Greenstorm's Journal

We got rain yesterday, not a ton but enough to make a difference. It was pretty windy all day and my tomatoes got a good workout on the deck to harden off. Morning dog walks were crunchy with frost.

All my energy is going to dog walks right now. Sometimes I can combine a bit of gardening with Robs.

Oh, my sewer line had slowed to a stop, the plumber came, and he found a stick wedged in the outside clean-out thinger, which is just a standard 4" plumbing pipe that comes up at a 45 degree angle from the line that goes from the house to the settling tank. None of us had a tool to get it out, it was about 6" further than fingertip reach and wedged at an angle so it caught anything solid that went down the pipe and caused a plug. He snaked it for me and broke up the plug but we couldn't get it out.

Well, after helpful advice from friends online and sleeping on it, I made two tools: one a stick with a hook on the bottom made from a sapling with a side branch, like a fish catching thing I saw made once, and the other a stick with a small loop of baling twine about three times as big as the stick I was trying to catch. Using the hook I was able to lever the end of the stick away from the pipe and drop the baling twine loop over the end, then I twisted the baling twine stick to tighten the twine and pulled everything up! Amazing! I am very impressed with myself. Living out here requires so much physical problem solving and I'm not good at it, but this wasn't so bad.

PSA: keep the cleanouts to your pipes covered with their caps and don't stick long sticks down them.

Fencing is mostly done in back but not fully; the guys did the back but I sprang scope-creep on them and added the side so it'll just be fully enclosed back there. They had to come back to finish the side, which they'll do sometime this week. Then I'll be able to let Robs run around in a space that doesn't have cats or birds, and he'll like that. He's been pretty tightly confined this last week except for a drop-the-leash session in the evenings up in the garden.

I don't like where my patience is at with him. I'm going to clock it up as another point in the "PMDD meds need work" but it means I don't always respond how I want to and it takes a lot of work to try and regulate us. One of my tools for handling the mental load of PMDD, sort of shutting down and moving slowly, isn't always available with a very fast puppy throwing stimulus at me as quick as he can.

Anyhow: rain, frost, fencing, alive.

It begins.

The first trickle of running water down my driveway showed up yesterday. Four feet of snow has sunk to three. Somehow, I never know how, the earth under the snow is warming: my house is staying much warmer in the basement even when the thermometer temperature is low, and streamlets are running down the sides of roads and puddles and small floods are gathering in the inner elbows of the highway.

It's not yet slippery, there's still enough snow for grip.

At solar noon the sun is finally reaching a height within the bottom range of what scientists argue may allow skin to produce vitamin D, though it needs to be a little higher to reach the consensus level.

Geese are squabbling and pairing off and there are eggs starting. The dogs are working hard at night over the whole perimeter.

It's almost time to put seeds in pots.

Against this backdrop I'm sleeping a lot. When I'm not working, and sometimes when I am, I'm lying on the couch with 2 - 3 cats and sometimes a dog or two right there in front. The woodstove is on, light comes in through one window and the other is entirely buried under snow. I'm still wanting to sleep a long night and 3 - 4 naps during the day so I think the medication I'm on needs to be adjusted. With all this sleep and quiet animal companionship I feel like I'm slowly healing in some ways. For most of the winter I was on birth control drugs that put me in the worst part of my cycle. For some time before that my natural hormone response was drifting more and more towards that state. I had no skin. Every thing that happened, every tiny interaction with living things or with the environment, raised crescendos of usually negative, corrosive, painful sensations in my head.

Sitting there quietly, kept loving and concerned watch over by the five house animals, occasionally venturing out and responding to the geese with old instinctive goose chatter: it's giving me practice at the world not hurting me. Cats acting like cats, dogs acting like dogs, geese acting like geese, ravens acting like ravens, and pigs acting like pigs: it's ok. It's becoming ok for the world to exist. It's a small world and it's going from a refuge to a womb. After a couple weeks I started experiencing love again in little flickers while looking at a sleeping animal that has been seeking me out and caring about me this whole time.

It's healing, yes, but my capacity is almost zero. I am incredibly tired all the time, I think from the sertraline. I barely manage to stay awake on my office days; on work-from-home days I nap at lunch, on breaks, before work, and after work. On weekends I sleep. My home is suffering since I can barely drag out the trash, let alone tidy things. I'm eating sandwiches and freezer meals.

And... I still don't have my passions, my enthusiasms, back. I feel indifferent towards my hobbies: cooking, butchery, pottery, even gardening just hold no interest for me. I'd be fine watching shows with the animals and going to work and coming home and watching shows and going to work and coming home for the rest of my life. Talking to Josh or Tucker is nice in the moment but not something to seek out. People aren't something to seek out. I just don't really care. Things are fine. I'm going to do my best to start seeds because I think future me will appreciate it, but it seems unnecessary.

Of course, that's not fine. I'm reasonably sure it's the medication, and obviously that needs to be tweaked. Luckily I set up doctor's appointments for next week before I started on the meds, because between sleeping all the time and not caring I wouldn't have done it while on them.

These are significant issues, of course, but I am at least safe and healing and the first whispers of spring are here.