Greenstorm's Journal

Sat, 02 May 2026 16:48:12 GMT

Yesterday I did my first sustained whip-and-tongue grafting. The rootstocks were pretty small and I only got through maybe 16. I only cut myself a little, shallow cuts that really only prevent me from working on the wheel and not from doing anything else (the clay packs into cuts with the pressure I put on my fingers and tends to infect them).

I don't love the tape I was using, some kind of micropore stuff. I realized only late last night I could use wax resist as, well, wax, so I need to do that this morning. I'm very very very curious to see how well they do. I had some hose issues etc so they got wet after being wrapped.

I still have at least a little of all the scions left, abotu twenty more rootstocks, and lots of wild saskatoons. I'm going to try some chip budding, try adding some bits to my big trees, and adding bits to the saskatoons. But, not today. Today I recover from last night's party across the way, and from the concentration needed for grafting yesterday morning.

I want to say it's easier than I thought, but that depends on whether anything takes. Rootstock and scion the same size would help a lot. Better tape would help a lot. A proper grafting knife, really sharp, did help a lot, and I only started getting cut because I didn't resharpen halfway through.

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Sat, 02 May 2026 16:41:52 GMT

I'm very grumpy today. The neighbours across the way had a party last night that started with several hours of dirt bikes in the afternoon running in circles and up and down the road, punctuated with occasional screams and crash type sounds. Then loud music, lots of swearing, some fireworks shot into the yard beside mine (which isn't theirs), doing dirt bike jumps in my ditch, parking in the middle of the road and swearing a lot, driving probably well over a hundred up and down the road, more swearing, and then at midnight-thirty turning the music up and angling a dirt bike so the light shone into my bedroom window for an hour and a half (I think they were trying to angle it across the yard to give themselves light to party, but it was an unfortunate angle). Right before the sun went down the dirt bike people went from jumping my ditch to slowly cruising along my fenceline. I am not sure any single one of them knew a word other than "fuck", at the very least it was more common than any other word or punctuation, and one had on a shirt that said "team shit stain" which at the moment I find hard to disagree with.

I was kind of hoping-- there were some kids doing 140 down a side street (km, not miles) when I was first here and they got into an accident and the engine flew out of the car, went through the roof, and got caught in someone's roof rafters in one of the houses next to the road. No one was badly injured somehow, and I'm not sure whose insurance handled the re-roofing, but you sometimes do wish for something like that. I'm not proud of it, and I'm reasonably sure it wouldn't fix anything.

The pigs did not like the loud noise and broke out of the pen -- first time they've done so -- to shelter on the opposite side of the house from the noise. Thea eventually came in and asked me for help. Solly had trouble staying calm on her walk-- to be fair I did too. The white crowned sparrows that had been around my place for the last week all left, though they're starting to come back this morning.

So today I build a new pigpen in the back, run the hose out there, and try to stave off my crash till Monday.

Next week I should definitely deal with the downstairs bedroom and move down there.

Just think, if I had a solarium on the front of my house there'd be one more wall to block sound.

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Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:25:30 GMT

I'm starting to harden off some of the tomatoes. Some of the others are still being potted up. My general tomato growing principle is to start enough that they don't all fit under my lights along with everything else, but bring them outside for the whole day for the last couple weeks to a month, and just bring them in and pile them everywhere the rest of the time.

It's chaotic, but it's using my house in the way I prefer to. It also results in very well-hardened-off seedlings, and somewhat clear surfaces indoors after everything is planted out because all the surfaces had plants on them.

Yesterday I planted chiddham blanc wheat, the going to seed parsnip mix, and sprinkled some black swan poppies over them. This is in the upper field, in one of the bays between apple trees, which is also how I planted the favas and radishes. It'll be the second time I plant parsnips, the first was maybe year 1 or 2 of my garden and they didn't germinate well, or maybe I just wasn't prepared for how slowly they germinated. It's also an interesting test of the wheat; I planted it in June or July previously and it overwintered gloriously and grew well. This, well, we don't seem to be having a spring this year so I'm not sure if it'll get its vernalization (cold temp) in order to grow properly, or if it'll overwinter. We'll see.

In theory planting grains like barley and wheat and rye in the late summer lets them establish, then they overwinter and use the water from winter in order to fruit. It's a strategy for the same climate as bulbs: find some way of using that very early water (and in a deciduous forest, sun, but that's not relevent to these particular plants) and then be in a dormant state, either seed or bulb, during summer drought.

We're catapaulting right past spring though. It hasn't rained since that last big snow, and it's not going to do more than sprinkle anytime in the forecast. I've had other years where I find it so strange to be watering a month before last frost date, and those are the years where fire seems close and scary. Nothing is leafed out yet. We are getting very hot days right now, and a bit of frost at night.

Deciding when to plant is maybe more dependent on soil temperature than air temperature. If the soil is warm, throwing something over plants will protect them from frost because it holds the heat the soil is radiating up. If the soil is cold there's not so much heat to radiate up, and the plants can be frosted regardless, and they'll also grow slowly. These hot days have me wishing for a soil thermometer.

The ephemeral creek has dried up into wet mud, which means I need to keep more of my own water out for the birds. I finally blocked off the greenhouse yesterday. There are four geese sitting in it, and I had a delightful moment when I stepped into the greenhouse and all four turned their heads in perfect unison and hissed at exactly the same time. The sitters are 4 saddlebacks and 1 mixed girl. Everyone else is excluded from that garden now. Goose eggs take roughly 28 days to hatch, and usually geese don't start sitting full time until they're more or less done laying, so there should be young ones at last frost date. Then I can move them. If I make a covered enclosure to the south of the greenhouse they can hang out there and suppress weeds while being safe from ravens. I wonder if I can do that in 28 days? I wonder if I can block them in the greenhouse somehow so I can plant half of it (they're all on the south side)?

Come to think of it, it's warm enough that I could keep my tomatoes in the goosegreenhouse (which is different than this greenhouse, which currently houses geese) if I kick everyone out.

I'm really very interested in this batch of tomatoes.

Some of them are from the sweet cheriette/karma miracle cross, and we're into the F4 this year. That means last year I grew out a diverse set of plants and selected seeds from different ones, which got labelled things like "prolific cherry" and "two largest fruit plants" so when I grow out seeds from those I get to see both how much diversity there is within a selection and how different the selections are from each other. I only have between 6 and 12 plants from each selection but it's still neat to see the differences. I'm also growing out some of the uluru ochre/mikado black ones, some from black fruited and some from ochre fruited selections, and of course those throw some very obvious dwarf plants, which is always neat. Then there's some of the silvery fir/zesty green ones, some of the original zesty green plant seeds (which I now know was a natural hybrid plant) and some of the red-fruited seeds from one of the selections of those seeds, and then a bunch of F1s I didn't realize I had lying around.

And then of course the usual mix of fancy long season (relatively) tomatoes and short season/cold hardy ones, including a new saraev one, saraev spring frost and one of the "sub arctic" line which I remember reading about as a kid.

Next things to plant: dango mugi barley, ceres wheat, martoc favas, root veg (turnips, carrot) which I'm not sure where they'll go, and I'm considering planting corn under clear plastiic on the south slope because it is WARM.

I would also like to put up the rest of my concrete reinforcing wire trellises and get the acorns in the ground, but to do that I need to prep The Circle and that requires a bunch of raking, which I find challenging.

Theoretically my rootstocks are at the post office for pickup today so I can also do some grafting as soon as they start waking up.

There's always more to say about the garden but that feels like as far as I can do memory and cause/effect thoughts before my mind snaps. Neat to walk to the edge and stop, when so often I've had to push past that and have it snap aand just be blank for so long.

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Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:06:58 GMT

Using my writing capacity for journaling instead of disability emails and paperworks makes a huge difference to my state of mind. I guess journaling is one of those very standard mental health things but if I say "disability paperwork won't allow me to take a pill" folks would be horrified but "disability paperwork won't let me do one of the most gold-standard other treatments" it's just kind of ok I guess.

Being able to rest also makes a difference. I can get back to real rest - eyes closed, quiet room with maybe a podcast that I kinda follow, or else sleeping -- from after my 8pm walk to Solly, interrupted for the 6am walk for her briefly, and then again resting fully until noon. If I do that, having the computer open for a couple hours scattered through the day, either journaling or watching youtube, doesn't mess me up as much. Then I start bedtime preparations at around 4pm, in order to have teeth brushed, dinner eaten, and maybe even showered by Solly's 8pm walk.

It's a long way of saying that I'm starting to feel a little better. I'm not recovered physically at all, and the inevitable weird new symptoms have shown up, but I'm reminded that there are reasons to continue to exist. I just need them to be a reliable part of my life.

"Just"

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Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:03:04 GMT

I divide the creatures in my house into two categories: agents of order, and agents of chaos. Some of us, like Whiskey, like routine and will enforce it and also positively reinforce those of us who do it. Others of us, like me, will tend to disrupt routines and just do random stuff. Avallu was an agent of order. Little Bear is an agent of chaos.

Solly really likes order, and she gets some with the walks etc, but I can't always remember what the order is supposed to be. Do I feed her after the second walk, or before the first? I know I was trying to set a routine but I can't remember which.

The days are getting hot enough that for the two afternoonest walks she mostly wants to lie in the shade instead of walking, though walking for physio is necessary, poor girl.

She is infinitely forgiving with me though. Absolutely the softest and snuggliest and most accepting floof. Basically a giant pipecleaner dustball with puppy eyes.

We're also developing, I want to say a communication system more like a horse through the leash. I have a couple sounds I make to get her attention or say, yes, this or no, not this. I also kind of... twitch the leash across her back to communicate, or do a slightly firmer pressure on her collar with the leash if necessary. We walk with a loose leash and her leading with me steering from behind when necessary. It's super interesting.

And she is starting to learn the word "home" now.

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Body/Garden

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:14:24 GMT

I made it outside yesterday. I have to, to walk Solly, and during our second walk we wandered into the shade at Avallu's point and sat there where he always used to. She was very happy to curl up next to me with her head on my lap sometimes or in guard position others.

A couple days ago (?) I'd visited someone* I knew through the pottery studio. She had got her own kiln and stopped coming in, but she owns the florist in town and now sells her work through there. She's added bigger pieces to her repertoire and refined her mug forms and it's neat to see.

Anyhow, I stopped in to the store, chatted a bit, looked at her work, and also asked if she had spare cardboard because the rumour mill had mentioned she might. Well! I came home with a ton of cardboard and some bubble wrap and that foamy sheet stuff. She was grateful to be rid of it and I was grateful to have it, I guess she needs to spend $100/month to get rid of it otherwise.

I use a lot of cardboard to mulch berry shrubs and to lasagne bed new beds. In fact, lack of cardboard stops me from doing a lot. This huge batch of it, in very useful huge pieces maybe 3' x 5', removes a significant bottleneck for me.

And packaging material means I can send mugs to people and all I need is the right sized box, I don't need to either store up amazon packaging for months, pillage the newspaper recycling in the mailbox and crumple it all up, or buy like $4 worth of filler in addition to the extremely high cost of mailing from here.

The packaging material is still in the back of my truck, but the cardboard is all staged. Last summer I hired a neighbour to burn the tops of aspens I'd had cut down along my fenceline and hadn't been able to deal with. There were a ton of aspen suckers, which I slowly picked away at. Last fall I ran a row of perennial beds, slightly raised, made with the trunks of those aspens and cardboard along

(shoot, that's about as much coherence as I can easily do in one writing. It's the reaching back and trying to order/correlate events, put causality on them, remember details, that's what runs my brain into a wall)

anyhow, I made a strip of beds parallel to the fence for peonies, and now I'm making another strip of beds, slightly terraced down the slope and closer to the fence, in which I will put hazel and oak and some taller decuduous trees to help screen the yard (elm, hackberry, and ash probably). YEsterday I (slowly) put down six pieces of cardboat and moved two logs in the space of maybe an hour and a half.

In the evening, after lots of rest, I planted my peas after bending some concrete reinforcing wire in half the long way to make a trellis (I did this with my feet and was pleased with the result).

So: lots lots lots of gardening relatively, and I'm happier today. Happy because distracted from my overall situation, and because I'm embedded in the immediate world instead of thinking about dedicating half my life to doing paperwork that, as above, stops my brain but I need to just keep doing it liek reaching my hand into the fire over and over for months on end.

Anyhow. IT was good. NAvigating staiirs is hard again today, I'm writing this in part because I'm waiting to be able to get up out of bed to go and pee before going back to sleep. The things you take for granted, riight?

*I visited her in her shop, which made it easy to leave when someone else came in

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Sat, 25 Apr 2026 17:05:59 GMT

Dammit. Yesterday the guy came to quote the fence and I headed to the back with him, then came back along the side fence and showed him where the gate needed to be cut. I hopped gates and climbed fences and ducked trees at my previous pace, not thinking much, and by bedtime I was at 8200 steps according to my not-super-accurate-but-still watch.

When I take Solly out I'm careful to do a gentle stroll. She mostly leads, so she can sniff and decide which parts of the fence need to be shored up with a poop marker (she will only poop within fifteen feet of a fence, and ideally within 5, and at distinct intervals along it. Like night barking it's part of guarding the property). I'm mindful that we need to walk 4x/day, which is a lot for my body, and I do what I can to mitigate that.

When I garden I have alternating short exertion and long slow periods. Last year I was able to develop an internal sensitivity that let me know when to rest.

I was not doing any of that yesterday afternoon, and though the guy was only here for 20 minutes I'm noticing distinct difficulty using stairs again today. I have all my day's food in the fridge but I'd soaked my pea seeds and really want to garden, and Solly will need her walks.

It's just so much harder to attune to myself around people. As I've said before it's probably a lot of habit. I know I haven't developed the skills to communicate (verbally or nonverbally) that I'm just done and need to stop or slow down even when I notice it's something I need. My habits around interaction developed before all this, at work and in groups of friends, and it will take a lot of repetition to change them. And, not being around people much, I don't have a lot of repetition.

When Avallu would nip at people who tried to come through the gate, I picked up a visceral "hand raised, palm out, just above belly-button height" gesture from one of the work violence-in-the-workplace webinars. Saying "wait, stop" just made people step closer to the gate to talk, but if I did that gesture big and confident, they less often came closer. It didn't need a ton of explanation, I could do it, get myself to the gate or grab Avallu, and then just pick up talking as normal. It's a gesture that communicates on its own, and breaks the person out of their automatic movements.

I need something like that for "I'm just done". Sitting on the ground doesn't do it, and if I'm just done I may not be able to get back up. Yawning is rude. Maybe massaging the bridge of my nose or temples, which is kind of a headache-signal?

I'm writing because I want to be outside and I'm disappointed and trying not to think about it, but this writing is also using my energy.

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Sat, 25 Apr 2026 16:08:19 GMT

It is such a relief to be able to go outside instead of staring at some words or numbers on a screen uncomprehendingly, losing time and or falling asleep, staring again, typing a bunch of stuff, realizing my fingers are on the wrong keys and deleting it, forgetting what I was going to type, and staring at the screen again.

This post brought to you by the disability people confirming they don't need anything more from me right now, and deciding to not go after my employer for messing up my tax forms, and deciding to file my taxes slightly wrong because of that.

I've also got someone to come and quote doing the back fence properly; I'm losing poultry to the foxes and garden to the deer pretty fast right now, and will continue doing so until Solly is better or I get another trained dog or I get decent fences. We'll see what he says for cost. I'd already bought the wire a couple years ago, hoping to do it myself, but that won't happen since I can no longer actually lift the rolls of wire, so we'll see.

I don't love my animals being eaten.

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Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:48:26 GMT

I planted the first seeds yesterday: the fava mix I've been shepherding since the beginning, a pink hybrid radish called Orient Ruby, and Olympia spinach. Both big radishes and spinach are sensitive to daylength, which often means they can't grow well in spring here: by the time the soil is thawed, the days are too long for them and they bolt.

I don't do any gardening for certainty. I do it to learn the plants.

In any case, I planted them in the upper field in one of the bays between baby apple trees and covered them with frost cloth. Instantly Little Bear and Hazard came and played in the frost cloth; Bear absolutely adores going under fabric and skulking. I'd forgotten about that. Last year he would run straight through the relatively lightweight cloth.

Next is grain and peas. I haven't grown peas much, but I'm trying for more diversity than just tomatoes this year. Last year the fennel, kohlrabi, and broccoli were such successful additions that I'm following that path a little more. I also have a bunch of old soup peas, of course, I can't remember the provenance of the oldest ones but still. And I want to plant my dwarf soup peas again if the seeds will sprout.

I got this out to write because it occurs to me that I don't do art about things, for the most part. If we're going to consider pottery art and gardening not-art, I still do them both in order to be inside the thing I'm doing. Everything is aligned: mind, body, that whole subconscious apparatus that figures out how to interact with the physical world and performs the calculations necessary to throw a ball, the discernment apparatus and the appreciation one. Everything works together in one direction.

I have done pottery about wildfires. I have and will do it about The Waste Land. And I will eventually do it about Avallu. Those are important things.

So you'd think I'd do pottery about the garden. I don't. My experience of the garden might inform my pottery but it's not a thing I alchemize into some body of work. I'm not sure why that is.

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Just plants

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:11:20 GMT

It's hot out! Still frosty nights but probably over 20C during the days. Solly lays down every time we go through shade on her walks, and really is only enthusiastic on the morning and evening ones.

I tried taking off her cone today. Fingers crossed for us all. She's a licker, but she was busy cleaning her front paws, and I'm hoping this will let her get at her bones and toys better. Besides, she was flexible enough to be able to reach and lick her wound with the cone on these last few days, I guess her leg is feeling flexible again.

I got the tiller working. It required siphoning out the old gas and putting in new. You're supposed to run the seasonal devices dry before storing them but I can never bring myself to do so. Maybe I should put the snowblower away and give it a try, anyhow.

The upper field is dry, the back field is a little squishy still but the puddles are gone. It's fascinating to use crocuses as microclimating tools. Places I'd think would be warmer, like a west slope, end up not being because of a couple degrees of angle in the wrong direction or a brief string of shade that I wouldn't expect to last long enough to have that impact.

All my apples in the main orchard are nicely woodchip mulched from last fall. I put in daffodils but the woodchip mulch is a ridiculous insulator: anything under it is still frozen, including any hose that runs under woodchips. The only exception is my perennial beds, which were layered woodchips and compost and maybe are just warm from compost still, or maybe the raised edge is south-facing enough to counter it?

About half of my scionwood has arrived. I'm going to try grafting one of everything on the wild saskatoons and one of everything on siberian crabapple rootstock: you can get two grafts out of a stick, usually.

I replanted some of the basketry willows along the ephemeral creek, some had grown up but geese had eaten others. The geese are excluded from the area currently, though it's occupied by a half-dozen muscovies who can fly around causing trouble.

The favas soaked last night, so I'm hoping to get them in the ground today. I should interplant them with spinach or radishes, something short. I had also considered alternating rows with a grain, wheat or the barley. I'll see what I do, I guess. They'll need watering whatever I do; we haven't had rain really, though that most recent snow was a lot of moisture for snow.

The first wildfire started in the area, though no one is worried about it. It did make it to 3ha, when usually they get caught below 1ha.

I'm mostly not heating the house anymore. Until the leaves come on the deciduous trees it's greenhousing when the sun swings around to the west. The point of sunset is moving really fast right now, but that's around 4pm at the moment. The temperature inside shoots up to 30C or so, I open the windows, then close them on the way down. By the next day midmorning the house is down to 18 but then it started to warm again, slowly then quickly. The basement has a tiny bit of heat going into it but that's mostly from the growlights down there.

The thermostat down there still doesn't work in spring, though it works in fall. I'm sure it has to do with the way the air flows through the area but it's deeply annoying. If it did work, I could keep downstairs at 20 and not have such extreme fluctuations, but it just doesn't turn the baseboards off when things heat up. Problem for another time.

Anyhow, gardens are good.

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Season chat

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:27:31 GMT

I slept for the significant majority of the last two days and three nights, aside from Solly walks and feeding animals. When I wasn't sleeping or walking Solly I was mostly laying down, though I did take an hour total to work on pottery in there.

I'm not better -- my body hurts quite a bit in many ways, I'm still weirdly weak -- but my feelings are starting to live within perspective again.

It was actively hot outside yesterday. I want to get things planted, the cold weather seeds outside like favas and peas, the cool weather things inside like broccoli and fennel.

Today I get my summer tires put on. They're slightly more fuel efficient than my winters, and we may get snow but I don't think we'll get hard cold anymore.

One of the muscovy males who hatched here last spring has picked a harem and they can all fly really well, so they wander around the property being ultra ornamental. It does mean I'll need to cover any seeds though, extra well because there would be crows even if I didn't.

The crocus are coming up in the warmer places. Those I planted two falls ago have multiplied into tiny clumps. This is the first time in my life I've had a garden with bulbs long enough for them to multiply. My alba roses -- cuisse de nymph, chloris, and bellle amour -- came through the winter well, though I guess that's not surprising since it was a mild winter and this is their third (?). The romance cherries on the south slope look good too. One is suckering quite a lot, which I think means it's Valentine(?). I need to re-mulch that slope with cardboard, a bit of goose muck, and woodchips. It helps keep the grass down and the water in.

I'd also like to put in the second terrace down the slope in the front yard, but that's less pressing than many things. The lower oak circle is maybe more of a priority. I don't know how much of the upper back oak circle survived, but when I do I need to sort out seeds to complete it.

The cats are deeply happy. They've been bringing in the most ridiculous number of fat voles, as well as (sadly) a couple birds. They romp and frolic. Whiskey and Little Bear especially do long sprints. When I take Solly out at night they all come out and spread out like a security team across the area, all within sight. Hazard pounces on every spruce cone in case it's a vole and accompanies Thea on walks or Siri on hunts on the south side of the front yard.

The non-flying birds are confined to the back. I'm not counting them daily, though with onlly Thea on duty I worry. I'm getting a quote for fox-proof fencing across the midback, behind the current fencing, and kind of hoping 1) I can afford it and 2) the foxes all eat enough eggs they don't need to kill birds, and then I get the fence up before their kits are hunting age. I have lost a rooster to a hawk or owl strike (they come down and break the neck, so even if they're fought/scared off the rooster is alive but unable to move the neck right and soon dies) but only one so far.

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Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:34:22 GMT

Yesterday I drove to the clinic and made them show me the fax cover that said they'd successfully sent my medical records to insurance, after a couple days of "yeah well maybe tomorrow". So that part is over, though I should send insurance a note to let them know I've sent the papers. Insurance will 95% send me a paper letter saying I haven't, which will arrive two weeks after next week's deadline. In the past I then contact them, they say it's my responsibility to figure out if the papers got to them and they can't tell me if they have them, then eventually say it's probably ok if I have some sort of proof and they go silent for awhile.

Which is to say, the relentless stress of the thing is supposedly almost over for a bit. I may also have got near the end of the wait list for one of the specialists, though this specialist tends to do some sort of group presentation things instead of one-on-one. I have doubts as to my ability to sit through a group presentation talking about, for instance, possible medications and when and what dosages are needed, then interpret that correctly and convince my personal doctor to prescribe it. At the moment trying to follow a complex or demanding youtube video or audiobook -- which I can stop and repeat -- will make me either fall asleep or lose ability to follow after 7 minutes.

This is why I like Agatha Christie: she's easy to follow and I've read them all lots of times, so missing chunks isn't so bad, and I know where to rewind to if I've missed a bit.

Anyhow, no use borrowing trouble about the specialist. If they accept my paperwork; and they don't try to put me on a return-to-work plan which I think could lead to me losing disability if I can't manage it; and the canadian disability they asked me to apply and then request a review of when they rejected the application, if that doesn't somehow reject me from insurance because I somehow applied wrong because I didn't hire oen of the application services...

...if those things happen, then I have until winter before I have to do it all again, which means I have some time in which to live my life, in an average of two hours a day. A lot of that life is walking Solly until her leg heals; it's going around and looking at the garden, which is good, but not really with the ability to stop and do anything in it, which is a bit frustrating. We're still getting solid frosts but we're in the teens during the day now, sometimes even the high teens (c).

When I've got some recovery in me I might even be able to clear off a surface or part of the floor and wash it. Imagine having an uncluttered couch or a table or a kitchen counter or no mouse blood on the floor and stairs. My current self is deeply grateful to my past self for keeping the dishwasher going, at least, and taking the occasional set of garbage to the dump (we don't have garbage service here).

At equinox I cleaned my pottery studio, which set it up so that I could easily use porcelain (it's very white so it prefers every surface to be cleaned to avoid contamination of dark smudges). Last night, for the first time since then, I got myself on the wheel. I threw three mug bodies with porcelain and remembered just how, hm. People say it's buttery, or like cottage cheese, but my experience is that porcelain moves by me thinking about it, where other clays move with my muscling them. It's a beautiful feeling. I can wreck a wet porcelain piece by setting down the board it's on too hard, and the clay will just slump over sideways, so it demands respect and attention. In return it responds, as I said, to mere thought.

That was a lovely but possibly unwise choice; I forgot my meds for an hour which made me nauseous, was up late, and now my body is complaining that I did too much and it hurts to lay down (actually it hurts to do anything but doing anything that's not resting is at least distracting, even if it will compound the problem). The fact that Solly has to be taken out to pee, which means no more than 11 hours of rest at a stretch for me, is another bit that's ultra hard on my body. But, we'll make it through. She's really being lovely about the whole thing, even though she's off her sedative drugs now and would like to run and play. She did a deep play bow to Thea last night and then tried to do the straight-legged romp around (vet said to keep her on a short leash, this is why: she can't be running) and I felt awful bringing her in. I would have felt more awful if she snapped the plate in her knee or had to re-do surgery though.

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Snow is a blanket

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:15:59 GMT

We actually got a snowfall warning last night and it snowed all night. It's not colder than any particular April day, and the snow is struggling to stick and melting into the soil but because it snowed all night there's still a blanket of wet, heavy white on everything. It's a couple inches deep. The sky is white. It's very calming. There's no question about it staying long; in Vancouver there were "snow days" and this will likely last a day and water the ground gently.

The last few days I've been wandering around checking to see which of my discounted perennials from last fall managed to survive. I have no experience with herbaceous perennials in this kind of winter, and in Vancouver it never really got cold enough for a perennial to look fully dead; there was always some little bit of green at the centre of a rosette or the base buds of a dead stem. Here, the first day I looked around I thought several things hadn't made it: eryngium, trollius, leucanthemum, perovskia. The salvia and strawberries had clear tiny green though. By yesterday there were bits of sprouts on all the above except the perovskia. The coneflowers aren't showing anything yet either. I don't see the dicentra or pulmonaria but they're in shadier areas, along with the hostas, so the ground is still frozen there. I wouldn't expect to see much there, though daffodils are already pushing up. Alchemilla made it in one spot, the other is still frozen. I'm very happy about that, I really love alchemilla. And there's the plant which I always forget the name of, super grey fuzzy leaves with neon pink flowers on tall spikes, that used to be in my grandma's garden. It came through evergreen! Can't see the coreopsis yet. Some of those pink peony buds are pushing up!

I'd like to add: rockfoil, columbine, daylilies, ?delphinium (they don't like clay), sanguisorba, baptisia, persicaria, nativer/hardier coneflowers, that tall lobelia, more hen-and-chicks semper-(viren? viven? I confuse them, I can't believe they survive the winter here) and either more sedum or just take cuttings from my current ones, maybe some of the new ajugas, and nepetas.

It's really neat to start to gently become friends with the new plants. Last year was just shoving them in the ground and maybe making them a label. Now I get to go walking with Solly (now at 10 min 4x/day) along the edges of the beds and sometimes on my own, bending and poking at what's coming up or at the center of an apparently dead rosette to see if there's that hint of unfurling green yet. I get to learn what the sprawl of each plant's dead leaves look like: still there, or did they rot away under the snow in the winter? I get to learn when they start to green up, whether the crowns have multiplied into multiple buds, whether those first leaves are simpler than the older leaves or just smaller. I get to learn whether the new shoots come from the crown a couple at a time or all at once.

Soon I'll learn how fast they unfurl, how they sit before they bloom, how much they multiply over winter for real and how they respond to, well, everything. I love making new plant-friends. There's something about-- the plants have been around for mostly centuries, I think the domestic florist sanguisorbas are fairly modern, and people will be looking at them and growing them after I'm gone. The plants aren't going anywhere. I can make slow friends with a plant, learn about it, and then for the rest of my life when I meet that plant it'll be an old friend calling to me. It might be a surprise, in a city on a corner or back lot somethere. It might be in my own garden, the same plant year after year as it responds to different seasons and my knowledge deepens. Either way it's a pleasure that I can rely on.

The woody perennials are slower to come out. That's for the best since it's still cool, but the amelanchier buds are silvering with bits of fur as they swell, the manchurian apricots and a few of the mirabelle plums have green stems, the sea buckthorn is definitely thinking about opening buds, and even the tiniest of the corylus, the beaked ones which grew more slowly than the hybrids, are getting that indefinable robust feeling that shows up before the buds actively swell but when the plant isn't hunkered down being frozen solid anymore.

In the herb garden it looks like a thyme survived, the horehound and sorrel look good, the mint looks good, and the clary sage is happy. Weirdly the weld in the upper garden is good but the woad looks like a green smear, not sure if there's a crown left in there, but in the herb garden I can't find the weld but there is still at least one or two each of woad and chinese woad.

Looks like the roses that were ok in fall are still ok, though it'll be a bit, with the maybe exception of stanwell perpetual. The scotch roses don't seem to transplant well here, but we'll see if stanwell comes back from the roots. For this year I ordered a couple ramblers from the save-the-ramblers project and finally found a source for Hazeldean (!!). I should probably take some currant and rose cuttings.

I somehow ended up with something like 270 tomato transplants, though very few peppers since the aphids got to them. I did a bunch of perennial onions this year that I should start hardening out, the goal is to put them in the perennial beds. It's time to put favas in the ground outside and brassicas inside.

As of this morning the vet has told me to take Solly on walks for 10 min 4x/day for 7-10 days, then 15 mins, then no more than 20 until she gets her x-rays in 8 weeks. 20 min 4x a day will be at the upper limit of my ability, so the disability people had better be done with me until after that. I cannot express how much joy I get being in the garden again, and having to cut myself off from that in order to only do medical calls or paperwork for months is a real problem.

In the meantime I have been told the florist in town (my town, usually too small for a reliable coffee shop, has a gift shop/florist) has a bunch of cardboard regularly, so I'll see if I can grab a bunch from her to re-sheet-mulch everything and get ahead of the grass and potentially summer drought a bit.

Reminder to myself; if I'm unhappy, step outside. Just step outside, if you can, even if it's just to collapse a couple feet from the door.

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Record

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:10:46 GMT

This is a bad one.

I didn't expect to still be trying to do the disability paperwork from before Christmas but here we are. I have my third appointment with my doctor -- she didn't call like she said she would after the skipped the second appointment, and I just miraculously got this third appointment y calling at a miraculous time -- but I don't know what time it is, so I need to go up at opening because phones won't be reliably answered until after the first couple of appointments. Then I guess I'll stand there and ask when the appointment is, and based on that I'll ask for it to be converted to a phone appointment or I'll stay and wait.

I haven't grieved Avallu yet and I'm still working with Solly, in the house, a five minute walk 4x/day and pills 2x/day. You'd think that wouldn't be a lot but of course for me it's too much. The snow is gone outside and the cats are hunting. They leave that one organ they don't like on the floor in the house, and sometimes the head. I have not had the wherewithal to clean them up. I have just barely managed to keep things going through the dishwasher.

I've been unable to sleep for a couple days due to physical pain, which is very unusual for me. There's something wrong with the way my hips, arms, and fingers are jointed and muscled, and sometimes my skin burns from being in contact with anything. Last night I made dinner, I think sandwiches, set the plate on the stove, and them made roasted cauliflower and potatoes for dinner while being annoyed the stovetop was occupied but somehow now realizing it was occupied with dinner so I didn't need to make myself dinner.

If, after driving to PG three times in a week, first for Avallu and then Solly ($400 in case you're wondering, a little over 12 hours total on the highway, which could have got me one way to Vancouver from here) I had gone to bed and stayed there, I probably would have lost a bit but been ok in the end. Now? I don't know.

And my non-adoptable animal is no longer alive. I was always going to outlive Avallu, to make him as safe and comfortable as I could. Solly and Thea, though, would be an asset to any farm, and unlike the southern US there's a real need for guardian dogs here. The cats also, though Little Bear would be rough. The end of my life would probably be the end of the pigs' lives, no one wants an old boar and sow, but still.

I hadn't realized how much of a difference Avallu made to that calculus. He really really did.

Writing this hurts a lot, my arm muscles are screaming, and I have to be at the doctor's office in two hours. It takes me a long time to get dressed and feed the cats so I should get started. I have a lot more to say about this but it can sit under a warning tag in a future post.

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Pottery notes to self

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:32:34 GMT

Things on my pottery list:

"Valkyries who helped my warrior from his battlefield" mugs for the Avallu vet & staff
12th century oil lamp
Candle holder fairie house
Sauce/pill jars (small)
Pet bowls for animal care team fundraiser
Mugs (?) for pig fundraiser
Tiered hanging fruit bowl
Yarn bowl for friend
Egg seperator cup for friend
Two-piece thrown-and-slab mugs
Iced tea jug
Spackle knife carved mugs
Resist-style mugs
Berry bowl, carved
Carved woodgrain mugs
ammonite bowl mold
ammonite stamps
"My sun leaps high again" mugs for Solly's surgery vet
Carved spiral sun motif mugs & bowls

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Snow mostly off

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:13:53 GMT

We can call this the snow off date for 2026, unless more snow comes along. The back field is still a touch snowy but is mostly underwater as per usual, the upper field has some streaks of snow, the winter field is clear on the unshaded side, the front yard beds are clear. No buds really open yet.

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Dogs all the way down

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:44:59 GMT

So just over a week ago Solly got her first TPLO surgery. If you don't know what that is, it's where they take the end of the tibia, cut it off, and rotate it about 20 degrees to create a stable platform for the joint. It's done when the tendons tear, which is ultra common in big dogs -- especially in big dogs who are "explosively" active, which is to say do sudden movements but not necessarily just a lot of movement, and I suspect in dogs who aren't carefully bred to avoid it.

Solly's ACL (or CCL on dogs and ACL on humans?) tendons were both gone. She was running around ok because, as I learned from Avallu, these dogs are more stoic than one can imagine, but it wasn't going to last long, and it hurt a lot. This surgery, or euthanasia after not too long, were the options. Back when I learned about this a friend offered to help me with the cost of surgery. Neither of us knew it would be just a few days after Avallu died. I cannot properly express how grateful I am that we can do this, that I'm not staring down losing two dogs in one year.

A week ago she went in and we came home with a big ziploc baggie full of pill bottles, a couple pages of instructions, a series of one-a-week phone calls with the vet scheduled, and advice from the vet to take it one day at a time.

She was heavily drugged for the ride home, because it's a roughly two-hour drive to the vet, and she's not supposed to be on the leg much for the first two weeks. She had the whole backseat of the truck with the seats out. Even so she sat up in her big cone collar, her chin propped on the console next to my arm, with her head slooooowly drifting downwards into a doze on the console and then snapping up groggily over and over to watch the road ahead.

After a couple days she started crying quietly in her crate. She was also reluctant to go in, though she would if I was insistent. She didn't cry when let out to curl up -- on leash, always on leash -- on the floor, and I finally realized that she couldn't fully stretch out in the crate and she wanted to stretch her surgery leg and her head both. From the tip of the cone collar to her toe when stretched out is over 5', there isn't a crate like that made, so I rigged up the hallway downstairs and she's much more comfortable in a nice 8' chunk of hallway, but only after sleeping on the sofa downstairs with her leash in hand a couple days. We're both happier now.

The cats are pretty happy because they can headbutt her and rub between her legs easily and she can't interfere with the cone, though if they're happy enough to purr she'll growl at them. She's never learned to properly interpret purrs as anything other than a growl.

I think the antibiotics were rough on her stomach. She's never been a big eater anyhow, and under her floof she has always been skinny. The meds are all take-with-food but I could barely get food into her at all; when the antibiotics were over, which coincided with the hallway change, she's started eating a bit more. We've also managed to find a pill solution. she chews her food carefully and can spit out pills except, I recently realized, if they're in roast beef chunks. So we're doing that and we're all relieved. She does not like pilling and in the beginning she had seven pills twice a day, and she'd growl to signal she needed a break after 4 or so, then after ten minutes would accept the others. I very quickly was reminded to cut my fingernails real short for it too.

It's astonishing she still loves me, honestly, but she clearly does. She knows the routine, recently shifted from 4x outside just to pee to 4x outside to pee and a 5 minute walk. She'll go willingly into the house (even when she was crated) after our walk, though she has been very happy to do bits of perimiter patrol on our walks. She even accepts the physio exercises, flexing and extending the leg and getting it massaged. I try very hard to allocate time, not just for the walk, but right afterwards for love and snuggles indoors so she doesn't just get dumped indoors and left totally alone.

We've made it through one week and done lots of learning. After this week it's supposed to get a lot easier. I know her wound is itchy, she keeps trying to lick it through her collar, but it's closing up nicely and the scabs are almost off it. Once that's healed the infection risk is I think gone, and I'll be relieved. The other risk is the plate holding on the end of her bone snapping (!!!!!!) which I can't do anything to tell how it is, just look at the joint and marvel. She's starting to put some weight on that leg already though, a bit limpingly, but it's happening, and that's what the vet wants.

Soon she'll be putting more weight on that leg than the other if all goes well, because it will hurt less than the still-torn side, and we get to go through it all over again with the other leg but with a lot more knowledge and understanding of each other.

It's good timing. It's a good time for me to be immersed in caring for one of my pups, just when I'm reminded how precious they are, and when a distraction isn't bad for me at all. It's a good time to get to know Solly better and be astonished at her immense heart, at her willingness to do what I ask, at her ability to laugh in the face of pain and strange happenings.

Meanwhile Thea guards the outside alone, and Avallu's memorial spot in the garden turns over and over in my mind until I have time and energy to create his stone to set in his favourite place.

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Sun, 29 Mar 2026 02:03:31 GMT

I remember picking Avallu up at the airport. When he was let out of his crate I was surprised he wasn't taller, but he kept coming out, such a long body. He moved like floating, effortlessly, with his tail held up like a flag even when baby Thea kept chasing it and he kept it canted to one side a bit for awhile.

I didn't know his language -- he spoke german -- and he didn't know mine. His handler had come over to drop him off and he definitely knew to look to her for guidance, but when I took the leash he looked to me. At one point he looked up at me and she said, "tell him he's doing well".

We drove home that fall, Tucker and I, with this giant dog. We walked him fairly frequently, in a park in Quesnel, by the Fraser at a campsite where he politely didn't roll in a rotten fish -- he'd been taught not to because people put out poisoned meat in his area, apparently, so for the longest time he only ate when given permission. We learned to communicate more in body language than language I think; it comes more naturally to me.

He's probably the most magnificent athlete I ever spent time with. He could jumo anything and make it look effortless. That September, when he got home to Threshold, we went into the tall grass in the back and he breached through it like a frolicking dolphin. In the winters, whenever he went outside he'd roll in the snow like a squiggled line drawing of pure joy.

He always wanted me to be iin his sight, especially outdoors. He'd put himself somewhere he could see me and ideally also see as many sightlines as possible. When he was near me he'd lean his butt against me and keep his eyes out on the horizon. He took my protection very seriously, and he loved me like an angsty teenager with quick jealousy and absolute intensity.

Avallu had very firm ideas on who could be on the property. He has both bit and nipped people he didn't approve of; he's also bared his belly to those he did. For his sake I learned boundaries I might not have learned any other way. I learned to lift my hand in a stop because it was faster than saying "wait stop" before people opened the gate and came in without prior permission, a layer of physical negation that was terrifying, but was worth it to keep him safe. I learned to only let people in the house if it was worth managing Avally safely and kindly: did he have somewhere I could put him where he would feel ok? Was it for an amount of time I was ok putting him away for?

And when he caught on to what I was doing I could see the relief in him when I came up to the gate and told him to get to his safe place before I let anyone in. By that time he trusted me to handle the issue, and he knew that being in his safe place meant he didn't have to be on guard.

His fur smelled like safety. He was there for me so many many times. I felt safe with him in the yard, so safe I could leave the house unlocked and the keys in the truck, but I also felt safe with my face in his fur. He loved me. He wouldn't leave me; he would neither tresspass his boundaries for me nor would he be offended by mine. We would just be together as much as we could, supporting each other as much as we could, and we did. I always kind of thought of Thea as the spirit of the land here, and Avallu as my own partner.

You always know they're going to go away. I wanted him to go before me, because I didn't want anyone else to have him who might think of him as a burden, as a reactive dog, instead of as the most steadfast partner who gave his entire life to keep mine safe. He's gone away, he's gone before me; he started vomiting yesterday and I made a vet's appointment for next week, but this morning I needed to get Tanya to help me lift him into the truck because he couldn't stand.

His spleen had ruptured and he was bleeding into his abdomen. It was cancer. I wish his last day had been something kinder than being manhandled into the vet's, but I was there with him with his head on my arm until the end. Every time the vet assistants came in he laid down his head to rest, and when they left he would lift it, panting, to keep watch. Even to the end.

It's the cleanest love I've ever felt for anyone. I intersect many lives in such a complicated way, and people are better off to limit their intimacy and go elsewhere for their deepest heart connections, and honestly I'm probably better doing the same. With Avallu, though, we were just together. And now we're not.

It's worth everything to have been with him, for him to existed in the world, it makes the world worthwhile that it could have been a platform for us to live together.

Thank you, pup. For everything. For every single thing. I will love you forever. When they find my bones in the soil all they'll know is that my bones loved you.

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Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:31:19 GMT

Last week (?) I went in to the doctor to do disability paperwork, but she said she'd rather fill it out together and I should come back.

So I came back today, luckily I had two appointments scheduled (I think our clinic is at 2/3 capacity and will shortly drop to half as many doctors as it should have, so we're back out to three months for scheduling)

I was pretty tired because stuff, so I lay down on the bed thingy once they moved me from the waiting room to the room. I'm glad I did because I was waiting for an hour, my doctor came in and said she was sorry but something had happened with her home security and she didn't have time now, but she would call me on the weekend or next week.

I made it home and collapsed, as per usual, but I need to take Solly to the vet next week -- I've already bumped it back twice, once for money reasons and the second time because I'd accidentally cross-scheduled it with today's doctors appointment which I need not have done, in hindsight.

And I noticed when I got home that Avallu has been throwing up.

In an ideal world I'd take him to the vet tomorrow, but between money and way overdoing it I can't even get out of bed. Like, I think I'm back to having to limit my trips down the stairs to the bathroom because I might not make it back up here to the bed. If I can't rest my way out of this I can't drive Solly in next week, and that's already a pretty sketchy proposition. I'll have to see if they can get him in the same day I take Solly in, and camp in town for the overnight instead of driving back and forth to pick her up the next day. Or something.

Maybe it was just a thing he ate and he'll be fine tomorrow. I can try getting some canned chicken into him and see how he interacts with it. But I can't think clearly enough to observe well or evaluate, and I need to reserve enough energy to help my doctor fill out that form over the phone.

Please don't let this be the wrong decision. Though I guess by making this decision, although I'll know if Avallu gets sicker or not, I'll never know if I would have driven off the road or into the back of a truck with both of us in the vehicle. Given how hard focusing my eyes and holding up my head is right now-- ugh.

And on top of that, the -20 last night probably damaged some swelling buds, though I don't think it'll have killed anything because it came right after a fresh snow. Interesting to have a winter 2 zones warmer than we're rated for that still kills things rated for our actual zone, if so.

Very discouraged. If I knew someone to ask for help, I'd do it.

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Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:27:41 GMT

Well, at least some of it was PDA-induced. I got in my part of the form and immediately feel lighter and less like I want to die. Like, not at all like I want to die.

I've been unable to throw more than 5 pieces at a sitting for months, and yesterday evening I sat down and threw something like 8 pieces -- many were off-the-hump and several were cat food dishes, the easiest of pieces, but it was just nice to get outside that limit for once.

I've also been going outside, snuggling the dogs and looking at the snow melt back from the garden.

I'm probably going to come to terms at some point with how much energy I've spent, my entire life, working my way around my PDA into something that approached functionality. It's always involved having choices of some kind, and being thoughtful about making them. I can't describe just how little choice I have in my current situation; I do the disability paperwork how they want it, when they want it, or-- nothing. There's no changing jobs because I can't do a job. Even cobbling something together like attempting to full-time house or farm sit isn't possible because most people's houses are scented, and most farm sitting probably requires more than my body has in it.

I keep pretending I can keep the pigs but it definitely does make a big difference to my daily life to feed and water them. The birds are easier, but the pigs are really destructive so I need to be way more on top of infrastructure. But, yeah.

It's working on spring out there though. One daffodil is inexplicably coming up in a bare patch. The sorrel is spiking its first leaves up through the snow-- I guess that means it didn't get eaten by voles over winter, which bodes well for my whole herb garden. Buds are swelling on a couple things, dangerous with -11 forecast overnight soon but they have been moving that same forecast back one day at a time for something like two weeks so who knows.

I super forgot what else I was going to write, except that generally not being in fight-or-flight from PDA like I was for the last couple months is pretty good, and there's not quite enough ground revealed yet to garden but it's coming.

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Leaves in the corners

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:07:16 GMT

It's equinox today. I went to the grocery store and inside an older man was saying to one of the shelf-stockers "it's the first day of spring today" so I'm not the only one in town that tracks it. I like that.

I sent in a bunch of my disability paperwork today, the parts I needed to write. Next week I go in and the doctor and I together fill out her part, then theoretically the clinic sends that plus all my medical stuff for the last year in to the insurance folks, and also make a copy for me (which 1. lets me know what it says 2. lets me know when they have it assembled and theoretically have sent it and 3. gives me a copy in case they forget to send it and I need to send it myself). Yes of course I'm charged for all of it.

The Canadian Potters facebook group mug exchange is coming to an end for this year. They partner people up, I think kind of randomly, and then we send each other mugs. I sent two, unsurprisingly, because one was a bright fun bigger one and the other was a dark textured slinky shaped one and sending two is only barely more expensive than sending two. Sending the box cost me $50, $7 of which was a fuel surcharge. Small-business-friendly government my ass.

Anyhow, part of the exchange is that when we receive our mugs we post a picture of them on the group. So there have been a ton of really neat mugs posted to the group lately. I enjoy groupings of art on the same theme made by lots of different people more than I enjoy one person's whole art display, generally, though a chronological series of works can be fun too. I both love seeing when a posted mug is something I've done or know how to do, and when it's a choice I've deliberately not made or don't know how to do.

*

I've been thinking lately about how, when the ability to clone files basically for no money showed up, such that any show or picture or music could be infinitely-ish reproduced for free-ish, we took on a huge social project to convince everyone that making copies of things was stealing. It crept into home plant propagation fairly soon thereafter. During the first part of covid everyone started doing workshops online, then paywalls went up around those too, so showing someone how to do something for free isn't as much a thing anymore.

I can't help but think we could have engaged in a social project to convince people that folks had rights to food and shelter, or to not being killed by [transmissible viruses, bombs, school shootings, school bombings, food poisoning, lead poisoning, lead poisoning in food, air pollution, mental health issues, not-so-secret police, being put in cages and not fed or whatever, floods, seiges, deliberately withheld medical care, exposure all on its own, etc etc etc take your pick] but instead we spent our social capital quite the other way.

I know food is more invisible to folks than computer files. It also has a little more of a base cost -- more now with oil prices going up and fertilizer markets being used as political leverage, and even more with both Canada and the US shuttering so many ag programs and the Ukraine being somewhat down for the count. Because of that base cost we're more able to accept that we can make a lot of it, but it's ok to not give to people. I guess it was practice for the rest of it.

And yes, I'm leaving land out of that equation for the moment.

*

We had those windstorms awhile back. The power didn't go out somehow, but it still got me making candlesticks, and then with the Iran war that stepped into making olive oil lamps. They need to go through the kiln before I can test them, and of course there are no olive trees here (apparently till recently 80% of olive oil was for light and lubrication, back when these lamps were used) so that one project line is turning along slowly until the next kiln fire.

I ordered another 3 cord of wood, which I need to stack somewhere, so I'll be solidly warm next winter.

It's light a lot now. I mean, equinox, theoretically it's light half the time, but when I spend a lot of time sleeping or resting a lot of the day doesn't count. I want to be outside.

*

I'm not settling into gardening like I usually do. Illness/PEM from doing too much? PDA from being forced into the disability paperwork etc for months? State of the world? My house being essentially a disgusting heap of whatever since I've been doing survival things and not cleaning it, and also the floor is falling off so it's harder to clean? Not having had a conversation with another human this year? Or meds?

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Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:41:25 GMT

Yesterday I taught a small workshop on making garden stakes at the pottery studio. In the other room the sculpture-only guy was mass panic-glazing his work (the hospital hasn't renewed his contract so he's leaving town permanently in a bit).

On the main floor the decorated paddle art exhibit was holding its opening, with storytelling and stuffed salmon and bannock. They had more food than people so I got surprise salmon and bannock, and chatted with folks, including someone who told me where some easily accessible clay was if I went at the right time of year (the lake has basically one big yearly tide, it goes way down in late fall/early spring, and way up in late spring/summer as the snow in the surrounding higher areas melts and flows into it).

On the upper floor was a class learning floor looms.

Most of the town was probably at the ski hill doing the everest challenge, which I imagine is some sort of distance ski, or on the lake skating, skiing, biking, dogsledding, skijoring, kicksledding, or walking. It was sunny out with little intense occasional snowbursts, as far as I could tell from the basement studio.

In my haste to get myself out the door in time for the workshop, I forgot to take one of my add-back hormones.

Today, although my body feels as expected and my mind is very slow, I am emotionally bouncy, er, that is, happy in a bouncy lighthearted sort of way.

Is this because:
-social and out of the house
-light returning and sun
-those pills are bad for emotions
-not doing the paperwork I'm supposed to be doing so PDA is less relentless than normal

Another day, another data point. It's a great town, though. We even have a coffee shop at the moment, though the population is generally too small to support one so they don't often stick around.

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Always the game

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:09:55 GMT

Am I in a bad mood because:

1) I think I haven't had a conversation with another human just for pleasure since before christmas

2) More and more things are becoming monetized and people seem to view this as a triumph since more people can pick up more side hustles, instead of viewing it as an insidious intrusion into normal human activities

3) Ecocide

4) Bombing infrastructure necessary for life

5) I don't want to read the books by other authors about Agatha Christie's characters but they keep being recommended to me

6) I probably can't do an 8 day workshop on soda firing and may never be able to again but I want to

7) New meds are doing bad hormone things

If 7, I should do something about it. Realistically I should do something about all of them, but they all require a different kind of response than 7 and maybe 1. I don't think getting a t-shirt made that says "useless eater" is the way forward on any of them, I guess.

I really do want the luxury of being able to crash out because of doing something for pleasure, though. It's a different feeling than wanting to do something but not being able to because I can't work. I really did live a lot at the edge of my ability.

Yesterday I stacked the last of the wood that isn't embedded in the driveway ice flow, and ordered another 3 cord for later this week or next week. Maybe I should have done pottery. Maybe especially I should have called someone to talk. I'm back to being a morning person again, though, and there's no one to talk to during my little windows of energy. Or something. Maybe that's just my excuse and it's just 7) above.

I've played this "which one" game all my life and I'm tired of it.

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Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:47:43 GMT

Instead of going to the pottery workshop in Medicine Hat, I've decided to contact the soda kiln person in Prince George and instead spend the workshop money on getting my winter 27/28 firewood laid in and freighting in clay for the soda kiln (they fire to cone 10, my clay is cone 5/6, so I need different clay). Fun fact: it costs about as much to ship clay to me as it does to buy it in the first place, since it's just rocks.

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Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:09:15 GMT

I can't remember what I've written about and what I haven't, so let's just dive in.

This morning is sunny. We've been having very high winds (wind warning has said gusts of 70-90kph) fairly frequently, heralding our bouncy transitions from warm (5-10C) to cold (-10ish or something) every week or so. It's been a strong enough wind to tear the overhanging sheet metal off the roof of the pigpen, though not the part of the sheet metal that is actually on the roof. Luckily I strapped that down with wood, which impedes snow slide off but does hold it better. I need to finish snipping that metal off before it tears all the way through, it's holding by a couple shreds right now and when it flies off it will undoubtedly either hit an animal which I'll need to then do emergency euthanasia on (I have not had to do that for awhile and I would like to not do it again for awhile) or go through the greenhouse plastic and slice it open.

Even with the wind the sun is welcome. Our most recent bout was warm, so the warm wind has eroded ice sheets into ice patches. At the end of the day, with the sun hitting the ice, water would flow down and pool in the door to the carport. Every night, with no sun, it would sink into the ground before the carport could flood. Given that rain on snow events -- which we've had a couple dozen times this winter -- can be the biggest flood events possible, I'm feeling lucky. We still have not been below -30 and I've switched the heat to electric for the most recent warm patch.

The fashion for saying that talking about weather is mundane and trivial highlights just how divorced folks are from their environment and life support structures. I think that idea is fading with global warming and energy being injected into these systems so we get more weird and more catastrophe.

This is going to get a bit dark, if you're not in the mood maybe skip it.

While we're on "people" I guess the innoculations of school shootings and gaza etc -- even with images, or maybe especially because of them -- and the relegitimizing of racism, along with the full collapse of due process and presumption of innocence have all worked together to remove the idea of certain things being verboten, like war crimes, from both US and Canadian society. People might feel bad about it but we go as far as "strongly worded letters", and our theoretically Liberal PM has already committed to smiling up and kicking down with his "middle powers" stuff-- bottom powers don't count anymore. Or rather, power is what counts.

For my own soul I need to recover enough energy to work through this, but the disability paperwork business has dropped my baseline because of the constant grinding. On the other hand my art has got better, when I go it? But I can do it less because my body has been playing with pain lately to see if that can slow me down, where just exhaustion and fuzzy-headedness maybe didn't.

I'm giving serious thought to signing up for an 8-day ceramics thing in medicine hat, that's a 13 hour drive, then the thing, then the drive back, just because if I'm going to do something ill-advised I'd rather do it in service of hope rather than nihilism. Ont he other hand, gas has gone up 30 cents a liter in the last 3 days and everything else is sure to follow, but I guess that's part of "ill advised". It'll be eating out of the garden season anyhow, in July.

The ceramics thing is a cone 1 soda fire, which I would bring back and do here after the experience of it.

I had wanted to write about how one thing autism teaches us is how rules are weaponized -- they're enforced hard against some folks and softened against others, which leads to deniability on the part of enforcers: they can say they're only following the rules, but the hardening and softening of enforcement leads to very different outcomes. A lot of autistic folks take this onboard by wanting to enforce rules hard on everyone, to make it "fair". Then, because they believe the rules will be enforced evenly, they want to fix the rules -- even though having a set of rules that is unbearable if fully enforced is often part of how society sorts its power and suffering hierarchies, which is the system operating functionally to keep itself going.

But there really aren't rules anymore. Internationally they've descended to a "haha, made you look, you're so gullible" level with no pretense of anything else at least as led by Israel and the US, and definitely internally in the US too. I haven't been looking too hard at Canada in the last few months because disability paperwork and my crumbling faith in sources of any kind -- still cannot believe everyone is upset about AI in art and not a peep about what it does to the credibility of video, maybe everyone has accepted post-facts and I'm left behind without getting the memo? -- but yeah.

I always knew that if it came down to it I wouldn't grow food in service of a group of people who chose to withhold it from other people. It's one of the reasons I rejected urban farming and high-end farmers markets (the other being I don't have a parent who will die and give me an inheritance to retire on, which is pretty much necessary for that as a viable career). Now I can't grow enough food to make a difference. I do distribute seeds -- probably only a thousand packets this year all told -- and maybe that makes a difference either way? But it may not. How do I support what matters from here, from this body, from this town, from this illness level? And how do I know when my body existing is support vs a liability?

In a complete aside, autism has taken up the rainbow infinity sign as its logo. Infinity sign has been poly for as long as I've known it, and the rainbow sign LGBTetc, which means I can't always tell what someone's shirt is in support of-- but also it often doesn't matter.

In counseling the other day I determined that not being scared into a corner is important. I just don't know what to do to dig myself out, especially while it feels like someone's backhoeing dirt on top of me while I dig.

This post brought to you by "after setting up for seedy saturday I was too unwell to go, and I'm too unwell to go to the pottery studio today two days after to, but at least I have a laptop and keyboard in bed"

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