Greenstorm's Journal

Two days back on pills. Really a very surprising amount of pain. Weird to think I'd been used to this only a month ago.

Second snow is happening. This one may stick. The first is pretty much gone. Josh canner up and we made kimchi and sauerkraut, hung shelves in the kitchen, and brought wood in from the satellite piles into the woodgreenhouse. The rebel hen who sleeps there was distressed. I'm still bringing a bit more in.

Seed swaps need to go out today. I also need to handle some fundraiser mugs and call the gov disability people to see if they've got their medical info from the insurance company yet. Also this week need to do a disability update to the insurance company. COVID shot is scheduled toi. This is too much for the week but it all needs doing.

I hurt and I don't want to drive my truck in the heavy snow before the ABS system is fixed but here we are. Maybe a bit more rest first.

Still happy to be alive. It's so improbable, all things considered.

The seed cleaning event yesterday went really really well. Someone I'd swapped seeds with (and nearly gone to live on her property once) several hours west of here is the person with the seed cleaning trailer; she loaded up her car and brought the stuff out and we set everything up on the lawn at the art studio and we cleaned seed for three hours straight in the sunlight. Then a storm showed up, blowing up the lake with exactly enough time to load things back into the cars before the first drops came.

We had enough folks bringing seeds that we worked steadily but unhurriedly the whole time. I learned to use a threshing board, bucket thresher (with basically a paint mixer with chains on it), various screen tricks, and a debearding device. We also used the office clipper, which uses vibrating slanted screens, a fan, two drawers, and several chaff ports to get seed really clean. My dango mugi barley, chiddham blanc wheat that thrived as winter wheat, and a bunch of last year's wheats got cleaned, as well as a bunch of brassicas. Other people brought carrots, orach, peas, lily bulbils, celery seed, coriander, lettuce (which can be done really well with the screens, we learned through experimentation), some things for IDing, and I'm sure other bits I missed.

There were between six and twelve people there the whole time, enough to chat happily and keep busy but not enough to overload the equipment. I came home with some brassicas and chervil uncleaned, but with the rest of my brassicas cleaned, and with some extra seeds (black chickpeas, white breadseed poppy, rye). The farmer with the seed trailer runs a farm called Woodgrain Farm, and so I contributed a hand-carved woodgrain mug to the thank-you basket (plus some soap and seeds) and she was super excited about that. I love when a piece finds the right home.

The trailers were created by a grant from one organization, but as always grants are happy to do capital costs and less happy to pay for ongoing use-costs, like moving the traler from one town to another so it can, you know, actually clean seeds. So I'm hoping everyone sends an email to the funding body talking about how excellent it was to have the farmer, skilled with equpment, come out with the trailer to our town.

I was tired before yesterday and my body is more tired now, but it was a joyful day and a joyful group of people all having fun and solving problems and learning together and ending up with an abundance of seed. Really very lovely.

Tomorrow is teaching clay for a couple hours.

I've realized that these two groups, clay and gardening, are what brngs me joy from the outside world lately. And I've successfully navugated changing my perspective on being in these groups. When I joined them I knew I didn't want to put myself into any leadership vaccuums, organize them, plan them, run a tight ship, and then ultimately burn out. I deliverately attended and did little pieces of things, did not fix things when I saw a lack, did not organize things to make them more efficient. I gave a couple ideas, supported a couple ideas, did some daily tasks, committed to a moderate amount of effort (which felt like a minimal amount of effort). I chose absolute uncontrol of anything. And while that seemed like it would be scary and lead to frustration and chaos, I knew it was the only way to proceed sustainably, and I knew it needed to be sustainable for me.

And it worked. IT was frustrating at first but less so now. IF I really want a thing to be done I have freedom to do it, and others work similarly. Folks don't get assigned things and run on a timeline by other folks; they step up or not, some things don't happen, some things appen less perfectly than they might, but no one burns out and everyone has fun. And we've been having fun for a couple years now in both cases? And it feels syustainable.

My body is being iuncooprtative, as my typing is likely showing, so I'm going to go back to lying around with cats. But: I'm happy. This micro-environment is good. The bit of how I interact with the world that I have control over is going as well as it can.

Doing pottery is so good but oh my goodness my core stability muscles. Working on the wheel I notice my lessened finger strength (all my strength is lessening, because obviously I'm a lot less active than I used to be with everything, and I've been using aids like wheelbarrows to move feed sacks etc) but it's when I stand up and then try to get myself home, and then try to get myself out of bed the next day, that I notice the core stuff.

Working my way through the backlog of stuff I wanted to make though! And I still have my skill, and I'm pretty fast so I can make a bunch of stuff in my window of ability. Another pottery studio person was there and she was newer to pottery than I am, and she didn't get through the quantity that I did.

(She also had most of the glaze kiln full of her work, which is absolutely gorgeous linework with fine black glaze tips and then colour, it is a privilege to watch her develop her style and to understand her experimentation and iteration on the way to her goals)

It's chilly here, perfect weather to stay in bed and recover. When it's chilly enough all 4 cats get on the bed, they really like the electric blanket. Not that it matters as much as all that, I can't stay awake right now for anything.

In a couple days I need to figure out my woad harvest and what to say to the doctor I'm seeing (my own doctor is unavailable till mid October so I'm seeing an interim doctor in the hopes of coaxing my referral out, but my prescriptions are also running out. thank goodness they let pharmacists fill in the gaps)

In the next week and a half I need to set the farm up to run while I'm gone. The auto waterers are set up, I need to empty the quail house for the auto goose feeder (they are going through *so much* food right now as they fatten up, it's astonishing. Well over twice as much what they were two weeks ago) and build a little auto feeder for the garden muscovies, as well as putting a pallet house up for them if I have time. It's doable in the time I have but I'm hanging myself up on making a door. Which way does the Z support run? Looking things like that up remains challenging.

I'm getting some nice tomatoes from the miracle cheriette line in a number of flavours, which is fun, and it seems to have switched from broccoli to zucchini bounty.

Despite everything, this summer is truly a glorious one.

The last three summers have been drought and wildfire smoke, and before that the heat dome. 2020 I spent in a state of basically complete panic that was probably a combination of PDA and work from home interacting, along with the ambient covid panic. I can't remember 2019's summer offhand but I think I changed jobs at that time; 2018 was a wildfire evacuation. I moved into this house in 2017 at the end of summer and that was the last summer like this, with birds and the smell of clover everywhere. Threshold loved me as much then as it does now, part of my body, a fully enveloping love like finally having real skin or gravity.

This year I've only closed the windows for wildfire smoke a couple days. We've had actual rain, the kind of rain patters I remember from before the drought: little wandering thunderstorms bringing cloudbursts and sometimes thunder as they pirouette across the landscape. There's no heat dome; outside it drops to about 10C at night and when I wake up the house is cool; during the day the sun can be a little hot between rainstorms but long cool mornings and the endless stretch of near-solstice evening give lots of time for moving around.

There are more bugs than I've ever seen and my body feeds noseeums and blackflies as well as mosquitoes when I go out in the evening. I leave the fan running in the bedroom, facing out the window, and a window on the north side of the house open downstairs; it pulls the cool air in but also disrupts the mosquitoes and any who get into the house can't fly against the air current. I picked that trick up from an Ologies bug episode, where the entomologist said the best way to keep mosquitoes off a patio was to put a fan at ankle level. They're bad fliers, he said, and like to be low, so they can't fight the air current enough to bite. I love that kind of elegant solution. When I came in from the garden two days ago in the evening my face was covered in blood, half from swatted mosquitoes and half from blackfly bites.

The garden rolls out like a carpet and then fills in like details on an oil painting. I'm putting in paths and trees and trellises, a little at a time, and yesterday I picked up a bunch of perennial flowers and they're waiting in the wheelbarrow to go up and in. I've put in a kolomikta kiwi trellis. I've put in a strawberry bed with six kinds of strawberries. I've put in baby lindens and silver maples and elms and ash and oak and hazel. In one tomato and pepper bed the hazel, cherries, and haskap are there, no bigger than the other little pepper plants and spaced in between them to line a path that does not yet exist, to a spot that is still weeds but will later be a portal.

I have somehow become a person with elderly animals -- not elderly in the way they act, but at ten years old they start to get yearly bloodwork at their vet visit to make sure everything's ok. Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri fall into that category and today is Avallu's birthday; he's 9. Yesterday Whiskey followed me out to the garden and followed me as I wheelbarrowed woodchips from down here to up in the back garden a couple times, then got the zoomies and ran along the path very fast, bounced off the wheelbarrow I was pushing, and kept going. He does not feel elderly.

Anything could happen during the rest of the summer. It's windier than it has been, with tornadoes surprisingly nearby, and the wind strips moisture quickly. We're only saved by the little wandering rainstorms that come regularly. There is a lot of fire elsewhere and strange heat anomalies and floods. Politically we've lost the idea of human life as important and human well-being and rights are so far out of functional equations as to be laughable. There are many wars, even if we don't call them that anymore, and no one with resources is interested in holding back the tide of disease. Systems infrastructure frays and I suspect one day we will wish we had our current access the things that right now we think of as irritating because they are becoming inconvenient: border access, medical systems, air travel, relatively free telecommunications, year round fresh foods, so many things.

This won't be the last glorious summer like this but it might be mine. Even if it isn't I draw a line here: I love being alive, I love inhabiting my life, I very very very much want to know what happens next, but this summer would be enough.

Cool wind and the scent of overnight rain through the window. Warm covers and a cat sleeping on the bed while others wait for breakfast. Thai black rice, coconut milk, and sugar in the rice cooker with apricots waiting. Aspens rustling outside silkily. A pile of woodchips waiting for their wheelbarrow, steaming slightly as they compost. Wiggly dogs and the sound of roosters in the distance and beyond that robins and sparrows. Nearly clean sheets and parsley, mint, and tomatoes from the garden waiting to be turned into tabouli downstairs. Reading again! by audiobook, the closest I can ever have to revisiting my childhood home. A nephew? Even a few people in the world who really want me alive.

It's very good to be here.

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.