Greenstorm's Journal

Too much people in the last little while. I spent a bunch of time at the studio which had a bunch of ambient folks and some time on the phone with disability folks and it's just been too much.

The pill fluctuations are catching up with me too; with PMDD it's the change in hormones that's the problem, not necessarily the levels, so I'm back to steady on the pill to suppress my body's cycles which had started to wake up. I have to remind myself that I lived through this monthly for decades, until it became super constant; I can get through this bit ok until I stabilize. The bubbles of hatred and despair and pain are just very unpleasant.

Being outside makes everything ok, though. Moving around, looking at different things, making garden beds and planting bulbs and splitting firewood-- those settle me and give me peace. I've nearly finished putting in the peonies and have added some grapes and a toka ownroot plum and three manchurian apricots, which may well be hardy here. They're all miniscule plants, of course, 2.5" pots, which take longer to mature but they're what I can afford. I can't spend as much time doing these things as I'd like, of course, or I lose use of my body, but any day that contains them is a better day.

Today the plan is to screw some pallets together to make a winter pig shelter. They can't stay in the back, and since the rescues are full they need to stay here, so I'm going to bring them in closer. We'll see how much of it I get done, but even if all I can do is move the pallets today, pound the t-posts tomorrow, and screw things together the day after then that's how it must be done. Weird to think I used to be able to do something like this in one bite in the dark after work, and work the next day.

The days are getting distinctly shorter. I think we're below 8 hours of sunlight now. I hadn't realized how this would impact my ability to be outside; because I need good long rest periods between pieces of activity I end up running out of daylight even if I'm only spending two hours outside total unless I start very early.

The ground is starting to freeze. I bet I can still get t-posts through the crust, it's not deep yet, but I'm not sure about digging anything and a bunch of stuff is likely frozen to the ground. I may have one hose encased in an ice flow on the north side of my house, which I think may not thaw till spring now, but I got most of the hoses and pallets up. I'd thought to move woodchips later in the winter but had forgotten that the outside of the chip piles, which are wet, freeze. I've moved most-ish of the chips anyhow, making the lasagne chicken-manure-and-green-deciduous-chip beds. I'd left bulbs-and-mulching the orchard until the ground on the way back there froze. It's more work slogging through mud, and anyhow, I just haven't had the ability.

A friend helped me take measurements for the automatic pattern thing (apostrophe patterns) where you feed in your measurements and it spits out a pattern. I just don't have it in me to self-draft leggings, and it's worked well for shirts in the past. Weirdly my arms are symmetrical now, biceps at least. I've lost 3" on my biceps in the last two years, which is not surprising but it makes me sad. I'm so much weaker now, and it's a combination of less physical activity and the illness.

Anyhow, the vast majority of my pants are in rags at this point. I have three pairs of comfortable-enough pants without holes, but none without stains, for winter. I have four additional pairs of pants that will work for winter with long underwear, two without stains, but that won't work for daily life, and of course I don't want to wear the ones without stains for daily life or they will stain. Either way I've been wearing the stuff with holes and trying to eke out the time between laundry, but if I can manage to put together several pairs of warm winter pants it will make a big difference.

Shirts that fit will be lovely too. I have several t-shirts -- they don't need to fit in order to stay on so I can buy them online -- but winter weather shirts that can handle chilliness and body moisture are beyond my price range, so it'll be good to put some more together. I did splurge on socks, as I have done at least every second year since moving north. Luckily I don't go through them as much as I used to when I was putting kilometers on them every day, and I don't need that level of quality, so it's a reasonable splurge.

Money is on my mind a lot. I have maybe eight months at most of the level of friends' support I've been enjoying. It's kept me alive through the worst of disability paperwork and learning to manage this, but it of course couldn't last forever. After that it will be back to survival expenses only.

As I go through the days I'm slowly saying goodbye to the luxuries I've enjoyed: premade food, steak sometimes, fresh veggies and even non-apple-or-banana fruits in the wintertime, fruit juice or pop or fancy tea or any drinks that cost more than a cheap teabag, milk and probably nut milks, gas for popping into town, a truck without check engine lights on, maybe regular membership at the pottery studio instead of saving my work at home to pop in and use the kiln every so many months, new plants, testing fancy clays maybe?, new sheets, electric blankets, keeping my home warm even in the shoulder season, running the dryer in the summer and midwinter (shoulder season is necessary I think), I know there'll be lots of things. In the meantime I need to sort out if there's anything that will substantially make my life cheaper at that time, and get it now. I've been thinking an e-bike, to get to town and back without gas, but that's only good in the summer. Maybe worth it? Maybe I can't maintain it well enough with my cognitive stuff and it's not?

I'm going to try and figure out some way of replacing my upstairs tile at least. Right now I can't wash the kitchen and bathroom floors except on my knees with a nearly dry cloth, because the tiles and grout and the MDF board underneath are so compromised that any moisture swells the MDF and further cracks or pops off the tiles and several are already missing or at an angle. So, I haven't been using my magic vacmop and in fact haven't been washing the upstairs floors at all. That just can't go on for the next 40 years. Even if I can just get it off and put well-sealed plywood in? It doesn't have to look like anything but I need it to function like a floor.

In the midst of all this, the ball I've been letting slip is meds. I've put off my covid shot, which I hear is a demanding one this year, because I haven't had enough recovery time lined up. I'm supposed to have started B vitamin shots a month ago, but again need to take the time to make sure if I have a bad effect I can recover. And I haven't been tracking meds symptoms except noticing the bubbles of intensity creeping back from hormonal fluctuations, and I notice them because they really are incapacitating.

Enough of that. I'll get the pigs tucked in somewhere warm today, or tomorrow, or the next day. I'll get the bluebells under the rest of the woodchips. Cats will snuggle with me when I rest by the woodstove. In a couple weeks I'll get the pottery area tidied so I can head back to my own wheel instead of the studio ones. It's a good life, full of things I love, and I'm very grateful to have it.

Hunkered down against the cold all night - my bedroom is pretty comfortable - but when I got up the wall thermostat came on, and when the sun came up it was -36C on the deck. That's Too Cold, and the temperature isn't rising with the daylight as we'd hoped. I was waiting for the temperature to rise a touch before I checked the animals -- no one is up and about out there, they're all staying in their warm shelters -- but it doesn't look like it's going to to that. I am displeased.

The house is making loud sharp noises from time to time. Some of them are icicles breaking off the chimney and falling onto the roof; others are just things shifting and settling. It's over a 50C temperature differential between in and out so I can hardly blame it.

I can see where all the draughts are this morning: the north window has ice on a spot on the frame, the crack between the patio doors (which to be fair always freezes like that) has frost for an inch or two on either side of the bottom, and the dog door seals at the bottom but not at the sides so frost creeps in there too (and the plastic gets a little stiff at this temp, so the outer of the three flaps doesn't always close perfectly, which is non-ideal). It's not cold enough for ice on the inside of the downstairs doorhandle yet.

I cut back the big peppers by the patio door and drew that side of the curtains, which I think means putting a light under the desk for them. Next up will be filming the north window so it can stop blowing cold air onto the sofa. It's a -- do you call it a dormer if it's got a flat top? -- kinda bay window thing and from the ground it looks to not be sealed under the eaves so well either, a piece of wood and some spray foam may go a long way out there. But, not at -36.

I also popped an oil heater in the downstairs bathroom, which doesn't have its own heat, and made sure the dryer vent flap was closed (lint tends to accumulate and prop it open a crack, so I gave it a good clean-out the other day, it does seem to be closing well now). That whole laundry room could use better insulation, including the 6' of dryer vent that I am certain has ice on it right now and including the plywood that the fuse panel is set into (but that's challenging because there are a lot of wires and I'm not sure how to insulate around them).

Work discourages outdoor work below -20C (must work in pairs, etc) and forbids it below -35C. I have to say, it does make me a little nervous to go far in this weather. If something happens I won't have my phone, because the battery doesn't work at these temps, so little things can quickly get big.

Having said that, it's not getting any warmer so I'd better go out and take care of those animals in the scary cold. Bets on whether the water tap is frozen? If it's not, my little polar fleece sewn faucet cover gets "object of the year" award.

The first night Josh was here I went to the other bedroom and hung out feeling super sick (with a bucket, just in case, since my bathroom isn't nice enough to hang out on the floor by the toilet) and I was honestly a little concerned. My random nausea hadn't been that bad previously. Then at 6am or something I realized that I'd been at a friend's house the day before, and she had pot plants outside. I'd given them a ten-foot berth minimum, and figured I was outside and I'd be ok, so I didn't think of it as an exposure event but I guess it was. Good to know.

Despite that, and a little bit of residual tired from that, it's been really nice having Josh here. He brought up a ton of produce and I've been making a lot of hot mix pickles (cauliflower, green beans, carrots, hot peppers, a touch of celery, a light brine with 1/3 cup salt and 1/2 cup sugar per pot, which is my preference) to complement my charcuterie meats. I'm always looking for a replacement for my store-bought pepperoncinis, they need to be appropriately spicy and gently salty and have the right texture. Maybe these will be that! Either way, more pickles to have with charcuterie are always welcome; there's nothing as nice as variety in a no-effort (or no effort at the time) meal like a charcuterie plate.

Work is less stressful because last week was the silviculture conference, not the office, and this week is vacation. I'm also making an effort to interpret the rules in non-autistic ways, so when they say "that's not allowed, but you can do it, just don't let anyone know or do it too much, but it's ok to do, but it's not allowed, and don't tell the wrong people you do it" I'll just... do it and not tell anyone, rather than trying to avoid it. In an ideal workplace there wouldn't be rules like that; in a non-ideal workplace that could accommodate me I could ask for what it means, does "not too often" mean once a week? Every two weeks? In a non-patterned way? etc. Being autistic usually means taking people at their literal word and being considered inhuman because of it. There's a real art to managing the space where everyone does something but kinda just says they don't, and I'm not great at it, but we'll try. Either way it helps relieve the stress of ridiculous rules that no one will change because no one follows them anyway so they aren't an actual problem.

I painted some signs last night for many of my perennials: the roses and the gooseberries, mostly. I'm putting little signs on stakes in next to them since all my other labelling methods have failed. A wooden board screwed to a stake is too big for crows or ravens to carry off, and hopefully the paint won't fade (the new formulation of sharpies, I've learned, isn't colourfast in the sun anymore so I lost my labelling this year. Frustrating, because the labels from last year are still colourfast). I wish I painted in a nicer font, but it's still a kind of charming effect to have things labelled.

Josh found a bunch of cascade ruby gold corn ears that were both not frosted and pretty ripe, so that's excellent. I should do a separate farm post for that and the new piglets.

For some reason it's only now, after more than five years living here, that I've realized my basement bathroom fan... doesn't have an outlet on my outer walls. It *may* feed into the sewage siphon tube thing that lets gas up, that comes out my roof, but that's a narrow tube three stories up from the basement. So I guess I need two additional throughhulls in the house: one for a vent hood over the stove and one in the bathroom downstairs. Both of them only need a five or six foot run to get outside, so that's not so bad. It also explains a lot about moisture in that bathroom. Those things are, unfortunately, on the list after the deck (currently collapsing). On the plus side, if I wait a little maybe I'll also replace the awful shower down there.

Things are so busy right now.

Mom and my youngest brother are here. I'm working, and they are bush days so I can't do home things around work: instead I need to use extra time at home to prep clothes and lunches, check weather, and charge devices. I'm doing this course, which does not have the two hours of homework stated: it's more like 4 or 5 hours extra per week. I'm engaged in this communication/intimacy course with Tucker. I'm trying to get administrative stuff done, like calling the bank to figure out where my money disappeared to (done) or making a dentist appointment (involves being in front of both my work and personal calendars) or talking to someone about my mortgage which is coming due soon (Canadian mortgages need to be refinanced every 5 years). I'm trying to get soap made in exchange for the ring my friend made me, so I can send it down with mom instead of shipping it. And now my new truck needs a new serpentine belt, part of it tore off and is hanging out in there.

Basically I can kind of keep up with doing things, but not with thinking about them. I'd had a lot of space to think for awhile. I miss it? A lot is getting done but I don't get to be fully inside the activities or inhabiting them. I also don't necessarily get to arrange them how best I'd like.

On the other hand it's making for a much more bearable extended stay with mom, I'm just not home or have the bandwidth to be annoyed when she puts the lemon juicer away in the mixer bowl (?) or whatever. I can start playing "where did she put that object" when she leaves.

And meanwhile I'm taking Friday off to spend time here before they leave on Saturday.

Meanwhile days are getting shorter, mud is getting colder, there is frost in the mornings but no snow yet. Mom is tidying up a bunch of stuff in the yard, some of which is pretty welcome. The stove is keeping the house lovely warm as long as a couple windows stay cracked open. It feels like brewing and baking time.

Last night I started up the woodstove; it got down to -5C last night and the mud was frozen this morning for early walking. My house is warm; the pain/slowdown of joints and muscles that my mind is so good at sidestepping is gone and with it a lot of tension and unrecognised cognitive load. I still need to figure out what to do with the roof, but I have a heating system at least.

I think I've also decided on a truck. More about that when it's happened though.

Mom and my youngest brother are planning to come up this Thursday. It'll be good to have them here, though the perennial problem of where to put my brother to sleep still exists. I'm thinking of buying a folding cot to put in the pantry; he often sleeps on the sofa when he comes over but the sofa is in the kitchen/livingroom/main room and his sleep cycle is different than mine and mom's, so I'd like him to have room to be undisturbed.

My mind is a little slow right now, I just woke up from a nap and I'm enjoying the surprising mental weightlessness of my body just being able to relax. It's been awhile.

I'm also already thinking of next year's tomato trial, and next year's pepper trial. I got seeds for some peppers that survive down to a range of -2C to -15C, some are perennial on the gulf islands here. They won't overwinter here but they should tolerate much cooler temps. I'm very excited about those.

And there are a ton of little indie seed places popping up on instagram that have short-season tomatoes. I suspect I will not be growing fewer tomatoes next year than I did this year. I also wonder if these indie seed folks have always been there and I have only now discovered them, or if they're a result of the pandemic. Probably a little of each, I imagine.

I did manage to score both Lucinda, which is a silvery fir tree green-when-ripe cross I've been looking for. Plus I'm looking into microdwarfs, which I should be able to grow indoors under lights. It's fun.

I did a feed run and the next town over was full of hoarfrost today: half-inch ice spikes covered everything as water sublimated out of the damp air. Winter is here. Better bring in my hoses.

There's a day in my cycle every month where I want to do lots of cleaning. We're going into winter and I'm spending actual time indoors. And folks are coming to tear apart the chimney, theoretically, and replace it.

So I've been overhauling the house. I had to take down the bookshelves that were up against the chimney. My livingroom isn't really big enough to leave the bookshelves sitting around. So I am rearranging the pantry to hold my bookshelves, putting my boxed books away in a closet, moving the kitchen shelving that's in front of the windows into the pantry so I can finally hang my curtains, taking the folding table out of the pantry, and maybe moving one bookshelf up into my bedroom for the farm reference books I'll be using in the next little while, like my butchery and sausagemaking books.

I should also probably go through all my canning and make sure the lids are all still sealed.

Right now everything is chaos but I'm happy to be working on a more useable space. This home is beautiful but not super useable -- the rooms are barely big enough to put beds in, and the walls are gothic-arch curved so shelves can't go up against them. Over time I'm developing strategies that work better for me.

In other news Tucker and I are working through a communication... course? together recommended by his therapist. The fact that it's voice rather than reading is a bit of a challenge since neither of us receive into that way particularly well. I don't really believe that any one set of tools is the Right One, but having a mutually agreed upon way of communicating about concepts is helpful. My hope is this will give that to us. I don't know how optimistic to be about it; I think he's starting to slide down back into his depression from before the trip and that brings in a more defeatist mindset overall. On the other hand he's still participating and he's definitely still making significant efforts to be kind and supportive of my feelings.

We definitely hit a bump this weekend anyhow. We've been pausing to chat about the course as we go through it and yesterday we got back into the original issue (I'm still reading it as "is it ok for me to have strong emotions in his presence" though I'm hoping that's a misread and waiting on clarification still) and I expressed that I'm still having some waves of reluctance/anger/etc from the last couple years of the relationship where he wasn't communicating with me, and that even though he's communicating now I'll probably keep having those emotions pop up once in awhile and I don't think there's away to just make them go away-- they'll fade over time as he keeps showing up. He doesn't want to have been told about that periodic nor to have been (and possibly ever be?) made aware of it. I started speaking from a place of anger, stopped what I was saying, and explained that this anger wasn't about anything he was doing right now but that it would come and go and he shouldn't take it personally, it was just a feeling I'd have sometimes. He was not ok with that.

So I'm struggling to know what he thinks I should have done.

My emotions are big and loud and all-consuming in my head, it's where the storm in Greenstorm comes from. From all the counseling and reading and whatever I've done it seems that non-traumatized neurotypical people, when their emotions get big and they get disregulated, they are "supposed to"(?) be able to do some grounding and breathing exercises and the physiological responses go away and they can go back to the subject fairly soon and maybe need to take a couple breaks to re-regulate but pretty much can continue. One of the things that convinces me that my brain isn't wired that way is that I can't do that.

If I talk or write my way through something I can become ok over a course of several hours to a day. If I do nothing the intense physiological response subsides after about 2 hours but if I approach the topic again I'm right back in it in slowly subsiding 2-hour waves for the next several days to weeks. If I try to do breathing and grounding exercises designed to get me into my body I experience extreme pain and what feels pretty much like a kind of death of self. This is what I understand to be an autistic meltdown. I *can* ground externally, go outside and let my mind disappear into the land and feel more ok, but I can't come back to the subject for awhile while I'm doing that still and I can only do it in tiny glimpses, like exposure therapy, over many days, before I can come back to it.

That is to say, if I'm feeling angry my options seem to be to talk about it and maybe it'll subside in ten or twenty minutes or to withdraw and do journaling or to withdraw for a long time and let it subside. Now, I'm not saying that talking about it looks like yelling or being mean; it's explaining what my internal story and pain points are, basically describing the emotion properly, invoking the narrator to channel the internal experience instead of necessarily living it.

Anyhow, we'll no doubt get into that together more later but it derailed the course this weekend. I had to sit through a couple hours of that internal storm before it subsided, I had to die and come back again.

It's kind of amazing to think that other people don't have this kind of mind. I'm envious of that in so many ways, but it's also a relief to know that it's not just that I suck at regulation. It's genuinely a different experience for me. I remember my mom being bewildered about the whole thing when I was a kid and trying different things to get me to calm down; I quickly learned to put on a perfectly normal and pleasant face while I was in meltdown, to not admit or show any sign of it. Folks who require that of me are not my friends. Not talk about it or process with that person verbally? Sure. Take physical space apart? Sure. Reassure someone that it's my mind doing stuff and probably isn't personal, so they shouldn't take it too seriously? Sure. But not to express that I have the emotion at all, either by word or tone or expression, while still maintaining the facade of physical and emotional intimacy? Nope.

I'm still in it a little bit. Luckily I'm home alone, it's quiet, and I can turn my hand back to work and cleaning.

Anconas, 34 eggs, 29 fertile, 18 hatched

Also first corn in the ground

Also drains working again

So tired

I really enjoy wood heat.

I probably say this a couple times a year but it's so true every time.

There are definitely inconveniences: without a good backup heat system I can't go away in very cold weather, I need to be home at about the right time to stoke the fire, I need to keep the chimney clean and source wood and that takes work.

There are clear wonderful bits: the air feels right and warmer than electric ever does, it's so quiet, feeding the fire is a calming daily rhythm, I can go stand in front of the stove and soak up extra heat, it works even if the electricity goes out, it's relatively inexpensive, and I keep in touch with the outside temperature by how much and how fast I go through wood.

And there's also: I can shift the amount of heat output by how much I fill the stove at once, by which woods I use, and by how I set the burning temperature/air supply. But the stove is still a relatively fixed amount of output. That means there's no thermostat; if I go to sleep with the stove in a particular setting and it warms up 15 degrees outside overnight, the house will be very warm in the morning. Conversely if the temperature drops abruptly overnight and I haven't set the stove accordingly the house will be chillier in the morning. And when it gets really cold I sometimes need to top up with electricity because there is a fixed safe maximum output.

So I get to be comfortable, but also to be physically aware of what's happening outside in ways that I really can't be when I just set a thermostat and leave it through the seasons. I appreciate that a great deal.

I also get to be aware of my temperature tolerances in ways I wasn't before: why does 17 feel perfectly warm enough, 19 too cold, and 26 so comfortable that my bones don't ache?

The other night I was part of a pagan thing where folks lit a candle to Hestia. I just went downstairs and sat in front of my wood stove. The house has a heart and that heart is warm and beating for the winter.

Cleaned the chimney, started the woodstove last night. Ooof.

The house feels so much nicer though. And there's something about wood heat, it makes the house feel quieter. Stepping out from the warm house into the woodsmoke-smelling cool air outside, though: it's definitely fall.

This morning I didn't feed the fire. Once a month I let it die down and stick my phone up there and take a picture of the chimney; about once every two months I clean the chimney; seems like every 2 chimney cleans I take out the ashes. Tonight I'm going for dinner with old coworkers and then staying at a friend's, my old boss'; tomorrow I clean the chimney, take out the ashes, and lay the fire that will take me into the upswing of sunlight and also into the new calendar year.

The tradition of staying awake to keep the solstice fire burning is much easier when there's a wood stove with a catalytic burner and a good damper. It becomes, instead of a once-night event, a daily practice throughout the winter with immediate and visceral consequences when it's failed: the cold comes in. My electric heat comes on and I am charged money. I need to split kindling and go through the ritual of fire-starting.

Still, I want to go through the ritual of having a relatively clean stove on solstice night. I want to know that fire can run until there's light on both sides of my workday and the light feels well and truly back. And I may shut down the breakers or at least turn out the lights on solstice; bottle booze with Tucker; light candles and listen to or make music and maybe read to each other or consult the cards or talk or pet kittens or look out the window or who really knows? There's plenty of time for all that, it's a long long night. The moon will be waning and the stars will be such a presence that they sweep away any sense of the earth as solid or meaningful.

So: clean the fire, clean the floors, pull out the snowblower. Tomorrow is solstice prep.