Greenstorm's Journal

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.

Further to my last post, the friends I do want to keep close are nearly all in some sort of depressive/emotional crisis. Most of them are externalizing it too, which means they're still in the "the world is objectively terrible and so I have to be emotionally destroyed and nothing can be done" which is-- I mean, that's where it's depression and not the much more manageable grief and feelings about change that one honours and uses to inform one's continued *living*. It's mirrored so similarly in so many people. Folks wrote about the covid mental health crisis months ago but right now it's worse than I've seen it.

In a lot of ways it feels like my society has become a death cult that cannot acknowledge the existence of death or change. It sits there staring at the drain it's circling, waiting to be sucked down, throwing the stopper as far away from itself as it can manage. Everyone wants it to be over but not too many people want to build anything after; they hope that if that dies then the next thing will just happen. Systems that are good for humans don't just happen; they take deliberate organization and work and compromise.

And I've always found the best way to make a change is to add something better to replace the thing I want removed. It's a bit of a permaculture concept too: design for the way that people behave naturally, for the way energy naturally flows, and the system will be more robust. Instead of removing caffeinated drinks from the diet, try adding non-caffeinated drinks you love. Instead of yelling at yourself internally to just put the thing away, make a good spot for it to live close to where it's used. Instead of struggling not to call your mean ex, make a standing date with a friend or friends for the particular time of day when your willpower is lowest. Introduce better things and they will displace the bad things. It just takes a but of thought to know what it is you're seeking in the thing to be replaced, and make sure that your alternative has a way for that need to get satisfied. With that thought up front, the rest just ...flows.

Which is maybe why everything feels like it's dying in my little social sphere. There's so much disassembly and so little building. For all that I live very present with death around me in the systems I manage I am a builder, and I like to contribute to building good systems or, maybe better, supporting folks who build.

Anyhow, in the midst of this I extra appreciate Josh. He's always broken the mold for folks I tend to spend time with and this doesn't seem to be getting to him in the same way it's getting to ...everyone else.

Depression has always been my greatest nemesis: it takes all my friends and loved ones from me year after year after year. They struggle, they resurface, I get them back sometimes but so much is lost. In the past I've promised myself I wouldn't date folks who are prone to depression, or who are prone to depression and who don't have explicit ways of handling it when it comes up other than to numbly wait until it subsides. I hadn't extended that to friends, though, and I guess the above principle still applies: if I'm removing those folks, who am I replacing them with?

But. What I really want, I guess, is folks who can lift their eyes towards something meaningful to them and who find satisfaction? in moving towards it.

As the poem says,

"With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."

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.

Today was the work flight. The world remains amazing from a helicopter. It's such a varied and intimate way of looking at the landscape.

We went up there with... my ipad. And. That was it. I had maps with waypoints that we used to navigate, and I pointed a lot. And I took lots of notes and pictures. It was a bumpy day; by the end of the 3 hours my stomach was a little displeased but that seemed to be pretty good: when I climbed out of the helicopter the pilot said admiringly, "you didn't puke or anything!"

And it was beautiful and free and lovely. I saw local communities I hadn't seen before. There were 300 swans, roughly, on the river between the two lakes where they overwinter. I got to think about something other than COVID and relationships. I got to ask the pilot, who's flown here for 2 generations, what's changed and what most surprised him.

When we flew over some of the many, many frozen lakes we saw lots of snowmobile tracks and a couple folks out walking. Speaking of social distancing, they were tiny specks on a huge empty shining surface. There were folks up in the back end of nowhere living in trailers. Many of these communities are from three to a dozen homes, speaking of social distancing.

In the world, several small communities have barred visitors: many islands in BC, more remote towns, and some First Nation reserves.

Meat and eggs are sold out of our local stores, but I saw a supply truck this morning so maybe not anymore? The liquor store is closed. I have a 5-gallon bucket half-full of eggs at home that gets fuller everyday and could put 250 pounds of pork cuts in my freezer out of my herd without batting an eye.

I need to do my tomato and pepper starts, I'm a week late at this point.

I have acorns growing. Maybe someday the oaks will feed another generation of pigs, will be ground into flour to ride out another person's isolation. First they need to get their roots into the ground.