Greenstorm's Journal

Orlando the cat looks like he's being adopted by the neighbours. I strategically sent them two videos of him asking to be petted and nuzzling my hand through the bars of the crate. They're the ones who named him Orlando, since they've been feeding him on their deck, but I guess he hasn't been willing to go in.

They'll be a good home for him; they have the money to handle the vetting he needs. Speaking of vetting, I was worried about that swollen front paw and in consultation with the vet (this is why I was videoing him) he's going in today. I need to remember to ask the vet about crystals too; he's peeing for sure but in smaller bits than I'd expect, and he was definitely dehydrated when he came in. That symptom of smaller clumps of pee but multiple of them in the litter box is familiar to me from Hazard and his pee troubles. And I do know that stress can cause inflammation of the bladder in male cats even without crystals. So, having someone who can pay his vet bills is a relief.

He is a complete snugglebug. When I open the cage and sit next to it I think his first plan was to escape, but he had to go past me to do that. When he gets close to me I pet him and he gets distracted from escaping, instead trying to absorb as much love into his poor tiny body as possible. If I stroke him from head to tail he does both elevator-head and elevator-butt to get the most he can out of it. He's very happy in my lap, especially if I support him with an arm so he doesn't have to put weight on that front paw.

The way I understand it, feral cats born feral don't do this. Only cats who are socialized young can quickly re-bond to humans. That means he was dumped, or left.

I'm also still fascinated by his cheeks. I've only ever been around younger intact male cats, I guess, and even Whiskey when I got him had huge muscles but not these tomcat cheeks. They are huge pads of what I understand to be fat on the back and side curve of his jaw. They're really firm, maybe the texture of an actual testicle, definitely firmer than breasts, and just these big ovoid things under the skin. They aren't so much visible, though they do make his whole head look bigger, but they're very palpable and he loves beign scratched around them.

His fur has gone from dry straw feeling and falling out freely to starting to almost be soft in the areas he can easily reach to lick, like his lower back. I know that dry-straw feeling from when Siri first came, and I'm very happy for it to be retreating.

He'll meow at me when he sees me, asking for affection. I gave him a shrimp tube treat to get the video for the vet -- the shrimp is the stinkiest one so they love it most -- and he adored it.

The plan is for him to go home to the neighbours on Saturday.

Also on Saturday, the plan is for me to go to Prince George and pick up my tornjak pup. Until he's happily in my custody I won't write out the story, but he's about seven months old, he's bred in Penticton or Princeton (I cannot keep them straight) and I've been in touch with his breeder previously and almost got someone from his litter last winter but ended up passing, then this boy showed up on kijiji. They wouldn't mention the breeder but since there are only like 4 people who breed tornjaks in any given year in north america it wasn't hard to track her down, and then she had pictures and video that matched this same dog from when he was a baby. So I didn't need to get into it with the owner over it, I can just take him, get his vax records from the breeder, I have his parentage from her, and we're good.

I'm not sure what his name will be yet, his litter name was Roko and tornjaks are translated from the croatian by fb etc as "tower"s so he may get a mountain name. It probably should be pretty different from Solly and Thea but tbh everyone comes to every name, even the cats, so. It shouldn't be either Shass, Pope, or Baker because those are silly names, though those are the mountains I'm most familiar with, and I just don't want to call him Rocky even though everything seems like it should line up that way. Who knows, maybe he will be a Rocky. Cascade shortens to Cass which is the right sound to distinguish itself from the others and continues Siri's tradition of confusing people as to gender. It'll work itself out. Osilinka? Mesilinka? He'll tell me.

Sticking to names because although I don't know him he's... well, his face markings look like Avallu's. He has that same asymmetric mask, smaller on one side, though he doesn't have the freckles. His back markings are very different and his energy is EXTREMELY different. Avallu always had this intense gravitas, even when he was playing, but this boy is a lot like Solly from what I can tell, just a silly bouncy kid. I think he'll probably fit into the group better than Avallu did; Thea was always grabbing Avallu's tail to try and make him play and these days she keeps enticing the willing-but-obedient-to-the-leash Solly when we're out on walks, doing that straight-front-legged gallop in big circles to show how much fun she is. Although I'm sure she'll get tired of the puppy, I think Thea will be glad to have him.

I will be glad to have him but every time I look at his face I love Avallu so much and miss him so much. I know this is part of the process. My plan had been to get someone who looked very different; tornjak markings are pretty variable. But here we are, and I will live with Avallu's ghost more than I might have otherwise, and I'm grateful always that we had each other.

Doubtless I will also be very distracted by managing: a dog who needs four fairly low-energy walks a day; a puppy who's not yet poultry safe and because of Solly's injury probably can't just fully use the dog door even if I exclude poultry totally from the front (a couple ducks have snuck through and the muscovies fly everywhere; and planting an entire garden. Though pup can help me plant the garden, it's mostly pretty fenced off and he can wander around and destroy things while I plant them back.

Maybe Cascade after all?

At least I'll be distracted from missing the gentleman cat, who is so absolutely loving. I will definitely miss him. And I'm definitely glad about where he's going.

I have a really good vet.

My animals are actually spread across two vets at the same pracrice, and both are great. As far as I can tell, they charge only a token markup on Siri's meds, and they're happy with me doing home testing to avoid both a trip in and the cost of his diabetes bloodwork twice a year (he goes in for normal senior cat bloodwork once a year). They go out of their way to help the community with things like vax trips, which is a four-t-five hour round trip for them and not a ton of money. They're fully accessible through text and are happy to give advice on things like torn nails free. They actively love my cats.

And when I took Solly in yesterday, after explaining the reason she's been limping, she took a look at my face and said, "she's on pain control now and I know this is a lot to take onboard, so if you like I can call you next week and we can go over this again when you've had some time to think about it"

Solly herself behaved excellently in the car and at the vet's, though when I left her alone to get xrays she was pretty scared. But as soon as we got home she took off like a shot in the -15 snowy dark and I couldn't find her. I assume she's inside the fence and you;d think I could follow her tracks, but no. And it was a long day, and I was kind of woozy from the one-two-three shot of finding my truck battery stone dead in the morning and running around in sandals in the snow trying to start it, the drive to and from the vet which is after all five hours round trip, and the heavy emotion of the vet's visit. The last thing we all need is me dropping in the coldening night, unable to get up. So I went inside with the idea that I'll find her in the morning.

She'll need to stay inside now except for controlled walks.

With five senior animals in the house -- Thea, Avallu, Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri -- I was not expecting to need to make life or death decisions about Solly anytime soon. But here we are.

Compounding everything, Solly won't be able to work. The other two dogs are in semi-retirement, and with the birds I really do need someone who can work in the summer. In the winter they get mostly shut up and it's easier for the pups to patrol. Solly was a superb worker. There's a tornjak pup, like Avallu, available in BC. I do not want a new dog. Getting Solly a partner had been interesting to me but if she isn't going to survive more than a year or two and she is going to transition to almost fully inside I want to mourn. But. The work needs to be done. Or do I transition to the idea that in three to five years I just... don't have outside animals anymore? The dogs pass, I get rid of everyone except a couple cats, I hand mow a couple of acres and have a garden?

That seems terrible. The reasonable terrible thing, like getting a desk job somewhere that thinks good social management is having ladies' nights or politely smiling through someone's kill-the-immigrants screed over dinner once a week or living in a house with nothing to do that's not either housecleaning or in a computer. Smart.

It's 3am. I cried some. Whiskey always comes when I cry, like I'd called him, and he snuggled a but but then I cried a little too much for him. I slept, woke up, pulled out the laptop. I am too old to cry, I can't see well now but I guerss I still have enough adrenaline to remember how to type, which has been going lately in normal circumstances. I expect I'll barely be able to hobble around tomorrow so I'm hoping my pup has forgiven me by then and I can get her inside. I need to rearrange downstairs so she actually fits there but that'll be a couple days.

The road gods were kind to me. Very little ice on the roads, unlike yesterday, and over half of the way the road lines or a reasonable facsimile were visible. We all made it home safe, or as safe as Solly gets to be.

It'smoments like these I realize just how much love I'm surrounded with. There is a lot to lose in my life.

My poor little girl. She's been hiding her pain really well.

Last month was a bad month. Fear and paperwork. When I write things here I re-live them, and I wasn't quite able to write about them because I wasn't done living them. In many ways I'm not.

It snowed for three days after all that, maybe 18" of snow here: over my boots. My snowblower is in the shop so although I have been doing some shovelling and knocking snow off roofs a feeling of isolation remains. In this case it's soothing, peaceful: I'm insulated from everyone else, though I do keep shovelling the arc of the gate so it can open if I need to get out in an emergency. The roads have been terrible, and this morning the snow turned to rain so I can't imagine it's any better out there.

Shovelling and walking the daily chores in the deep snow are all my body has been able to do. It's such a relief after using myself up emailing to follow up with bizarre information and paperwork structures (to contact benefits, for instance, I call someone who transcribes the call, puts it into a ticket, sends the transcription to me to ok, then the ticket goes to the benefits people, who email me an answer which I can't reply to so if I want to reply I need to call with the ticket number, explain the whole thing to someone, who puts in another ticket...)

Enough of that. My difficulty navigating these systems does give me real fear -- for instance, the system that was supposed to give me stopgap money requires reports every 2 weeks, and I'd been keeping my eye on their online portal, turns out the online portal just keeps saying it's "in review" until I do my first report, there's no way of knowing online if I'm approved or not until after the report is done, so I missed my first several reports, several weeks of money, and had to reapply (which then means I need to go through the weeklong no-money-during-this-period after they process it, and before I get money from them).

Anyhow, I would not be here in my bed with my cats and dim snowy light coming in through the window without friends who just give me money to live. I might be in a shelter, but the shelters are only 12 hours at night, and I think a day or two of that and I would not be able to move anymore, so maybe the hospital? With a foreclosed house and that terrible stabbing feeling of letting down the creatures I love who rely on me.

None of that is why I started writing now, after so long. I started writing because Siri came in this morning and lay on me and fell asleep with my hand under his chin, then sprawled across me. He dreamed and his tail twitched and he growled in his sleep and then settled. He was curled right up against me, as if I was safe for him, and I am?

I pay money to keep hi alive and I do not resent it in the least. Given a choice between feeding him and giving him his meds and say, clothes that fit, or a mattress without holes from laying in it so much, there's no question for me. I've felt bad about or resented people before for requiring money, but not the cats.

My house is gothic arch shaped. It's perfect for winter: the snow either stays on the roof and insulates, or it slides down and covers the basement windows and insulates down there. Things are quieter and more still, muffled by the snow at point of impact and by the rampart of snow around my house.

I've always rejected the idea of money as love because it was too painful for me to think there were ways I was unable to love people, that I just didn't have much money so that would mean I couldn't love folks properly. Like, as they said, if I did love them I'd find a way to get money for that use.

But maybe I can start by thinking of money as community love. It's still too hard to think that I can't do for anyone what has been done for me in an interpersonal love sense. But for community? I can do other things, and not this one thing, and that's maybe ok.

Though realistically I can do basically nothing right now. I can shovel a little snow and eat crackers for dinner and pet some cats. I can write very little and I can't do any pottery, though maybe if paperwork stops then I can. I can't articulate the increasing fragmentation and polarization I'm seeing in meaningful ways.

Some days I can't even find what's beautiful. I was describing my situation to a counselor at one point and she said "oh, I'm glad you have pets" and, yes. This is the thing Siri brought to me: he showed up, he chose me, he comes and snuggles close to me in the morning with full trust, and between him and the others I can always access feeling loved. Humans are so far away these days, I'm grateful to have these other ones closer to me.

And honestly, since my cognition really started to go, and since there's been more distance with Tucker and Josh, I'm not sure where my comfort level is with people at all. I used to do it so easily.

Bits of rain out there, falling on the snow now. Each drop makes the ramparts a little more impassible: I should shovel my way out at least. Or I should properly rest, since yesterday did wipe me out pretty badly.

This piece of writing has no summary, no conclusion, no theme to brush past on my way out the door. It just ends as it began, with cats snoring, and winter light in the window.

I walked down to the highwayside of my property today to hang a red dress along the highway. I very very rarely go there -- it's a wildlife corridor along the highway, in my mind, and not really for me to mess with. I noticed a bunch of stuff.

For one, there's a lot of water down there. The cattle dugout behind my fence trickles down into the aspen woods, and at the far end of those woods by the highway there's one of these ephemeral ponds. I had to look closely to make sure it wasn't a beaver pond, but of course there's not enough of a stream for it to be beaver. When the glaciers scraped over this land not too long ago, and when the big glacial lake was settling into the Prince George and Stuart Lake areas, a lot of clay-bottomed wetlands were formed. These are basically impermeable shallow basins that fill up with overland flow water, and then dry out by the end of the year if there's no reliable inflow.

There are also a lot of trails. They're obviously animal trails; it's unclear to me how much of the paths through grass, wildflowers, young trees, and larger forest are Solly, how much are large animals, and how much are made by smaller ones. That said, I saw droppings from the young moose, deer droppings, and at the southwest corner of the property many poops from a very large bear. I also mostly didn't have to duck for the paths through smaller trees. So it looks like my wildlife area is doing what it's supposed to and providing habitat, kind of as a tithe for using the rest of the land.

I think they also recently did some culvert work under the highway down there. My highwayside ditch is significantly wetter than I ever remember. We're still in a low-level drought, and the last couple years have been heavy drought, and it really matters seasonally what time I go there as to whether there's water. But still. Lotta water.

I didn't see clear signs of smaller predators like foxes, coyotes, or lynx but I also wasn't really looking. I know foxes hang out at my neighbours. I also see them on the highway or in parking lots every once in awhile.

Anyhow, Solly is doing a fantastic job in the back and she's a very good girl. Now if only she could stop eating her collars. Everyone has a microchip and their vaccines now (I would have assumed everyone who was neutered got a chip but turns out they didn't. That's now remedied) but as the stray cat reminded me it's nice for people to know someone is owned by some sort of clear sign, especially since she's so skinny. She is in fact skinny enough from jumping the fence and running around that I'm going to put her on a puppy or performance food for awhile and see if that helps.

Today was a very active day -- planted several garden rows with corn (gaspe x saskatoon bicolour ears), gold rush beans, batanka wheat, dango mughi barley, zesty green x silvery fir tree F2 tomatoes, some napa kind cabbage starts, and then marker calendula and radishes in with those seeds. I'm just doing a couple rows at a time but I'm working through it. Then there was the walk back to the highway.

So I spent the rest of time splitting love among the cats. I can't imagine how someone can dump an animal that is so openly affectionate. Normally my imagination is pretty good, but my neighbour who's done some cat rescue says this is "the season" and having enough folks do it that there's a season? Ugh.

Finally getting decompression time. Walking in the garden, eating 3-4 smallish meals a day, lying around with the cats watching America's Got Talent highlights, bringing water to the chicks.

Something down in the back garden really wants my chickens. It's tried digging into the chicken coop from multiple sides, basically tearing the insulation off the sides of the quail shed until there's only plywood left. Not sure why the dogs aren't disincentivizing it, but it might just be that it's so close to the fence and down in the back. I haven't found the tracks of whatever is doing it so I'm guessing it might be smaller than I think -- no coyote or fox trails in the grass that I can see? But who knows. The bears are awake now so it could be anyone.

I'm very glad we made that quail shed with a solid floor rather than a dirt one. It means no one can dig into it. As part of the general moving (baby chicks into quail shed, quail shed chickens into chicken coop) a couple chickens tried to sleep under the quail shed instead of being shut up in the coop for the night. I didn't see them around this morning, it being light so early, but I'm hoping they made it. Otherwise whatever it is can eat chickens whole or take them whole without much feather scatter, which is another data point.

Solly is super interested in me moving the animals. She comes and watches as I'm kneeling next to the quail shed at midnight with a broomstick trying to get the chickens out or as I'm walking the pigs around. She knows she's not allowed to chase animals so I think she's trying to figure it out. It would be nice to have a trained herding dog about one hour out of every week, but those dogs need a sense of their own presence and Solly doesn't have that very well. The other dogs know how to walk past any animal without disturbing it, she's less good at that.

It's been too wet to till even if I had the wherewithal to fix the tiller (I left gas in it over winter, it needs to be drained and refilled) but yesterday I planted a couple sour cherries and sea buckthorn and burr oaks in the upper fields. My seedling apples have almost all survived except the ones that drowned in the clay/water seep that goes down the hill across my property. I will likely start putting my tomatoes in by hand today and just deep mulching instead of tilling, though I sill need to till to get the corn in.

Ok, enough thinking. Naptime.

Now that I'm home, and still on leave from work, I am finally able to sort some of the stuff out I'd intended to get to originally. My capacity is tiny, which is to say I have a couple to a few hours of movement/doing things if they're interspersed with resting per day, one phone call every second day or so whether it's practical/medical or for social, eating several times a day but minimal food-making, and that's mostly it?

So I managed to arrange for someone to pick up the pigs tomorrow, I'm keeping Baby and Hooligan back because they're old and friends. I unloaded the truck, which took 2 days and a furniture dolly (boxes of clay are roughly 40-50lbs and I just couldn't lift them the first couple days). I went in to my specialists appointment and they eventually gave me a bed to lie down on since I couldn't sit as long as I needed to without my head supported.

In February I'd ordered chicks with a friend and we got the reminder email last week, but I somehow thought they were coming next Sunday. Well, yesterday-Sunday she messaged me to ask where at the airport to pick them up. So yesterday I cleaned out the bottom chicken coop (6 wheelbarrows of light bedding) so I can move the silkies over into it so I can put the chicks to brood in the quail house. The quail house bedding is moister, so heavier, and I need to move everyone over at night when they're sleeping, so it'll be a couple days. Meanwhile the babies are brooding downstairs in a giant rubbermaid tub brooder on the sofa. Little Bear is interested but there's lots else going on.

When your memory sucks every day is a surprise.

I also had a talk with my supervisor, who-- you know, I think I need a lot more words to say "it's still bad and I don't get to see my doctor till after the leave is over because Healthcare so I can't really plan at this point"

A friend brought me by soup and bread. Another friend helped me out financially. I feel safe, and I feel like I shouldn't feel safe.

I haven't had capacity to do pottery yet. That's hard. Because I can do only one or two things a day I need to have food lined up and no animal/work/medical stuff, but because I can only do one or two things a day most days contain something I need to do, I can't get it all out of the way to clear my schedule.

My housesitter killed about half my tomato plants by number, and more than that by variety %. I still have maybe 16 flats of peppers and tomatoes, and I started a bunch of squash and leafy greens and re-started some of my precious northern cantaloupe seeds. I'm getting to the point where some of these I don't have backup seeds for, either because they're an F1 or a rare unobtainable variety or whatever. That isn't to say I can't get other seeds and start them next year - it's too late now to start more tomatoes or peppers -- but it's a loss. Turns out the plants started dying after a week and instead of messaging me to ask what to do the housesitter decided to wait till I came back to explain. Who knew what could have been saved in that time?

She also, like every human to enter my house without intimate knowledge and care for me, threw out the "rotten" tomatoes in a bowl on the counter -- my seed tomatoes that the parent plant is now dead, so that line's done -- and I'm pretty sure fed one of my prosciuttos ("moldy cheese") to the pigs to get them in the pen when they got out, and despite very very very careful instructions to take only the meat from the downstairs bedroom freezer (which had frozen and thawed) to lure the pigs in used the gorgeous salmon Josh brought me from the freezer in the carport instead.

A ton of things in my house are unique, irreplaceable, and don't make a lot of sense to people without exposure to the concepts behind them. When people visit and try to be well-meaning (and don't have unique homes of their own) generally irreplaceable or hundreds of dollars worth of stuff gets destroyed. Other people's houses are frequently inexplicable to me but I don't think I destroy stuff like that? I've finally got mom trained, pretty much, and Tucker and Josh understand. But it's frustrating and I think it's yet another reason I wish I had more space-- space to entertain separate from the living space which contains what I do with my time everyday.

Anyhow, that aside we've had good rain on and off, more than we've had in awhile. I'm hardening off my tomatoes. Something on my back deck eats lettuce but all the leafy greens other than lettuce I planted out there before I left are doing well. I have a silkie - looks like a giant white cottonball -- who can somehow hide effectively in an empty field. Little Bear had his first shots, is microchipped, and will shortly be fixed and I have a vet. Every time Little Bear goes to the vet they exclaim "he's such a delightful cat" so who knows what happens back there.

I need to get the wherewithal together to till my garden but we still have some lows in the forecast, even though the actual temps have been turning out very high. With the loss of so many tomatoes I started a sweet corn grex. My southmost garden is now fully planted, more or less, and waits only for a path and little greenhouse. It's woody perennials, needs underplanting with herbacious, but still. Has lots of haskap, hardy cherry, ribes, elderberry, etc and lots of blossoms this year.

Some apple seedlings from last year survived -- I knew my winter would kill some, since those seeds are from california -- and I'd like to catalogue them when I have wherewithal. I sorted through my seeds and put away anything I'm definitely not growing this year (missed the favas window, pulled out individual squash seeds, chose my corn path, put away the tomatoes and peppers, etc) so I only have a single dairy crate of seeds left out that I'll be putting in. The year is shaping up.

Every night Little Bear stalks me up to bed and settles in with me and Whiskey.

Solly has been sleeping in the muddy stream to keep cool, and here I thought she was just getting out.

The goose nests were eaten by the pigs when I was gone, but there might be a couple they missed.

The ambient temperature here varies between 10-27C indoors and 4-25Coutdoors (barring a little frost here and there) and is comfortable open window weather. Somehow n Vancouver a much smaller range was sticky and both too warm and too cold.

I'm not strong enough right now to unscrew the hard-water-encrusted thingers under the sink tap so I may need to hire the job out, annoying when I know exactly what I need to do but less annoying than not having running water in the bathroom sink.

I'm slowly sorting through "what if rest doesn't increase my capacity, it just maintains it, and I'm like this now". So: instead of telling a friend I can go for a walk with them, I would probably invite them over? So: I need to plan my systems much better and more efficiently. So: I need a cart so I'm not using the same wheelbarrow for chicken manure and bringing groceries in from the truck?

Threshold loves me. I love being here. All that, good and bad, and things are ok.

The psychologist I was referred to asked twice if I had things I enjoyed, hobbies, etc. Of course they want to steer me towards depression. The first time I just said yes. The second time I said "Yes, tons of stuff, the best is my tomato breeding program where I'm finally into the F2, so after 3 years of work I get to see the results finally, to see it opening out into a whole bunch of possibility-- and of course we're starting the little pottery studio in town, and there's a garden club" and I think he finally believed me. But it's hard for people to believe, I think.

If you're disabled you're supposed to be dissatisfied, unhappy. If you cure the unhappiness you're supposed to cure the disease, too, especially in "women". I have pain sometimes and a weird lack of function other times, enough that apparently I'm setting my jaw hard to get myself through things and have worn through the disc on both sides, which is what's causing the ear pain? But I'm happy. It's very possible to be in pain and also to be happy. And it's obviously possible to not do everything you want to do and still be happy, because in this near-infinite world how could anyone ever be happy otherwise?

Loving my life, and living in a life I love, has always been my most radical and least-understood act. Even when it's hard and it hurts and it's lonely. Even when it's not safe because of course it's never safe. Even when, even when.

I've been sitting up typing for 40 minutes now. The rain has restarted outside. I need to lie back down. Two cats are sleeping on the foot of the bed. Sometime later I'll go out and clear out another third of the bedding in the quail shed, or maybe do some pottery, or maybe do a run into town for more chick starter. I'll not chain multiple activities together, I'm learning that. And things will, for now, be ok.

Every day there's more sunshine.

We had a fresh blanket of snow two nights ago and through into yesterday early afternoon. I popped out on work breaks to snowblow, working from home, and it was the kind of fine dusty-sand snow that blows all around and is easy to snowblow but hard to walk through.

Today it's very sunny, -20C. That sounds cold but with the sun at least making it above not just the horizon but the trees there's so much directional radiant heat and everything is bathed in light. The air is cold enough that it's full of glitter, sparkling like a christmas card or fantasy movie set.

I have a friend at a similar latitude in maybe Sweden whose geese are starting to posture. I should split off a couple groups for breeding before they pair off inappropriately.

I started seeds for the garden club meeting in two weeks, we'll be splitting the tightly-packed seedlings at the first leaf stage and everyone will be potting up some micro tomatoes and small pot-friendly peppers. It's much too early to plant indoor starts for planting outdoors at the end of May, so this is a way to get our hands in the dirt and play with seeds and build some community without having overgrown seedlings later on. Plus it introduces people to micro tomatoes and I do have a ton of micro seeds. The club is providing soil and pots (I am also bringing some pots scavenged from the grocery store program's poinsettas). This makes me happy.

My apple seeds will arrive soon and I will soak and stratify them. I have no money right now but am hoping to order a couple more haskaps and some oaks for this year. Maybe I'll sell some pottery to do it?

Speaking of selling pottery, I have the kiln lined up to buy from my mentor in spring, but money is a definite issue. I'm considering doing a "help set up my ceramics studio" kickstarter/indiegogo/maybe patreon sales type thing, though it makes me nervous. I do love the idea of crafting items for people based on a couple data points though (big or small, handle or no handle, texture or no texture, colour family, choose a word if you like).

I really appreciate the perspective that ethical animal training literature has brought me with regards to "bad behaviours". When Solly is sharking or Bear is wanting to practice the cat death-bite on my wrist I can see this as trying to fulfill a need for play, much as eating fulfills a need for food. This isn't an animal "acting out", it's an animal who knows what they need and who is communicating that need.

It's also probably one of the more common examples in these articles, but now that I'm not afraid of a dog's growl I am so glad for the communication: it's a request for space. It isn't a symbol of a vendetta or a threat, though I guess for many people being asked for space can be considered a threat. It's just very clear communication of a desire. My cats and myself both are very capable of understanding these communications and responding in a respectful way and in all cases the dogs are relieved and grateful. The dogs trust me so if I need to invade their space momentarily to fix things they actually welcome it, like when I need to pick up a piece of meat Thea is chewing on and put it in her doghouse for her so she doesn't have to protect it from all sides, or when I help Avallu into the safety of the house when there's a stranger he doesn't like.

Solly has had the growl trained out of her a little -- this is typical when folks punish a dog for growling instead of giving them the space or security they are asking for -- and it makes it challenging for the cats to figure her out. I'm starting to train her back into it a little. It's remarkable how similar the whole thing feels to, for instance, a human who's been told what they want isn't ok learning to advocate for themselves, and of course "don't use aversive methods" is starting to be a cause in the autistic community, where there's advocacy around how we treat children.

This post brought to you by my sweetest Avallu and by the teenaged Bear-kitten.

The juxtaposition of pottery, data entry for work that requires mousing in a web entry form for each of thousands of entries, and carrying water in buckets to the animals has wreaked serious havoc on my right elbow. It hurts, but it hurts especially when I'm typing or right after carrying water. In some ways it's nice to have a familiar hurt when my body is doing strange things, but I do worry about losing use more than I have. So far it's just concentration when typing that suffers, functionally.

I haven't sold the pigs. I'd asked some folks to help me write up the ad and none of them did, so I relied on that instead of trying to sidestep PDA and grief and do it myself. That means I'm out of money -- worried about paying basic bills for the first time in maybe decades -- and hauling heavy water. The more important this is to do, the harder it is to bypass my PDA and do it. If I took a week off work I could probably manage but I do not have that week. I haven't been able to bear the thought of just shooting them all.

That said, this Friday and Saturday I am selling pottery for the first time at a little local sale, at the historic site at the original Fort. I have zero idea how it will go and no real expectations of selling a ton of stuff, but it would be nice.

I have thoughts about pottery, a lot of them, but pretty much only when I'm physically engaging with it. I don't have a visual memory. I have no idea what things look like if my eyes aren't on them. I could describe them pretty well if they were in front of me, but when I'm writing that doesn't really happen. I can collect only fragments here:

I use many different clay bodies -- clays -- and they all feel different and finish different. I love them, I love the contrast between the many surfaces that can be created from even just one clay and the quite different surface of glazes. I do not want to cover up the whole of anything with glaze, really.

I'm starting to have skills to create the shapes I want, instead of having them happen and then needing to stop before the piece collapses. Shape and line is fascinating, and when I sit down and do a set of pieces on the wheel each shape relates to the one before it in that set. For instance, I'll do a cylinder, then a classic vase curve, then invert it to a curved hourglass, like that. Those pieces, usually three to five, speak to each other and feel like a set in my mind even if they're different sizes and, obviously, different shapes.

Glazing is awkward and hasn't settled into a rhythm. I don't have a lot of space to store glazed pieces at the studio and every time I get in the glaze room other people come in and ask questions and want to do their own glazing. It's super understandable because glazing is weird and intimidating and we haven't had much instruction on it, and I am kind of positioned as the person who knows what I'm doing. I love answering these questions and helping.

But, I don't have a visual memory, and one doesn't have glaze buckets all open at once, and pieces need to dry between layers of glaze. So I would love to make series of several pieces where the glaze also relates to the other glazes and to the shape, but that requires an intense concentration and uninterruptedness I don't have. Right now everything is haphazard, "I know I like this combo" rather than "what best fits this series of shapes and how do I best show off the raw pottery as a highlight to glazes" let alone "how do I catch my poetry into these forms".

I suspect as people learn they will be able to work on their own and also answer other folks questions and I'll be able to find time to glaze when other people don't flock in.

There's a long time between shape creation and use of a vessel. Because of that long time and the burst nature of finished products -- the glaze kiln runs maybe once a month so I get several objects back at once -- it takes a long time to get feedback on the actual purpose of the item. I'm still creating in that time, with no feedback. I'm still iterating on a couple things I made in the summer without that actual use to direct me. It's an interesting feeling.

It's astonishing the number of things that can be made with clay that are actually useful. Not just cups and plates and knicknack holders but jars and dog dishes and shower caddies and shelves and rings and beads and buttons and so on. And wall sculpture. And signage.

I've made enough beautiful things that it's going to feel sad to part with them, but the ones I use are the flawed ones. Not sure if that's an aesthetic preference or if it's because I feel safe attaching to them or just because my first pieces tended to be flawed and I got into the habit of using them. It will be unusual and extraordinary, though, if people choose objects they like to use and then use them? That's a kind of sharing that doesn't happen with most things I make.

There is a weird and unnecessary chasm between pottery as a craft and pottery as an art in the community that's mostly erased in practice because of course it is, humans don't actually work that way, but exists in the discourse.

As in natural systems (how is our brain interpreting the world not a natural system?) edges are useful and intriguing.

I have always liked playing with the unexpected and will continue to do so.

My kitten, henceforward Bear, not only likes joining me on the wheel but also lounges among the drying pieces. We were joking that he's quality control, but actually two days ago he was lounging among the drying pieces, sniffed them all, and reached out to tip over and break... the ugliest one. He has never broken any others. So, fair enough.

Kittenlet got approved by the vet to go in with my other cats yesterday: no FIV or whatever the other one. This morning he and Demon were chasing each other around the house, I think deliberately. When folks come up for thanksgiving it'll be interesting to see where everyone ends up. It seems like he's probably staying here? But only if Hazard can handle him. That's the last holdout.

It's definitely fall. The aspen trees are brilliant gold, and soon they'll drop leaves on roads and sidewalks and those will be gold too. We've had a bit of rain but not a ton. The ground is still very dry. Frost has killed the tomato plants back and is taking its toll on the favas. I've harvested very nice gaspe and gaspe x corn, the first round of favas, and my seed tomatoes.

I'm very, very tired and I've been distant from all my people lately, and/or they have from me.

I played with a little porcelain on my home wheel for the first time the other night and it is just so much easier to control than stoneware clay.

Probably more to say but too foggy to think of it.