Greenstorm's Journal

This winter has just been a continuous bounce from cold to warm to cold again. We're having another one-- last week was up to 7C, this week will get down to -24C at night. Bounce, bounce. My driveway is a 6" slab of ice, but since we got a full foot of snow last night and a ton of wind it's impossible to fall down on it.

I need to go out and snowblow, but first I need to dig the snowblower out of the drift of snow in front of the shed. We hadn't had a big snow this winter, or maybe just one, so it will be good to have the moisture. On the other hand, I am poorly equipped right now to snowblow and carry straw for animals. I just want to sleep and sleep and sleep, despite that glorious sun outside.

In slightly troubling news my well needs something or other done to it, the pressure has dropped considerably. The pressure tank seems ok, it may be the pressure switch that's failing. So I hope, anyhow. Hopefully too I can get someone to come out and look at it before it fails completely. Melting snow on the woodstove for animals to drink does not seem fun, though I guess I could hook up the animal water heaters.

Edited to add: there are something like 40 ravens hanging out in the pigpen, it's driving me nuts.

Cleaned the chimney yesterday and made the first fire.

The birch is damp and hard to light, but I expect after all that pine everything will be hard to light.

Today the downstairs is up to 24C after the 16-18C that I've been holding it at with electricity. It's lovely. My muscles ache less.

We are having another cold spike, -23C last night is supposed to be the worst of it. We'll see.

Meantime inside so many of the seeds I planted are coming up. First Moment then Fat Frog tomato are showing flower clusters; they were planted on Dec 25 so this is 59 days, I expect the flowers will be open by day 65. That seems very standard. There seems to be a little community around breeding micro tomatoes on the totally tomatoes forum; I don't have time to think about that too much right now but I'll likely revisit next winter.

Meantime artichokes are putted up, a bunch of my saved peppers and tomatoes - doe hill, pepperoncini, favourite panamorous toms, the zesty green one, sweet cheriette, some of the perennial onions, the dahlias, etc. It's almost time to set up my real production seed starting for peppers around March 1st, then it will be tomatoes April 1st. Hopefully my pepper seeds arrive by that time!

The matchbox peppers on the windowsill are covered in baby peppers and flowers and flower buds. I can't believe how many peppers those things want to produce! I did fertilize them, maybe that was what did it. There are so many flowers I've lost which ones I crossed with hungarian black, so I'm going to have to do that cross again. I marked the cross on the hungarian plant ok, but the matchbox plants are so delicate I'm uncertain how to mark them, maybe by tying a thread around?

I still have not threshed all the barley and wheat. I think I need rubber gloves to do it.

Mom is up for a couple days and yesterday was a holiday, so we rearranged (arranged?) my basement so I can put the production transplants down there. I added two more big shelves and for the first time I feel like I'm starting to have a handle on this space. It basically means lining every wall with shelves, and with whatever size of shelf will fit (short shelves under curved walls, tall shelves against straight walls) but it is finally beginning to be functional.

Next step is a castor type device for my pottery wheel so it can scoot away and out, and then line the back of the downstairs main room closet with wine rack probably.

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.

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

We've had a thaw here: huge full moon over halloween and up to 11C or so, brely dropping overnight. The snow is gone, the water atop slush is gone. Mars (?) has been bright in the sky lately whenever I look.

The BC election has come and gone. The NDP, a labour/traditionally left but becoming centre as society catches up party, got I think their first ever back-to-back governments, and turned a minority government into majority. The greens kept their 3 seats. It's cautiously hopeful.

And tomorrow is election night in the US. For future reference, this is for Trump's second term. Things feel like a powder keg: there will be a very slow return of all the votes because many people mailed or voted early with covid, neither side -- because there's nothing in the US right now that doesn't feel like it has only two diametrically opposed sides -- trust that it will be a fair election. So for those to whom the country isn't already an irrelevant sideshow there is tension, and a waiting breath.

Tomorrow Tucker and I will spend the evening together, doing little projects and trying to keep distracted. Benefit of living in Pacific time is that if there's something to be known by end of day we'll know it before sleep.

Things I can do:

Tidy the plant shelf and start microgreens for winter, I miss eating green things.
Jar up the sauerkraut and the jalapeno carrot pickles and either find room in the fridge and/or pasteurize some of them.
Make another big batch of italian sausage, and maybe a batch of bangers, and freeze or can. I pretty much take all my sausage out of casings anyhow, so I might as well not bother to put them in.
Brush a dog or two.
Make a super old-school boiled pudding with lard instead of suet, is this doable?
Bottle booze.
Sex.
Yoga.

Meanwhile the antidepressants are working well, bringing me definite hope that I have the capability to be happy. The last two days weren't the best but I am going into the worst part of my cycle. The side-effects so far are pretty tolerable: very occasional ringing in my ears that is banished by a change in background sound, a little bit of digestive upset, sleep is a little more fragile than it was but still possible to get with a little more care. And the benefits, well. I brushed the dogs today and we cuddled. Just... something I do because we both enjoy it, not because it's a chore. That's good.

I also spent a bunch of the day reading through the whole Franklin Veaux relationship harm thing. It came up, and last time I paid attention there wasn't such a well-curated site about it. I appreciate reading a range of perspectives on how folks are impacted by various behaviours, and using that to consider my own behaviour and my own boundaries. I feel so so far removed from any poly groups or poly community now, and to be honest I met some neat people in those communities but I don't think I could stomach them now. Poly itself has diversified so much from those days, too; I think there's a set of relationship standards and skills that I share with a bunch of folks who may or not be under the poly umbrella. So it brings back echoes that I'm well away from, but also gives me a bit of a playground to see folks' relationship stuff. And I do like seeing folks' relationship stuff.

A couple more days before we freeze again. It'll be a rough freeze: everything is wet and muddy right no and I think we're supposed to have a sharp drop to -14. Better get everyone tucked away in good deep straw.

I am so curious about what tomorrow brings. Fingers crossed.

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.