Greenstorm's Journal

It's been a long time, experientially.

I caught the piglets. Well, Avi caught 5/9 of them with my goose net, which he broke, then fixed without a telescoping handle. The piglets went along to their new home and are doing well there.

The whole time Avi was here I was doing awful keep-away body language and feeling completely dissociated, at least until the last day. It wasn't great. I just could not do human.

I seem to be ok with Tucker now, afterwards.

A bunch of things are taking up my brainspace but I want to give you a moment from Friday evening first. I was talking to my neighbour over the fence when the closest lightning I've ever experienced hit. You could hear the crack and sizzle, though I couldn't see any tree hit. We've been having these evening thunderstorms.

Anyhow, the dogs immediately ran inside and I also went inside a few minutes later. The storm was right over us: glasses clinking on the shelves, walls and windows shaking. I let the dogs upstairs and brushed Avallu to calm us both down; by the end of it there was a pile of fur bigger than he was. Thea mostly stayed downstairs. We had an inch of rain in an hour, which took us nicely out of medium fire danger and into low an was great for the garden. And... I've never been in that sort of a storm before. Not one that close, that intense. Even when I can see where lightning strikes I've never felt thunder right over me, one side of the sky to another, or thought I might be hit.

That's not the reason it's been hard to think, though. It's hard to think because:

My one neighbour wants to hook my well up to his property, which he has a legal right to do and it might let me put in a standpipe which would let me water the pigs out there. But it would mean I'd be sharing my well, which makes me nervous.

My other neighbour wants me to move the pig fence so it's not right up against his garden on the other side of the fence, and has offered me fencing materials to do so but I had just finished fencing that corner so I'm going to have to redo it.

Plus that other neighbour is getting someone in to pound fenceposts, which means I could put fencepost across the back of my property and put up a proper perimeter fence to keep dogs in this winter and bears out this fall. That sounds pretty great. It's money, but it's less money than I'd need to do it myself because the machine operator will already be there.

My rear driver-side trailer hub is heating up a little when I drive so I need to get the trailer hubs redone, which I need to do anyhow, and I might as well take the 4runner in for an oil change because I sure am not going to have time to do it.

It's been a cold late spring and I think I need a high tunnel for squash here to be reliable. Where would I put it? Likely on the south side of the garden. I can pick one up quite cheap right now, there's one of those weird chances, but between that and fencing it's a bit of a financial stretch.

I need to take out a couple aspen trees and killing trees makes me sad.

All the 3 people I see in person are expanding their covid bubbles and I don't want to micromanage their connections so I have to figure out how to do risk management in this situation.

I have 10m3 of soil to move but I need to tweak a fence first because I used the fencing for it on a chunk of fence I now have to remove because of the above "other neighbour".

There are a bunch of folks coming in and out of the house that had been abandoned for 2 years right across the road.

I need to downsize pigs but maybe in a big way. Three breeding sows? 4? It would be easier if the 2 I wanted to use for sausage at the end of the month didn't suddenly get very pregnant-looking.

I need to figure out where to put my new 10x20 pop-up firewood shed.

I just planted my small greenhouse with peppers, and most of my deck is planted with tomatoes and haskaps now.

What am I going to do about humans? Apparently my neighbours are a community I need to interact with whether I want to or not. Vancouver seems to be a complete write-off. I have friends I like and friends who only want to come see me when they think I'm a survival route. I don't think I have carrying capacity for three relationships right now. I want to live close to someone who does farming. I want to live close to Tucker, who doesn't want to live in this town. I spend more days than not feeling like if the world burns, everyone deserves it. This is not real great.

I'm enjoying yoga coming back into my life but am having trouble making room for the structure.

So, busy mind. Lots of panic. It's super rough that work pretty much doesn't cover therapy at this new place. Definitely it's a spot where Canada's medical system falls down hard. I can't imagine going into a "5 session max issue-solving" therapeutic relationship of the kind offered by work's "mental health care" and starting out with "I'm poly and gender nonconforming" and going through "the land is my primary partner and I also want to be with humans" and getting anywhere with "I need to figure out how to sort out my energetic priorities and balance my human/nonhuman contact during COVID".

So I'm kind of circling my cage here. At least I like the cage a lot. Friendly piglet is going to a pet home, I have a nice deck garden, and spruce tips are really delicious. Also Tucker and Dr Who watching and yoga are pretty good company in the cage.

Maybe I don't want out so much as I want fewer windows for folks to look in and out.

Ohhh, we're coming up on solstice too, aren't we? I suppose some time observing some ritual is overdue.

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.

It occurred to me a day or two ago that soon we'll get the first rain of the season. Last night it snowed lightly. March is our driest month up here. But someday we will get snow.

Everyone is bored in quarantine and messaging me. It would be great if 1) I wasn't running around being a stressbucket for work and had time to talk 2) I had a stable routine going on and had inclination to talk 3) I didn't feel like a combination free apocalypse insurance and entertainment option and 4) These folks hadn't previously indicated that for various reasons folks shouldn't live rurally (first nations, bad for the environment) and 5) I thought that if folks came up they would bring what food they could, do what work they could, and be careful about bringing up potential virus (self-quarantine for 10 days previous or whatever) and know that with more than one person in it my house is smaller than their apartment.

Ugh. I'm in a terrible mood lately. Working on this flight tomorrow is keeping me from stabilizing; I need to get my hard labour in somehow. The roads are mostly snowfree enough to run on so I may end up going to that again.

And... buried in here, Tucker needs to move back to Vancouver. We're talking about ways to still be together some, but it won't ever be as close to full time as it has been, I think. The virus has slowed things down in that regard; the stuff he needs from the city is less available right now. But.

I'll write more about that later, I'm still processing, but it's rough times. I love him and the combination of autonomy and domesticity we'd got going on.

So, for those chalking up events on the psych stress list at home: in the last 4 months we've had a job change, 2 major relationship changes, significant financial status changes, and a pandemic. Not to mention a pretty big change in activity levels.

After the flight my plan is to take some days half-to-off work and focus on building a solid WFH routine which includes things like food and running. Hopefully that will give me a foundation to get through the rest of the year.