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I can't think very well right now but I really want to record an experience.

With humans I'll often circle them a bit before they catch my attention and I interact. I think it's a lot of backbrain work, where I pick up on information about them and then eventually decide they're safe and interesting enough to spend my time on.

I grew up in the pacific northwest and was pretty much familiar with all the plants about me with the exception of the ornamental ones, which I picked up quickly as a tour guide at the botanical gardens and as a landscaper (consider those plants part of a friends group, with a formal introduction).

When I moved up north I had the experience, for the first time, of living in a place where I didn't know the ecosystem. I did not know all the plants. I was working in forestry and doing things like ecotyping which required me to learn them, and I learn plant names more easily than doing almost anything, so with a little effort I picked them up. But they weren't family, in a sense. I didn't have a multidimensional understanding of their habitats, related plants and animals, human uses, range of phenotypes, lifecycle, and a kind of bone-deep familiarity with them week-by-week through the year like I did back home.

Even now most of the plants here I'm familiar with in that way are the domestic ones.

This year I think I'm starting to develop that kind of deep relationship with amelanchier -- june or saskatoon or serviceberry, as you like. This is the time of year when it flowers, and even the first year there were whole power cuts full of fluffy white bushes in full bloom that were just so striking and noteworthy. This house came with what I'm fairly sure now is a Smokey cultivar, the one with a milder berry taste but the distinct overtone of almonds. The previous tenant said the sweetest saskatoons were behind the chicken coop.

Last year or the year before (what is time?) I noticed that pretty much every tree on the property, both deciduous and coniferous, have young saskatoon bushes under them. This must be from birds, nibbling, sitting, and then dropping seeds. It really drives home how drought-tolerant these plants are if they can grow, not only right on the south slope of places or on exposed areas, but also right in the middle of those snaky shallow spruce roots that instantly suck up every drop of water.

Someone in Canada with Oak Summit Nursery did some experimental grafting of apples onto saskatoons a couple years ago and it worked and the grafts are still good. It brings the apples into precocious (early) bloom and probably dwarfs them. One of the more interesting permaculture methods is grafting fruit trees onto existing native plants, so for instance on the Islands putting apple trees onto crabapple trunks, high enough to avoid deer and on that established and suited-to-conditions rootstock. Well, saskatoons are hardy far far colder than here, they're drought tolerant, what's not to try? It doesn't hurt that a developmentally disabled vocational school's horticulture class was selling scionwood to raise funds for a pizza party* so I have some apple scionwood around

And then I started poking around more. I learned that the first year the plants grow very slowly, only 4-6", and they don't start leaping until later. There are a bunch of species that seem to hybridize, though I haven't learned the differences between them yet. I haven't sorted out their evolutionary history yet, nor have I grown my own from seed yet, but those will come. My time and thought are, after all, very limited these days. At some point I'll taste different bushes more concertedly.

But I have... a new friend. It's a friend on the landscape, that I can easily see at this time of year when driving, and also that I know in several different spots and shapes in places around town and around my property. It's neat.



*there is nothing about that I don't love with my whole heart. My image of these kids working with plants and getting pizza, and being able to do it in high school, is one I hold as a shield against the darkness of these times
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I've managed to:

-Get stuck with all my truck keys a >6hour 1 way drive from the truck
-While my wedding clothes and presents were locked inside
-During the wedding
-Had someone take a set of spare keys to me through the airport
-His plane broke down so he was in a hurry
-He gave the keys to the airport with me, with my name and number on them
-The airport lost/didn't know the keys existed for a full day

-Drive 1000km on two wheels that had not even been finger tightened by the shop that switched over summer tires
-Despite their "we torque each bolt three times so you don't have to retorque" policy
-So I was repeatedly checking tire pressure, bearing heat, etc and made a mechanic's appointment only to discover this
-No idea if vehicle damage occurred from this but my brand new tires are in rough shape
-I look like an idiot but my regular tire place looks worse

-Am sensitive enough to scents/perfumes that I can no longer travel on public transit
-It's a bit of a slow build so I was super sick at a friend's place
-Had to extend stay at friend's basically lying around being sick for an extra day
-Had to cancel most other friends visits
-Basically spent most of the time after the first few days down here either lying around or regretting trying to do anything other than lying around
-this part of the story has more vomit than I want it to

-Walked housesitter through several issues on the phone including
-Get another load of feed delivered
-Bear in the yard
-Pigs out
-Interpersonal differences with people who came to help with pigs
-Threw out breeding tomato seeds
-Almost threw out charcuterie "meat with mold on it" from fridge
-Opened bedroom door because cats asked to be let in so bed full of cats
-There may be an extra cat living there now?
-Opened the trailer full of bear/pig attractant but can't close it so it's just sitting there like the biggest bear attractant in literally the worst bear season we've had
-When the pigs got out they ate more feed so I need to try and get more feed delivered
-I'm not sure how to walk someone on the phone through troubleshooting fences
-I struggle with her literacy/english level so some things likel slip through the cracks
-Several baby geese died, I can't understand her description of how

-Everything costs a ton of money to handle
-Even things like courier costs, fancy food that my stomach can handle, etc add up
-Sorting feed from here is about 3x price of normal
-My credit was already maxed out from being sick which is stupid expensive
-Canceling things meant canceling friend gathering that helps sell some pottery and reimburse some costs

-Body is now alternating between periods where I can't move and where I have to carefully hold all my muscles in tension

-Tomorrow is the drive back home in some combination of rain and maybe?snow depending

-Kinda feeling done but can' afford to be because every bit of rest or trying to cut corners now gives me weeks of extra work later which my body will not tolerate

-I can process it all later but ugh

-I'm now a month in to my two months off work

-I still definitely have less than 6 hours of capacity a day but can still sometimes carve extra out at great cost but that just kicks the can down the road

-I have not had a day since day 3 or so that I've been able to turn off my phone and not cancel things, arrange things, remotely buy things, candle couriering things, etc

-Screens are making my nausea worse sort of by the minute at this point

-So is having the incessant nose of the ringer pinging things on, on my phone that I normally leave sound off

-My bank is sending me ads for investments

-The first specialist appointment to come through for health stuff is a psychiatrist nor neurologist etc so I'm scared about being put in the "you're crazy but not properly crazy little girl, your body is fine" track.

-To see my doctor again before my medical leave ends I will need to sit in the clinic waiting room on her walk-in days.


Anyhow.
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Oldest son
Responsible one
Peacemaker
You try to mend the world
With a million kindnesses
And every day
A little
It works
The world is on your shoulders
Sometimes in your hands
May its joy
Always outweigh
Its burden

***

Open-heart
Joy-maker
Lover of animals and family
Saviour of silent lives
May you always walk
Supported
In many worlds at once

****

We all have something that brings out our spine. Countercultural. Joe is vegan, Al is antivax, Ben is anti sane, and goodness knows what I am.

****

I drove down to Sherry's with Tucker and left my truck in Vancouver, with pottery and wedding shoes. I didn't want to drive Seattle traffic. I left one key at Sherry's, accidentally. The spare was in Fort: respectively 5 and 12 hours drive away. My community in Fort rallied to get the key flown down Monday (I'm not planning to leave till Friday) and there are a couple options for the other key.

***

I'm reinspired by my work last year that was half-finished at Sherry's. I miss putting poems on my work. I got a bunch of texture tools/stamps. The plan is to spend some time going there.

***

I met my brother's new wife for the first time yesterday, at their western ceremony. She's very nice and she works with animals, which I appreciate. They've bought a condo and want to spawn. I wish them well. The wedding was very sweet.

***

I find myself wondering what it would be like if family and community had ever come together in a celebration to support and approve of something I was doing. Maybe life-changing. Even if I held my wedding to myself people would come but maybe not with such support. They'd come because I asked, not because they believed in the institutions I was supporting.

***

Housesitter messages me that I may have another cat staying in the house. Very curious to see who's there when I come home.

***

My home is full of emotional support. Being around family -- some on my dad's side I hadn't seen in thirty years -- was very strange. People love me here. It's not home though.

***

Point Grey traffic was unreal last night as everyone moved to the darkest area they could think of for the extra strong aurora borealis.

***

I love my family a lot. They're not my home, but I love them.
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This morning I woke up and it was -31C outside, -26C at work. This is really only the third cold spike this winter; it comes after a big day of snow on Sunday and forecast snow this week. I'd taken off work sick for the last couple hours yesterday afternoon, taken several naps, and fed and watered everyone extra. I woke up, filled water in the new downstairs laundry tub, fed and watered everyone again, started up my reliable truck, and drove in to work.

On Sunday I gave a quick workshop to the gardening club on cheap vanduzee-style kratky hydroponics. Folks got to take home lettuce, micro tomato, matchbox pepper, arugula, and tatsoi plants in collars of pool noodle skewered by bbq skewers that held them over jars and a little packet of nutrients. Driving in the highway wasn't ploughed yet, it had about 5" of snow on it. I was impressed, some folks came from the next town over and drove in on that! People were driving reasonably, important when you don't know where the highway is so you need to drive in the middle of it and navigate getting around each other when you meet a car coming the other way. Lots of good chat and met some neighbours, including the one with the oak trees (!) lining her driveway.

After that I went down to the clay studio and spent two hours loading the kiln with glaze tests. I'd had a migraine the week preceeding and making glazes is quiet, can be done from paper rather than a screen, and allows lots of slow and restarting. So I put in several of my own glaze tests, plus some of the big bucket's worth that had been newly mixed at the studio, plus one quick floating blue test for the studio out of alberta slip.

My own tests were chun celadon with minspar; val's turquoise with 3134; oldforge floating base with 10% iron, 3% copper carb, and 1% copper carb; and an ash glaze called "new hagi" from my birch ash. There was also a copper wash in there to pick out carving and see how it goes through those glazes. I also tried a bunch of studio glaze layering including seaweed and bailey's red 2 under the cedar hill white ravenscrag, blue opal and oldforge floating rutile overlap, and some spectacularly splattered tall forms that had used up the remains of bits of glazes people had decanted. Plus other people had bought some glazes and were playing with overlapping. The big kiln was full -- two of my bowls wouldn't fit -- and it will be very very exciting to open. Everyone is excited to see it. It'll be cool today but I don't think anyone with a key will be around, so tomorrow after work will be the opening.

I've been reasonably sick for the last week, basically since the scent issue the Tuesday two weeks ago. I didn't end up going to bed for three days like I probably should have, and ended up carrying symptoms into a true migraine. Funny enough I didn't realize they were migraine symptoms. I seldom get really disabling pain and my normal tell is southwest-patterned chevrons in my right visual field and holes in my left. This time I didn't get those tells, but when I went into the massage therapist she asked a bunch of questions: "pressure on your eyes? photosensitive? short of breath? nauseous? brain fog--" at which point I stopped her and said, "how do you know all this? I don't have all those symptoms now but those are the cluster I get with scent exposure normally" and she said "oh, they're just migraine symptoms". Anyhow, I'm reconsidering my scent reactions now. And I did eventually get a headache because I pushed it, even wearing sunglasses etc.

I had a great visit with Tucker, and a pretty good one with Josh despite being sick and somewhat rushed -- it was a couple days shorter than I expected, which is becoming expected with him. My animals are good and my grain bins are full, my house animals are good and snuggly, I woke up at 3am and stoked the fire and the house stayed nice and warm. My pepper seeds are up, and a couple of my hydroponics tomatoes are forming buds.

As I'm writing I see holes in my visual field that are subtle enough I only really see them when reading. Hm. Never had this linger for two weeks before.

I like it here. I like it here. I like it here. It's my home.
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Also washing machine broke. I can work around a lot of things, but in my household? Not a clothes washer. All the new ones are 1000+ dollars and have WIFI, AI, and goodness knows what else.
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I'm writing from home. Lately most of my posts have been from work where I have some distance from myself. Today, though, it was dark when I left town and the snow forced low-beam headlights to carve only a small private space on the highway. I travelled here with the electric sound of ceramic clattering gently with every irregularity on the road.

When I got home, in the dark, I unloaded four boxes of my pottery from my truck while animals swirled around inside and out. I also had milk, salad greens, a chainsaw, and winter boots to bring in. You know that feeling of warm light coming out of a home doorway? And walking back and forth, carrying armloads of things, while underfoot everything seeks your attention and love?

I don't know how to describe the next part. At some point I needed to put groceries away, make food, eat, add wood to the woodstove. Solly came indoors and was growling and warning the cats, so I worked on some conditioning by having a joyful cheese party every time she looked at or interacted with the cats. She's very smart and had some rough nervous system stuff recently and I'd unthinkingly gave her some intense "no" for going after a cat yesterday, so she was very guardy around them. We're back to a much better place now but it took lots of attention on my part to jump up and give her a cheese party all the time. Then she woud only drink water from the cat bowl, which is about a cup of water, so I had to keep refilling it so the cats had water whereupon she would drink it again.

I finally gave her a bunch of chicken broth in her own water bowl, which solved that problem, but then Bear decided he would only drink flavoured drinks by tipping over my cups and water bottles. That meant all sorts of things all over the couch, and while I was handling that a full strip of flypaper full of dead flies got tangled in my hair, the cats were asking for dinner, Solly still wanted attention, there was a chainsaw in the middle of the floor and also Solly but she'd also just grabbed one of my winter boots to chew...

And in the midst of that I was unloading my pottery, piece by piece, from the newspaper nests in those four boxes. Here's the thing.

You don't know what pottery will look like until after it's fired. Glazes are not like paints, roughly the same colour as they'll be when done. Glazes are like cake batter, or a kitten's eyes: the final result only comes after you've waited through the necessary rituals. Glazes are red and grey and pale green, almost all of them, and depending on how you applied them they'll turn a huge range of colours. One of our glazes at the studio is green, but sometimes purple, and can be made to turn yellow. That's chemistry.

But also, here's the thing. Pottery, or really three dimensional objects, require attention and time. The glaze on my cups, when it works just right, is different inside and outside and all the way around. When you look into it there are depths, not just patterning but also movement under a translucent surface. The clay itself is textured, from smooth white or dark brown that feels almost manufacturedly smooth under the fingertips to sandy reds that reach out with friction to pull at your skin. There's a balance of weight in the hand. Looking at them is one thing but handling them is quite something else.

But also, they respond to the light. Whatever the light is in the kiln room at the pottery studio it makes everything look terrible. Sunlight is amazing, but even the lights in my house - daylight LEDs, warm white LEDs, or white grow lights - give them a totally different character.

I wanted to take pictures so through the chaos I was unloading them, piece by piece, onto a shelf I'd cleared. Piece by piece, on at a time, I lifted them. I held them. I tried to sort them into categories. The whole time there was this very familiar intensity, the feeling of being internally obliterated by the strength of something I didn't have time to attend to. I fed the dog cheese. I moved cups and wiped the couch. I picked sticky flies out of my hair. I tried to corrall newspaper packing scraps into the chainsaw box. And I felt something.

By the time I finally made dinner and came downstairs I was on autopilot. In hindsight I'm so grateful for a home where I can autopilot through my needs and not be broken out of the habits by roommates etc, sort of ironically the animals don't count. I turned on one low, warm lamp and turned the other lights off. The flames danced in the woodstove. I ate salad and chicken rice and drank water and chai hot chocolate and fended the kitten off my food.

Now I'm done, nursing my hot chocolate in the cup I get to keep because it has a small crack on the inner rim. I made the cup-- it's a tall straight cylinder of dark red clay with fine horizinal textured striations in the middle 2/3. The bottom quarter is raw clay, the next quarter up is dark blue that pools in between the striations, and the half above that is swirling fluid blue with white wavelet patterns and drips moving through it.It's beautiful, and I made it, and I know where my emotion is from.

Last time I made beautiful things was in high school. My art teacher gave me, not just free rein, but support in doing what I wanted. I made beautiful things: paintings of what it felt like to stare into my own eyes, sculptures of what love felt like, bowls on the wheel that engaged my body. I made art that was banned from being shown in public at the school, and art they displayed front and center. I externalized parts of my experience so that people could see and experience with me. I integrated my inner self into the world where it could be seen. People said nice things about it.

That was the last year in high school. Right afterwards, in the summer, we moved to the city from the 4000 square foot house and 5 acres I mostly grew up on. We moved to the city, to a 42' boat where three of us would live. I slept on the folding couch in the livingroom, my brother had the front v-berth, mom had the back room.

We had to get rid of a lot a lot a lot of things to make the move and I packed up my most cherished and important things in one crate and set it beside the car on that last day. I kept it separate, apart from everything, so no mistakes would be made. It contained my art, my american passport, my notebook that was the predecessor to this journal, and my love letters with Kynnin.

It was thrown out.

I haven't made physical art since then. Functional things that are incidentally beautiful, sure, but not--

Sometimes I exist in words and writing. That's when I make poetry.

Sometimes I exist in space. That's when I make physical art. So much can't be communicated any other way.

I didn't do that for so long, and here I am with so many beautiful objects. I didn't trust I could still do that, could still evoke that heart-feeling from materials the earth gave to my hands. I don't know how to handle having those objects, them existing where I can access them, having a home that is mine with then inside.

This has never happened before and I have feelings about it.

And now that I'm safe in the warm barely-lit room with a fireplace and a shell of wood and shingle and outside that snow and dogs and fence protecting me I can almost entertain the idea that I could do this again: make another beautiful thing and another, and keep them or let them flow from me as I choose.

Almost.

It's been so long.

Iterations

Nov. 30th, 2023 10:12 am
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I built two doghouses in addition to the third that Thea made herself. It looks like Thea has taken over all three and is guarding them from Solly. Need to give this some deep thought. That's probably why Solly likes coming in so much. Meanwhile working on guarding indoors against cats with Solly. It really shows that I lost awhile focusing on building those relationships between everyone.

Meanwhile I've been doing swirly pottery and started carving it. Carving through the multicoloured layers makes a stratified rock-like pattern that's a little more metamorphosed than leaving the marbled edges straight. I've noticed that even carving leads to even patters, which I dislike, so I've started carving more roughly. Sometimes I've gone through the wall of the piece, then attached rough pieces overtop and scraped them all up, and I realized-- I started out in the summer using rocks for patterns and textures. When those were fired they didn't look like rock patterns, so I left that aside, and now I've come full circle to basically create rock looks but from a place of imitation and control instead of borrowing the actual textures. Very interested to see where this goes.

Looking forward to seeing Kelsey and Tucker over the next month, though I need to sort out my home better. Want to do some more sewing, and put up some shelving, and eventually some lighting to highlight those shelves so I can put my pottery on them.

I have two more sets of seeds to ferment and dry for my tomato breeding, I'd probably best do that before anyone comes to my place. I also discovered the source of the weird ongoing winter fruitfly apocalypse: one of my carboys had the stopper damaged and it's become a 5 gallon breeding ground. It will be gross to deal with but at least I know where it's coming from now.

Had help with the money situation so I'm no longer looking mortgage vs work fees in the face, it eases my day-to-day considerably. I need to get the whole thing sustainable though.
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The kitten I ended up with is firmly integrated into the home and is growing up. He is Very Smart-- he learns super quickly from experience, and more than any other animal I've known he is able to attach actions and consequences in a less-general way. For instance, he understands that mugs might be hot so he approaches all my mugs cautiously after one unfortunate paw incident, but is unconcerned about water bottles. He knows not to attack bare feet but needs to learn not to attack each different pattern of socked feet, and when I'm putting on pants the dangling leg of the pants is fair game until my foot comes out the bottom. He knows when jumping on me not to use his claws, and is learning that per different pair of pants too. That said, the skin on my hands and arms hasn't been fully intact for awhile even while he has learned to mostly keep his claws in when playing. However he's a bit of a bully and isn't great at reading the room around the other cats. He's especially obsessed with Hazard, and will jump onto hazard's back with his arms around the older cat's neck and just hang on like a little black cape. Also, he has never been completely successfully photographed.

His primary mode is flitting from cover to cover like Things in the backdrop of a horror movie, or alternatively curling up with his paws around my neck and his head under my chin, sleeping and purring. Kittens, right?

Solly was disappearing for a day or a day and a half at a time and returning for food for the last little while. This concerned me for obvious reasons and I built more fencing, blocked holes in the fence-- and then the neighbour who has his own two LGDs tracked me down and let me know he saw her get hit by a car on Friday and had been trying to track me down and tell me. Now, when he told me she was in the fence and doing fine. I've been in the habit of doing a quick body-check when I haven't seen her in a day, just running my hands over all her limbs and spine and belly to check for injuries because who knows what could happen to her out there, and she'd always and continues to be fine.

The weather has been really mild and I'd made her a dog house in case that's why she was disappearing, but she didn't use it. After learning she'd been hit I let her come in the house and she stuck in there all day when allowed. She's still acting very afraid of Avallu even though Avallu politely ignores her now, though who knows what they get up to when I'm not around. Ideally she'd feel comfortable using the downstairs dog door but that's where Avallu sleeps, so it seems unlikely. At this point I'm letting her in through the front door to the upstairs, and it looks like she wants to be a velcro/house dog. If she could just let herself in and out I'd be fine with that, though I'll need to work on resource guarding around the cats. Like Avallu used to, she guards snuggles with me. I've also made her a second dog house that she seems to like better - at least, she slept in it last night. I'm not leaving her in at night until the upstairs is better set up, too.

She's been playing with the next door dogs when she escapes and I suspect she'd like a similar-aged companion. Four dogs at once is A Lot, but it does make sense to keep in age-similar pairs. Nothing is happening on that front while I still have pigs and a scary financial situation though.

Avallu seems to be doing well. He's staying outside more and is more active so it looks like the antibiotics worked to clear up his UTI. His x-rays showed a bit of arthritis in his back and he tends to want me to let him in and out instead of using the dog door, so I'm wondering if he does have a bit of pain and I need to talk to the vet about that. HE's not young anymore.

Thea is a little food-guardy around Solly, and I suspect would like more solid routine around food. They all get fancy fresh meat when the grocery store has extra in my expiry-day pickups and that semi-rhythm seems to upset her. We're getting into the time of year when they all need lots of extra calories, so I can start supplementing with fatty pork belly and that will likely help. I also want to renovate the A frame she chose for a doghouse so she has more visual range and more protection in it.

The other cats all still are very snuggly and also miffed at Bear. I don't blame them, since his primary cat interaction mode is attacking, and he initiates most interactions by attacking from stealth. Whiskey and Bear have been sleeping on my bed until I build a door to my bedroom, and Whiskey is very happy with that but even more happy when I work from home and sit in just exactly this one spot at this one time with my computer. Hazard wants me to carry him around whenever the kitten is nearby so he can't be attacked. Demon has taken it on himself to play with the kitten a lot of the time, which means he's often socialled out, but he very much appreciates quiet petting if he's protected from the kitten.

It's still extremely warm out, at least for this time of year, just hovering around freezing this week. We've had maybe 4" of snow total and it's mostly either melted or subsided into ice sheets. There's no insulation on the ground if the temperature drops quickly so I expect there'll be burst pipes in town all over this year-- unless we don't actually get those low temperatures. The ground has just finally got cold enough to begin freezing duck and goose feathers to the ice sheet overnight so they get left in the ice when the birds get up in the morning. I'm unsure if they'll go indoors or not.

When Avallu was feeling so bad I took down the original dog bed (crib mattress) I got for Thea that has gone unused. He slept on it and seemed to feel less painful on it, but now that the fire is on downstairs the cats have taken it over. He's far too polite to ask even a single cat to move off it, so he whimpers and settles down on the concrete. Combine that with pottery stuff and I'm making a pottery bench to replace my downstairs table, with the goal of enough room underneath for a second dog bed. I'm also making up cat beds that might be more appealing to them, potentially to put on the wall to give myself more floor space. I've also put up one shelf for pottery and need to put up a bunch more. There's no reason not to display this stuff. So, doing a bunch of rearranging down there ideally to increase both functionality for me and liveability for the animals.

I also finally started cutting out my winter sewing, which has been a challenge with one kitten, one Very Large dog, and three cats in the room. I basically made it work by putting up a gate to keep Solly in the kitchen, feeding the cats, and dumping Bear outside on the deck that doesn't have any way to the ground. By the time he had figured out how to climb down and gone around in through the dog door I'd cut out two and a half pairs of pants.

I take so much comfort in these loved ones, even when literally the entire floor and hall is covered in bodies and it's challenging to move around.

Had some great social days at the pottery studio, answering questions at the open house, and I met someone at the community studio who's equally obsessed with wheel throwing who I can actually talk to about it, so that's nice, but it doesn't feel the same kind of safe and interesting and loving that my pack does.
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In past years they talked about fire on the landscape. This year the landscape is fire. Small fires that started during the lightning in June and July and didn't have enough people to put them completely out flared up in August and even the beginning of September and their outlines are creeping across the https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map map. No doubt if I circle back to this post in future years that link will be defunct, but right now it's very lively. All the international firefighters have gone home; most are in the southern hemisphere where their skills will be needed, and where our folks will soon go to help. But. Our fires aren't out, we're only getting a sprinkle of rain, and Canadian firefighters are burnt out and demoralized, in part because of the high number of deaths this year. Most years no one dies.

At this point it's likely that both the drought will continue in stage 4 or 5 for a third year (when in fact most of BC hasn't hit level 4 or 5 in the history of the system previously), and that the fires will go underground into the duff, the forest floor which decomposes so slowly up here and the peat in all the wetlands that dot the landscape, and they'll pop up as soon as the snow is gone.

That used to matter to me. The Waste Land still reverberates in my head moment to moment:

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water


Not that we have cicadas here. But the thing is.

Last week I was hooked up to electrodes for 19 hours. I slept, and then I napped four times, two hours apart. After each nap, after half an hour, someone would rap lightly and then open the door a crack, letting the light in, and say "good morning". I don't think that's happened since I was a child? Then she would ask, "did you sleep? Did you dream?"

I don't know if I slept. I think I did. Isn't the point of sleep that you're unconscious, so you're not aware of it? In November I'll talk to the doctor who will interpret the results, and he'll let me know whether my assessment of whether I slept lines up with whether I actually slept. I'm curious. There were a potential 5 naps, and if I fell asleep in less than 8 minutes in at least two of them, and entered REM sleep within a short time after falling asleep, that's a narcolepsy diagnosis. They sent me home after 4 naps, which I believe to mean they got clear information one way or another, so one more nap would not make a difference to the findings. So either at least two, or zero, met the criteria.

I'm genuinely curious. The whole experience also basically flooded my PDA coping mechanisms for the week: I had to prep the farm, drive in for a certain time, bring a day's worth of food, be confined in a place and kinda forcibly relax myself, then live life in 1.5 hour chunks with those half hour naps in between. I had trouble doing anything else.

The idea of it being or not being narcolepsy isn't stressful. What was stressful was that day there were anti-LGBTQ+ protests across my country, and counter-protestors. Someone I know ended up in the hospital, and it kind of threw off my last nap. Someone threw a rock at her head.

Over the last several days I've learned that two more of my people were injured: one just bruised, from having a full waterbottle thrown at them, and one punched in the face.

There were protestors in my town. I don't know if there were counter-protestors. I was in this room, you see, with electrodes attached.

I might be able to shrug that off, but tomorrow and the next day I've signed up to help present to some high schoolers about the non-stereotypical parts of forestry: how ecosystems are connected, how figurative shit flows downhill and ends up in riparian areas so they're a good litmus test for how the system is doing, how it's important to always monitor so we can make decisions from a place of knowledge. I have a couple fun stories to back it up: how beavers were airdropped into a valley to successfully fireproof it ( https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/environment/2015-01-14/parachuting-beavers-into-idahos-wilderness-yes-it-really-happened ), how willow evolved in waterways to be broken off by floods and then the pieces float down the river and root, colonizing raw soil and turning an environmental liability into a strength. We were going to wade around in a creek, look at the fish, and count insects and talk about abundance vs diversity.

The protests were about keeping talk of people like me out of schools. Letting kids know that folks like me, genderweird and with love for folks outside whatever normative bullshit, that's called pedophelic grooming, child abuse, all that. You probably know the drill by now.

Yeah, if I wore a rainbow shirt to the thing I could maybe help out a kid. But.

I'm partly angry. You don't want me in your schools? Don't expect volunteer labour from me. Don't expect me to support you in maintaining your normal of having kids stay in your community supporting your economic bullshit.

And I'm partly scared. But when I'm scared and angry my power move is to come out loudly and basically say "yeah, are you all talk, or are you going to try and enact consequences"

Which. A coworker just came by and asked how I was, and I explained the above to her, and the organizer of the event walked by, and I said I was basically at the point of wearing a rainbow shirt and introducing myself as "they/them" and coming out at work properly and she was very supportive of both. So. But it's not something that can be taken back.

Anyhow. Last week was a mess, this week is a mess, we're getting overcast skies but bits of drizzling rain.

There were two club meetings this week, simultaneous, the clay and the garden clubs. One was shorter than the other so I flitted back and forth. At the garden club someone who is deeply respected in the community for being from an old family and making paintings went on a multi-minute tirade about how awful my house and yard look, full of "geese and ducks and garbage", and that she was thinking of calling the district on me. It went on long enough that everyone else there was very uncomfortable for quite some time while she was talking, then there was a long silence.. Like, this wasn't a short outburst, it was ignoring very loud "shut up" social cues from everyone else there for those long stretched-out seconds.

I want to do pottery. I want to make beautiful bowls imprinted with goose feathers that say things like "one girl's flight is another lady's garbage" and "the garbage is always greener". I want to do a series of heart-shaped cups with a rainbow of blues on them that say "I exist. I still exist."

I want to make rock-shaped red bowls that cut you when you pick them up that say "there is no water, there is only rock" with tiny hints of glossy blue glaze deep in the cracks.

I want to do this work with the kitten sitting on the back of my neck as I sit at the wheel, as he is wont to do, drawing blood as he gets older and heavier. I want to do this work with my dog sitting behind me on the dog bed and occasionally sighing. I want to go sit with the silly chickenlings, the silkies and showgirls and my chantecler lines, and turn off my mind and watch them peck around.

Instead tomorrow I go down and tell kids that the world is all connected and that as humans we have a responsibility to be involved, to know the consequences of our actions.

That's all.

That's been less than a week. That's all.
greenstorm: (Default)
When I was little I had nightmares about being buried alive
Trapped, arms to my side, unable to move
My chest slowly immobilized, my air slowly run out
But not quite yet, not quite.
Alive, but knowing.

Since then I've learned what I am. Not quite human
Because humans can--

You say you're home. We'd both like to talk
It's been awhile
And we miss each other.
I hold the phone in my hands
But I can't feel my hands
Can't feel
Clicking the screen on and off
On and off
Off

A human would pick up the phone.

A human would just--
It's only--
It's easy, do you understand? Why do you never understand? I'm only asking for this little thing.

So easy anyone could do it.

Now I'm forty-two.
This is a nightmare about being buried alive.
Trapped, unable to force the needed words or motion
And, even with my home loving around me, watching my time run out
But not quite yet,
Not quite.
Alive, but knowing.

If I could only just
It's so easy
anyone
could have done it

That's why
i
am
not

Theme Park

Aug. 29th, 2023 08:16 am
greenstorm: (Default)
So operation "can I do a vacation I like?" was successful. Turns out I can.

Operation "returning to my normal life" is a bit more tricky, even assuming I had a normal life to return to. This isn't the sort of "vacation drop" I hear from many people. My home is a theme park, perfect for me. Instead it's that I've come back inspired in several directions and I want to actually focus and get things done.

For example, there's a corner of the compound (the central courtyard space I'm working on slowly enclosing with a ring of buildings) that was thistles and young plum trees and haskaps. Mom flattened cardboard and mulched deeply with cardboard and aspen chips. I'd been thinking of putting the bed swing there, which is why I steered her in that direction, but now: I stopped at the dump and they had a big two-person jacuzzi tub which I snagged, and there's a perfect spot there if I build it out as a hot tub. There's also a perfect set of 4 aspens off the edge of that drop that I could set a platform between and I'd have a nice spot for the shower (it could just drain into the swale) and a net bed. Then there's another two trees perfect for a hammock right there. It's a central, secluded space with shade and drainage, so it makes sense as the hub of some outdoor living infrastructure. Looking into hot water on demand devices at the moment.

I had made noises about having pagany folks up this summer and didn't follow through for various reasons. I'm thinking very seriously about claiming Lughnasadh in 2024 and seeing if anyone actually will come up. It's a wildfire risk and there wouldn't be any way to do bonfires, we'd definitely be in burning bans. It would be warm enough, though. The alternative would be earlier. We could do fires, nights would be cool, and the garden would not yet be producing. I think eating from the garden is important? Solstice seems like the logical time to have a Thing up here in the long days and it might even be before fires if we're lucky, but it feels like it's too important for me to host?

I think Threshold would like solstice...

And then I have a bunch of clay inspiration, so I want to be spending my time doing that, and my garden is at one of the most interesting times right now with all the different tomatoes just on the cusp of ripening, and I still haven't got winter grains in, and something about sewing since I'm running out of comfy non-jean pants, and I have an idea for the pigs, and I need to decide on the other 13 orchard trees, and...

Anyhow.

Sherry kept pointing out that she was "retired" (into her second business, doing pottery, after a previous career) and I had both a dayjob and farm animals so it made sense that she had more time than I did to do fun ceramics things. I'm super envious right now. I want to make poetry bowls and mugs for the people I care about, build places that are fun, create homes, spend time with animals.

Oh well.

Eeeep

Aug. 9th, 2023 08:29 pm
greenstorm: (Default)
Just pulled the trigger on a vacation, mom's going to farmsit for a little over a week while I do pagany stuff, visit a pottery friend, visit Tucker and his new cat, and then finally come back up here.

We'll see if I survive this.

Respite

Jul. 18th, 2023 08:12 am
greenstorm: (Default)
Yesterday was cool with almost no smoke. I was able to open the windows and little breezes played through the house. It was lovely, especially since I was cleaning house for Tucker's arrival. I even washed all the squished mosquitoes off the bedroom and bathroom walls! It's been long enough since I was a housecleaner that I begin to forget how much difference those little things make to the feel of a place: cupboard fronts (which I did not wash), walls, light switch plates, baseboards. It makes a house look newer and lighter.

I'd got these tiny tiny pouches from the grocery store trash run that said "add to 1L of water, let dissolve, and spray" and they were a bathroom cleaner. They worked surprisingly well, and even more surprisingly the scent didn't bother me. I guess the format is meant to reduce the number of spray bottles and weight of water that gets shipped around. I have a couple more to drop into cleaning buckets of hot water (not how it's meant to be used, I know) for big wall-cleaning days. I continue to be grateful for my vacmop.

Today the smoke is creeping back. I'm in the office to figure out what's going on with this summer: my fieldwork is a no-go, since more than half the road-accessible area of the district is under evac alerts or orders for fires and at least a couple of the blocks I was going to sample are probably on fire. Between the smoke and the alerts fieldwork is probably counterindicated.

This morning I put on my "neurodiversity is beautiful" shirt and wore it to work. Previously I've worn autism-coded symbols but not anything with the word. I figure I may be dizzy, tired, and disoriented but that's the best time to pull off representation - when I'm too occupied by living to overthink it.

Wish me luck on scooping some good work out of the pile today. Contracts all summer will destroy me. I can't even put correct names on itineraries lately.
greenstorm: (Default)
#53 F3

It’s just us two here:
Me, and the whole wide world.
Humans didn’t stay,
One of us was too big for them.
Last year I ripped up flowers
Bending the tiniest part of the world to my will
Cradled my offspring under lights all winter.
The ravens watch over me
And take their share in exchange
A reminder that flesh always tears
In the end.

I am the meaning-maker,
My stories stitched together to support
The weight of my demanding mind
My life bigger than the compass of my memory
Glutted with years of joy
And honed by solitude.
I always watched across the room
Watched you,
Watched myself,
Told stories as kindly as I wished they’d be told about me.

In the beginning I named myself
And like any good spell the name remained
While the world burned the rest away.
In the beginning I named myself
And like any good self I remained
While the world burned away.

When the story is complicated there’s an ending close behind
No one can abide uncertainty
At least I can’t, and the wide world isn’t talking.
The flowers I ripped up last year are growing.
It’s just us two here.
Humans didn’t stay.


#54 Global warming as a failure of relationship 3

Humans once said they yearned
For the nature they actually spurned
They judged it by looks
And wrote lots of books
Any wonder the atmosphere burned?


#55

There's something about that last glimmer of light,
Sky some sort of deep aquamarine and bright enough
To show up the wind-tossed aspens as they hiss against it.
You don't understand, it may have been light this late,
Until an hour before midnight,
In the city too. But if it was
There were too many streetlights
And it never made a difference.

The sky is glimmering. The aspens are hissing. The fan tosses white noise and breeze into my warm attic-shaped room. Summer is beginning, and I am home.
greenstorm: (Default)
#49

I write poems to my love
And she gifts me with flowers
I whisper fears to my love
And he holds me tight
I shed tears for my love
And she aches for my troubles
I come home to my love
And he warms me at night

I walk fields of my love
And she gifts me with flowers
I risk all for my love
And he holds me tight
I shed blood for my love
And she aches for my troubles
I come home to my love
And he warms me at night.


#50 “Late Stage Capitalism”

Alien nation
Of alienation
Of self, of other
Read more... )


#51

Pink tea, white cookies, grey day
The rain brings vivid brights to new greens
Brown cat, white cat, black cat
All fluffy, warm, and purring
While raindrops cling to the window


#52

Your world is so small
When you write all your love poems
Only to humans.
greenstorm: (Default)
So, roof's been replaced, chimney has been replaced. The roof is pretty much the same as the walls. So what does that leave?

Well, I thought I had a pressure tank issue, so that would have been a water system issue. However, Threshold has stepped into "go big or go home" territory.

tl;dr I think the waterline from the well into the foundation is broken/cracked where it enters the foundation, but my water pressure is back.

The long: so my water pressure has been declining for awhile and we all thought it was the pressure tank, since the pressure tank is super old. There were a few things not entirely in keeping with that but I kind of ignored that, having no previous experience with a pressure tank failing. And honestly, the pressure tank is still old and may fail.

However, when I was getting ready to go into town for a couple days I ran the water for a long long time (low pressure and trying to get all the animals topped up) and noticed the basement was flooding. I had to leave (doctor's appointment was a timeline) so I turned off the well, turned off the tap on the mainline from the pressure tank into the rest of the house, and left. I figured that way there would be minimal extra leakage, since I didn't have time to troubleshoot and figure out what was going on.

Well, when I came home a couple days later the tap on the mainline wouldn't turn. There were a couple taps below it, so I hooked up a garden hose to one of them, ran it outside, and tried turning it.

I got full pressure. The kind of full pressure I hadn't had for a long time.

So I ran water from there for awhile and messed with the different taps below the stuck shutoff, then tried turning the mainline tap again. It turned slowly with a gritty feeling, spit a ton of mud into the water system, but it did turn-- and my house system was back up to full pressure. So it seems like a clog of mud had been blocking the pipes and that's why my pressure was so low.

However, this pressure led to me being able to use lots of water, and what I noticed additionally was that whenever the well ran too often, or when the well ran (to fill up the pressure tank) at the same time as I was running water heavily, the basement would flood. The pressure tank holds ~25 gallons, so this is either when I ran the washing machine on heavy or when I did the animals; nothing in the house uses that much water at a time.

I kept looking at the flooded area trying to figure out where the water was coming from but I couldn't. There was no water noise. There was no clear flow direction. The water just... swelled into the low point in the basement, which is right by all my plumbing stuff (it's all on the same side of the house, thank goodness). It was at the point when any time I heard the pressure tank filling I grabbed the flashlight and poked around in the area trying to see where the water was coming from.

Well, one evening I got lucky. There was a slight bubbling noise coming from under the downstairs toilet. Hm. And then I noticed the water was also flowing in the direction away from where the shower went through the foundation. The water was seeping up through any holes in the foundation.

And, sure enough, the ground right outside the corner of the foundation where the waterline entered was damp.

So it makes sense that the waterline is cracked at or just outside the foundation. When the well runs, it saturates the ground, and then when the ground is saturated the water is forced up by the pressure through available holes in the foundation. Because the soil outside is damp, and because there is no dripping from my waterline inside the house, it must be broken where it meets the house. And it must be a small break because my pressure tank still fills up, etc (though it does get a little air in it from time to time).

So, fair enough. Except that I live in a place where it freezes deeply in winter. That waterline is likely very deep under my foundation. I'm not sure what kind of damage water does to a concrete foundation over time; I know enough water movement would undermine it, not sure about concrete stability or the ground remaining saturated. Either way I'll need to do inside drywall remediation, some mold is starting to form, and unfortunately...

...I'll need to somehow get down to the throughhull or whatever you call the place where the waterline goes through the foundation, which will likely be a fiddly job (can only do some of it with an excavator since breaking the waterline &/or the well electric is a no-go.

Small blessings: my water still runs, my basement is concrete instead of having flooring over it, it's not midwinter.

Poem-a-day

May. 23rd, 2023 06:43 pm
greenstorm: (Default)
Catching way way up.

#33 Thousandth Poem To My Home

A thousand days
A thousand more
Lots of poems from the last week )
greenstorm: (Default)
Two poems from the same seed. This is one of the sets I was nervous about posting: one, because of the subject matter and how personally it touches my life, and two, because it’s one line that I wasn’t sure what to do with, so I tried two very different approaches: a pantoum which is very very formal, and free verse. I’m curious if there’s one of the two you like better than the other? It’s neat how the pantoum drives a particular message and led me to think differently about what I was trying to say.

#26 Vancouver 2: Pantoum

My city is a mother who eats her young
We shelter ourselves from the truth
We take our lives in our hands if we run
Believe nowhere else can we find a safe roof

We shelter ourselves from the truth
Only her people are safe to live among
Believe nowhere else can we find a safe roof
Those elsewhere must all be shunned

Only her people are safe to live among
Too frightened to look for proof
Those elsewhere must all be shunned
Once we feel safe we hold aloof

Too frightened to look for proof
We who tolerate this, what have we become
Once we feel safe we hold aloof
While so many fall unsung

We who tolerate this, what have we become?
We take our lives in our hands if we run
While so many fall unsung
My city is a mother who eats her young


#27 Vancouver 1: just words

My city was a mother that ate her young
Spit the vulnerable in the streets
And turned to smile in sparkling world-class recreation,
In green forests and towering mountains to the rich.

She courted me with the promise of,
If not riches, then some kind of security
Trading time for money and money for
A roof over my head.

She said she had the only friends that were good enough
That elsewhere they’d hurt me, they wouldn’t understand,
Those same friends seethed at strangers
If they were greeted in the street.

Every year I planted a tree and moved
And planted a tree and moved
And waved to the trees I’d planted from afar
As they fruited in strangers’ yards.

I do regret the compromise.
So many times I stayed
When I should have hopped on a rainbow
And ridden right out of town.

My friends stayed long enough that displacement is invisible to them.
Relief not to do the work of moving,
Relief not to find a new place to live,
They have that, but no one mentions roots they’re torn from,
A home they wish to know forever,
The desire for familiar walls.
Whether in dark comedy or enthusiastic compliance
They displace themselves yearly
Crossing the oceans and celebrating how they are not at home.

I stayed long enough that displacement etched into my bones.
Later, when I found my home
And the wildfires came so we left for awhile
I couldn’t imagine a homecoming and was left
Arms wrapped around myself
Lying on the carpet
Willing my soul out of my body
So my body could finally be returned
Could finally be laid back in a home. In my home.
Just so I could return somewhere for once.

My city was a mother that ate her young
And the scars of her teeth will always be on me
I escaped her and when people ask I tell the story
With a light smile at parties because in this she was right:
Though these friends welcome strangers it’s true that
Elsewhere, as within my city, people don’t understand.
greenstorm: (Default)
Been posting to fb, haven't got over here for awhile. Busy in the garden, busy writing poems. Obvs posting more than one per day.
Poems 17 through 25 )

Poem-a-day

May. 9th, 2023 03:38 pm
greenstorm: (Default)
Not posted to fb yet, but there will be two today. One written a couple days ago, the other written today.

#15 Threshold-my-home, or, the trauma from years of displacement begins to ease.

Cloverhome
Scents of bees and safety and mom when I was little
Summer beckoner of lazy shade
And misty mornings with glimpses of glades between trees
Greeter-with-roses, pink and five-petalled and fragrant
Giver-of-bounty, grass and geese and aspens and apples
Wintersafe
Cedar cave of warmest wood
Ship’s hull that cups me against the wind
Place with warm fire’s beating heart
And the snore of sleeping dogs
Your walls are my living skin
Your fields are my tendrils of thought
That lead me
Back to the door
Way
Of
My
Self


#16 First smoke of wildfire season

When I write I think about displacement
Every day.
When the fires come I think about it
Every minute.

It’s a hot spring and my body is tense already
With the memory of wildfire smoke
And fleeing with trailers of animals
And that’s when I had somewhere to go.

Tension that came from years ago
Fleeing poverty from roomshare to apartment
Trading freedom for a roof over the head
And a couple months in the same bedroom.

Someone always helps me in the end
But it’s hard to trust the world without a system.
What happens when I’m not pretty enough
Or smart enough for this charity to fulfill my rich friends?

Whatever soft space once existed
Whatever joy peeks out and runs wild
In clear summer air is scarred
With drifting smoke awakening every old terror.

Land of my land of my land of my land of my
Heart of my heart of my heart of my heart of my
Body of my body of my body of my body of my
Memory of my memory of my memory of home.

You for whom the earth is not your body
You for whom the walls are not your skin
You for whom the seasons are not your heartbeat
Save me now
I’m curled under the bed
Hiding
I’d be crying if it was safe to move.
Bury me here
So my body can finally stay home.

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