Greenstorm's Journal

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

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.

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?

I've always presented as fairly smart and competent, and these days I'm acutely aware of how much our ideas of smart and competent really are attached to a specific presentation. Able-bodied too, for that matter: if someone speaks clearly and calmly and doesn't appear to be shaking they're probably ok.

I don't know if this works for me or against me these days. The list of things I can do only sometimes is long. The list of things I can do safely and easily is short. It's easy to think that if I looked a little more impacted I'd get more help, but digging into it more plenty of folks with high impact intellectual and physical issues are, in at least one case, actually doing things like starving to literal death in the care that was supposed to be provided by the gov to help them.

The "am I doing disabled right" and "other disabled people are getting help that I (also) deserve" thoughts are part of the way the complex thread of social and bureaucratic systems atomize us, breaking us down into little categories that fight against each other or ourselves instead of pushing outwards to say: anyone who needs help should get it, regardless of what they do right or wrong, and regardless of whether we think they look bad enough on the surface.

Which is to say, I missed my doctor's appointment two days ago because I can't easily do time anymore. Both reading a clock (translating the visual into an actual time in my head) and the on-the-fly calculations of how long something will take need several minutes for me to actually stop and think through several times, and usually write each calculation down, if I want to be very sure it's right. I'd been having floating blank spots in my vision anyhow, and I was pretty anxious about this appointment. It felt confrontational, because I've been trying to get my doctor to refer me to the gyne for a long time, and last time she said she would, and the person who helps me with paperwork etc called the clinic a couple times and figured out she hadn't, left her a note, and she still didn't. She also refused to do the gyne-related meds change I'd asked her for.

(It occurred to me about a month ago that the basis of this meds change is an ovary-blocker that is part of what's used for gender stuff, usually along with testosterone, but I don't think that's why she's stalling)

Anyhow, I was working really hard to be present and focused and ended up in town way early, stopped to do something from my list, and then ended up at the clinic at the same time as my appointment ended (that is, about fifteen minutes late). My doctor has often been significantly late for my appointments before but I guess this time she was on time.

They offered me to see the walk-in doctor, who would be able to refer me, but... there was a 40 minute wait. I'd left the house early and my vision was still kinda compromised and I explained to the receptionist that if I sat in the waiting room for 40 minutes I'd probably end up on the floor unable to move. She looked alarmed and said I'd better not do that, then.

I've known for awhile I can't access the walk-in clinic here, because there's a long wait or else you go home and come back, and I can't manage either of those. I guess if I made a bed in the back of my truck I could lie down in it while waiting? It's sort of emergency or scheduled appointment for me.

But of course I felt terrible about missing my appointment, more out of principle I guess than out of any thought it might actually have helped. So yesterday I spent a lot of time in the garden. I woke up this morning with really intense chest pain, hard to breathe, you know, all that stuff they have on the list of "go into emerg" and just... I dunno. I seem to be fine now.

But having a ride, either to the doctor's or to and from emerg, would be pretty life changing around these things. A ride would let me get there roughly on time, because "most people" can do time more or less ok. A ride wouldn't leave me calculating if I was going to be conscious and undistracted enough to drive or if I'd use up my whatever in--

Oof. Brain just shut down and eyes mostly too. I wanted to think about this experience but mostly just was able to relay it. There we are then.

For long term disability they want me to tell them the reason for every sick day for a little over the last five years, since I was hired. NBD, not like I have memory problems as part of what's wrong with me, or like everyone couldn't remember that kind of thing anyhow.