the world, people are excited about it, it
s going to be eaten with respect and reverence. That is why I do this; it's what makes the work and the sacrifice of lives worthwhile; well, that and continuing the breed.

It feels good to be self-willed for a bit, to just do what I want when I want without observing folks in my house and using that to steer my behaviour.

It's hard to know I'm coming up on the time Tucker will leave. It hasn't been addressed between us, not really, and certainly he hasn't addressed it. While on the one hand there hasn't been a good time to do so, on the other he hasn't reached out to schedule that time, just like when he said he'd like a regular relationship check-in and I agreed that would be good but that he'd need to lead the scheduling he did not do that. He likes the idea of these things in theory--

Here I am, centering his perspective again. I'll allow myself time to do that but the time is not now.

It's hard to know I'll be missing Tucker; it's hard to know I'll be alone up here; it's hard to know I won't have anyone nearby for support (who do I put on emergency contact forms when they ask for someone local?). It's hard to know I'll slip away from people a little more and then be annoyed when I have to mask up, to act human, when they want back into my life periodically. I suspect that's one reason I want a local anchor/daily/domestic person: to be my tie to the human world.

The real cold is starting to set in. Water freezes fast and does difficult things. The pigs have deep straw in their beds, the waterfowl are all locked up in the woodshed (I need to run them out some water) and the chickens are also confined. It's hard to work without gloves. The outdoor water tap has been frozen for days, which surprises me a little; something must be wrong and I need to poke at it. Meantime I've been filling buckets for everyone in the bathtub. The fire is down to a 12-hour cycle; if we get much colder it'll be an 8-hour cycle, which means splitting a lot more wood in the cold. I unplugged the outdoor freezers last night.

Cold is the time of year when infrastructure really matters. Having a frost-free standpipe out by the pigs or chickens would be great. Some sort of water de-icer that they couldn't wreck would also be great. The woodsplitter is great. A good coat and decent gloves and a good toque and good boots? They make everything better (are they infrastructure? I think so. Mobile and consumable infrastructure?).

My routines have been disrupted. Whatever I do now will set into new routines; it's an important space that shapes what comes next. My job now is to center my needs, to do what I need to keep the rhythmic stability of the farm seasons which I love, and to keep gently building on community.

Brevity

Nov. 22nd, 2021 10:56 am
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Tucker, my local partner, has bought a condo in Vancouver and is moving there in spring. Both my regular-ish partners will then live 1000km away. I'll be looking around for folks closer but that'll be a bit of a reach. Longer term stuff is not decided but.

My good friend Kelsey is coming to stay from the 2nd to the 12th (unrelatedly!). We can talk for hours and she's super awesome. We're both in kind of rough spaces right now. I'm so looking forward to seeing her. By the end of her visit I suspect I'll have a better perspective on things.

The flooding/destruction of all reasonable (<12 hour drive) connections to he south means that Josh's visit will be delayed till next week, which is probably for the best. It'll overlap with Kelsey's visit a little and that's ok.

Feed prices have risen from $170/bag to $210 and is no longer local due to a bad crop year. I will be doing a very substantial herd reduction both for $ and for my mental health, I need to be able to handle being pretty sad for awhile without being overloaded with animal chores.

I think my chimney is leaking air a little where it enters the stove, that or the gasket around the glass door is finally going. Stove is still workable but is accumulating soot around the glass and I suspect in the chimney faster than it should.

Duck and goose abattoir date is Dec 17th. I need to look into flying the meat down to customers and what that will cost.

Brevity

Nov. 22nd, 2021 10:56 am
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Tucker, my local partner, has bought a condo in Vancouver and is moving there in spring. Both my regular-ish partners will then live 1000km away. I'll be looking around for folks closer but that'll be a bit of a reach. Longer term stuff is not decided but.

My good friend Kelsey is coming to stay from the 2nd to the 12th (unrelatedly!). We can talk for hours and she's super awesome. We're both in kind of rough spaces right now. I'm so looking forward to seeing her. By the end of her visit I suspect I'll have a better perspective on things.

The flooding/destruction of all reasonable (<12 hour drive) connections to he south means that Josh's visit will be delayed till next week, which is probably for the best. It'll overlap with Kelsey's visit a little and that's ok.

Feed prices have risen from $170/bag to $210 and is no longer local due to a bad crop year. I will be doing a very substantial herd reduction both for $ and for my mental health, I need to be able to handle being pretty sad for awhile without being overloaded with animal chores.

I think my chimney is leaking air a little where it enters the stove, that or the gasket around the glass door is finally going. Stove is still workable but is accumulating soot around the glass and I suspect in the chimney faster than it should.

Duck and goose abattoir date is Dec 17th. I need to look into flying the meat down to customers and what that will cost.

Excitement

Nov. 15th, 2021 07:05 pm
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At the end of last week some folks from Vancouver and the Island came up for the weekend-- it had been a couple years since I'd seen them. They had come up previously when Thea was little and before I got Avallu, so that would have been late summer 2017. I drove in to pick them up from the airport in the city and we spent some time eating, petting animals, walking along the lake looking for rocks, and chatting before I drove them back Sunday. We went in a couple hours early to have lunch in town before their flight.

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

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

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

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

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

Excitement

Nov. 15th, 2021 07:05 pm
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At the end of last week some folks from Vancouver and the Island came up for the weekend-- it had been a couple years since I'd seen them. They had come up previously when Thea was little and before I got Avallu, so that would have been late summer 2017. I drove in to pick them up from the airport in the city and we spent some time eating, petting animals, walking along the lake looking for rocks, and chatting before I drove them back Sunday. We went in a couple hours early to have lunch in town before their flight.

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

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

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

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

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

Blur

Oct. 28th, 2021 07:17 am
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Things are so busy right now.

Mom and my youngest brother are here. I'm working, and they are bush days so I can't do home things around work: instead I need to use extra time at home to prep clothes and lunches, check weather, and charge devices. I'm doing this course, which does not have the two hours of homework stated: it's more like 4 or 5 hours extra per week. I'm engaged in this communication/intimacy course with Tucker. I'm trying to get administrative stuff done, like calling the bank to figure out where my money disappeared to (done) or making a dentist appointment (involves being in front of both my work and personal calendars) or talking to someone about my mortgage which is coming due soon (Canadian mortgages need to be refinanced every 5 years). I'm trying to get soap made in exchange for the ring my friend made me, so I can send it down with mom instead of shipping it. And now my new truck needs a new serpentine belt, part of it tore off and is hanging out in there.

Basically I can kind of keep up with doing things, but not with thinking about them. I'd had a lot of space to think for awhile. I miss it? A lot is getting done but I don't get to be fully inside the activities or inhabiting them. I also don't necessarily get to arrange them how best I'd like.

On the other hand it's making for a much more bearable extended stay with mom, I'm just not home or have the bandwidth to be annoyed when she puts the lemon juicer away in the mixer bowl (?) or whatever. I can start playing "where did she put that object" when she leaves.

And meanwhile I'm taking Friday off to spend time here before they leave on Saturday.

Meanwhile days are getting shorter, mud is getting colder, there is frost in the mornings but no snow yet. Mom is tidying up a bunch of stuff in the yard, some of which is pretty welcome. The stove is keeping the house lovely warm as long as a couple windows stay cracked open. It feels like brewing and baking time.

Blur

Oct. 28th, 2021 07:17 am
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Things are so busy right now.

Mom and my youngest brother are here. I'm working, and they are bush days so I can't do home things around work: instead I need to use extra time at home to prep clothes and lunches, check weather, and charge devices. I'm doing this course, which does not have the two hours of homework stated: it's more like 4 or 5 hours extra per week. I'm engaged in this communication/intimacy course with Tucker. I'm trying to get administrative stuff done, like calling the bank to figure out where my money disappeared to (done) or making a dentist appointment (involves being in front of both my work and personal calendars) or talking to someone about my mortgage which is coming due soon (Canadian mortgages need to be refinanced every 5 years). I'm trying to get soap made in exchange for the ring my friend made me, so I can send it down with mom instead of shipping it. And now my new truck needs a new serpentine belt, part of it tore off and is hanging out in there.

Basically I can kind of keep up with doing things, but not with thinking about them. I'd had a lot of space to think for awhile. I miss it? A lot is getting done but I don't get to be fully inside the activities or inhabiting them. I also don't necessarily get to arrange them how best I'd like.

On the other hand it's making for a much more bearable extended stay with mom, I'm just not home or have the bandwidth to be annoyed when she puts the lemon juicer away in the mixer bowl (?) or whatever. I can start playing "where did she put that object" when she leaves.

And meanwhile I'm taking Friday off to spend time here before they leave on Saturday.

Meanwhile days are getting shorter, mud is getting colder, there is frost in the mornings but no snow yet. Mom is tidying up a bunch of stuff in the yard, some of which is pretty welcome. The stove is keeping the house lovely warm as long as a couple windows stay cracked open. It feels like brewing and baking time.
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Yesterday was another appointment with the trauma therapist provided through work. The previous time I'd spoken with her it was pretty useful but this time was, if I'm honest, a bit of a shit-show.

I used the term partner. She talked about my "husband".

She lectured extensively about how women "like us" think about many eventualities at once, whereas men like my husband usually only take one thing into consideration when they're making a decision. Oh, and men are always more worried about financial things.

It honestly was too much energy to deal with it all so I agreed along but it was not comfortable even a little.

By the time she was shocked and worried that if I was thinking about buying property with someone I might want to discuss the exit plan before we signed anything it barely even registered.

The gist of what she's saying is, concentrate on actionable things and take actions, and basically don't think about things where actions can't be taken. Additionally maybe be creative about what actions can be taken because there's usually something.

We also got our "post-covid" flex info from work, we've known for awhile they'd be calling us back to the office Sept 7th but that something was in the works for some kind of remote flexibility.

Turns out their plan is-- I get it, but I don't think it's super well thought out. Basically there's room to work remotely 1-2 days per week for normal folks, then for folks who want to work 3-5 days remote there's a more rigorous process with approval from higher-ups (not that we have any higher ups right now, different story) and you are likely to lose your permanent office/desk.

On the surface that makes sense, right? Not using the desk much, might as well not pay for the space to keep it, and as I've noticed this year it's not really feasible to ride the middle line of a couple days from work and a couple days from home per week without paying for a second set of equipment out of pocket. But it super disincentivizes folks from coming in for a day a week to keep in touch with the rest of the folks in the office and I'm a little concerned about that. Forestry is 10000000% politics and relationships and maybe 2% science.

On the other hand it's probably not as bad for me: my town is in the bust part of the boom-bust cycle so our office is empty on the best of days. I don't think anyone's going to remove my name from my cubicle. And I suppose that in the summer folks are taking a lot of vacation (lifers can have 8 weeks or so of vacation, or sometimes more) and also a bunch of us are in the field pretty often. For relationship-building it might make sense to try to go to the field once a year with almost everyone rather than keep abreast of them in the office. But still.

Speaking of in-person, the parade of summer students is occurring. I took one out two weeks ago (I think?), another one last week, the same one this week, and each in succession next week. I think the following week or two I also will take out the third summer student. The first two haven't been in the bush before and-- I'm glad I checked before we left the office because the second one didn't have any water with him. He also didn't bring the water to the block, so we walked a kilometer and a half back for lunch and to the block again, but I think he's getting sorted out. They are both enthusiastic, polite, and friendly kids.

My ex-previous-job friends were talking about how much energy summer students bring into the office, especially back in the days when there would be 40 of them (I think our whole office is 30 people nowadays, and in the office they were speaking of there were 12 by the end?). I think it's true. Supervising or managing folks who have never had a professional job before, or who have never been to the bush, is sure different than handling someone who has some idea of what they're doing.

These daily writings were supposed to be exploring my emotional landscape but they're coming out pretty much like news bulletins. Well, like news from before the shock and disaster era of news. I guess I haven't felt spacious and energetic enough to really dive back into there. I've been working my way through a pretty great video (youtube https://youtu.be/diE7f6CKj6c ) by Sarah HendrickX called Hiding in plain sight: shining light on women with autism profiles. It's... there's a lot to unpack in it, and I'll no doubt write more about it in the future. It's an odd feeling to be seen in some ways so clearly, but to still have to accept such ill-fitting labels as "woman" to get that info. It's like cutting my arm off to escape a trap, but at the same time once I'm out of the trap I can't drive home without the arm. It's damage.

There are good things in the world too. I got my shipment of Ugandan vanilla beans, which smell truly amazing even compared to other vanilla beans. The tomato trial with seven or eight ripe varieties so far feels like a completion and proper fit of self into the world, more than I can describe it makes me happy. Being happy in that way I wish I had someone to talk about it with, but here we are. It's been cold and raining, below 10C at night and below 20C during the day, so my trial is going to be fairly representative of my conditions and I'm less likely to need to evacuate for a wildfire. The green cherry tomato I got from the grocery store, that I saved seed from, has ripened some fruits so it's early, and they taste amazing even though they're the first fruits off the plant. I am impressed.

I'm just putting off going out into the cold in fuzzy socks to do chores, though, so I'll go get the pigs their bounty of spoiled dairy and their grain and watch the baby geese and maybe harvest some more cucumbers for sunomono. It's definitely sunomono season.

It's good, out there, but it's not enough time to grow back after everything else.
greenstorm: (Default)
Yesterday was another appointment with the trauma therapist provided through work. The previous time I'd spoken with her it was pretty useful but this time was, if I'm honest, a bit of a shit-show.

I used the term partner. She talked about my "husband".

She lectured extensively about how women "like us" think about many eventualities at once, whereas men like my husband usually only take one thing into consideration when they're making a decision. Oh, and men are always more worried about financial things.

It honestly was too much energy to deal with it all so I agreed along but it was not comfortable even a little.

By the time she was shocked and worried that if I was thinking about buying property with someone I might want to discuss the exit plan before we signed anything it barely even registered.

The gist of what she's saying is, concentrate on actionable things and take actions, and basically don't think about things where actions can't be taken. Additionally maybe be creative about what actions can be taken because there's usually something.

We also got our "post-covid" flex info from work, we've known for awhile they'd be calling us back to the office Sept 7th but that something was in the works for some kind of remote flexibility.

Turns out their plan is-- I get it, but I don't think it's super well thought out. Basically there's room to work remotely 1-2 days per week for normal folks, then for folks who want to work 3-5 days remote there's a more rigorous process with approval from higher-ups (not that we have any higher ups right now, different story) and you are likely to lose your permanent office/desk.

On the surface that makes sense, right? Not using the desk much, might as well not pay for the space to keep it, and as I've noticed this year it's not really feasible to ride the middle line of a couple days from work and a couple days from home per week without paying for a second set of equipment out of pocket. But it super disincentivizes folks from coming in for a day a week to keep in touch with the rest of the folks in the office and I'm a little concerned about that. Forestry is 10000000% politics and relationships and maybe 2% science.

On the other hand it's probably not as bad for me: my town is in the bust part of the boom-bust cycle so our office is empty on the best of days. I don't think anyone's going to remove my name from my cubicle. And I suppose that in the summer folks are taking a lot of vacation (lifers can have 8 weeks or so of vacation, or sometimes more) and also a bunch of us are in the field pretty often. For relationship-building it might make sense to try to go to the field once a year with almost everyone rather than keep abreast of them in the office. But still.

Speaking of in-person, the parade of summer students is occurring. I took one out two weeks ago (I think?), another one last week, the same one this week, and each in succession next week. I think the following week or two I also will take out the third summer student. The first two haven't been in the bush before and-- I'm glad I checked before we left the office because the second one didn't have any water with him. He also didn't bring the water to the block, so we walked a kilometer and a half back for lunch and to the block again, but I think he's getting sorted out. They are both enthusiastic, polite, and friendly kids.

My ex-previous-job friends were talking about how much energy summer students bring into the office, especially back in the days when there would be 40 of them (I think our whole office is 30 people nowadays, and in the office they were speaking of there were 12 by the end?). I think it's true. Supervising or managing folks who have never had a professional job before, or who have never been to the bush, is sure different than handling someone who has some idea of what they're doing.

These daily writings were supposed to be exploring my emotional landscape but they're coming out pretty much like news bulletins. Well, like news from before the shock and disaster era of news. I guess I haven't felt spacious and energetic enough to really dive back into there. I've been working my way through a pretty great video (youtube https://youtu.be/diE7f6CKj6c ) by Sarah HendrickX called Hiding in plain sight: shining light on women with autism profiles. It's... there's a lot to unpack in it, and I'll no doubt write more about it in the future. It's an odd feeling to be seen in some ways so clearly, but to still have to accept such ill-fitting labels as "woman" to get that info. It's like cutting my arm off to escape a trap, but at the same time once I'm out of the trap I can't drive home without the arm. It's damage.

There are good things in the world too. I got my shipment of Ugandan vanilla beans, which smell truly amazing even compared to other vanilla beans. The tomato trial with seven or eight ripe varieties so far feels like a completion and proper fit of self into the world, more than I can describe it makes me happy. Being happy in that way I wish I had someone to talk about it with, but here we are. It's been cold and raining, below 10C at night and below 20C during the day, so my trial is going to be fairly representative of my conditions and I'm less likely to need to evacuate for a wildfire. The green cherry tomato I got from the grocery store, that I saved seed from, has ripened some fruits so it's early, and they taste amazing even though they're the first fruits off the plant. I am impressed.

I'm just putting off going out into the cold in fuzzy socks to do chores, though, so I'll go get the pigs their bounty of spoiled dairy and their grain and watch the baby geese and maybe harvest some more cucumbers for sunomono. It's definitely sunomono season.

It's good, out there, but it's not enough time to grow back after everything else.
greenstorm: (Default)
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.
greenstorm: (Default)
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.
greenstorm: (Default)
But I've had so many worse years than 2020.

The years I was in university were worse, especially when I was also trying to recover from my big car accident and didn't realize I had a concussion.

The year I got pregnant over Christmas while working a bunch of different cobbled-together jobs and went to the hospital with a high fever and abdominal pain, then got chewed out by the doctor in the hospital for not being on hormonal birth control ("it makes me suicidal" "that doesn't matter, without it you'll die of breast cancer") and moving twice and maybe there was a breakup in there? was worse.

The year I got kicked out of living with mom and couldn't support myself and moved to a very suburby place and still couldn't support myself and was out of bus range to visit anyone I knew and together with the person I lived with who was paying for my housing we were doing our first major poly was worse.

The years I lived with my dad after my brother died were worse. Tose years were so much worse.

I'm very lucky right now, sitting here waiting for my jars of pasta sauce to cool and my jars for applesauce to sanitize, in a house I own that I may conceivably be able to keep owning through the next several years if the stars align, with life projects that most days feel like they matter to the world and with people who love me and though many of them may be far away some are not.

And I think covid is helping me to realize I don't really like travel much anyways. I'd rather people came to me. Ha.
greenstorm: (Default)
The breeding trio has gone off to a home in Burns Lake. They loaded well, UV took a couple minutes but the bones and veggies left over from making chicken stock were good lures. I'll miss them: Acorn and UV and a nice spotty girl.

The pekins have settled in as if they were born here, basically spending half their time as geese and half their time as ducks.

The ducklings from under the snowblower have finished feathering out. Potatoes are fruiting-- and still flowering. Apples are getting fat and losing their sour, though it's only the less-tasty of the two apple trees with "bigger" heavily loaded apples this year. Wednesday night is supposed to be down to 3C and raining -- so likely not frost -- but ouch.

I'd better bring in the green tomatoes soon.

I canned a bunch of chicken stock and started organization of the pantry. It'll need more organization but what doesn't?

Tucker and I got the quail sorted too: twinwall poly instead of mesh for windows, mucked out and clean woodchips, birds ankle-banded by batch and with the roosters marked. Chicken coop next! I got new brooder plates so I can continue using Rubbermaid bins as brooders, the bathtub just isn't as good.

We also had a really lovely date weekend watching 90s and modern Dr Who, lots of snuggles and sex and feeling close, and just generally being together. I really appreciate our connection right now, especially the way it leaves room to move in and out of proximity with each other yet still know we're solid and loved.

Still on the to-do list: eggs set, turnip and beet pickles, sauerkraut, roosters killed, firewood sourced, chimney cleaned.

Sprucey

Jun. 9th, 2020 01:14 pm
greenstorm: (Default)
Today was pickled spruce tip day, and also spruce syrup day. I want to do a big batch of spruce tip syrup and freeze or dry some to use like rosemary, too.

The spruce tips *definitely* change colour when they are heated.

Yesterday compost/peat mix was delivered to expand the garden, and last night we had a frost that was (finally) worse in town than it was here.

At 1am or so Demon came home, he's been gone over a week and close to 2. He seems snuggly and yowly and normal, not particularly skinny or unkempt, so I expect someone else was feeding him. His fur is pretty fluffy so he may not have been sleeping inside though. He maybe acts like he's been getting wet food, when I feed them their dry food he stays as if he's expecting something.

Whiskey seems annoyed with him.

It's been a super long time since I did any yoga, I headed over and did some with Tucker yesterday morning. It was excellent for my mental health but goodness am I still and sore. I should definitely keep that up.

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