Greenstorm's Journal

The butcher was supposed to come today and do the biggest set of pigs yet; Josh and I did a ton of prep to set up. Turns out he's sick in the hospital (!) and will try to come in a week, when Josh will not be here, but in the meantime today and the next couple days isn't a huge absorbing rush.

Josh brought me up a sewing machine, a Singer 401 Slant-O-Matic, and I've been slowly getting acquainted with it. I've never used a drop-in bobbin before; I find it surprisingly hard to thread the bobbin. It's a nice machine; it runs smoothly, it has lots of ways to adjust everything and a everything is adjustable in very fine increments. It also smells like a proper sewing machine. It has a very weird pedal, not a lever but instead basically a foot plate with a button it it you press with your heel, that will take some adjusting.

The plan for the next couple days is now to tidy up odds and ends (put in the yard light, deal with the downstairs fridge that makes that awful noise, maybe shell some corn and cook some food) and probably also now to can everything in the freezers so they're empty for the butcher. Not that there's so much left in there, honestly.

I've realized how much of an effect being with Tucker has had on me. When something relating to a relationship is on my mind I don't bring it up anymore; I used to assume that folks I was in a relationship would want to hear about stuff relating to the relationship, and would be open to conversation about it. That has definitely been trained out of me. There are a couple things with Josh where the relationship has changed over the last couple years and I've been thinking about them when he's here but not mentioning them; last night once I knew nothing was happening today I mentioned them. It was hard? That's not normal for me. And now I'm nervous about it, even though it went well. That's... really instructive, and I need to remember this. It's a stupid and counterproductive way to exist and any situation which exerts pressure on me to not mention feelings and changes in interaction is not a situation I should remain in.

So I guess I'm slowly healing here. The cats are getting lots of brushing, the chimney got cleaned, the house is getting gradually put in order. There's space for me to exist here, and exist I will.

Took a week off from work to play on the farm with Josh. What this looked like:

Chopping and pickling 76 jars (roughly 50L) of hot mixed pickle, a batch of lightly syruped strawberries, and a batch of the "ploughman's pickle" from healthy canning website
Cutting down some aspen trees with the chainsaw for mushrooms
Fixing the deck and adding a window to the carport under it
Hanging pictures on the walls
Splitting some wood
Cleaning the chimney and devising a method for me to do it on my own (last time sucked)
Making shelves in the newly-repaired carport
Borrowing a really big trailer, picking up 6 large square (half-ton) bales of straw, and using his vehicle and a pulley and a rope and some trees to pull them off the trailer and put them in strategic locations where I'll need straw in the next year
Making and eating some chinese noodle dishes Josh has been playing with lately
Looking through the garden for any ripe-enough corn, for seed, and picking it. Hulled a bunch
Petting the cats a lot
Eating lots of roast-and-foget veggies, and biscuits, both of which are my easy-to-make contributions
Making creme brulee in the low-and-slow bake method, which doesn't require twice cooking
Discussing ways to re-roof the greenhouse
Making garden signs for my plants
Cruising past the dump a couple times getting some nice-looking bits of wood and wild sunflower seeds
Sleeping in late, till 8ish, most mornings


What this did not look like:

Talking about relationship stuff
Talking about sex stuff
Trying to do anything when I was less than 100% into it, which meant a lot less physical stuff
A ton of cooking, this time
Dispatching the roosters
Finishing splitting the wood, or coming close
Actually innoculating trees with mushrooms (I'll do that today)

I made garden signs for all my roses and gooseberries. Soon will do cherries and haskaps and apples, at least the ones I know the names of. These are signpost-style, with a stake and painted sign screwed to it. My plastic tags were not holding their marks, I guess sharpies have been reformulated, and so I lost some names that way. I lost some other names because crows and geese like the tags. So, wooden signs seem both practical in an enduring way and kind of charming. Now if only I had pretty painting handwriting, but I was not turning this into a stenciling project.

I found two more squash out there that looked pretty ripe, hiding among the weeds where they were sheltered from frost.

Josh helped me find a dairy crate full of relatively ripe cascade ruby gold cobs, so I'm calling that more of a success than I earlier anticipated. We'll be looking through the painted mountain today. The plants were definitely frost-nipped but I don't think the cobs themselves were harmed.

It's neat to be out in the corn and hear that dry, rustling noise of the leaves. Humans have been listening to that sound for many thousands of years as they bring in the harvest.

I've done a bunch of mixed pickles as documented on my preserving site, urbandryad on dreamwidth (I just keep recipes there). Basically I've done a couple gallons with my zesty brine at half strength for salt and sugar, a couple gallons with a lightly sweet brine, and I'll do a couple gallons with a salt-only brine. all have bay leaves and pepper, I forgot the garlic in the lightly sweet ones. Oops. The veg mix was largely brought up from the big farm on Josh's way from the city, it's more-or-less 1 part cauliflower, 1 part carrot, 1 part green beans, 1 part hot peppers, 1/4 part celery. The goal is a moderately hot pickle mix to eat with charcuterie, everything bite-sized.

Meanwhile Black Chunk (who has still not got a better name) had 8 piglets, and she's doing well with them. Lotta piglets this fall it seems. Ugh I guess I need to castrate, better do that while Josh is here. I will probably miss Tucker's calming presence for it.

A chicken in the bottom chicken run got huge adobe balls on her claws, they must have accumulated through iterations of mud (the ducks splash by the water a lot), dust (everywhere else in the run, it's been a dry summer), and straw/wood shavings from inside the coop. It took Josh and I roughly 3 hours to soak them (did nothing), chip away at the very edges with pliers delicately so as not to hurt wherever her toes were in the balls, and then finally pry the last bits off. I do not know why she got it and no others did. Her toes inside the balls were fine, though she did lose a fingernail by getting loose enough to shake her foot when we were part done and... you know, just don't think about it too hard, let's just say it was another weird and uncomfortable farming moment. She's good now, I gave her a penicillin shot for the one raw bit of the toe where the mud was rubbing and the toenail, I figured her body could use the help, and put her back in with everyone. She's lifting her feet ridiculously high as if trying to compensate for the weight that is no longer there, but is walking and perching just fine. Poor girl. Also I'm much less suspicious of cobb houses now, my goodness that stuff was durable. Clay soil, wow does it behave in unexpected ways sometimes.

Meanwhile I am going to keep one of the americauna roosters from my friend in town, and give another to a friend who has a couple hens and wants to let them hatch out more chickens in spring. That means 7 going into the soup pot this week, which is manageable. I've had the propane ring on the deck and that makes canning a lot more comfortable given the humidity situation in here, not sure if I'll can the roosters immediately or freeze them a bit but I'm more likely to can them now.

Asparagus planted. Daffodills, chiondoxia & relateds, and muscari ordered. These are all supposed to be vole-resistant, we'll see how it goes.

I've been looking backwards a lot lately. It's funny, I have almost never spent a ton of time reading back through old journals, but this last few weeks I seem to have been doing a lot. In some ways I'm the only person who can give myself good advice, though that was back at the breakup with Angus where we had just started, then had this breakup, then decided the breakup sucked and we'd just change our relationship to suit ourselves instead.

So much looking back and I'm searching maybe for a sense of perspective on my life. I've gone from one extreme to another, from no space for my hobbies and no privacy or ownership over space around me but a ton of people around who loved me all the time to, well, the opposite. It's almost like going back further, into my early-mid teens where I lived out in the middle of nowhere and connected to people only via the internet, but I had 5 acres to play on.

Even in those old writings I could plot you my hormonal cycle based on how I feel about things. The cycle seems to be exacerbated by a lack of touch and closeness maybe? But also by a lack of stability or certainty.

Just now, though, I'm appreciating sitting here with my nail-holed foot up on the couch. I got three hours of corn planting and tilling in this morning, if I can do another three today I suppose that's ok? I was hoping for more, but that was before I had a hole in my foot.

Gardening is one thing but making lunch really hurt. I got through it. I had a nice doctored ramen with egg and cabbage and I'm drinking my favourite wine and talking to Josh about corn shellers. He's telling me that the Lehman one catches the cob at the end of its run by magic, which appears to be true in videos of its use. Hopefully someone I know will find one for me at a thrift store in those piles of unknown cast iron objects, I bet there's one in Clinton.

Now I can nap and go back into the garden with my foot hopefully a tiny bit healed up and listen to the truly wonderful Future Ecologies podcast while planting and anticipate Tucker's arrival in not so long at all: less than two weeks.

Plus, imagine, if this all works out I'll be able to add corncakes or Jonnycakes or tortillas to my food rotation.

Sometimes things don't go, after all, from bad to worse.

Actually, typing that makes me realize I need to get up and water everyone pretty soon, but I wanted to capture this last little while.

Josh came up with a meat slicer he'd found for me on craigslist, which is a lovely machine and makes both bacon and charcuterie much better. We had a fun bacon taste-off, since I sent a bunch of bacon down with Kelsey the next day and my labels had not made it through the smoker.

Generally: 2.0% salt is too much without sugar, heavy applewood plus something with Ossabaw fat makes for a cheddar (?) taste, japapeno fermented stuff in bacon is The Best, and a 4ish setting is good.

Then we ground a ton of meat and salted it, and made up: andouille, merguez (sorta, it's pork), kielbasa, spicy maple breakfast, nduja, hot dog, and lap cheong (with sichuan peppercorns) and packaged that into vacuum bags. Then we ran out of time to case them last night so they're in my fridge waiting for me to handle (the hot dogs aren't emulsified yet though). They've all been fried and tasted for spices, though, and they all seem good. I wouldn't necessarily case them for myself but Josh wants some cased.

Then we loaded everyone up and sorted the ducks (keeper or to abattoir) and scooped out the geese that were going (more about that later) and collected the spare roosters. Everyone got tetrised into the truck and then the next morning at 6 we set off. Roads were good, everyone was delivered ok, and we hung around Smithers until the birds were done at 7.

Smithers is a nice little town. It has dramatic looming snowy mountains, a walkable little downtown, and some nice shops and restaurants. Due to the covid surge we stayed out of most of those, though we made it into the sausage shop (dutch peppernuts! salted black licorice! frankfurter casings! concentrated tomato paste in a tube! two walls of sausage for inspiration, though I think I'm doing pretty well in that department, and some frozen ducks and geese for me to price-check (I'm under theirs on geese and over theirs for ducklings, no one has free range ducks) and the bakery (I got a nice light sourdough rye, and was sad that so few people make sourdough dark rye; an almond danish was consumed). I picked up tire chains for the truck so I can access the pigpen and the back in winter, and I found the little fiber optic Christmas Tree I've been looking for, plus luckily stumbled on this excellent brand of bread flour that I'd run out of and didn't know could be got there (our grocery store brought it in on an emergency basis dyring covid but didn't continue to stock it).

However, it was roughly -8C/-10C and that kind of bone-chilling coastal humid, we were tired, and we were anxious about the four-hour drive back in what started as a snowfall warning (luckily cancelled before the drive back). It would have been nice to get a hotel and nap, or even sleep there, but we ran the truck a lot and sought out a very empty microbrewery for an hour until people trickled in.

The drive back was brutal, I was too tired to drive most of it so Josh did, and at one point an hour from home we stopped and napped for half an hour. Luckily that truck cab retains heat with two bodies in it. Anyhow, we got back, laid the fresh birds out (they hadn't had time to freeze) and put a fan on them-- the -18C and moving air froze them very solid overnight. Yay for natural blast chillers!

Then yesterday was sorting out folks' orders and prices, trying to mess with sausage, fixing my dryer vent (turns out the house was cold because the vent had come loose and there was a big hole in the wall leading directly outside, who knew? Does this happen to other people's houses when folks come over?), snuggling a little, and making oyster sliders with some oysters Josh brought up. Turns out (ha) the business part of farming is still pretty time-consuming what with organizing orders, spreadsheets, invoicing, and that sort of thing. It's a kind of work I enjoy periodically, though it would be no fun doing it everyday.

It was a good visit -- it's fun to do things with Josh, and as our communication evolves a lot of the frustrations of working together are gone and it really is just fun. There was a little emotional distance there, but a lot of caring and support. I really needed that; I needed someone who felt safe to hold me when I cried. An additional week would have been great but that won't happen, and I definitely am feeling that if I'm going to see him just a couple times a year I need to keep scaling back the projects I assign to "want to do this with Josh" in my mind, just as I need to scale back my physical stuff I allocate to "want to do with Tucker" after he moves.

Tucker closed on his new condo in Vancouver, though he kindasorta plans to live up here till March. But that's done, and he seems really happy in a way that I haven't seen in him for a long time. To be honest, he seems really happy for the first time since going to see his other partner last.

I know the road of being with someone who wants to not miss you, but who doesn't actually still experience joy in the relationship. Josh isn't that person and I don't have to guard against it. Tucker? He might be. We'll see.

I've had continuous company on the weekends for the last two months: mom, the As, Kelsey, and then Josh, with a weekend or two with Tucker between one or another of those. Social has been good for me, but being alone a bit will also be good for me. It'll be nice to just go do a thing without stopping to see where folks are at, and it'll be extra nice to put things somewhere and have them stay there, including: scissors, dishcloths, the kitchen markers for labeling food, doors, drink glasses, and the dryer vent.

Now nap, feeding animals, and casing hot dogs. I'm excited for the hot dogs, emulsified sausages are top of the list in terms of challenge.

So last summer when Josh was going to come up, his drive was almost blocked by highways closed due to wildfires. He made it up ok, I don't remember if he detoured or not. Tucker definitely did around that time on the same route.

A month ago Josh was going to come up but flooding took out a ton of our highways, most of which are not open yet. We've been waiting for them to reopen to come up but the few that survived are essential services only.

I finally wrote an essential agricultural services letter (small farm, need both services up here and food transportation to markets down there) and his plan is/was to drive up Fri/Sat. Except now there's a heavy snow advisory for today, down there, on the few remaining very twisty turny highways full of grocery and gas trucks.

I think he's going to come up Saturday once its light and see what happens, both if it's passable (and not blocked by a jackknifed grocery truck) and if they'll let him through with my letter.

I can handle this stuff on my own if I need - I can contact the prince george meat place and see if they want my ducks, and/or my suckling pigs and geese for Christmas, and I can get the local butcher to come by for home slaughter use and make the sausage and ground I was planning to make with the piglets. Totally doable. But I was really looking forward to Josh being here, to doing projects with him, to interacting with someone who's enthusiastic about a portion of my stuff, and quite frankly to spending time around someone who I viscerally feel values me.

At the same time I don't really feel cut off; I am the center of my universe, I guess, and it feels like it's they who are cut off from me, and not me from them.

At the end of last week some folks from Vancouver and the Island came up for the weekend-- it had been a couple years since I'd seen them. They had come up previously when Thea was little and before I got Avallu, so that would have been late summer 2017. I drove in to pick them up from the airport in the city and we spent some time eating, petting animals, walking along the lake looking for rocks, and chatting before I drove them back Sunday. We went in a couple hours early to have lunch in town before their flight.

Well, as I got into town the truck started flashing a ton of lights: ABS & traction control, 4Hi, & 4Lo. I got us to the restaurant and they went in while I ran the codes. At this point I hadn't tried to do anything like go into 4hi, the flashing had all just started on its own. Well, I turned 4hi off and on again, turned the truck off and on again, and rocked back and forth a couple inches. That part stopped flashing. The code the engine was giving me was for a rear speed sensor. That wheel looked fine, the code cleared and didn't come back. For awhile I was looking into a cab to the airport from the restaurant for folks and a hotel room in the city because I didn't want to get stranded. In the end, because the codes didn't come back and the ABS appeared to be working, I drove folks up to the airport and then myself and Tucker back home in the twilight/dark. We skipped our normal shopping because I was just done for the day: when we got home after that last hour of driving in the dark and snow I went straight to bed and fell asleep.

Turns out that was the right call because this morning we woke up with several inches of snow on the ground and maybe 14" total falling throughout the morning/afternoon. I am so glad I did not have to drive home in that, especially in a vehicle I don't trust.

Turns out that snow is the northern tip of a ton of rain falling on the south coast that's taken out all highway access: basically the umbilicus that connects the interior to the rest of the province and to Canada. A big snow closed these same highways in 2015 for five days but this is a lot more structural damage than snow. Thoughts: Very Happy my friends did not drive up here, concerned to see if Josh can get up at the end of the week, very curious to see what grocery stores do in the next little while. Also this will probably foil my 4th attempt at getting a bank card by mail, so there's that. There are some pretty spectacular pictures of the Coqihalla (highway 5), highway 99, and highway 7 washouts. Apparently there are a couple hundred folks stuck between slides and they're trying to evacuate them through to the nearest town, which itself doesn't have power. I'm feeling pretty lucky with a full pantry and a generator (though no gas for the generator and I need to replace the fuel in the snowblower since it's been sitting which has meant a lot of shovelling).

Exciting times. I'm glad mom lives on a boat, though she said a random boat looked like it was lifted from anchor by the flooding and drifting towards her dock.

After Josh's (hopeful) visit next week is Tucker's birthday, when I'm looking forward to making tasty food appear and watching movies and snuggling. Downtime stuff. It feels like winter has hit pretty hard and I'm ready to hibernate awhile with some good tea, no-cook charcuterie platters, and a book or two.

I slept under a weighted blanket for the first time last night. It's made like a quilt, with two layers of fabric sewn into squares and glass beads in the squares. That's a pretty common way of making a weighted blanket, and it had the issue that I expected: that is a lot of thermal mass, and so it took a long time to heat up to body temperature and then once it heated up it stayed hot. It's probably still super warm now, three hours after I got out of bed.

I'd got the blanket used, in town, pretty cheap. I'd been thinking about getting a weighted blanket for awhile-- I usually need several comforters or blankets on me to sleep and figured it might replace several of them-- but it's a lot of money to put out. I was glad to find this one and be able to either use it as a trial or keep it.

I'd forgotten just how *scented* other people's homes and laundries are. Whatever they've done to this it fills the room and then some with this... fragrance. It doesn't seem to trigger my fragrance-sensitive headaches, and I don't use the blanket against my skin so it doesn't have a chance to give me hives. What it does do, though, is poke my senses over and over like a curious 3-year-old and make my house feel foreign. Last night felt like sleeping on someone's couch just because it didn't smell like my home at all.

The blanket is 25 lbs so it's not really washable in a machine. It's even actively a little hard to handle. I might try to give it an enzyme or bleach soak but I'm not sure what drying it would look like. It is definitely too heavy for a laundry line and would probably tip chairs over if I tried to drape it. You know the way a dead body is hard to carry, because it flops all over, it's literally a dead weight? The blanket is worse.

It was nice to sleep under, though, once it warmed up. My sleeping positions tend to stretch out the muscles I've used during the day and having the weight also was a nice tension on my muscles. Plus I imagine if I keep using it my forearms will strengthen up quick.

It was good to have something to think about. I had a talk with Josh where he's prioritized some stuff with his other partner that will change the kinds of sex I can have with him, told after the fact. That's kind of piled on top of something relatively similar with Tucker that happened previously and I'm feeling-- I don't know. Not pleased. Angry? Bereft? The volume is turned down a little on those feelings but they're not great.

And then today I'm trying to get Nox and Oak into the woodshed. I've done the things right, three hours to set up the yard into a series of funnels using the trailers and lots of panels. All I need to do now is go out with a bucket and treats, let them out of the garden into the yard, and gently steer as they wander around. I've given myself all day. I will need to be slow, not be anxious (which of course I am) and just have patience and live in their mindset with them until they're moved.

It's a significant emotional challenge, honestly.

Anyhow, that's my morning. We'll see what the afternoon brings.

Ok. Self-reflection. Map my thoughts.

( navel gazing, as per the deck's instructions )

Today I can hopefully take the tiller in to get it looked at. Josh says it's probably the carburetor.

In the meantime my plan is to plant spinach and grain, and maybe pick up a bale of straw for the pigs tonight.

Planting continues: I got the rest of the melon seeds into pots yesterday, and hopefully by the end of today I'll have the squash done.

Josh is doing the expected trajectory with the new relationship. We usually talk once a week and he's like, "no change" but then it turns out in the ensuing conversation that they're gone from one weekend a month to seeing each other a couple times a week, or the "maybe we'll see how this goes" has changed into "this is definitely a permanent relationship" or whatever. You know, the exponential growth that is NRE.

I'm tired of it. I'm tired of talking about it, I'm tired of thinking about it.

In actual fact I'm pretty tired of dealing with relationship stuff at all right now. I want to be outside fixing fences and putting things in the ground.

It occurred to me that the folks I relationship with tend to go on trips for a couple weeks a couple times a year where they're largely-to-completely unavailable for contact. I don't tend to travel, but there's... actually no reason I can't deliberately block time off away from contact even if I'm not travelling. I mean, I tend to fade out a bunch at this time of year anyhow but I can be more deliberate about it if I want.

Once the boundaries door is wedged open it seems to just keep creeping further and further open. I hadn't realized how many things I was doing to make the people around me comfortable, or how many things I was not saying and not doing. I can hold up my poly lens and say, I tended to be punished for doing relationships in an atypical way so I tried to be as typical as I could be, allowing what I absolutely could not avoid and shoving down my discomfort about anything where I could pretend to the standard narrative. Interestingly, I can hold up the autism lens and say the exact same thing.

My highschool friend -- the one who was close friends with me for years and years and then never responded to a single word after he got into a longterm relationship, such that I only learned he was 1) in a relationship 2) married and 3) had kids from mutual friends -- said that I only ever talked about relationships and plants, but that I made it interesting.

This week, or this month, I guess I want a break from talking about relationships.

Maybe living somewhere with non-gardening winter really is bad for me. I'd really missed immersing myself in my garden.