Greenstorm's Journal

Alright. Here's to recentering myself.

This week was really not good.

At the beginning of the A&E thing, my position was that I liked where I was, and if something better was offered I would do it. Tucker left, and once the Sayward location was pinned down I was kind of in a holding pattern waiting for it to begin.

It's not going to work out as I was led to believe, and the people involved are the ones who led me to believe it. This whole time I've been trying to be cautious about it and not commit myself emotionally until I had verified everything; on some level though I assumed it was a formality and that the general shape could follow what A&E proposed.

It wasn't and it can't. They're scrambling to put other plans in place but what they've proposed doesn't show a lot of evidence of thoughtful consideration either. They'll be moving to Sayward this month either way; they'll own the place and will start living there regardless of what happens with me.

So I've learned two levels of information with this process: one is simply that the plan as proposed won't work. But the second is that the folks involved promise before they verify, they get themselves into situations without thinking things through thoroughly, and don't seem to do much in the way of research and budgeting on new endeavours. In other words, they aren't folks I want to be casually financially entangled with; if they leap into something that requires a bunch of digging out, I need to limit my exposure to that. So, if I do end up doing this, it needs to be and to remain very financially and emotionally structured. I'm not able to leap into something before I think it through and do some sort of risk assessment, then leave someone else to pick up the pieces; I need a structure where I'm not responsible for someone else's pieces without first accepting the risk.

It's a big emotional adjustment. I was already starting to lean into it, no matter how much I was determined to go through verification first, and this is not a fairytale ending.

Instead of a fairytale ending I have my periodic reminder that I'm the one in charge of making my life sustainable, in charge of making it work for me, no matter what. People have my back in emergencies, yes, but it's my job to make sure my life isn't a continuous emergency because folks don't have the ability to bail me out of that.

Before all this happened I was feeling overwhelmed and isolated on the farm. It's my job now to remake Threshold into my home. If I'm able to come to an agreement with A&E, given the pacing so far, and without overextending myself into an unpaid and unwanted business advisor role, I'm expecting that move is six months to two years out as a very rough ballpark. I think it will take them that long to come up with a convincing, fact-backed answer to "what can you offer, and what can you not, that I need to handle myself?"

And this is what I mean by sustainability: I was using all my free time and more to try and sort the details of the situation, and racing through the things I needed to do here without enjoying them. Instead I'm going to shift my focus back here, and with my leftover energy I'll put it towards the garden there, and I'll let A&E sort their financial stuff as they will, and I will observe how it goes. If they ask for help with financial organization I may provide it but their finances aren't my finances right now. Whatever they're going to commit themselves to is on them, and the level of risk analysis they want to go through beforehand is also on them. My experience with nonplanners is that when things go sideways they tend to blame anyone nearby: they didn't do the analysis of what could go wrong at the beginning, and those analytical skills don't tend to materialize partway through a project, so if something goes wrong it's likely put onto whoever is closest. I won't take that role.

In that way I can back away from resentment and anger, I can keep myself centered and stable, and I can focus on what it'll take to maintain myself here. Starting with my garden, with making some decisions about what I'll plant here; with reducing the pig herd significantly to reduce work and cost; with maybe paring down on the geese once they're done nesting; with deciding to bring in wood for this winter and exploring the cost of a heat pump for these big shoulder seasons. I need to figure out how to maintain my hot water heater and pressure tank for the well. I have a roof and a chimney and a good wood stove.

I'll also pursue my diagnosis and accommodation at work, and/or consider whether other companies in the area have something useful for me. I'll keep an eye out for remote work. I'll draft up a list of companies in Sayward area I may want to work for, so I know who to reach out to when that happens.

Threshold doesn't mind that I've been exploring my options. She's still here for me. In the beginning that was the point. Now, it is the point once more. Threshold has my back.

Bubbles for bubble tea are cooking on the stove. Behind me the aerogarden that I bought to function as a humidifier/sofaside lamp is casting its light. A cat is playing with a jingly cat toy beside me. The dishwasher is humming along, taking my kitchen towards tidiness. A gloom-grey sky is dimming from bright moonlight to daylight outside. I have just eaten a cheese-and-tomato-and-Worcestershire-sauce sandwich on light sourdough rye from the abattoir trip.

Last night Josh got into Vancouver at 8pm, that's a 15-hour drive, and gave away meat for an hour in a McDonalds parking lot in one of the less-great but extremely transit-and-drivable parts of downtown. Everyone picked up; during meat pickup I took a photo series of removing breasts from a duck, wrote it up, and posted it on fb for folks with cooking instructions for how I do my favourite goose preparation. Today I need to do bacon write-up; honestly making those bacon kits was pretty great.

It feels really good to know my food is out in the world, people are excited about it, it
s going to be eaten with respect and reverence. That is why I do this; it's what makes the work and the sacrifice of lives worthwhile; well, that and continuing the breed.

It feels good to be self-willed for a bit, to just do what I want when I want without observing folks in my house and using that to steer my behaviour.

It's hard to know I'm coming up on the time Tucker will leave. It hasn't been addressed between us, not really, and certainly he hasn't addressed it. While on the one hand there hasn't been a good time to do so, on the other he hasn't reached out to schedule that time, just like when he said he'd like a regular relationship check-in and I agreed that would be good but that he'd need to lead the scheduling he did not do that. He likes the idea of these things in theory--

Here I am, centering his perspective again. I'll allow myself time to do that but the time is not now.

It's hard to know I'll be missing Tucker; it's hard to know I'll be alone up here; it's hard to know I won't have anyone nearby for support (who do I put on emergency contact forms when they ask for someone local?). It's hard to know I'll slip away from people a little more and then be annoyed when I have to mask up, to act human, when they want back into my life periodically. I suspect that's one reason I want a local anchor/daily/domestic person: to be my tie to the human world.

The real cold is starting to set in. Water freezes fast and does difficult things. The pigs have deep straw in their beds, the waterfowl are all locked up in the woodshed (I need to run them out some water) and the chickens are also confined. It's hard to work without gloves. The outdoor water tap has been frozen for days, which surprises me a little; something must be wrong and I need to poke at it. Meantime I've been filling buckets for everyone in the bathtub. The fire is down to a 12-hour cycle; if we get much colder it'll be an 8-hour cycle, which means splitting a lot more wood in the cold. I unplugged the outdoor freezers last night.

Cold is the time of year when infrastructure really matters. Having a frost-free standpipe out by the pigs or chickens would be great. Some sort of water de-icer that they couldn't wreck would also be great. The woodsplitter is great. A good coat and decent gloves and a good toque and good boots? They make everything better (are they infrastructure? I think so. Mobile and consumable infrastructure?).

My routines have been disrupted. Whatever I do now will set into new routines; it's an important space that shapes what comes next. My job now is to center my needs, to do what I need to keep the rhythmic stability of the farm seasons which I love, and to keep gently building on community.