Greenstorm's Journal

The post office doesn't deliver to the door here; you need to go in with proof of address and they hook you up with a post office box which most of the world doesn't deliver to (including the postal service that removed door-to-door service and replaced it with post office boxes) and then you need to go in when there's someone behind the wicket to get packages.

Lately the post office has been understaffed, so we've only been able to pick up passages between 11 and 1, and 2 and 5:30, on weekdays-which-are-not-holidays. The closures are announced by handwritten paper on the post office door.

For me this means two things:

One, if I go in to get mail as part of doing other things before 11, I don't get my mail, because I have a two hour window of activity per day and so I can't wait around for it to open, nor drive back out later that day. So I can get my mail another day, but that is basically my full window of activity two days in the week instead of one because of the drive out etc. And I can't plan around it because it's not posted online, just on a piece of paper in the post office. After 2 weeks they send your stuff back.

Two, there's a long lineup of people in there when I go in. Before I could hit midmorning and pretty much miss most folks, but now I both spend longer in there because I'm waiting in a line and am exposed to more people. In fact, I'm exposed to every single person in the town, because we all need to go into this little room to get our mail. I've been pretty chill about my post office covid exposure because I pretty much only see one person a week for more than ten minutes, and my post office trip was very short and there were basically no people in it. The situation has changed some there.

Meanwhile the one grocery store in town has significantly reduced its offerings and raised prices. In the last six months prices have close to doubled, and many of the things I used to get are no longer available. I'm not sure what the store is full of, but it's sure not things I'm used to buying. There's also nothing reliable, something that's usually there will just sometimes not be, and then will maybe be back next week, or next month, with a blank spot on the shelf. They've cut things like cornmeal and seasonal veg, and they don't reliably carry any particular brand of cat or dog food anymore, so I'm mail-ordering those.

The other grocery store is kept by the local First Nation, and it's got an eccentric set of stuff as it always has, and also a dollar produce cart that's let me have some treats like a bunch of bell peppers more than once. I probably need to shift most of my grocery shopping there, but they don't have online shopping and curbside pickup -- again with covid risk and also energy, but also thinking on my feet to put together meals from what the store carries.

All this has led me to try once again to reschedule my covid booster, which is overdue by something like six months. Our gov sends us a text message when we're able to get our next booster, along with a helpful link. Many times I've clicked on this link, walked over to get my medical card number (this itself actually requires some stairs, so the attempt isn't low-energy) only to find that there are no available dates in town. Pretty sure I actually did my last booster a couple towns over because of this. I'd even gone in to the pharmacy to ask about it, and the pharmacist said I could just book online, they had frequent boosters there, but again, it kept showing nothing.

Well, I've been gardening and not much else for the better part of a week and a half so my mind seems ok, and someone was coughing in the line to the post office the other day, so I gave it another try. Tap the link on my phone, no appointments in the calendar thing for the forseeable future. Wait, I thought, what if I try this on my laptop?

Turns out the link they send to text message has a mobile mode which prevents seeing, and thus toggling, a thinger which then allows the available dates to show up. Now, I have not had the ability to figure this kind of thing out for quite some time, but in my earlier life I likely would have persisted and managed.

Do normal people get their text messages on desktop/laptops? Like government ones from phone numbers? Does everyone else not have this issue? Does no one get a covid booster anymore so it doesn't matter?

Anyhow.

I can feel the town gently decay as the mills all close down, and as the network of services -- post office, doctors, transport which is everything from busses to airlines to major connecting roads -- also begins to come apart. The biggest, best-run First Nation is taking up the slack when it can, like with grocery stores and even apparently a bus to the big city. None of it is online or, I want say, predictable and reliable, but it's there.

(Incidentally I think you get the bus by calling some guy, but I don't know the number to call offhand, and I also feel pretty weird gambling that the bus will run in time to get me to and back from a flight or anything. There's a paper with the number... somewhere in town on a cork board, but it's not the main cork boards for communication used in the grocery store or post office, so I can't remember where and go back and take a picture to capture the number. But other than the bus there's driving for a 4-hour roundtrip or hitchhiking, so)

I got someone to come look at fixing my deck the other day. He's booking into 2026.

I just planted a hundred baby apple trees, with daffodils underneath, and 78 survived last winter. I have another couple dozen to plant, along with peonies which might not flower for years (and which I need to go in to the post office to pick up). I don't want to leave.

I also don't think I can live anywhere else, really. I can't drive in the really big cities at this point -- I think my cognitive tics are not safe for it, where I can't follow through on decision-making quickly -- and I certainly can't take transit there. Living closer in but still somewhere relatively small is significantly beyond my financial reach -- I'm not even sure I'll be able to renew my mortgage on disability payments, if I do actually get disability payments. (Canadians need to "renew" their mortgages at the current interest rates every five years minimum, so they need to be re-approved for the mortgage, and my income is either down or nonexistent and interest rates are up).

Anyhow, this is a lot of atmospheric rambling from someone who's spent all its time and energy gardening and been very happy to do so.

This much typing and my fingers are slowing down, all the letters are doubling and I'm hitting thr wrong keys. So, enough for now.

It's later than usual for snow but not ridiculously so. October has been warm; this last day or two looks like it's finally going below freezing for good for the winter.

Things I have not done that I need to do:

Pull up the hoses and coil them

Power wash hoses, snowshovel, nets, anything else that's been sitting in the mud for the last two weeks since we finally started getting rain

Put my chainsaw pants on and actually cut up all the logs

Screw together the field fence

Put a roof on the greenhouse

Move the birch wood in

Build one or two doghouses with pallets

Build a roof over the feed area, or build a feed shed

Pick up weird bits from the yard in prep for the snowblower (Solly makes this hard, since she re-scatters things everyday)

Spread the woodchip piles

Put the rototillers "indoors" somewhere

All that said I'm still pretty easily winded from covid, and when I do too much in a day I get dizzy. Yesterday I spent the full day at the pottery studio -- this month Sundays seem to be when it's open, and hopefully that continues -- and by the time I got dinner in me the room was just spinning. I'm back at work now and it's definitely a struggle.

I've got a bunch of tomato seeds fermented and drying, though, the corn's in and there were some gorgeous gaspe x saskatoon white ears with a peaches-and-cream pattern in the mix. I pulled in a karma miracle, sungreen, sweet baby jade x "heirloom" micro, taiga, and sweet cheriette plant to do some crossing this winter, and I need to start some micros.

Pottery is super fun. Having the wheel in my house really helps; my skill is improving so quickly when I'm able to work even a little most days. I still haven't got a slurpee-cup-height cylinder thrown but I'm only an inch or two away. Most recently I've started attaching handles. I have two shapes I like: one is a classic rounded bellied shape and the other is a very geometric conic flare; I can make the former but not the latter. I'm learning so much all the time: besides handles, the most recent bit is that these big pieces need a lot of material left at the bottom, to be trimmed off, for stability. Funny that I've just learned to clean up the bottoms and take extra material away. Each technique has its place.

I've been working with two clays: p300 and m332, both by plainsman. the p300, a porcelain, is like sewing with silk. It does whatever I ask it to do immediately, it holds its shape. The m332 is like carpentry, it has a significant set of physical limitations and strengths. It's sandy and red and has absolutely gorgeous potential for texture, where the porcelain is pure white and smooth and I end up being uninspired by the surface except to cover it with glaze.

Kitten has settled in as a full member of the household. He still sucks on any bare skin he can find, but otherwise functions like a very energetic, exploratory tiny cat. He harasses the other cats, who set boundaries; climbs the curtains and shelves; snuggles lots; and sits on my lap and helps with the wheel. I think he wants to be called Bear or Little Bear. He's also apparently a smoke cat, and not a black one. That is, he looks black but his undercoat is white, and his belly is developing white longer hairs too. Between him and Solly it's feeling very animally lately.

Covid took my sense of smell but not of taste, and I found it remarkably easy to eat for a couple weeks. I think I didn't realize how processor-intensive food is for me until that went away for awhile. There's just so much going on in the whole nose/sinus area. Things are back to normal now, more or less, and I'm enjoying the bergamot in my earl grey tea again.

There's probably more but my cat is sucking loudly on the inside of my elbow and it's distracting. I should talk about eating with people from separate rooms over thanksgiving, but that might need to fade into obscurity.

Today, in the most terribly-named event ever, my office is resuming "safety day". This is an event where everyone from both locations gets together and go over the legally-mandated safety training, such as a lecture on the corrective action log and sign in/sign out principles, reviewing the contents of the heli kit, and a lecture on how to drive on radio-assisted roads.

Covid numbers are, of course, up, except that we don't test for covid anymore so they're down. Our emerg isn't shut down today, but it's had rolling shutdowns, and it takes about two months to get a doctor's appointment.

No one is wearing masks, and every person will be piled into the conference room for a friendly break time even if the main group is divided into two for the main training.

I haven't been super careful of covid for the last while; I don't really see people, except at work, and my workplace has been pretty empty between our inability to staff fully and work from home part time and the last bits of fieldwork season. I share a truck, unmasked, with my one coworker (who is married to a schoolteacher, so there's a significant path there) and chat with a couple folks face-to-face in the office unmasked.

Today I'm masking, though honestly it's probably more a symbolic gesture than functional given the long-exposure high-density situation.

I'm also 100% sure I'm going to go home and feel sick for the next 24 hours or so due to scent exposure either way.

It's April and snowing.

The roof is scheduled to be replaced this Friday (/SaturdaySunday/Monday and maybe Tuesday). I'm awfully curious to see what is under it. The colour will either be Boreal Green or, in this era of covid shortages, Twilight Grey if that's not available in time (they're all listed as in stock). I suspect the house will be quite a bit warmer after the re-roof, because it'll have an extra layer of plywood over the shiplap-insulation-shiplap sandwich that is the gothic arch roof/wall right now. The installer will warranty it for 5 years, and it's supposed to last 30-- this in contrast to the current roof, which was put in 7 or 8 years ago and started falling off after only 4 years.

They'll approach the roof with scaffolding. It's effectively 3 stories and never less than 50 degrees or so from horizontal and rarely that, so it's not much for standing on. I'm very interested to see this.

Back to the office for work tomorrow, I had a massage appointment but I just put my summer tires on and don't want to do the hour round trip in slippery freeze-thawing slush so I bumped it down the road. So it'll just be back to the office, no masks required, faces and noise and everyone coming into my cubicle to say hi all day. I have some videos lined up I need to watch (silviculture manual updates etc) so at least I can do headphones.

I didn't clean my chimney when Tucker was here so I don't feel super confident in lighting a fire right now. Electric heat it is.

On the flip side: gardening forums, landscape sharing, poetry, planting tomatoes, friends.

Hey, brother. COVID is a sensitive subject for me, as it is for many people. I have the assumption that you know it's sensitive, so when you don't treat things around it with sensitivity I further assume you're not taking care around folks' emotions about it, and you won't take care around my emotions.

It's sensitive for me because it's harmed a bunch of people I know in various ways. One of my friends lost the use of his arm, permanently, because his rotator cuff surgery had to be postponed with the hospitals too full to take him. When we had the height of our outbreak here and lost so many of our First Nations elders, the helicopters and ambulances taking people to Vancouver or Prince George hospitals because our hospital was full went past my house. I have a friend who's only now able to walk across the room, a year after their positive covid test. I have several friends in various kinds of healthcare who have been working nonstop and who have some pretty intense experiences to share. These are strong personal and emotional experiences. They have all had a big impact on me, and they're all raised when folks talk about covid.

Furthermore, I work with plants and animals that are prone to get contagious issues. I've seen what happens when those issues go uncontrolled: it's a lot of death and destruction. I've also seen what kind of strong control measures are required to actually control these contagious issues. Vaccines are part of these control measures.

Sometimes mass killing is part of the measures. If a vaccine mandate can prevent significant death, I am wholly in favour of it, much as I am in favour of vaccinating animals to prevent the spread of their diseases. I am not in favour of a "herd immunity" response since that involves enough people dying or being prevented from passing on their genes that the frequency of genes in the population shifts. That is a lot of people dying. I don't believe a lot of people being left to die is an ok policy response; not if they're poor, not if they have illnesses or are disabled, not if they're rich, not if they have a particular skin colour, not if they have a particular political belief. That is not an ok way to solve any problem. This is an intrinsic moral belief of mine and you will not change it. I really hope it's also a belief of yours.

You don't seem to be careful about the links you share. I haven't read this more recent one; an earlier one that I did take time to read was not only poorly thought out, but used my gender as an example of something ridiculous that shouldn't be taken seriously. Since when you post in family chat you don't use language that expresses curiosity or empathy and you have used links that didn't display curiosity or empathy on the part of the authors, curiosity and empathy is not my first response to you in turn. You certainly do not appear to be trying to invite them.

I know I said this subject was closed for me, and I really do want it to be. I don't have the energy to talk about this stuff much with people who are actively supportive of me, let alone with someone in our family with all the baggage our family has. I was surprised by how snarky your answer to my statement was. I don't want to have hurt you, if I did, and I don't want you to have hurt me, which you did. I still don't have the energy to engage in a confrontational back-and-forth on this with you.

I love you. You've always been the brother I felt closest to, and I'm surprised we're out of alignment now since for so long I felt like we were more in alignment. In another world I'd like to be able to talk to you comfortably about all this. I'd like to be able to believe, unquestioningly, that our morals are in alignment. I'm not in that world right now, and I am sorry for that. I do hope we will be again someday.

Absolutely I want you to know that I wish you personally well. I want you to be happy and thriving, loving your job and being involved in it, loving your marriage and your home and your dog. I want you to have a fulfilling moral and political life; I think those things are important.

I'd like to talk about how your life is going, and how mine is going. I can't do that if you keep bringing up covid-related stuff as your main conversational topic. Can we work together to talk about other things? Can we build some sort of rapport that way, and maybe eventually we can find our way back to this discussion that's obviously important to you, but at a time and in a way that we can both be kind and generous towards each other?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least my hands have mostly stopped hurting.

Vaccine seems to be taking me apart piece by piece: the first day after, my vaccine arm hurt. The second day after, my other arm hurt. Now my finger joints have been really painful for the last couple days. What it mostly feels like is that my body isn't recovering when I use those muscles or joints, so they go into overuse/strain territory. Seriously though, I need my hands.

In other news: full-on spring, as in, it's sunny and bright and warm during the days, still cold at night, and the snow is really almost gone from everywhere there isn't a shadow. Fencing and the garden are my life.

I have a lot of tomatoes to transplant, a lot of pasta to make and freeze, and a bunch of seeds to plant (but I need to do more fencing first).

Yesterday I got my first covid shot-- everyone seems to be dividing themselves by brand of shot, which is weird to me, but for my own records it was the moderna one.

I'm definitely having a response to it-- my arm hurts enough that its use is limited, and chores aren't my favourite right now -- carrying buckets of water and grain and whatnot. I'm told the pain should just be a day or two. Very glad someone advised me to get it on the arm I don't sleep on.

It reminds me of putting together the yearbook in high school. I don't remember which immunization it was, but we did a spread on "entire grade nine class shot", which was lightly amusing at the time. That was my graduating year-- 1999. The Columbine shooting happened between design and publishing, and obviously we had to choose a different theme last minute.

I'm also reminded of the depo-provera birth control shot I was on for awhile. My life was often too chaotic to take a pill every day, especially the same time every day, so I switched to it for peace of mind. It was super easy, just go in every couple months. It got rid of the blood times, which was pretty good. Unfortunately it also made my emotions super volatile and all-consuming; I mean moreso than they are normally. I didn't recognise it at the time, and I went off it for other reasons. When I look at the difference in my journal between the time before the last one wore off and the time after the difference is stark, however. Now my birth control depends tenuously on the one kind of copper IUD I can use. It's super common in Europe but isn't approved in North America, so I need to have it brought in and inserted kind of under the table. Bleh. I'm working up to "only dudes with vasectomies apply within" I believe.

In more general covid-not-shot news, our whole little town got done at once. They're doing all the little towns up north here one-by-one, I think first they did those without hospitals, now they're doing those without hospitals able to keep covid patients, more remote first -- the helicopter to Vancouver isn't cheap for the medical system, I guess. It seems easier for them to come through and do two days twice rather than step through the age brackets one-by-one as they're doing down south.

Canada (or is it BC?) is choosing to prioritize getting everyone a first shot, and waiting as long as they can -- 4 months is roughly expected -- before the second shot, with the idea that it's better for twice as many people to have 80% immunity rather than half as many have the higher immunity. We'll see how that works out. I know we're much shorter on vaccines than the US, so they're now way ahead of us in numbers after a slow start. Meanwhile the variants, which spread more easily (well, the ones that become prevalent spread more easily) and in some cases are more deadly for the younger folks being immunized last, are beginning to take over. This is definitely a good time to be getting higher immunity, and to keep being careful.

One of the hardest thing about the pandemic has been how folks who'd previously been in the "bad social structures lead to bad outcomes for individuals" folks have turned into "these individuals are evil people choosing to hurt us all and should be hurt in turn" and "I did the thing, so everyone else should be able to".

I get that folks are scared and hurt and lashing out.

I also find it disheartening. It feels like more folks were following dogma rather than actually believing principles of social organization.