Greenstorm's Journal

I have two kinds of hot peppers growing indoors, rescued from my deck at the end of the year: matchbox and black hungarian. As the light has returned and I've increased their water they've started blooming. I did a very impromptu cross-pollination between them yesterday, no anther removal, and will try emasculating some flowers and doing a proper cross next time. If I grow the F1 out this summer, next winter I can have a sea of F2s to play with.

Some of my fancy peppers are coming up, or at least germinating on their paper towels and heat mats and being transferred to pots.

Plus I found the pepper seed store Semillas La Palma, which is a lot of fun. A lot of peppers aren't great in my climate, but when I branch into baccatums and high-elevation ones I can find some. I love the idea of hunting down some and trying them here. I also like heat but not super intense heat, and the fact that there are a ton of "seasoning" or "dulce" peppers in their collection, with no heat, is nice too. I need to winnow down through their offerings to find what works.

The sun is completely returning. The sky was light before I got out of bed this morning. It's been warm during the day a lot, my freezers are plugged back in and I moved the frozen food on my deck into the freezers.

Plus, Black Chunk, who I thought miscarried during the cold, gave me six lovely little piglets. They're born in a warm spell! I locked her in her chosen birthing shed with the piglets and they were all fine this morning. They'll need to be castrated but hey.

In concert with this the cooler at the grocery store broke down and I brought home 40 dairy crates of milk and yoghurt for the pigs. I'm feeding it out roughly four crates a day. There were a couple crates of tiny squeeze bottles of yogurt that will go directly in the garbage, but the pigs will get gallons and gallons of it. It's a great supplement for them right now.

Meanwhile I'm doing the standard juggling to try and figure out where to put my plant shelves with lights, where to put my geese for spring pair-off(wading out to the empty greenhouse involves thigh-deep snow and too many things under the snow to snowblow my way over, ditto one of the a-frames). At some point I'll get to what to plant and where it will go, that will be even more juggling! But it's the fun kind.

Oh goodness, that's always so good.

My counselor is so affirming. She illuminates all the things I like in my life, the things that stabilize me, all the carrots dangling around that I could pursue. It's such good work. Clarifying.

I made a bunch of connections between the way Tucker punishes himself for having feelings and for not being how other people want him to be, the way my mind works more to restorative justice/accept differences and sometimes find humour, the way Tucker and I don't feel like we can comfortably and openly share emotionally (because he's always fighting feeling like he shouldn't have those emotions, and that if I have negative emotions about something he's done that he shouldn't have done the thing, rather than knowing that two different people will sometimes just have situations that lead to friction and that's ok), why talking with Kelsey is such a relief, and the fact that I am one of very few people in the world who genuinely likes myself and approves of myself.

Kelsey has been on my mind so much lately and I got to talk about that.

Gosh the world would be easier if everyone could start from "this is who I am and this is who you are, how shall we proceed from that" rather than "maybe if I hurt myself and you enough things will be fixed"

We don't get that world, though, without making it first.

I have this small well of security and comfort inside from finally feeling like myself again for the first time maybe since the breakup. I like myself, and I'd missed being this person.

Ok. Time to play in the kitchen. I need to put up some pickles too.