Greenstorm's Journal

Oh goodness, where even to start. Yesterday I disappeared into the garden. I'm sure I did things but I don't remember what I did, other than in the late evening as the sun was setting I planted saskatoons in front of the spruce hedge. They seem to grow well even under spruce, and even though they were planted into the crevices in a matt of thick roots I have hope that, if I water them, they'll do as well as the other saskatoons I planted there. Once those bushes are well rooted the spruce can eventually come down.

The US bombed Iran yesterday. I was going to say "started a war" but we have a lot of weasel words to avoid that term these days. Someone or other in some gov or other was like "this could be viewed as an act of war" and I just... y'think?

I hda a bit of an online chat with a friend, brushed dogs lots, I'm sure I did other things. I rested as needed but the biometrics on my watch are telling me I'm overdoing it. Still, I made it through a shower and clean hair (I wore sunscreen, which means a full scrubdown every evening or my skin falls off) and... oh, I ran seeper hose irrigation and watered things that way.

We're under a smoke advisory here and the purpleair site (we pretty much have to use private business sites to know air quality unless we're right in a big city, because of course wildfire smoke is primarily in big cities) says that both my town and the town next door have bad air quality. Having said that, it doesn't seem that bad here? I probably should get a monitor, more money to replace yet another function that I consider the gov should do. It just doesn't smell like smoke... though I guess I have been choking a lot more than normal, but that also happens when I overextend myself and my swallow muscles get lazy. Anyhow, it's felt like my place has been in a little oasis of clean air so I've had the windows open and been outside without a mask.

This morning I woke early, turned on the fan to pull cool morning air in, and went back to bed to sleep in and to listen to an agatha christie audiobook. I'm having an experience I haven't had before -- the absolute freedom and joy of having an accessibility device, in this case the audiobook version of my old friends. Honestly even holding up a book takes something out of me, apart from the weird reading thing after my accident AND the weird vision thing. I can read a book I don't even like, or think "I'm not sure I enjoy this" because I don't need to fully minmax every letter in every word. I can lie in bed and read like I used to, comfortably, freely. It's life changing, or maybe life restoring?

I'd been going device-lite during solstice so I missed a text from the tree company; they showed up with chips, I rushed downstairs and put Avallu in, got delightful woodchips, the dogs were exceptionally well-behaved, it was very good. I carried a purring Siri around for awhile out there.

Then I came in and learned my brother's wife had their kid. It might have been yesterday? I hadn't checked that communication channel for a bit. Looks like it's a boy, and there are pictures of my mom and other brother there with the kid (but not my antivax brother in the picture, I've been really worried about that with measles being a big thing now and obviously covid is still around). I need to call Mom and get the details. Between Mom and my sister-in-law's (?that's such a weird thought) huge family with lots of her own sisters and parents and aunties I'm sure they're being well cared-for.

So, big 24 hours, and much better than expected given world events. I now have an abundance of chips to do paths as well as mulch. I need to get my hardy kiwis in the ground because the cats are eating them. I'd like to trellis the tomatoes at some point -- oh yes, I mulched some of them! and plant oaks and graft apples. The first flower clusters on the tomatoes are showing up, 3 weeks after the plants went in the ground more-or-less.

I've been pushing myself harder than I should to get the garden in. We've had weather that goes back and forth between too hot and dust-dry to work the soil and rain (that clay soil really needs to only be touched at the right time), mostly courtesy of these very intense drying winds we had for the last two or three weeks. I don't want to complain too much about it -- basically the prairies are all on fire right now, with tens of thousands of evacuees -- but it has impacted the pace at which I can put things out there.

Something is happening with the garden out there. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's what I've always wanted from a garden. I'm putting in permanent paths, originally because I can't remember anymore where things are supposed to be if they're invisible. I'm putting in more bones, hazels lining the paths and shaping edges of things with trees. I'm putting in perennial flowers this year? Echinacea and sedum and daylilies and that sort of thing.

And then of course the tomatoes are going in, I now have at least one of each variety in the soil. The sweet peppers are in, the hot peppers will go in today hopefully.

It's becoming something recogniseable. Not an ad-hoc this or that, but places within the larger place, an entity that swirls through time forwards as well as back into its history. I love it here.

I was chatting with someone online the other day and realized I've somehow come into the crone stage of life unexpectedly. I never would have thought I'd take issue with interacting with humans as much as I do now, but here we are. I don't share values with anyone anymore. It's possible this is still the remains of the breakup with Tucker and the way that's playing out, but I don't think so. Maybe something about how the bad things in the world are getting closer and the way folks react to that. I'd write about that more but I've finally learned discipline around keeping away from emotional things now that I'm unwell: every feeling indulged is minutes to hours I lose from later in the day doing other things, eating or gardening or rescuing a gosling with lost parents and finding it a foster (yesterday's task).

Maybe that's why I have trouble handling people right now. There's anger sitting next to that feeling of being dismissed and I don't really want to work through it until the garden is in for the year. That does sound pretty classic breakup, no?

I'm very very happy with my selection of tomatoes and peppers this year. I didn't get everything I wanted in the ground -- woad and weld but not coreopsis for dyeing, no flax, and the squash and corn are going in late. I did get some juglans in the ground, though, and I have a fun selection of blackcurrants to put in the wet part of the back field this year, and some swamp white oaks for around them.

I'm getting a sense of how much land I can handle in annual crops in my current state, and perennializing the harder-to-handle parts, I guess.

I follow a couple of accounts in gaza of kids who remind me of me when I was that age, doing things they love as best they can. One of them is a gardener who has cats, he shows us every time he gets a new tomato or squash on the plant as the flower fades. I know one of them will eventually turn up dead, or rather, the feed will go dark and I'll have to assume that's happened. There's no way out for the folks there.

And now LA is rising up against-- well. That's just happening now, calling in the military. And I think, what would it be like to have a society that rises up to put itself in harm's way for you (I mean, at the same time as the rest of the society is putting you in harm, to be fair) instead of thinking it's too hard and letting it happen?

Dark thoughts interwoven with gardening as we move solsticewards.

Every election a different group of people turns into preppers, as if social support and the standard of living isn't drifting downwards so slowly the whole time.

There's so much I feel I can't say to folks around this: how exactly their responses echo the other side's responses on my off-grid etc groups four years ago, what access to medical care and standard of living and stability during climate events looks like over time, the complete symmetry in discussions on how to protect oneself from the other side.

I just removed the "" from the other side. It's like twisting a ripe peach with your hands and it comes apart into two halves and the pit pops out.

Someone on a local group -- in Canada -- just posted that they couldn't get a family doctor or dermatologist appointment in a reasonable time, and did anyone have tips for handling some skin issue. Everyone did have tips: keto, gut health, essential oils, various potions and amulets. Again I think about how if you can't personally access the benefit of something you need a reason why it's not really a banafit, you need to justify in your own head that it's better this way-- or if you don't, I would imagine that's when the torches come out? I've never seen that happen.

Even in myself, when I wait for a specialists appointment for long months to years, I begin to think that surely they couldn't do that much anyhow. Which is, of course, ascientific. But the feeling is there.

Everything was ultra muddy yesterday and the day before, things had thawed. I put down woodchips since I had access to them, though that means I need to keep the geese off long enough to establish a vegetation cover or it'll just break down into soil and more mud.

Last night it froze. I still need to plant my variety of sunchokes that I got from a semi-local tiny shop, one of these people who posts a couple videos on youtube of their garden and collects rare things. I ended up with skorospelka, stampede, red fuseau, clearwater, corlis bolton haynes, and beaver valley. May have to break through a frozen crust to get them in.

The peonies are in, and a ton of bulbs. This long slow fall has been a blessing for my body and my hope as I was able to put a little in the ground at a time for so long.

Assuming I achieve some sort of stable financial situation where I'm not doing paperwork all the time-all the time, I'm curious about whether I can write poetry still. My mind is so different from what it was, but poetry still feels like a mother tongue. It's just that my tongue is more often feeling silent these days, replaced by the experience at the inside of my eyes. Either way, these are times that call for poets and I feel the call, whether or not I can answeer.

The first tomatoes to ripen outside this year were:

Some hummingbird f2s. These are from Joseph Lofthouse and most are about pea-sized. Genetics are roughly 50% pimpinelifolium, 35% domestic, with some pennellii and some habrochaites. The ones that are ripening are all tiny, and on little, branched plants, mostly in racemes of 6-8. There are two plants with larger fruits that haven't begun ripening yet. I haven't tasted them yet but the fruits are on my counter waiting.

Mission Mountain Sunrise. These plants stay tiny and then just set clusters of fruit. I found one out there ripe before all the others, a gorgeous orange-and-black.

KARMA miracle x sweet cheriette F2. There was a set on my deck that ripened awhile ago, they were pink or orange cherries with a really zippy, lovely flavour like I liked from zesty green. There was also a bright orange grape shaped one in the garden I haven't tasted yet, I bet it'll throw some green babies. Sweet cheriette seems to impart both earliness and a good robust growth up here. Now that I'm sitting here I'm wondering if the ones on the deck were actually zesty green and my memory is failing me, I should check this.

The next ones to ripen will likely be a promiscuous tomato, Ildi, Brad F5, and some of the Mission Mountain Grez as well as some other cheriette crosses.

Corn is slow but it's looking like I'll get something from my morden field crosses and maybe from my sweet corn patch, which is pretty alright.

I harvested a bunch of brassica seed the other day: ethiopian kale (carinata), ultraviolet mustard, and a mix of napa cabbage, pak choi, the aforementioned two, and whatever else was around.

My cinnamon rose is producing hips; I'd like to harvest them and pot them up to hopefully germinate in spring, and do some layering on a couple of my rose branches. Cuisse de nymph did well this year too.

I have some lovely lettuces out there that are unlikely to finalize seed before frost. More interestingly, I have some turnips that are quite small, and densely planted. I'm going to leave them and see if they overwinter through both cold and voles and maybe give me some seed.

Some tomatoes are going to come in for breeding, and I have some F1 seed of zesty green x carbon that just ripened. The other F1s are a zesty green field cross and a taiga x early promiscuous tomato cross.

The dango mugi barley and khorasan grains look like they may ripen nicely, the former more certainly than the latter. The batanka wheat didn't really start up, so maybe it'll overwinter and be a spring wheat? We'll see. The sumire mochi barley only one stalk survived, and this is the second time I've had that happen. It's not happy here I guess.

My apple seedlings need to go in the ground to overwinter, but that means tilling somewhere. After I get the disability forms filled out I'm hoping to do that, but right now the thinking involved in disability stuff is just laying me out in bed.

Luckily I have a rotating selection of cats to help me with that and the show Time Team.

The transparent-type apples are near ripe, and I'm very much looking forward to them. The branches really bend under their weight, until the geese can grab and shake the apples off, but then the branches rebound and leave some for me.

I harvested a very large amount of rhubarb seed, an dI should remember to harvest some sweet ciciley seed.

That's all my mind will do right now, but it's the important stuff anyhow.

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.

Tomato seeds are in for the year, I believe 101 or 102 varieties depending on how you count. Several of them are F2s, which is the first variable generation after a cross. Many of them are up already.

Peppers are potted up, mostly, and the couple that didn't germinate are replanted.

I put a bunch of greens in too, though just a couple of each except sorrel, with the plan to start a bunch more for the farmer's market later on. Doesn't impact me, but I believe some legislation was just changed so it wouldn't be legal for actual stores to buy veggies from me unless I did a bunch of licensing stuff and joined a group of some sort based down south. Not a great look, gotta say, for a gov that mouths words about food security. As always I'm excited at the idea of ethiopian kale.

Potato seeds started, though seed potatoes are not ordered. The snow is mostly off the garden, on a sunny day I could go up and plant favas and poppies and I bet the ground would be thawed enough; it's still mostly freezing hard overnight which makes chores less muddy.

Looks like many of the apple seedlings I planted are still up there -- some are not -- but the geese keep getting into the garden and likely will eat them all if I don't get better fencing sorted asap.

No legumes or corn or squash started yet. I'm thinking about doing a round of sweet corn or popcorn on top of my gaspe, I'm more likely to eat popcorn but people locally like sweet corn so a seed crop might be nice. Anyway, I could offset those by starting them indoors, especially if I'm starting from several different varieties. I'd like to try runner beans this year too, I don't really like figuring out support but they're supposed to do well in cooler weather. Maybe on the deck? I have a nice assortment.

I did plant some mache and pak choi on the deck.

I would like salad season.

I set up some damp boxes and am experimenting with those. I'd like to be able to throw a bunch, carve a bunch, and handle a bunch of objects not necessarily in the demanding timespan that air drying with a bit of plastic over them forces on me. Fingers crossed! The damp boxes are just clear bins, I set cardboard in them for the mugs to sit on and I can spritz those or just dump water in. Now I need to shift some shelving so they can be somewhere convenient and also allow more plant space when the tomatoes get potted up.

Geese are sitting in a lot of cases, I'd been hoping to keep them off the eggs until midmonth so no babies happen while I'm gone in early-mid May. I've managed to keep the ducks off at least. It all means lots of eggs for me, I sent a box of them with Tucker and stored a box in the back of my fridge (goose eggs keep for a really long time) and now it's time to start making and freezing pasta dough. The little food processor I got way back when is putting in some hard labour on pasta dough.

Thea has really bad matting on her pantaloons. It must be uncomfortable because she doesn't want me touching it. I think I can get in on Solly's before it's that bad, and Avallu's are good, but I think I might take Thea in for a professional groom. She gets spectacularly motion sick, but there's a groomer just a couple kms down the road, I might even walk her down there?

In other dog news, Avallu let me clip his nails the other day after I worked up to treats-for-touches for awhile. None of them are running on the road much, so they're definitely needing clipping. Thea is Not Having It, Solly will be worked up to it ok, she's just skeptical. And Solly has showed truly excellent escalation from tiny liplifts, through gentle escalating growls, to a sudden but roomy air-lunge with the cats. I'm very pleased; when she arrived she went right to lunging to indicate her displeasure, and I've been working on letting her know that growling is a good communication tool. This just makes her a safer dog all round. The cats appreciate the heads up too, and are feeling safer knowing when to be around her and when not to be (the not being: when she's eating or getting lots of attention from me. We're working on this latter one a bit).

I realize I'm supposed to be making some dishes for my brother's wedding but I haven't been in to the studio to use those bats for plates recently. Hm.

I also started a "mug of the day" post on instagram, where I'll post something about something I've made. Sometimes it will be a glaze detail, sometimes another thing I'm noticing or thinking about. At work it's something about the mug I bring in to drink out of.

Visit with Tucker was excellent, though I didn't love being away from home. Finally talked with Josh about all the stuff that had been waiting on me having energy, and that was good. It's a place to start.

So: lots of good.

The drop-dead date for having completed all the stuff I haven't been able to do to keep working is this fall, and I'm just not able to do it in time, plus work, plus manage my health stuff. So far as I can tell they allow zero accommodation there, too. So this lovely castle in the air I've built myself rests on that foundation until October, when I'll most likely lose my job because I'll be kicked out of the forestry thing for not finishing it. The forestry thing doesn't allow it all to be done separately, only while working, so that's a no go. I'm glad to have had this, anyhow. Not sure how long I'll be able to hold down any other job, like retail or whatever is available in town, since I'm working from bed a couple days a week right now. So I know there are changes ahead, but I'm happy right now. That counts for something.

It's been awhile since I wrote. I had that truly terrible cluster of migraine symptoms at first, then work was extremely busy -- we did a last minute heli flight that lasted a full workday, then I was helping with a conference one town over, then I was recovering, then I was helping with our seedy saturday, then I did a tiny bit of pottery at the studio, now it's now. It really took everything I had to get through that. I gave up on non-masked human social stuff for that couple weeks, on doing more than minimum for food and house. Now I want to sink into the deep pool of peace that is my house and my life. I want to watch my cat sleeping and intermittently pet him for hours while my mind unspools and processes.

There's a lot to process.

It's spring and the geese are all over the yard looking for nests and there are melt-pools everywhere. I can hear gregarious honking through my dog door.

While I was at the end of the conference, but still in it, before the drive home, I was sending off a quick email to my supervisor about how my work hours supported the yearly priority plan. I used the term "DEI" and he didn't know what that meant; I sent him a copy of our organization's new DEI plan that had come out and been circulated something like last fall and he said thank you; he didn't dispute (and never does) the time I spend on this but wow.

I introduced my colleague to proper vietnamese food for the first time and as I was dressing and flipping my pho he asked how I knew how to eat it. He loved it, even the (truly phenomenal) fish sauce.

I gave away 8 mugs as door prizes and several hundred packets of my own seed at seedy saturday. They had someone else as a speaker this year talking about "proper" seed saving (how not to cross, for instance) so I spent my time at the seed tables. First I was stuffing envelopes with seed and directing people to label them as I stuffed, but we quickly ran out of packets. Then I showed people how to do the origami seed packets, the librarian used her paper cutter and a pile of recycled paper to make squares, and we folded, filled, and taped. People kept coming in with big bags of seed. Someone came in with elaborate origami seed packets with a crane folded into them. We had such an incredible richness of local seeds come in, I felt so honoured, like a conservator of a community treasure. Several thousand packets of seed went out, free, to people. My mugs, some plant starts, other folks' homemade wine went out as door prizes. The space was packed. Everyone said it was an amazing event. One of the speakers brought 75 varieties of tomato seed to give away. They say that in the coastal indigenous cultures your wealth was measured by what you give away, and I always feel that, and last Saturday I felt wealthy. All the extra seeds go to the new seed library in the library there so anyone who missed the event can still grow things. A+ use of my time but following on the end of a long week it was a lot, and by this time I was really missing talking to my people.

Dogs finally got treated for the fleas Solly picked up when she went on her walkabout. I hadn't seen any in the last month but that means very little. I've been watching videos of a professional dog groomer doing livestock guardian dogs on youtube and trying to figure out how I could wash my pups. I'll settle for getting the mats out and doing a deep brush. Avallu's been loving this; I think it's time to start treating Solly for it. Thea has realized it gets her attention so she's settled into it.

My pepper seeds are all up except for the african birds eye. It's getting on time to start tomatoes and separate the peppers, which means setting up more lights, which means clearing a shelf or two, which means doing some work on my storage container. My first round of seeds, tomatoes from Jan 1st, is doing well-- some of the micros are flowering, and the F2s exhibit the breathtaking diversity that hold me in awe and that I'd always hoped to attain.

The headache seems to be somewhat recurring, but not as constant as it was. Nausea is a near-constant struggle. These two things may (?) be correlated to air quality, as they may get worse when I turn off the CR box or have the windows closed? On the other hand it's warmed up and I can keep a couple windows cracked open so my body just feels lighter in a lot of ways.

In two weeks I'm driving to the coast for a couple days to visit Tucker and bring him (and some clay) back up, maybe disseminate some mugs.

This Wed is a bisque kiln and possibly the following weekend a glaze kiln, that doesn't leave much time for glazing.

Odds and ends, unprocessed. Spring is coming. My mind doesn't think well. Still I'm doing what I love and am happy; I only hope this life doesn't have that fall expiry date.

I was going to write about sorting tomato seeds, losing the tomato vault, the number of tomatoes I have outside the vault, which seeds I was planning to give to whom...

...but for the second time this year I was scent-bombed at work, really badly, and now I hurt and I can't think and I feel sick even though I came home as quickly as I could. Cubicle work environment really are the devil. As is the concept that a "pretty scent" is clean or nice instead of "no scent" being the actual clean.

Scent pain makes me so aggro lately. Funny how that works.

Taught the new pottery tech to take the specific gravity of glazes yesterday. I had figured it out by reading about it. She had been given a handout and didn't understand it, by someone who had never done it and I suspect didn't care to understand it. I also gave the tech the link to the "for flux sake" podcast which goes into a bunch of nuts-and-bolts stuff around the practical parts of glaze chemistry and running a studio. I wish there were more pottery podcasts like that and fewer "meet this potter artist in an interview and learn about their inspiration, how they started, and how they use art words". Like, I'm not opposed to having those, but there are roughly one to two hundred hours of that kind of podcast for every hour of practical stuff around how to make clay or glazes do things.

We also did a bunch of glazing with the new pottery glazes, and I introduced one of the members to websites where people layer and posts pictures of premade glazes. I don't think she knew that premade non-underglaze things existed. It's fun, I'm pretty sure she's also on the special interest train because she says this stuff lives in her head.

Apparently the new tech can't mix glazes because of her asthma, and she doesn't yet know how to run the kiln, so I'm coming in this Wednesday to run the kiln and... well, they'd likely like me to come in the next weekend to mix glazes but 1) I've been busy too many days in a row and it's causing my body to malfunction and 2) Tucker will be here and I want to spend time with him. So, I'll trust that the folks I mixed glazes with before, volunteers, can do it again if they want glazes.

Workshop last weekend went well, people got to take home plants and craft plant markers and folks chatted and had a good time. No one mentioned my mask -- I was the only person masking in the building -- so we'll call that ok too. Next workshop is kratky lettuces, I should get some started as a demo.

cw sui
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I also continue to lose capacity, especially if I don't spend a couple days a week lying down. I think it might be time to talk more about this with my doctor. I mean, I don't know how or what, but I don't think we've found the solution. Same questions as always, is it "just" autistic burnout, is it some sort of post-covid post-exertional malaise thing, is it some random autoimmune thing that all have the same vague symptoms, who would even know to rule these things out? I'm starting to get a ton of ads from everything from psychiatrists to physios to whatever else to "help navigate the medical system and bring back functionality" and I hate the idea that our system is built so folks who are least able need to pay to navigate this. I'm very lucky to have a job where I can functionally slack a bunch if I need to but I can't do nothing.

This last thought brought to you by trying to type this morning with arms that felt like noodles. Kind of ironic that I finally have community in this town, both a garden club and a pottery club, imagine that! but that my body is just kind of not having any of it.