Greenstorm's Journal

I grew up in a huge (albeit cold and unfinished) house, 4000 square feet and 5 acres for 6 people. There were always places both indoors and outdoors I could go to be alone, private, and safe. In the house if I didn't want to be in my room I could climb through the undrywalled bathroom, over the pile of contruction lumber and down the not-yet-or-ever-wired hallway, into the sauna-without-electricity which was basically an unheated unwindowed cedar room full of spiders, dust, and peace. It felt like the tombs of Atuan, known only by touch. Or I could go upstairs, through the library, into mom's office where she was never to be found during non-school hours since she was doing chores, making dinner, and taking care of my brothers and I could take a book off the shelf and hide under her desk (which faced away from the door). No one could find me and it was warmer in there.

When I graduated from highschool me, mom, and one brother moved into a 42" boat. The boat had three rooms plus a toilet room: mom's room with the shower in it, the front V berth, and then the galley-slash-salon with a couch in it on which I slept as long as I lived there. There was no privacy at all, visual or sound or anything, except when my brother was at school and mom was at work (and she didn't work in the office every day). The boat was (illegally, since we lived on it) moored in the city's downtown and I learned to live in public spaces at that time: the new library, the new plaza next to the transit station, the acres-big park with a bike path encircling it and swings, the big cheap clattering chinese restaurant with a million things on the menu which I could even occasionally afford.

I had no money at this time, I was working a very part time job for minimum wage and I was supposed to be going to school. I'd go to the university and use the computers there but I failed out of my classes pretty quickly; I was too afraid to talk to adults to ask them for help, and too poor to afford the textbooks. I tried to get a job following mom's advice ("just go in with a resume") but through some combination of the early 2000s recession, being too afraid of adults to talk to them, never having been raised around non-abusive adults and not knowing what to say, having no idea what working actually entailed since mom was a college professor and had hoed beans as a kid and dad hadn't worked, being deeply depressed, and being autistic I had a two year job search that failed to get me more than the occasional month or two at part-time minimum wage. At that point it was clear I wasn't doing well in university, and to motivate me mom kicked me out: she said I either needed to pass classes (which I needed to pay for myself) or pay rent on the boat. I wasn't able to do either.

Luckily my boyfriend had started working at a nice job at his mom's workplace at that point, and we could move in together to an actual apartment.

(This is so painful to write about)

For awhile we lived together in a couple of what were probably fine apartments, but that felt amazing to me: carpet! that was less than twenty years old! Smooth, drywalled, mudded, sanded, and painted walls! Molding at the base of the walls! Doors that fit their frames and frames that were finished! Showers with curtains! I felt rich. I was not rich. I was living with someone who we thought we would be together forever, but I was still only working the occasional stint in call-center jobs. He worked at a regional airport, so we lived deep on what were then the fringes of suburbs whose population mostly commuted to the city. He could drive, I could not. The busses to the city took a couple hours, and they did cost money. I grew tomatoes on a south-facing deck, walked to a yoga class and to the local nursery where I hung out, and spent a tremendous amount of time online.

It didn't feel unusual for me to be dependent on my partner, to not be able to leave. I'd never had the option of leaving while growing up, of living on my own. I'd never had enough money at one time to make up a full rent cheque even if I were to take every cent in my account and the change in my purse and spend it on just that one thing.

That was at least two apartments in the suburbs. Long story short we moved to a third apartment in the city to be closer to another couple we were dating. A year or two more went by, maybe more, I'm really uncertain of the timeline at this point. I was completely unable to get work in the city; I volunteered at the botanical garden for years, sold knives door to door for a bit but didn't have the network that business model relied on to sell to all my friends.

Finally one of my friends from the polyamory group had to go on maternity leave; she owned a cleaning business that she'd built and wanted to pass it on to someone. I started cleaning with her and I was completely terrible in the beginning, but she was patient and trained me up for months, introduced me to all the clients, and then eventually left it in my hands.

As soon as I had enough money to pay my own rent, my first partner said he needed some time living apart. I believed him. I suspect he believed him. The last time we ever had sex or an intimate date was in our shared bed, though, because once I moved out he made excuses about not getting together in private, got married to part of that other couple we were seeing, that person vetoed me with him and my other partner (the other part of that couple), and every time we got together for the next several years he'd express what seemed like real interest in meeting up but never actually follow through.

Anyhow, when I moved out I didn't know any of that. I found a room on craigslist in a house full of gay dudes. It was a beautiful old house, immaculately kept, with a big fishtank in the livingroom. At this point I'd developed some social skills but I still didn't spend much time in the shared areas, just up in the little attic room I had my own rights to. I kept my rats in there, my own fishtank for a little while, and my bed: that's all that fit. I wasn't home much: I spent a bunch of time at the home of the couple we were dating (I didn't really know I wasn't dating the one partner yet, and the other was still seeing me), and then my commute to work and back took a couple hours each way on the bus if I wanted to be on time. I learned the city's bus system intimately.

This is when I was first buying my own food. I remember buying a frozen brick of masago, the cheap orange kind full of msg ad sweetener, and eating about half of it on rice, then not eating any again for months. I couldn't leave anything in the kitchen, not even a dirty glass overnight, and friends didn't come to my place.

My home at this point was really the home of the couple I was dating, and my time was spent more there than at the room I rented. I'd swing home, hang out for a day, feed and play with the rats, and swing away again for a day or two or even three, depending on how much the rats were eating/drinking. In the other house I had no bedroom or anything like that, not even a drawer, so I lived with my bag full of housecleaning supplies including little vaccuum on one shoulder, and my big hockey bag full of clothes and books on the other. The other house meant stability though, it was people who loved me at the time, who cared for me and who I spent time with, and I (and partner) had been spending time there for the last several housing moves so it felt stable. It felt like home.

Then came the veto, and that house was no longer mine. I'd planted things there: a pawpaw tree, elephant garlic, raspberries, saskatoons. I'd built a greenhouse. I built a greenhouse in the backyard of the house I was renting a room from too, with the help of my other partner, and one of my roommate's friends offered me a job working with plants. I took it, and for the first time was, not full time employed or anything, but was actually employed by another person in a job where I could pay my rent.

A kaleidoscope of homes and partners follows: I moved on average once every six months for awhile, in with partners mostly but sometimes with roommates. This home had a hole in the floor that let in daylight and then the ceiling collapsed. That home we moved in as a group, lived there for six months while the landlord was always going to install floors, then got evicted when he finally did. This home was a studio space that one partner's brother let us live in for awhile, then kicked us out. That one I couldn't afford when the relationship ended. This one was really too much of my income. That one was a friend's place she rented me while she lived elsewhere, but I got the boot when she moved back in (that one was really lovely, and it's where I was the longest aside from here). There were sublets and sublets and sublets. I kept a PO Box in town, paid for, because it's the only way I could do all the legal documentation things you needed to receive mail for. When I needed to recover a password on the phone to do my taxes I ran through three or four possible postal codes when they asked what mine was.

I played ATM fishing every week, putting in two dollars so I could get at the extra 1.50 in my account and thus debit 3.50 at the store for groceries.

I remember moving my things in a wheely suitcase once in the summer, a gift that my aunt had got for me to pointedly suggest I should move out from living with mom before mom kicked me out herself. It was summer, and they're not made for that kind of use: the wheels melted right off.

If it was the right time of year I always planted things, if there was any outdoors at all. I tried to alway s be somewhere with outdoors. I could afford rent and mostly food, I always paid my rent, and sometimes I'd buy plants. I'd plant them where I was living. Years later I'd see them sometimes, flourishing if they hadn't been removed. I watched the saskatoons in front of that one house grow huge and full of berries.

I never stayed anywhere long enough to pick fruit. Tomatoes, a couple times. Mint, in very different types of locations, yes. I hauled pots of plants from home to home to home on the graces of friends who could drive and were willing to help me move.

I got so good at moving. I only ever had one dresser of clothes. I kept things in steamer trunks and books lived in boxes. The plants were awkward, of course, but there it is. I had a moving company I liked and that I eventually paid for; luckily I had a strong visual style so people would give me clothing they thought I'd like and I didn't have to pay for clothing; I could afford to move. Moving was my poverty hobby and my most expensive hobby.

Eventually my stuff went into storage. I don't remember when, or what spurred it; I think it was the breakup of a relationship where we were living together just the two of us, or maybe it was my decision to go back to school. Everything I loved was in a 10x10 box in an inaccessible part of the city (that is to say, busses didn't really go there) and I was in another box with a moldy futon on the floor, a rabbit, and a dresser in a house that was probably a negative 500k value on the multi-million-dollar lot.

Years later it came out of storage. I'd been at threshold a couple months by then, my own house, this house that I own. I'd been rattling around in it with a set of dishes I got on a facebook sales group, a week's worth of work clothes, a bed they'd left behind, and two of those tall barstools that are impossible to sit on. When all my stuff arrived on the truck it was like Christmas is supposed to be (did you grow up with nice Christmas presents?), all the things I wanted curated by someone who loved me and knew me well: my pottery wheel. My sewing machine. The mirror I liked. My lounging couch. My marshmallow mattress and the bed I can hang clothes on the frame of. Dishes I'd made. Festival clothes, fluttery silk and good for nothing but pleasure. Steamer trunks full of costumes and sweaters and kink gear and unfinished skirts. Boxes of books, and shelves for the books to go on. Old spiral bound notebooks. Booze I'd made and bottled in the hope of someday being able to sit somewhere and drink it.

People who place little value on stuff inevitably have enough money to get what they need, or a corner of their parents' basement where they still have stuff. People who say "it's just stuff?", I have no time for those folks.

Five and a half years ago I moved here, to Threshold, and my stuff came, and it was a completion. Three pieces clicked together: the land, me, and my nest of things. The next year we were evacuated for fires and I had one of the bigger trauma responses I'd ever had in my life: I was displaced, temporarily in someone else's home and unable to spend much time at my own home where I had put in a garden. My other partner was ghosting me and gaslighting me about the ghosting. I spent the weeks of evacuation in a dark dissociated haze where I could barely hear sounds; even with someone who loved me there, even with my animals close to me.

After that it slowly got better. When I came home the greenhouse had grown so much I couldn't get into it; Josh had set up automatic watering while I was gone and things had flourished. Winter, summer, winter, summer again: the seasons continued to come. The apple trees, here before me, bloomed every spring. Every spring! Ice locked the house and slid down off the roof and sheltered it in a cradle of white peace, while inside the woodstove breathed its heartbeat of full to empty, blazing to smouldering, over and over and over and over.

Last summer I was given a couch and put it in the basement, in the woodstove room. The room has a rack of squashes I grew for seed (I mean, also to eat) and is stacked with dairy crates of corn drying for seed. The dog door opens into this room and three cats and two dogs wander in and out freely. I spend so much time here now, sitting on the couch with my feet up on a suitcase (hard-sided, so I can set a drink on it if I need and my back to the firewood rack holding the next few days' heartbeat of heat. The wood stove creaks occasionally beside me, topped with the hum of a little heat-driven fan, and when it's windy I can hear the chimney singing. Outside is the winter's worth of firewood, right outside, the future sitting there in solid form and every week I split it and carry it indoors. Sometimes I go upstairs and get a jar of applesauce from the pantry, from the apple trees that where here before me, and I eat it.

This home makes demands of me and every demand is: stay, interact with me, I'm here, stay, you can't ignore me, stay. These demands feel like love.

I haven't opened every box from the moving years but I'm getting closer. Last night I took a rubbermaid of various things, noticed it was mostly winter gear, and I hung two dairy crates near the door. Shelves are beyond my budget, but dairy crates? I have a source. I labelled one "hats" and one "scarves" (considered, and discarded, "scarfs") and put the combination of work toques and unicorn toques in the one and the scarves from the box in the other. I took some other scarves off my coathooks and put them in too, which let the coats stretch out a little more.

The rubbermaid isn't empty but I'm one step closer to being unpacked. I have years of "important papers" to go through, mostly no doubt taxes and government correspondence about permanent residency and citizenship and paystubs that were so desperately valuable and so desperately hard to manage with all the moving, but can go on the fire now. There's another box labelled "ancestry" sent by my cousin on my unknown dad's side, and I think some sort of catholic baptism thing? My US birth certificate may even be in there somewhere.

Scarves and hats, two steps closer. In the summer I can reverse the crates and put pocket-vests and sunhats in them so I have somewhere to put eggs when I find them. Closer and closer.

The pottery wheel is out.

I've unboxed my sewing machine and ordered the part that got broken at Josh's place in 2016. I've made a spreadsheet of fabrics and put my patterns in one place, together, in one rubbermaid. I've assigned fabrics to patterns, pending toile making (I can't actually sew until the part arrives and I can fix the machine). I've cut out the base patterns, and much to my cat's delight have rolled out the big roll of paper to copy the patterns onto for useable templates.

I carry water every day for the animals.

I split and carry wood once a week for the house.

I move through my kitchen, through my livingroom and its current sewing space but sometimes its butchery space, its soapmaking space, its seed-saving space, for myself.

The wood shifts in the fireplace. The dog exhales and shifts in her sleep, head and limbs akimbo. Outside the geese honk quietly.

Last night there was something that could help me living in my house and I just did it, powerdrill was there to hand, screws were there to hand, I knew what the next months would be like and where I would need something, I put that thing there without it being a wasted effort or a ding on my damage deposit. That's the story. As you see I can tell you stories all day. The stories are just the setup, though, the context and feeling of chaos and kaleidoscope and helplessness and slow inching towards healing.

The noun to all these verbs is me, the person to this home, sitting next to the fire and beside the dog and typing thoughtfully on my laptop. Me, in the same home where last night I hung two dairy crates from an unpacked box, where four years ago I came back to find my garden overgrown and remnants of wildfire smoke still in the air, where five and a half years ago I rattled around on the floor in this basement with a puppy.

Somehow I'm still here.

Somehow life is still allowing me to unpack my boxes.

And you better believe I'm still planting things.

So with the idea of maybe moving comes the question of what I need to move to. I have a pretty good sense for myself whether a property will fit me, but because my decisions are always based on a huge number of trade-offs and priorities that have different weight when set beside other trade-offs it's not easy to communicate them.

What would make me happy though?


Property has:
-Roughly an acre of basically level or terraced fenced garden for variety trials etc, I don't plan to use it all at first but I know I'll want that much at some point
-Space for at least 1000 square feet of greenhouse eventually, whatever that looks like and in whatever configuration, existing greenhouse can double for winter bird or pig space
-Ability to walk around near the house, at least out one of the doors of the house, without worrying about clothes etc. This could be created with privacy fencing, distance, or vegetation
-Root cellar or unfinished basement room, this can be added if the water table permits
-Own source of reliable water, either a stream or a well, or if on city water than some sort of nearby backup
-Orchard space for at the very least 8 trees (ideally standard size but hey), doesn't have to be level
-Small fruits space (raspberries, haskaps, etc) ideally an acre but flexible, doesn't have to be level
-Loop driveway
-Trailer storage, doesn't have to be covered but has to be off the loop driveway
-Bear-proof dry feed storage, at least 100 square feet, though this can be made or a sea can will work
-At least 600 square feet of barn/stall/shelter space, though this can be made
-Hammock location
-Absolute minimum 2 acres of pasture to rotate the birds through, can double as lawn etc
-Some organic matter in the soil, ideally lots, and at least some areas without swamp/standing water/pure sand
-Gosh fencing and standpipes would be nice

House has:
-One pantry room for shelves of cans and for freezers
-One brewery/wet hobby room with water-ok floors (concrete, lino, robust wood, tile) and ideally a sink or tiled shower surround with a detachable showerhead, though in a super ideal world the curing and brewing and pottery would be separate
-One meditation/yoga space, could be a loft or a room or even a small building on the property
-One dry hobby room with sewing machine and lots of shelving
-Either a big kitchen or an open concept kitchen/diningroom where the diningroom can be turned into a kitchen counter-and-storage extension
-Bedroom with enough room for a king bed and at least two dressers, ideally with a closet too
-Some sort of entertaining space, livingroom or something

Site has (these are more flexible):
-Within half an hour of a feed source
-Ideally walking distance to a corner store or somesuch
-Far enough from an airport that I'm allowed to fly a drone over it
-Agricultural neighbours or crown land surrounding, or very large property
-Far enough away from highway noise
-Safe, trailer-and-bike friendly road
-Wildfire buffers of some kind
-Local food hub of some kind
-Within twenty minutes or so of town or work
-Nurseries in the area
-A robust farm facebook site or similar
-People that say hi or wave when they drive past each other
-Not colder than -30 ever, or -20 most of the time, would be nice
-Some rain in summer
-Bike paths in the area
-Some nice restaurants in town
-A walkable downtown area
-An abbatoir within 30 mins (ha)

Exserted orange tomato has ripened, three on three different plants. It's surprisingly uniform for an outcrossing tomato. I'm getting regular cucumbers, I got my first tomatillo (amarylla, small but basically an eating-out-of-hand fruit when ripe), the gaspe corn (the short one) is tasselling.

Last week I had two vehicle incidents at work, I wasn't harmed nor was my vehicle damaged in either (I wasn't driving during one but I was involved in some of the decision-making). Those always leave me shaken.

Last weekend Tucker and I took a trip to Quesnel, evaluating it as a place to live. It has a little downtown that's super walkable, a nice walking track, and walkable bridges going into and out of the downtown. It sits at the confluence of two large and quick-moving rivers and it smells like river. It also has a pulpmill which definitely effects the air north of town and the highway north runs right through it; many country roads feed into the highway without a light and the left turns across a couple lanes of what would sometimes be heavy truck traffic was sketchy.

The rivers carve deep into the landscape where they meet. The downtown is near water level, in the V formed by confluence, while residential, farm, and industrial lines the surrounding steep, tall banks. There are a lot of switchbacks and limited flow up/down the cliffs. In at least 2 places there were impassable washouts into the surrounding area, where detours added 20-50 minutes. A couple other washouts were very rough drives as they repaired the roads. I could see why folks were selling their houses on the far side, and it definitely led to accessibility concerns. Last winter was very, very hard on roads but as Tucker pointed out the climate isn't going to get better and there's a lot more left to slide.

A couple years ago there were big fires around the town -- not close enough to see on a short drive -- and there were evacuations. Then the lumber industry tanked for awhile and the post-pine-beetle cut reduction occurred so Quesnel lost a lot of jobs. It had a plan to diversify the economy, more than many places, but it was still hit hard. This seemed to manifest primarily in a lot of infrastructure for folks in rough places: addiction centers, emergency shelters, outreach centers. It's also a very pretty town, hanging baskets, lots of interpretive signs, public art and lots of benches. It seems to be full of massage therapists, health food stores, and restaurants that have existed for over twenty years. I guess it's got a bit of a Vancouver vibe that way.

It's only really livable if one can find a place close in enough to bike or walk into town, maybe? Maybe the most livable place we could afford with some land still? But it was nice, and nice too to get out and try some good restaurants and poke around some streets. It was good to wander around a climate warm enough to grow grapes. The north does seem to have finished with masks altogether -- I suppose Quesnel is southern interior rather than north, but still.

I came back and my new surprise ducklings are still all ok, the pigs didn't break out, and the grocery store has 17 crates of dairy for the pigs. A good cap to a rough weel, all-in-all.

Well. That was kind of awful, two weeks of terrible mental stuff instead of the two weeks of joyful planting I was hoping to have.

On the other hand, last night we got a very very light frost and if I had planted out my melons they would have been toast.

It's interesting to see the frost patterns: in town it was a heavier frost and out here it was lighter, which is very unusual. Generally I'm a couple degrees colder. The pig field -- where the squash was -- had basically no frost by the time I got out there. The main garden -- luckily mostly brassicas and favas this year -- definitely had some crispy-feeling leaves but recovered just fine.

Some tomatoes are looking a little chlorotic and dark purple, stress/cold responses, but I don't think I lost any leaves even. There was also a really heavy dew.

I've put 7kg of rhubarb in the fridge. Dry beans, one full iteration of the tomato trial, corn, and some squash (lofthouse squash especially) are in the ground. Corn is up, both flour and flint, and interestingly although the flint corn was planted earlier it's not ahead. Not sure if that's the variety or the location -- flour is on that pig field south slope, while the flint is on the south slope off the main garden. Both were presoaked, as were the beans.

It's time to harvest spruce tips and get them vacuum sealed and into the freezer, and maybe toss some with sugar in a jar for fancy syrup. It's time to harvest and dry nettles, not quite time to harvest mint for drying yet. Apple petals have fallen. I had my first serious salad out of the garden yesterday, and some beef-and-broccoli-raab that reinforces how much I like the raab. It's quick, cut-and-come-again, can fit in the time after frost and before tomatoes are planted in the greenhouse (!) and it's tasty.

Radishes aren't doing much this year, weirdly. I hope the fall radishes do better.

Tomorrow Tucker and I are doing a run into Prince George, which is the biggest town in northern BC and where folks go when they can't get something locally. I haven't been there for a really long time, but I'm looking forward to stocking up on a bunch of things. We're going in Tucker's little car so I really shouldn't be able to get a plum tree, in line with my "no woody perennials" rule this year preperatory to moving.

Speaking of moving, I seem to be the only one concerned about it at the moment. Tucker has been living up here for two years and hasn't been comfortable in the community; he's said he doesn't want to spend another winter here and I think that's a sound instinct for him. On the other hand, he's travelling in August so he isn't likely to be moving that month, and July is definitely too soon to come to a consensus together. Moving in the winter is dodgy. The thought was to maybe move with A&E, but that's stalled out and I'd really like a backup plan.

The other group of folks we'd been talking about all moving together with have had some stuff come up, so that's not moving forward right now. In addition to the substantial distraction they've got going on, the real estate market is moving so quickly that we're priced out of the original area they were interested in. They'll need to make some decisions around trade-offs: size of closest town, winter climate, commute time to Vancouver/are ferries ok. I'm concerned that by the time those trade-offs are made we'll be priced out of wherever they decide is ok and they'll have to go through the process again.

It's weird because I think I'm the happiest with my current situation of everyone so I'm most ok staying put where I am another year or two. I am also maybe least tolerant of feeling like there's no time to come to an agreement together, and fearful of being left behind in the decisions. I think Tucker and A&E have generally more similar desires to each other than I do: they want to be closer into a big city, basically, and I want to be further out or closer to a smaller town. I'm willing to compromise some in order to get into this situation with some folks who can trade chore help, be interested in and aware of the property, and to get Tucker into a place he's more comfortable around people. Still, if it was just me... I probably would still move eventually, to a place where I have more space around me, but it would likely not be the same place I'd end up in a group decision.

Househunting is, at least, fun either way. I have been looking around at stuff and found a couple bigger acreages with little shitty houses on them around Quesnel that I'd be content with: end of the road, good wells, lots of space. I also found a truly amazing home near Kamloops with, um. Well, the outside looks normal with a deck and hedging cedars. The inside is... gold leaf, fancy tiles, and ornamental flourishes everywhere with ceilings that have carved gold relief. I'm very surprised by how much I like that look.

One of the weird parts of real estate in BC is that most homes on land are either old and falling down, or monster mansions with 5 bedrooms and a chandelier in the entryway. There's not really such thing as a utilitarian middle-aged home; I think this is because rural areas have been hollowing out for so long and only folks able to afford an estate move out of the city and build a new home. Covid and the ensuing remote work has really upended that, thus the shockingly fast skyrocket of land prices rurally. I think my little town, 1500-3000 people depending on how you count, has got at least 20 families from the lower mainland -- the real big city, not just the northern BC big city -- in the last year.

My current home is basically a very beautiful gothic-arch-cedar-lined vacation cabin; it's both too pretty and too small to be ideal for me. I got it because the land is magical and it has a good well, and at the time I only had one neighbour close by. would not at all mind trading some of the niceness of the house (some of which I've got rid of by replacing expansive lawn with pigpen and pasture, and by marking up the walls) for more land and maybe an outbuilding that wasn't falling into the root cellar.

It's nice to feel like myself again, to be able to actually engage with the world outside my own head. I'm really enjoying the garden. The animals are... a little stressful, maybe even fairly stressful, since the ravens seem to be eating my piglets and are definitely carrying off live ducklings. On the other hand some of these things suggest integrative solutions: berry mesh over the haskaps which would be a great place to let natural-hatched ducklings and their mamas forage, and which would protect both ducklings in their season and berries in theirs, for instance. Over time I'd like the two halves, animal and plant, to merge more into a single system. The summer garden in the winter pig field is a start towards that.

Ok. Time to get rolling. It's good to be back.

There's a ghost in the machine. I'd forgotten.

I've been busy for the last couple years. School-- there's always something to do or to think about, something that should be done. I still have a couple things that should be done, in fact, on that front.

This was the first week of work and it's a learning curve. I'd managed to forget how much I liked learning; the knowledge of it was obliterated by the awfulness of huge classes; terribly planned timelines; arbitrary structure; and useless, required, and strictly measured outcomes. I couldn't remember how I'd come to start this whole path, couldn't recall the girl who liked learning so much she worked through a two-year diploma program just to gather the knowledge it offered.

Well, this week and for the easily forseeable future I'll be learning a lot. It's a whole mix of things from physically driving gravel roads and seeing precisely through a forestry prism to the liminal skills of pacing and awareness through to complexities like achieving the correct sampling error for lowest man-hours when double-sampling across multiple blocks where some are pretty far from the road and others are more heterogenous. I was a little nervous about it, but I think I can learn it, and I'm enjoying learning it. My current boss is an exceptional teacher, I know pretty well how I learn, and it's so nice to be figuring out a thing in the world rather than accepting an expert's word on something without any ability to fiddle with it myself.

That's not what this post is about.

I put an offer on a house today. I was originally going to put an offer on a different house, but the expenses of weird incidentals on that house was very high (heat, but also housing insurance and internet and property taxes and basically all the little things that *could* add up) and I got nervous about my budget so instead I went for one that is significantly more modest, on a nice 7 acre chunk. I will grow out of this house if I don't add on or put in lots of outbuildings, but for now that's okay. I have some debt to pay off and I'll be able to do that expediently this way, and if something goes sideways with my career and american politics (see also: softwood lumber) then I'm not as worried as I could be. I put in the one offer previously, for a lot that had a pretty run-down house but also a gorgeous gorgeous garden. This house is better, the garden will take more work. We'll see.

I feel much better about spending a little less right now.

That's not what this post is about.

Last weekend I was arriving here, this week I worked a lot, and this morning I ran around looking at homes and finalising my offer on the house. This morning I also went to look at a farm and talked for hours to the two women who ran it for twenty years: they retired into it and now are too old to keep it up. We spoke about orchards and brewing and bees and deep-mulch gardening and cows and fungus dyes and a ton of stuff and I loved their company and they offered me tea and seemed to enjoy mine. On the way to the realtor's place, driving, I waved to people in cars as they passed.

And now I'm done for a bit. I can feel myself slowing down. I can feel myself looking at things: the strawberry bed, the river. I feel like I'm becoming a person again, a being with *awareness* rather than merely an automaton doing all the things I'm supposed to do. Both partners keep talking about how happy I seem up here, even just this week. I suspect I haven't even begun to dip into the community here and how happy it makes me, and beyond that there's my life waiting, and how happy *that* makes me. And I may, soon, even be a person who's being happy, instead of a fleeting sensation on my way to doing the next thing.

I took time to email my mom.

I am lazily contemplating dinner.

I could wash my bedsheets or tidy up.

I could search the internet for more potential dogs or goats.

Or I could write, here, because I have the luxury of knowing what's going on in my life well enough to write about it. So here I am.

It's very good.

That's what this post is about.

Well. Back in school. Best Forestry Student In Canada, according to one metric (it's on a medal and everything). Proud of it, I guess? But here's the thing. Good-student-ness and happiness don't coexist well for me. I was originally a good student because I was terrified as well as innately curious. I've retained my innate curiosity, perhaps currently my most valued trait (it's only in the last couple years I've considered anything more than "a machine made for loving things" to be my most valued trait), I'm still attuned to details. School requires a particular ability to create absolutely nothing, though, to make something that will be sent down a black hole and never seen again, and when I'm not seeking approval to convince myself I'm allowed to exist (kinda done with that) I find that hard to stomach.

But! I have discovered that if I ignore that part of school by alloting myself a very short amount of time for that stuff (think "I am being paid hourly for half an hour of work here" mindset) I can go on and enjoy things. I am currently both in school and enjoying things. What am I enjoying?

I am enjoying asking my instructors questions about First Nations (Canada) vs American Indian situations, and about what to do in particularly ethically sticky work situations I've encountered.

I am enjoying volunteering with a Canadian forestry organization in what is also a student rep/student council position and thus meeting folks like the Chief Forester (who is a woman for the first time and who is delightful in person) and older folks in the forest industry who are technically retired and have lots of stories and young women with whom I feel some level of comradeship.

I am enjoying my people, so many people I love so much.

I am enjoying plotting this fall's boozemaking when the apples are pressed (three cysers, maybe?) and also tasting some of the things I made two years ago at this time.

I am enjoying living in the same room as my rabbits, being more intimate with them after a summer of not-so-much contact.

I am enjoying having my own bed, both to lounge in alone and to invite people into it as I see fit.

I am enjoying proximity to my mom.

I am enjoying Suhaylah, my SUV, who affords me the ability to travel despite increasingly awful transit systems in Vancouver which often make me sick even if they're not overcrowded or late or taking an hour and a half to two hours to get somewhere.

I am enjoying anticipation of having a home, a real home where I could live and put things and maybe stay there for more than eight months at a time. I've been looking at houses in Fort and I can do that there.

I want to go into detail about people, but it's long past my bedtime and I'd be here for hours. I haven't seen half the people I need to see, but I *can* and that is wonderful.

So anyhow, my overwhelming experience right now is not that of school, it's that of my life around school, which is excellent. School is a problem when it's my focus.

Conifex in Fort St James has said they want me back after I graduate, so I'm tryins g to treat this window as the last, most extended vacation I'll have down south. It's working so far.

Moving twice a year for school is very difficult, worse than moving twice a year for the rest of my life because there is such a long distance at play. My nail clippers are currently in Williams Lake and my bedside lamp has been missing in the stack of boxes for two years (I hate typing with long nails). It's hard to do hobbies, I'm tired of setting up my computer, I didn't get to tuck my garden in for the winter nor do I get to ever live near that garden again, the air always feels to dry or too damp, and I miss my bed which I haven't got out of the storage locker yet.

I always live my life for the next day, or the day after that. The trick seems to be including short as well as long term in "the next day". Use long term to pull myself through short term; use short term to recharge my soul so it's strong enough to be pulled.

Anyhow, tired. Missed you, felt lonely. Late to bed now. Be well. A couple years and you can come visit me and stay in a guest cabin I made you with my own hands. How lovely will that be?