Greenstorm's Journal

Yesterday was outside a lot. I went out in the morning and pulled wheelbarrowsfull of thistles and finished planting my shade garden (hostas! alchemilla! er, the what's-it-called with little purple or pink flowers that under the doctrine of signatures treats lungs and goes in a shady place and has silver spots on the leaves!). Then a deep nap, sunscreen, and more outside play. I even managed to get out for a third time as the sun was setting and stood in the centre of my circle where the elm is growing, hissing and muttering to the setting sun until I had its location. All the cats accompanied me except Whiskey.

I read an entire audiobook yesterday: Mysterious Affair At Styles, an old friend, as are all poirot and marple stories. I hadn't realized just how much of a difference it makes being able to access that familiar-- you know, from my preteens to early twenties I spent much much more time with books than people. Agatha Christie's gently satirical, aware humour is a parent's voice to me, and I hadn't been able to read in flow state since roughly 2016. It brings a piece of myself back to me. So strange that I'd always had difficulty understanding and interpreting verbal language as compared to written, and now my mind is slowed so much and whatever it is that broke in my mind was so pervasive that listening is easier than reading.

There are so many things in my life that are, not unpredictable, but the complete opposite of what would have been believed about me in the beginning. Yet here I am, more myself than ever. Especially more now that I can visit my old book-friends. I'm still listening only to fiction I'd read at least a dozen times before or science fact where I have a framework pre-existing to hang the info on, and I rewind and reread freqently. I'm curious about reading unfamiliar fiction. I'll learn about that in the fullness of time.

In the meantime I can;t access all my old book friends since they're not all audiobooked, but I haven't run to the end of what I can access yet. I do miss specific voices and people, but I do have some. So.

I made a lovely supper last night, put on clean sheets, and went to sleep after midnight, after the sunset.

This morning I woke at 6am with wildfire smoke coming in the window with the light. I got up, closed everything up, turned on the filters, and went back to sleep. I'm very glad the air was clear yesterday but I very much want to plant oaks today. Theoretically we're provided with a smoke forecast so I could try to plan my day around less smoke.

The tomatoes want trellising. The blackcurrants want in the ground. Things want mulch and more weeding. Eggplants need into their final pots in the greenhouse. Things will grow, ripen, and then fade and die. The seasons keep turning. I'm within them. It's good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

The post office doesn't deliver to the door here; you need to go in with proof of address and they hook you up with a post office box which most of the world doesn't deliver to (including the postal service that removed door-to-door service and replaced it with post office boxes) and then you need to go in when there's someone behind the wicket to get packages.

Lately the post office has been understaffed, so we've only been able to pick up passages between 11 and 1, and 2 and 5:30, on weekdays-which-are-not-holidays. The closures are announced by handwritten paper on the post office door.

For me this means two things:

One, if I go in to get mail as part of doing other things before 11, I don't get my mail, because I have a two hour window of activity per day and so I can't wait around for it to open, nor drive back out later that day. So I can get my mail another day, but that is basically my full window of activity two days in the week instead of one because of the drive out etc. And I can't plan around it because it's not posted online, just on a piece of paper in the post office. After 2 weeks they send your stuff back.

Two, there's a long lineup of people in there when I go in. Before I could hit midmorning and pretty much miss most folks, but now I both spend longer in there because I'm waiting in a line and am exposed to more people. In fact, I'm exposed to every single person in the town, because we all need to go into this little room to get our mail. I've been pretty chill about my post office covid exposure because I pretty much only see one person a week for more than ten minutes, and my post office trip was very short and there were basically no people in it. The situation has changed some there.

Meanwhile the one grocery store in town has significantly reduced its offerings and raised prices. In the last six months prices have close to doubled, and many of the things I used to get are no longer available. I'm not sure what the store is full of, but it's sure not things I'm used to buying. There's also nothing reliable, something that's usually there will just sometimes not be, and then will maybe be back next week, or next month, with a blank spot on the shelf. They've cut things like cornmeal and seasonal veg, and they don't reliably carry any particular brand of cat or dog food anymore, so I'm mail-ordering those.

The other grocery store is kept by the local First Nation, and it's got an eccentric set of stuff as it always has, and also a dollar produce cart that's let me have some treats like a bunch of bell peppers more than once. I probably need to shift most of my grocery shopping there, but they don't have online shopping and curbside pickup -- again with covid risk and also energy, but also thinking on my feet to put together meals from what the store carries.

All this has led me to try once again to reschedule my covid booster, which is overdue by something like six months. Our gov sends us a text message when we're able to get our next booster, along with a helpful link. Many times I've clicked on this link, walked over to get my medical card number (this itself actually requires some stairs, so the attempt isn't low-energy) only to find that there are no available dates in town. Pretty sure I actually did my last booster a couple towns over because of this. I'd even gone in to the pharmacy to ask about it, and the pharmacist said I could just book online, they had frequent boosters there, but again, it kept showing nothing.

Well, I've been gardening and not much else for the better part of a week and a half so my mind seems ok, and someone was coughing in the line to the post office the other day, so I gave it another try. Tap the link on my phone, no appointments in the calendar thing for the forseeable future. Wait, I thought, what if I try this on my laptop?

Turns out the link they send to text message has a mobile mode which prevents seeing, and thus toggling, a thinger which then allows the available dates to show up. Now, I have not had the ability to figure this kind of thing out for quite some time, but in my earlier life I likely would have persisted and managed.

Do normal people get their text messages on desktop/laptops? Like government ones from phone numbers? Does everyone else not have this issue? Does no one get a covid booster anymore so it doesn't matter?

Anyhow.

I can feel the town gently decay as the mills all close down, and as the network of services -- post office, doctors, transport which is everything from busses to airlines to major connecting roads -- also begins to come apart. The biggest, best-run First Nation is taking up the slack when it can, like with grocery stores and even apparently a bus to the big city. None of it is online or, I want say, predictable and reliable, but it's there.

(Incidentally I think you get the bus by calling some guy, but I don't know the number to call offhand, and I also feel pretty weird gambling that the bus will run in time to get me to and back from a flight or anything. There's a paper with the number... somewhere in town on a cork board, but it's not the main cork boards for communication used in the grocery store or post office, so I can't remember where and go back and take a picture to capture the number. But other than the bus there's driving for a 4-hour roundtrip or hitchhiking, so)

I got someone to come look at fixing my deck the other day. He's booking into 2026.

I just planted a hundred baby apple trees, with daffodils underneath, and 78 survived last winter. I have another couple dozen to plant, along with peonies which might not flower for years (and which I need to go in to the post office to pick up). I don't want to leave.

I also don't think I can live anywhere else, really. I can't drive in the really big cities at this point -- I think my cognitive tics are not safe for it, where I can't follow through on decision-making quickly -- and I certainly can't take transit there. Living closer in but still somewhere relatively small is significantly beyond my financial reach -- I'm not even sure I'll be able to renew my mortgage on disability payments, if I do actually get disability payments. (Canadians need to "renew" their mortgages at the current interest rates every five years minimum, so they need to be re-approved for the mortgage, and my income is either down or nonexistent and interest rates are up).

Anyhow, this is a lot of atmospheric rambling from someone who's spent all its time and energy gardening and been very happy to do so.

This much typing and my fingers are slowing down, all the letters are doubling and I'm hitting thr wrong keys. So, enough for now.

Today I took Siri back to the vet, with meds, to get blood and urine tested. He's been drinking a lot and if his food intake is disrupted he gets diarrhea, so I knew something was up.

I'd been overextending myself so I made no plans other than a quick trip in to the vet, stopping at the grocery for a pickup order they'd bring out to the truck, and going home.

I got out of the vet earlier than expected -- I've learned to put padding between things in town, so the pickup order was going to be a bit. I decided to pick up some sushi, then I got to the grocery store. As I pulled in to the pickup spot I got a call from the vet: Siri has diabetes, she wanted to catch me while I was still in town, there were 3 options:

-Put him down, she knew he was a stray I'd just found and this was going to take some commitment to deal with

-Insulin shots, which would require him to go into the clinic for a full day, then once every couple days for a couple weeks, then once a week for awhile, then once a month. He'd get the shots twice a day. The vet is a 5 hour round trip from me if nothing goes badly.

-A new drug she doesn't have much experience with, which he would take by mouth once a day, along with diabetic food. It would still require monitoring but some of that could be done by phone maybe. The drug isn't cheap but the vial should last a couple months.

I had pulled my truck really awkwardly into the parking space -- it's too long to super comfortably go into most of them, and I was trying to answer the phone. I'm sitting there on the phone in the row of 12 pickup spaces with someone pulled into the one space beside me that I was partially cutting off, while all but 1 of the other spaces were empty, sorting through this in my mind. The person in the other car, also on the phone, was glaring at me.

I went with the last option, the once a day drug that probably didn't require as much monitoring. This is why I can't keep my credit card empty, I guess.

I had ordered a bunch of frozen food because the plan was to go straight home. Even though I'd brought a kinda cooler thing running up to the vet was going to add an hour to me getting home, but so be it. I loaded my groceries into the truck, covered them with blankets and jackets, and drove the half hour back up to the vet, then back down again in pre-long-weekend-rush-hour (which, to be fair, is probably less in Prince George than nearly anywhere else people might live).

Got onto the highway, air conditioner blasting -- it had somehow gone from 19C to 27C -- and slowed down because the car in front of me had their flashers on. They were part of a line that stretched to the horizon, which at this point wasn't too far because of a hill. No one was moving.

After about twenty minutes the line of cars started creeping forward. Nothing on facebook about what was going on. Cars had been coming the other way intermittently, so I knew it wasn't a logging truck fully jackknifed or anything. Why weren't they alternating traffic past the blockage? Why were we creeping so slooooooooowly? At this point the cars stretched to the horizon behind me too.

Crested the hill finally and could see the long stretch to the next hill a little over a kilometer away. There were police lights flashing but it was too far to see what was going on. Creep, creep, creep--- never really stopping enough to leave the truck in park.

Turns out the police were worried about a suspect in the area (?) ahead and wanted to stop each car, make us roll down our windows, and say, "don't pick anyone up or stop for anyone in the next bit". They weren't screening cars on the way out of the area, just letting us know on the way in, and this was the way they decided to do it during the busiest time on that highway. When I got past the area, the line in the opposite lane was over a mile long.

I was in the line for about an hour, so that added another hour to my freezer groceries timer and "I'll eat this sushi I picked up when I get home" lunchtime delay. Between emotional stuff about Siri, stress from running all over and waiting in that line without knowing what was up (they had phone blockers deployed, so no internet, unless it's just that so many people were using all the signal), heat stress, and being already tired I'm impressed that I managed to get the truck into my driveway without ending up in the ditch. Most of the groceries were even still frozen, yay survival blanket supplies.

This is the kind of situation where, even if I'm figuratively crashing, there's not too much to do -- I can't really stop the car by the side of the highway in 27C with $300 of frozen groceries and a cat and nap or rest. The trip itself is pushing my resiliency, so then when enough events occur it's really not great.

Also someone should tell the cops around here about things like writing and signs. They could have slowed us to 50 and flashed a sign without having us stop drive-through style and have that poor guy repeat the same message to what must have been a couple miles worth of cars in the end.

Anyhow, Siri is home and recovered from the trip. Thank goodness he's such a good car and carrier cat. The other cats are loved on. I'm in bed, contemplating ability and a new symptom (random pinprick feelings, yay! I didn't notice a wasp had stung me earlier because I've just been getting that sensation kinda randomly throughout my skin).

We will see what tomorrow brings, but at least it will bring me a still-alive cat and some time in bed.

Let me tell you a story. It'll start out dark but end up better, I promise.

It begins with a big issue in the North-- the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. I live near what's called the Highway of Tears, Highway 16, where hundreds of women have gone missing and been reported to police but never really followed up and found.

The highway is basically required to get to services -- anything from medical to a welfare cheque -- but for a decade had pretty much no public transportation at all after Greyhound pulled out and before a raggedy string of municipal busses got put in very inconveniently. To access services you still need to sleep in downtown Prince George for a couple days if you don't have hotel money or relatives. So you can imagine a lot of people hitchhike, not on a lark, but under duress. Attend a funeral? Hitchhike. Visit family? Hitchhike. Get your government checque? Hitchhike.

Between that and the legacy of residential schools it's a very dangerous place, especially for people who society views as disposable. This is the same area where the police (RCMP) keep getting investigated for killing indigenous people but... well, let's just say that the most recent acquittal the indigenous guy died less than an hour after being hit, kicked, pepper sprayed, and punched by a bunch of police but it was ruled accidental and nothing to do with the police.

Anyhow, First Nations aren't thrilled about any of this, and there's a tradition of hanging red dresses by the highway to represent people who should still be here but who are missing. Additionally there are various kinds of demonstrations. Right now there's a gentleman walking from Takla Landing to Burns Lake to... raise awareness? Heal himself? Make a statement? about this. People from town are joining in-- not all indigenous, but that's beside the point.

He'll be walking along the highway by my property today. It was going to be yesterday but he's getting pretty sore after a couple hundred kms and has slowed down. My dog Solly jumps the fence, and although she's very friendly lots of people are scared of dogs so I've been keeping her indoors during the day while he's walking, just in case she decided to jump the fence and go solicit love from humans who might not welcome it.

Normally Solly jumps the fence several times a day and runs towards the forested area by the vacant cabin on my neighbour's land. He likes wildlife there, and there are a bunch of animals that hang out there-- lynx and bears sometimes, definitely foxes too, that sort of thing. I've been less concerned about this than I might because she normally chases into that forested area then comes back within twenty minutes or so, doesn't go towards th road or the highway, and it's much easier to keep predators away from the space when you can cross the fence so I've had the least predator losses ever so far.

But, Solly was in yesterday, so she wasn't jumping the fence to chase away predators. A goose had died (suspiciously close to an electrical cable, I checked it and didn't see chew marks but he wasn't touched though there were some signs of a seizure. He also wasn't super young, so) and I left picking him up and dealing with the body till later.

Well, when I went back later to get him, after Solly was inside, something had eaten the easy meat off the body. There was a pie of feathers where this had originally been done, and then the body had been pulled up against he fence where more feathers were scattered. As I went to pick him up I noticed... a small orange cat that came up, I meowed at it, it meowed back fearlessly and started ravenously chewing on the body through the fence.

He was not my cat, nor a known neighbour's cat, and his fur looked a little rough, like he'd been eating very cheap cat food or something. We meowed at each other a little, then I went and got him some kitten food because he looked Very Hungry and I had some kitten food in the house, which, high calories, he seemed like he could use.

Well, he was still there when I came back and wolfed down about half a cup of kitten kibble in just a few minutes. Solly came to take a look and was very polite (he was still on the other side of a 2" x 4" grid wire fence) and some other cats came around too and the cat alternated between wolfing down food, prring as I petted him through the fence, and hissing/growling at my dog and cats, mostly doing all three at once.

He kept meowing and purring when he had eaten all the food, so I went back and got another half cup, then another quarter cup after that. I probably sat there for an hour, petting him, petting my cats and dogs as they came around, observing interactions, and trying to figure out what to do. He was clearly a male and probably fixed from what I could see, ultra friendly, had an ear tattoo. But he was also very very thin -- I could feel the knobs on his vertebrae, and his pelvis bones -- his ears were abraded or sunburnt, and his claws were a combination of razor sharp and dirty/broken. Basically, he didn't look like he'd been home in a bit.

I wanted to pick him up and bring him into the house because of those predators in the field he was in, and so I could be sure to feed him more, but I couldn't get through or over the fence while holding a cat. So I figured I'd feed him at the same time every day there, and then Tucker and I could capture him in a couple days, when Tucker comes up for solstice.

Well, the cat finally slowed down eating, I finally got up and went to feed the pigs and shut the ducks in for the night... and on my way past I noticed him clinbing up over the fence onto my property. I went to take a look and saw him curled up under the quail shed.

Now, I have baby birds in the quail shed, it's secure. There's a space full of straw under it. Something in the last several days to weeks has been shredding the lumber wrap around it, which just gets whatever is outside into some plywood but it's been noticable that something was trying to get in, and something Solly doesn't completely freak out about. So I'm thinking, ok, this cat has maybe been living under here a bit, that'll make it easier to feed him and catch him.

As I walk up to him he pops right out and lets me pick him up. I carry him into the downstairs bedroom, set him up with some food, water, and a litter box, and he demands love and food for awhile.

I've posted his picture and as much of the tattoo as I can read on the town fb groups, emailed the neighbour (it's not hers), and called the vet with the tattoo number (the last digit is a bit faded though). I've done a bit of reading on tattoos, he may be 5-6 years old from Windermere? The vet hasn't called me back yet. No one on FB has claimed him yet.

He's drunk 3 cups of water in less than 24 hours, eaten a ton of food (I'm giving him small meals) and peed in the litter box nicely though he's not pooping yet (I think he was pretty empty). He snuggles and purrs whenever I go into the room. My cats are pretty ok with him being in that room, though Little Bear is unsurprisingly curious.

So that's the story of how I have a stray cat in my bedroom, how Solly is an effective predator control that the farm notices when she's kept inside, and how institutional cruelty and neglect lead to bad situations but people are struggling to right them.

Also holy man, what are people on when they say cats are aloof? I can't walk three steps without getting mobbed by cats who want love, and this strange cat who doesn't know me was no different. I guess there's very strong selective pressure for it, though I wonder what effect neutering has on that?

Tomato seeds are in for the year, I believe 101 or 102 varieties depending on how you count. Several of them are F2s, which is the first variable generation after a cross. Many of them are up already.

Peppers are potted up, mostly, and the couple that didn't germinate are replanted.

I put a bunch of greens in too, though just a couple of each except sorrel, with the plan to start a bunch more for the farmer's market later on. Doesn't impact me, but I believe some legislation was just changed so it wouldn't be legal for actual stores to buy veggies from me unless I did a bunch of licensing stuff and joined a group of some sort based down south. Not a great look, gotta say, for a gov that mouths words about food security. As always I'm excited at the idea of ethiopian kale.

Potato seeds started, though seed potatoes are not ordered. The snow is mostly off the garden, on a sunny day I could go up and plant favas and poppies and I bet the ground would be thawed enough; it's still mostly freezing hard overnight which makes chores less muddy.

Looks like many of the apple seedlings I planted are still up there -- some are not -- but the geese keep getting into the garden and likely will eat them all if I don't get better fencing sorted asap.

No legumes or corn or squash started yet. I'm thinking about doing a round of sweet corn or popcorn on top of my gaspe, I'm more likely to eat popcorn but people locally like sweet corn so a seed crop might be nice. Anyway, I could offset those by starting them indoors, especially if I'm starting from several different varieties. I'd like to try runner beans this year too, I don't really like figuring out support but they're supposed to do well in cooler weather. Maybe on the deck? I have a nice assortment.

I did plant some mache and pak choi on the deck.

I would like salad season.

I set up some damp boxes and am experimenting with those. I'd like to be able to throw a bunch, carve a bunch, and handle a bunch of objects not necessarily in the demanding timespan that air drying with a bit of plastic over them forces on me. Fingers crossed! The damp boxes are just clear bins, I set cardboard in them for the mugs to sit on and I can spritz those or just dump water in. Now I need to shift some shelving so they can be somewhere convenient and also allow more plant space when the tomatoes get potted up.

Geese are sitting in a lot of cases, I'd been hoping to keep them off the eggs until midmonth so no babies happen while I'm gone in early-mid May. I've managed to keep the ducks off at least. It all means lots of eggs for me, I sent a box of them with Tucker and stored a box in the back of my fridge (goose eggs keep for a really long time) and now it's time to start making and freezing pasta dough. The little food processor I got way back when is putting in some hard labour on pasta dough.

Thea has really bad matting on her pantaloons. It must be uncomfortable because she doesn't want me touching it. I think I can get in on Solly's before it's that bad, and Avallu's are good, but I think I might take Thea in for a professional groom. She gets spectacularly motion sick, but there's a groomer just a couple kms down the road, I might even walk her down there?

In other dog news, Avallu let me clip his nails the other day after I worked up to treats-for-touches for awhile. None of them are running on the road much, so they're definitely needing clipping. Thea is Not Having It, Solly will be worked up to it ok, she's just skeptical. And Solly has showed truly excellent escalation from tiny liplifts, through gentle escalating growls, to a sudden but roomy air-lunge with the cats. I'm very pleased; when she arrived she went right to lunging to indicate her displeasure, and I've been working on letting her know that growling is a good communication tool. This just makes her a safer dog all round. The cats appreciate the heads up too, and are feeling safer knowing when to be around her and when not to be (the not being: when she's eating or getting lots of attention from me. We're working on this latter one a bit).

I realize I'm supposed to be making some dishes for my brother's wedding but I haven't been in to the studio to use those bats for plates recently. Hm.

I also started a "mug of the day" post on instagram, where I'll post something about something I've made. Sometimes it will be a glaze detail, sometimes another thing I'm noticing or thinking about. At work it's something about the mug I bring in to drink out of.

Visit with Tucker was excellent, though I didn't love being away from home. Finally talked with Josh about all the stuff that had been waiting on me having energy, and that was good. It's a place to start.

So: lots of good.

The drop-dead date for having completed all the stuff I haven't been able to do to keep working is this fall, and I'm just not able to do it in time, plus work, plus manage my health stuff. So far as I can tell they allow zero accommodation there, too. So this lovely castle in the air I've built myself rests on that foundation until October, when I'll most likely lose my job because I'll be kicked out of the forestry thing for not finishing it. The forestry thing doesn't allow it all to be done separately, only while working, so that's a no go. I'm glad to have had this, anyhow. Not sure how long I'll be able to hold down any other job, like retail or whatever is available in town, since I'm working from bed a couple days a week right now. So I know there are changes ahead, but I'm happy right now. That counts for something.

Every day there's more sunshine.

We had a fresh blanket of snow two nights ago and through into yesterday early afternoon. I popped out on work breaks to snowblow, working from home, and it was the kind of fine dusty-sand snow that blows all around and is easy to snowblow but hard to walk through.

Today it's very sunny, -20C. That sounds cold but with the sun at least making it above not just the horizon but the trees there's so much directional radiant heat and everything is bathed in light. The air is cold enough that it's full of glitter, sparkling like a christmas card or fantasy movie set.

I have a friend at a similar latitude in maybe Sweden whose geese are starting to posture. I should split off a couple groups for breeding before they pair off inappropriately.

I started seeds for the garden club meeting in two weeks, we'll be splitting the tightly-packed seedlings at the first leaf stage and everyone will be potting up some micro tomatoes and small pot-friendly peppers. It's much too early to plant indoor starts for planting outdoors at the end of May, so this is a way to get our hands in the dirt and play with seeds and build some community without having overgrown seedlings later on. Plus it introduces people to micro tomatoes and I do have a ton of micro seeds. The club is providing soil and pots (I am also bringing some pots scavenged from the grocery store program's poinsettas). This makes me happy.

My apple seeds will arrive soon and I will soak and stratify them. I have no money right now but am hoping to order a couple more haskaps and some oaks for this year. Maybe I'll sell some pottery to do it?

Speaking of selling pottery, I have the kiln lined up to buy from my mentor in spring, but money is a definite issue. I'm considering doing a "help set up my ceramics studio" kickstarter/indiegogo/maybe patreon sales type thing, though it makes me nervous. I do love the idea of crafting items for people based on a couple data points though (big or small, handle or no handle, texture or no texture, colour family, choose a word if you like).

-38C on the truck this morning. She started, yay battery blankets, and I ran her for half an hour to prep her for restarting later, so I can go into town at lunch and check the mail. The main room was 19C this morning, impressive for the end of a 10-hour stove run in weather like this. It's the kind of weather where, if you dump a bucket of water on the ground, it makes noises like you've started a fire and it's getting good teeth into the kindling.

I'm so, so grateful for that 6-8" of snow we got right before this. The snow blanket on the house keeps it a good 10C warmer in here.

I fed and watered animals this morning without a hat and it was a mistake. I had to come back in and get one. Working from home so I can bring them water on my breaks because it will 100% freeze. Everyone seems pretty cozy, the chickens fluffed up almost round on their perches and the pigs nearly invisible under the straw. I am very glad to have got that last minute extra straw. I'll use a couple bales to build an extra windblock for the ducks since they say it'll be colder again tonight than previously forecast. Either way the prep I did in -20 is paying off. This is terrible weather to work in, even if it is beautiful.

This is probably the day the interior humidity drops below 10%. Drying clay pots and plants slowed it down a bit, I guess.

There are six animals plus me curled up in the woodstove room right now, and I know Whiskey is right around the corner on the stairs. The dogs are napping after a morning patrol while I fed things; the cats are waiting for breakfast.

I'm tired, and much is in doubt, but this could look like being happy.

Today was the Steven Edholm apple order day. He lives in a much warmer climate than I do in California, but he hand-crosses lots of neat stuff. This is the third year I've ordered apple seeds from him; I don't expect a super high survival rate but I do order carefully from crosses with at least one hardy parent (preferably the mother, though I'm not sure how much difference that makes). Open-pollinated seeds from a hardy parent are cheap, where hand crosses are less cheap but still a very small investment overall. For apples the big investment is land for them to hang out for 5-10 years before they fruit. In most places that's a big ask. Here a place without moose to eat the trees to the ground is a big ask (thank you, dogs).

Anyhow, he focuses on red-fleshed and long-hanging apples. Long-hanging apples don't work here between bears and the fact that they need many months to ripen and super cold temps, but I can peel off the short-season hardy ones and capture some of the flavours he favours: berry, cherry, savory.

Plus this year I have some crabapples from ecos/oikos farm to plant. In general I receive these too late to plant on any given year so they wait for the next year but it's possible this year's edholm ones will arrive by Feb, which means there will be time to rehydrate and cold stratify them before planting and I'll have two years' worth of seeds to plant, maybe 300 babies in all plus the ecos ones.

I cannot possibly describe how hard it is to wait to see which ones survived from last year. Some died in the drought -- they were being watered but they just crisped up anyhow. Some didn't put on any height and just hung out. Some shot up, mostly those with Wickson or Kingston Black as a parent. During the winter some might also drought out despite the snow, and they may become tasty treats for voles. Then I expect some to be cold-killed even though we still haven't gone below -15C or so. Granted, they are covered in snow so they're pretty insulated from snaps, but I have no idea what percentage will make it through. As always I am very curious about this winter's temperatures anyhow, and if it stays above -25C that's a good couple climate zones warmer than normal so then next winter will be another big test.

Parents I'm interested in: Wickson (a hardy, very tasty big crab that grows fast babies), trailman (a super hardy crab), Williams Pride (a just-hardy but very early and tasty apple), Sweet 16 (a descendent of Wickson and a more full-sized, very tasty, and hardy apple), roxbury russet (I adore russets but they don't usually ripen here. I'm planning to drive something like 12 hours one way to get a couple hardy ones, one of these years, but in the meantime investing in seeds crossed with shorter-season varieties seems like a good middle ground), cherry cox (cherry flavour!!), and some apples edholm has created basically with those parents crossed in for good measure.

Dream eclipsed double moose strike accident from last night, mostly because I suspect everyone (me, the truck, the two moose) are all fine, though I know there's a dent on the truck and I suspect that moose is bruised.