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Jan. 14th, 2025 08:18 amDreamed that I lived in an enormous house with someone and, after some stranger wandered in, I was going around trying to lock the doors to the outside but there were so many in so many different rooms and corridors. The person I was living there with decided to bring another person to live in the house and I did a bunch of logistics work around where they would live so it would be most comfortable for everyone but was still finding doors to the outside as we went.
I think the person ended up in the downstairs luxury apartment-cum-whiskey lounge with leather furniture, a fireplace, and a livingroom the size of a large house. I do not remember having any space in the house that was mine, just running around trying to fix things for other folks.
( obvious metaphors )
I think the person ended up in the downstairs luxury apartment-cum-whiskey lounge with leather furniture, a fireplace, and a livingroom the size of a large house. I do not remember having any space in the house that was mine, just running around trying to fix things for other folks.
( obvious metaphors )
(no subject)
Jan. 11th, 2025 07:51 pmI broke up with Tucker this morning.
( It's not even a good story, just one unkindness too many )
So we're going to talk on the 16th to wrap up loose ends and decide whether we're going to try and continue some kind of contact or friendship, because he has the conference today and his tattoo on Tuesday and I go in front of the disability police (and my counselor, thank goodness) on Monday.
It's been a long time coming. It was nice to be with someone who was really poly at his core, but we don't share enough other relationship values. And his slowly distancing himself in increments without discussing it first, it's been hard. So it's time, I guess.
Of course I'm going to wonder what if things had been a little different, and of course I'm going to regret that huge long history and so much work put into it on both sides just slipping away like this. And of course I'm going to miss him.
I wish I could wish him and his girlfriend picking up norovirus at the kink conference and then having to deal with it in his one bathroom apartment but I can't. I'm just sad. I'm glad I've been doing my poem a day (I should bundle them up over here at some point) because it's been really good for me, and glad that I have some pottery teaching classes lined up. I need to reach out to some friends, I guess.
I want to go to something I can be surrounded by likeminded people I don't already know. There's a wood firing kiln workshop in Minnesota. I'm sure there are garden things around. I think firemaker is happening? There's a lot of body stuff to think about, covid and ability, for anything like that. They're all outside and camping at least.
Siri has come to tell me to rest. I'll do so. What a sad thing to have to record.
( It's not even a good story, just one unkindness too many )
So we're going to talk on the 16th to wrap up loose ends and decide whether we're going to try and continue some kind of contact or friendship, because he has the conference today and his tattoo on Tuesday and I go in front of the disability police (and my counselor, thank goodness) on Monday.
It's been a long time coming. It was nice to be with someone who was really poly at his core, but we don't share enough other relationship values. And his slowly distancing himself in increments without discussing it first, it's been hard. So it's time, I guess.
Of course I'm going to wonder what if things had been a little different, and of course I'm going to regret that huge long history and so much work put into it on both sides just slipping away like this. And of course I'm going to miss him.
I wish I could wish him and his girlfriend picking up norovirus at the kink conference and then having to deal with it in his one bathroom apartment but I can't. I'm just sad. I'm glad I've been doing my poem a day (I should bundle them up over here at some point) because it's been really good for me, and glad that I have some pottery teaching classes lined up. I need to reach out to some friends, I guess.
I want to go to something I can be surrounded by likeminded people I don't already know. There's a wood firing kiln workshop in Minnesota. I'm sure there are garden things around. I think firemaker is happening? There's a lot of body stuff to think about, covid and ability, for anything like that. They're all outside and camping at least.
Siri has come to tell me to rest. I'll do so. What a sad thing to have to record.
Conduit for the self
Aug. 24th, 2023 09:12 amIt's been awhile since I did this kind of magic. Then again, I'm getting very used to channeling this kind of magic.
First was the time in the forest and the river. That wasn't magic. It was just me, being myself in a space with humans. It had been a very long time. I didn't have to watch myself, to do anything right. This doesn't only mean I could wear clothes or not as I chose, but also that I could bathe in the river whenever I wanted, even if there was no one else doing it; I could behave as I needed during ritual without the requirement of conformity; I could talk about sciency forest management and being spiritually wedded to the land in the same breath; and when I couldn't stand up during ritual I could participate as I wanted without anyone breaking the space with undesired concern or assistance or excluding me.
I walked around and people fed me. That's how I feel loved.
I could have an intense discussion about the character and connection to my land with someone else similarly bound, learning through contrast and similarity and most importantly never feeling like an alien in that space though other people were behaving very differently at that time.
I could watch Tucker inhabit his space and we could come and go from each other with love and admiration without being bound by emotional responsibility for each other.
I could see friends I haven't seen in too, too long and remember they are friends.
That was one half.
The second half involved going to Sidhehaven and making objects. The first couple were mundane, warm-ups but shortly thereafter it was muse or magic, take your pick. I had gone to learn from Sherry, who's been a professional potter for over a decade now. I had also gone to make use of her tools -- she has the most amazing collection of pottery tools -- and to be in a dedicated space that wasn't limited to a couple hours every week except maybe it wouldn't happen because someone didn't have a key or something. Don't get me wrong, I like Sherry, but I was able to immerse fully in what I was doing.
I continued to sleep outside, more-or-less; instead of camping there was a little shed with one outlet, no heat, and a metal roof that sang when it rained. Benefits of being outside for me in the pacific northwest are that I don't have to handle folks' scents and that my body likes the arc of temperature variation. It's generally within a range I can handle.
Sherry cooked a couple times, made fresh bread, had figs and apples ripe around the property, and had a fridge full of food I could plunder. She showed me some things, was around to chat a little, kept me clued in to her schedule, but otherwise left me to my own devices in the studio. I could wake up and go make things before breakfast, before anyone was up. I could work late if I wanted. I could nap when I wanted, taking runs of 2-4 hours of intense concentration and channeling and then collapsing with some tea or a fig into a nap.
My plan had been to replace my plates and bowls I'd made when I did much the same thing in 2014, and to learn to throw taller cylinders. Those plates had been each imprinted with a single plant, inscribed with the latin name, and I'd thought I'd do something similar. The first day I did a circuit of the property with a notebook writing down which plants had available material and which ones I also felt an affinity for.
An hour or two later I was pushing clay against the deep crags of douglas fir bark and getting it hopelessly stuck instead of taking imprints. Another hour and I was draping clay over abalone shells. Twelve hours later I was layering cast-aside clay trimmings and texture mats and rollers and draping them over all sorts of objects. Twenty four hours later I was carrying a big rock into the studio to use as a form for bowls. Thirty hours later I was imprinting poetry, letter by letter, in incantations into the objects.
Thing about clay is it imposes pacing on the potter. It's generally used wet, in a paste or dough consistency where it can't necessarily support itself. Then it dries and as it does so it becomes more able to hold a form but also more likely to break getting into it. If it dries too quickly it cracks. If it's not try enough it can't be taken off a form, or even really handled in many ways.
It's only once clay is very, very dry that it can be put into a kiln and fired to a fairly low temperature. This sets it up so it will hold its shape and survive moisture instead of melting but leaves it porous. The porosity is important because then it's generallly glazed: covered in ground glass and minerals that are absorbed into it. Then it goes into the kiln again, much hotter this time, hot enough to not only melt the glaze into a layer of glass over the object but also to vitrify the underlying clay and make it non-porous to some functional (if not statistically certain) level.
I was at Sidehaven from Sunday evening to Wednesday evening. Nothing was perfectly dry when I left, let alone dry, fired, glazed, and refired. Sherry was loading the kiln for the first fire when I left. She was going to do a candle, basically running the kiln as a super low heating pad overnight to dry everything out before doing the first fire.
Clay changes colour when it fires. The physicality of it changes completely. I left heavy, damp objects. Because I was somehow working with porcelain I will return to smaller, bright white, light objects with much less heft. I won't make it back for months but when I do it'll be to apply the colours and textures of glaze to these objects: objects I haven't even handled yet. And if you think clay changes a lot when it's fired you should see glazes! They're usually a dull grey or red thick liquid when they go onto the piece. When fired they completely alchemize into colours: bright or dark, shiny or dull, speckled or swirled or depthlessly clear. Depending on how many layers are put on the piece, how porous it was after the first fire, what temperature it gets to, how quickly it gets to temperature and how long it stays there and how slowly it cools, it can look very different.
I have ideas right now, developed as the objects formed under my hands, but when I go back I won't even remember what they look like. I took pictures, but still. I was carried by my interaction with the clay so completely in the past couple days. I can only hope it comes back when I return. I made a lot of objects: ridiculous serving platters, big plates, small plates, nearly a dozen cups, some large bowls and some larger bowls and a couple sauce dishes. Enough to populate a kitchen with, really. It's hard to leave; it's good to know I can go back.
I write this on the train that connects Sidhehaven to the city, to Vancouver. The train is cheap, civilized, it runs every day, it doesn't get delayed forever like airplanes. I'm grateful, and a repeat feels achievable. Things want to be finished.
That is to say it's been an excellent vacation so far. The highway home is closed and rerouted due to a fire that's been burning on it for days. I'm not heading up for another couple days but I'm hoping the highway is open by then; if not we go around. Then home, to hopefully collapse into a pile of dogs and cats and just absorb for a little while. That or run around the garden to see how it is: my neighbours got a frost on the 20th but mom says my garden is fine.
Note: train was delayed by a police incident and ran a couple hours late. Apparently this is "not normal" and I am just cursed with transportation.
First was the time in the forest and the river. That wasn't magic. It was just me, being myself in a space with humans. It had been a very long time. I didn't have to watch myself, to do anything right. This doesn't only mean I could wear clothes or not as I chose, but also that I could bathe in the river whenever I wanted, even if there was no one else doing it; I could behave as I needed during ritual without the requirement of conformity; I could talk about sciency forest management and being spiritually wedded to the land in the same breath; and when I couldn't stand up during ritual I could participate as I wanted without anyone breaking the space with undesired concern or assistance or excluding me.
I walked around and people fed me. That's how I feel loved.
I could have an intense discussion about the character and connection to my land with someone else similarly bound, learning through contrast and similarity and most importantly never feeling like an alien in that space though other people were behaving very differently at that time.
I could watch Tucker inhabit his space and we could come and go from each other with love and admiration without being bound by emotional responsibility for each other.
I could see friends I haven't seen in too, too long and remember they are friends.
That was one half.
The second half involved going to Sidhehaven and making objects. The first couple were mundane, warm-ups but shortly thereafter it was muse or magic, take your pick. I had gone to learn from Sherry, who's been a professional potter for over a decade now. I had also gone to make use of her tools -- she has the most amazing collection of pottery tools -- and to be in a dedicated space that wasn't limited to a couple hours every week except maybe it wouldn't happen because someone didn't have a key or something. Don't get me wrong, I like Sherry, but I was able to immerse fully in what I was doing.
I continued to sleep outside, more-or-less; instead of camping there was a little shed with one outlet, no heat, and a metal roof that sang when it rained. Benefits of being outside for me in the pacific northwest are that I don't have to handle folks' scents and that my body likes the arc of temperature variation. It's generally within a range I can handle.
Sherry cooked a couple times, made fresh bread, had figs and apples ripe around the property, and had a fridge full of food I could plunder. She showed me some things, was around to chat a little, kept me clued in to her schedule, but otherwise left me to my own devices in the studio. I could wake up and go make things before breakfast, before anyone was up. I could work late if I wanted. I could nap when I wanted, taking runs of 2-4 hours of intense concentration and channeling and then collapsing with some tea or a fig into a nap.
My plan had been to replace my plates and bowls I'd made when I did much the same thing in 2014, and to learn to throw taller cylinders. Those plates had been each imprinted with a single plant, inscribed with the latin name, and I'd thought I'd do something similar. The first day I did a circuit of the property with a notebook writing down which plants had available material and which ones I also felt an affinity for.
An hour or two later I was pushing clay against the deep crags of douglas fir bark and getting it hopelessly stuck instead of taking imprints. Another hour and I was draping clay over abalone shells. Twelve hours later I was layering cast-aside clay trimmings and texture mats and rollers and draping them over all sorts of objects. Twenty four hours later I was carrying a big rock into the studio to use as a form for bowls. Thirty hours later I was imprinting poetry, letter by letter, in incantations into the objects.
Thing about clay is it imposes pacing on the potter. It's generally used wet, in a paste or dough consistency where it can't necessarily support itself. Then it dries and as it does so it becomes more able to hold a form but also more likely to break getting into it. If it dries too quickly it cracks. If it's not try enough it can't be taken off a form, or even really handled in many ways.
It's only once clay is very, very dry that it can be put into a kiln and fired to a fairly low temperature. This sets it up so it will hold its shape and survive moisture instead of melting but leaves it porous. The porosity is important because then it's generallly glazed: covered in ground glass and minerals that are absorbed into it. Then it goes into the kiln again, much hotter this time, hot enough to not only melt the glaze into a layer of glass over the object but also to vitrify the underlying clay and make it non-porous to some functional (if not statistically certain) level.
I was at Sidehaven from Sunday evening to Wednesday evening. Nothing was perfectly dry when I left, let alone dry, fired, glazed, and refired. Sherry was loading the kiln for the first fire when I left. She was going to do a candle, basically running the kiln as a super low heating pad overnight to dry everything out before doing the first fire.
Clay changes colour when it fires. The physicality of it changes completely. I left heavy, damp objects. Because I was somehow working with porcelain I will return to smaller, bright white, light objects with much less heft. I won't make it back for months but when I do it'll be to apply the colours and textures of glaze to these objects: objects I haven't even handled yet. And if you think clay changes a lot when it's fired you should see glazes! They're usually a dull grey or red thick liquid when they go onto the piece. When fired they completely alchemize into colours: bright or dark, shiny or dull, speckled or swirled or depthlessly clear. Depending on how many layers are put on the piece, how porous it was after the first fire, what temperature it gets to, how quickly it gets to temperature and how long it stays there and how slowly it cools, it can look very different.
I have ideas right now, developed as the objects formed under my hands, but when I go back I won't even remember what they look like. I took pictures, but still. I was carried by my interaction with the clay so completely in the past couple days. I can only hope it comes back when I return. I made a lot of objects: ridiculous serving platters, big plates, small plates, nearly a dozen cups, some large bowls and some larger bowls and a couple sauce dishes. Enough to populate a kitchen with, really. It's hard to leave; it's good to know I can go back.
I write this on the train that connects Sidhehaven to the city, to Vancouver. The train is cheap, civilized, it runs every day, it doesn't get delayed forever like airplanes. I'm grateful, and a repeat feels achievable. Things want to be finished.
That is to say it's been an excellent vacation so far. The highway home is closed and rerouted due to a fire that's been burning on it for days. I'm not heading up for another couple days but I'm hoping the highway is open by then; if not we go around. Then home, to hopefully collapse into a pile of dogs and cats and just absorb for a little while. That or run around the garden to see how it is: my neighbours got a frost on the 20th but mom says my garden is fine.
Note: train was delayed by a police incident and ran a couple hours late. Apparently this is "not normal" and I am just cursed with transportation.
There's not even poetry
Aug. 9th, 2023 12:25 pmI had last weekend to catch up on rest, then spent the long weekend with Tucker for a one-night date in town. It was a lovely date -- we got picnic food into a hotel and watched most of Good Omens 2, talked some, snuggled lots, had some nice sex. It's sounding like he's moved into wanting the same kind of emotional connection that I've wanted and while I'm kind of skeptical about it on some level -- is this one more go-around on the roller coaster? -- just the ability to have these kinds of conversations is allowing me to relax on many other levels.
You wouldn't think I'd need a recovery day after mostly lying around in bed and then a hotel room all long weekend, but this morning was more weird body stuff, so I didn't get into work till late. I'm starting to get worried. I have an appointment with the sleep specialist coming up to maybe do the round of "do a sleep study, get a cpap because they won't diagnose anything without a cpap trial to rule that out even if it's super marginal, after the trial start to look into other things". The amount of time everything takes is staggering.
This morning I could move my arms a little bit but not lift and control them for awhile. I never really think to track my ability to move my legs, or to roll over. I can definitely control my breathing during these times and I'm so grateful for that: when I used to get full-on sleep paralysis in my teens the worst part was being unable to take deep breaths. At least now when I feel like I can't breathe I can move the rest of my body and vice versa. I also have this really intense sensation on my shoulders and upper arms, which I've had on and off and associate with the sertraline but who knows? I'll likely have to go off that to sort this whole thing. Hopefully there's some sort of room for the ovary-suppressing drug while I'm doing that.
I think I'm more scared than I'm admitting about this? I'm feeling pretty checked-out today and I'm not sure if that's protective dissociation around that fear or whether it's just my brain slowly decaying.
Still, last night I walked in my garden a little. I settled a new rooster, a brahma who's still very tiny, in. I snuggled with dogs and cats, and I was happy.
Now my mind is just quiet, being present, waiting.
You wouldn't think I'd need a recovery day after mostly lying around in bed and then a hotel room all long weekend, but this morning was more weird body stuff, so I didn't get into work till late. I'm starting to get worried. I have an appointment with the sleep specialist coming up to maybe do the round of "do a sleep study, get a cpap because they won't diagnose anything without a cpap trial to rule that out even if it's super marginal, after the trial start to look into other things". The amount of time everything takes is staggering.
This morning I could move my arms a little bit but not lift and control them for awhile. I never really think to track my ability to move my legs, or to roll over. I can definitely control my breathing during these times and I'm so grateful for that: when I used to get full-on sleep paralysis in my teens the worst part was being unable to take deep breaths. At least now when I feel like I can't breathe I can move the rest of my body and vice versa. I also have this really intense sensation on my shoulders and upper arms, which I've had on and off and associate with the sertraline but who knows? I'll likely have to go off that to sort this whole thing. Hopefully there's some sort of room for the ovary-suppressing drug while I'm doing that.
I think I'm more scared than I'm admitting about this? I'm feeling pretty checked-out today and I'm not sure if that's protective dissociation around that fear or whether it's just my brain slowly decaying.
Still, last night I walked in my garden a little. I settled a new rooster, a brahma who's still very tiny, in. I snuggled with dogs and cats, and I was happy.
Now my mind is just quiet, being present, waiting.
Sometimes it rains
Jul. 24th, 2023 08:18 amWe've had several days with lightning and thunder in the afternoons, accompanied by high winds and-- by rain! Enough to bump the fire danger down from extreme to high, and in some places in the district even moderate or low. It's not enough to totally skip watering the garden, but it's enough to reduce the urgency. It's also enough to bring down the smoke level in the air, and it's cooled down here to perfect skin temperature.
Now, it was pretty extreme wind, and it's likely more of the lightning strikes will flare up when things dry out and warm up again -- the last round left three spot fires around the highway -- but for now, a reprieve.
Tucker came up for a week. At one point I'd asked the question, if a lot of what had been going on before was burnout, then what? Well, the "then what" is that he was able to engage emotionally and intellectually with what I was asking, to share his stuff and to be vulnerable and to make long-term plans and be realistic about the likelihood of those plans, to listen to me and be empathetic and loving, and to give me space to make my own missteps so I could overreact, catch myself, and apologise instead of it leading to a spiral. These are new skills for us and we need to be careful not to tear the new skills by overworking them but it was so nice. When my counselor said what I wanted from him might be mystery, it didn't land quite right. He is capable of surprising me, and that's fundamental to longevity of this stuff, but I think what I wanted from him was hope. Hope for visits like we just had: not perfect, but generative and close and loving.
Added bonus I can send some pork down to Josh with him.
In farm news the muscovies are coming out of every corner with babies. First a chocolate mama showed up with 9, then a lavender one with 7 the next day, and the black mama who's mysteriously nesting in the pile of feed bags had one. I've consolidated them all with the chocolate mama in the quail house along with the geese and anconas. I'm pretty sure there's a humidity component involved: when things are dry and the nests are dry I don't get so much of a hatch. Then when it rains or if I soak the bedding around the nests (not in the nests) things move better.
Hopefully I got all the babies off the ground quickly enough that they'll do ok. I think there's a disease in my soil that catches them if they're not taken off it in time, and I've lost a lot to it over the years. I'm considering building more enclosed space up off the ground for that reason. Having the aspen chips is really nice in that regard: it's going to be a brutal season to get straw.
In light of the pottery studio dissolving I'm keeping an eye on kilns. They've hired a studio manager and have mentioned that no personal work will be done in the studio -- I haven't talked to the studio manager yet, this had come through the program director. It's such a shame to have a lovely studio, two brand new kilns, all those wheels and equipment, and only use them for classes and not allow anyone who's taken a class to do follow-up work. And maybe they'll get to that point. But I have re-learned the lesson that, for things important to me, people and organizations are not necessarily reliable.
Mostly looking at kilns is a hobby right now: they can be got pretty cheap because they're super heavy and hard to move, but that money is not in the plan right now. Good to keep an eye on what stuff looks like. At this rate I might be able to go down south for pagan stuff and maybe...
...a very soft and purring cat just came and sat across both my arms. I guess that's it for this update.
Now, it was pretty extreme wind, and it's likely more of the lightning strikes will flare up when things dry out and warm up again -- the last round left three spot fires around the highway -- but for now, a reprieve.
Tucker came up for a week. At one point I'd asked the question, if a lot of what had been going on before was burnout, then what? Well, the "then what" is that he was able to engage emotionally and intellectually with what I was asking, to share his stuff and to be vulnerable and to make long-term plans and be realistic about the likelihood of those plans, to listen to me and be empathetic and loving, and to give me space to make my own missteps so I could overreact, catch myself, and apologise instead of it leading to a spiral. These are new skills for us and we need to be careful not to tear the new skills by overworking them but it was so nice. When my counselor said what I wanted from him might be mystery, it didn't land quite right. He is capable of surprising me, and that's fundamental to longevity of this stuff, but I think what I wanted from him was hope. Hope for visits like we just had: not perfect, but generative and close and loving.
Added bonus I can send some pork down to Josh with him.
In farm news the muscovies are coming out of every corner with babies. First a chocolate mama showed up with 9, then a lavender one with 7 the next day, and the black mama who's mysteriously nesting in the pile of feed bags had one. I've consolidated them all with the chocolate mama in the quail house along with the geese and anconas. I'm pretty sure there's a humidity component involved: when things are dry and the nests are dry I don't get so much of a hatch. Then when it rains or if I soak the bedding around the nests (not in the nests) things move better.
Hopefully I got all the babies off the ground quickly enough that they'll do ok. I think there's a disease in my soil that catches them if they're not taken off it in time, and I've lost a lot to it over the years. I'm considering building more enclosed space up off the ground for that reason. Having the aspen chips is really nice in that regard: it's going to be a brutal season to get straw.
In light of the pottery studio dissolving I'm keeping an eye on kilns. They've hired a studio manager and have mentioned that no personal work will be done in the studio -- I haven't talked to the studio manager yet, this had come through the program director. It's such a shame to have a lovely studio, two brand new kilns, all those wheels and equipment, and only use them for classes and not allow anyone who's taken a class to do follow-up work. And maybe they'll get to that point. But I have re-learned the lesson that, for things important to me, people and organizations are not necessarily reliable.
Mostly looking at kilns is a hobby right now: they can be got pretty cheap because they're super heavy and hard to move, but that money is not in the plan right now. Good to keep an eye on what stuff looks like. At this rate I might be able to go down south for pagan stuff and maybe...
...a very soft and purring cat just came and sat across both my arms. I guess that's it for this update.
Yesterday was cool with almost no smoke. I was able to open the windows and little breezes played through the house. It was lovely, especially since I was cleaning house for Tucker's arrival. I even washed all the squished mosquitoes off the bedroom and bathroom walls! It's been long enough since I was a housecleaner that I begin to forget how much difference those little things make to the feel of a place: cupboard fronts (which I did not wash), walls, light switch plates, baseboards. It makes a house look newer and lighter.
I'd got these tiny tiny pouches from the grocery store trash run that said "add to 1L of water, let dissolve, and spray" and they were a bathroom cleaner. They worked surprisingly well, and even more surprisingly the scent didn't bother me. I guess the format is meant to reduce the number of spray bottles and weight of water that gets shipped around. I have a couple more to drop into cleaning buckets of hot water (not how it's meant to be used, I know) for big wall-cleaning days. I continue to be grateful for my vacmop.
Today the smoke is creeping back. I'm in the office to figure out what's going on with this summer: my fieldwork is a no-go, since more than half the road-accessible area of the district is under evac alerts or orders for fires and at least a couple of the blocks I was going to sample are probably on fire. Between the smoke and the alerts fieldwork is probably counterindicated.
This morning I put on my "neurodiversity is beautiful" shirt and wore it to work. Previously I've worn autism-coded symbols but not anything with the word. I figure I may be dizzy, tired, and disoriented but that's the best time to pull off representation - when I'm too occupied by living to overthink it.
Wish me luck on scooping some good work out of the pile today. Contracts all summer will destroy me. I can't even put correct names on itineraries lately.
I'd got these tiny tiny pouches from the grocery store trash run that said "add to 1L of water, let dissolve, and spray" and they were a bathroom cleaner. They worked surprisingly well, and even more surprisingly the scent didn't bother me. I guess the format is meant to reduce the number of spray bottles and weight of water that gets shipped around. I have a couple more to drop into cleaning buckets of hot water (not how it's meant to be used, I know) for big wall-cleaning days. I continue to be grateful for my vacmop.
Today the smoke is creeping back. I'm in the office to figure out what's going on with this summer: my fieldwork is a no-go, since more than half the road-accessible area of the district is under evac alerts or orders for fires and at least a couple of the blocks I was going to sample are probably on fire. Between the smoke and the alerts fieldwork is probably counterindicated.
This morning I put on my "neurodiversity is beautiful" shirt and wore it to work. Previously I've worn autism-coded symbols but not anything with the word. I figure I may be dizzy, tired, and disoriented but that's the best time to pull off representation - when I'm too occupied by living to overthink it.
Wish me luck on scooping some good work out of the pile today. Contracts all summer will destroy me. I can't even put correct names on itineraries lately.
People have been asking me how I am and I’ve been saying things like “good” or “excellent”. It’s been awhile! A couple counseling visits ago I said something like “is it even possible to give a straight, single, non-ambivalent answer to this? Like do neurotypicals have everything average out so they don’t experience both the good and the bad, but just a kind of middle mush?”
Last visit I said, “really good, actually.”
It’s important to laugh at myself when it’s warranted.
So here’s the stuff:
Garden: tomatoes are looking great and I’m starting to acclimatize them to outside. I never did set up my lights, but the thing about seeding so late is that daytime is starting to be warm enough to keep them outdoors as they’re thinking about stretching. We’re still getting freezes at night but they’re still in the “couple hours at a time in the shade” phase so I just take them out once it warms up. I’m thinking of repurposing my chick brooder for a mini greenhouse on the deck so I don’t need to haul in and out.
Meanwhile the apple seedlings are thriving, they’re outside all day and any evening there isn’t frost (only one so far). Peppers had poor germination but I did plant two flats so I’ll have enough to grow. I also had poor germination on ground cherries.
I started messing with the raspberries the other night. Started cutting out last year’s fruiting canes and cutting the east fence one into rows, leaving a stub so I can dig out the extras.
Outside is beautiful but weird. Stinging nettles are coming up, rhubarb is up, sweet ciciley and apple trees haven’t budged yet. Favas are in the ground. The pigpen is almost dried out, it could almost be tilled already. The lake is lower than folks remember ever. They’re forecasting a big wildfire year for the whole province. Eep.
Pottery: so looks like we’re crystallizing into an actual functional group, or at least moving towards it, without me having to shoulder the whole thing. A previous volunteer, who burned out because she didn’t have help, seems to be back. The first kilnload of bisque is currently cooling down, I’ll get to see it on Thursday. We’re going to glaze. The plan is to meet regularly on Thursdays. Hopefully that doesn’t fall apart. I really do want to do a bunch of throwing until I can do it confidently.
Tucker/stupid/mystery: a lot of stuff is percolating on this one. My therapist suggested that what keeps drawing me back is that he’s unpredictable. Or, I mean, she said “mystery” and that’s maybe accurate? Which offers me the lens that his unpredictability throws me off in both directions: I appreciate not always knowing what’s going to happen, but I really struggle without any sense of certainty or agency in the relationship. I also feel stupid every time we go through the dance where he distances, I distance, and then he comes closer after I distance. It is kind of predictable, after all, and if someone doesn’t explicitly commit to me I feel uncomfortably ambivalent about my right to complain when they suddenly don’t act committed: on the one hand they didn’t say anything for me to rely on, on the other hand if someone does a bunch of stuff with typical societal meanings about commitment for years and then stops it was in fact fair to believe they’d go on as they had begun unless they said otherwise. Anyhow I’m chatting cautiously with him again. We’ll see how it goes. He tends to schedule himself pretty full and I’m not great at “I can only talk to you on Tuesdays for the rest of the year except when I’m too busy, then we skip a week”.
Willow: the basketmaking course was nice. I’ve harvested a bunch of willow, some from my property and some from the side of the road last time I drove the highway. It’s supposed to be harvested before buds start to open. I may have been slightly late? And just a week or two later it’s definitely too late. We’ll see if the stuff I got is ok for basketmaking or not when it’s done drying and soaking. I have a couple friends interested in learning too so we’ll see how that goes. I guess practice baskets are fine even if they’re not perfect.
I really enjoy the way the willow smells, and the way it scents my basement while drying.
Poetry:My friend did that wonderful poetry month daily challenge, and I’ve taken up a PDA-compatible “30 poems sometime in 30 days” challenge starting randomly on April 29th. It’s a real joy. I’ve written a backlog of poems to put out one at a time (I did write them all in the first couple days) and in the meantime that frees me up to write new ones without PDA last-minute pressure. Writing feels so good. Manifesting the inside of my mind on my outside is empowering-feeling. Also it’s neat to see what’s on my mind.
Well: my water pressure is a real problem. There’s also sand coming up through the system. I cleaned out a bunch of my little faucet screens last night; the kitchen water had completely stopped and I pulled maybe ¼ tsp of sand out of it, which fixed it. Apparently the sand is a big thing for everyone on my road right now, so for everyone on the couple layers of aquifer. We think it’s because the water is SO LOW right now, and I think on a karst system it shifts around very quickly. Anyhow, my washing machine is struggling – it’s the thing that uses the most water in my house right now, and loads are taking an extra hour or two as the machine fills up so slowly. I need to order a pressure tank and try to figure out how to put it in by myself or get a plumber to come out for an hour. The money is definitely hard right now and I’m waffling between the same sized tank (25 gallons of “useable” water, aka drawdown) or get one step larger (35 gallons of drawdown) to help protect me through power outages. Either way I may need to sell random stuff to make it happen.
Starlink: the provincial government said something about wanting broadband to every rural household in the province in 4 years. This comes 1-2 years after almost removing it completely from some remote communities, and after funding it being put in south of me along the whole highway of tears (which is definitely taking longer than they expected). My internet right now is a hub that runs on cell service, it’s very very slow but it’s reliable and it’s $90/month. It’s getting worse as the local cell towers decay (as with everything owned by businesses, they cut the nonprofitable stuff for small groups and focus on what makes money, which is not rural stuff). Starlink (and the truly awful satellite internet) are the only other options.
I hadn’t wanted to get starlink since there’s the $700 equipment cost up front and if the gov ever does get some other kind of broadband internet up here I don’t want to be stuck with the sunk cost fallacy keeping me on it. However… the other day I learned that starlink is offering its equipment to rural Canada, NZ, and Australia at a very very steep discount ($200) that makes it palatable amortized over even just four years. Soooooo… I’ve ordered it. I am not thrilled to be supporting the organization, I firmly believe it should be a government service, but my government is failing me here.
I am looking forward to making youtube videos again! I wasn’t able to upload them in less than 20 hours or so before. I wonder if IO can find a used gopro or something?
Anyhow, that’s a lot and mostly good.
Last visit I said, “really good, actually.”
It’s important to laugh at myself when it’s warranted.
So here’s the stuff:
Garden: tomatoes are looking great and I’m starting to acclimatize them to outside. I never did set up my lights, but the thing about seeding so late is that daytime is starting to be warm enough to keep them outdoors as they’re thinking about stretching. We’re still getting freezes at night but they’re still in the “couple hours at a time in the shade” phase so I just take them out once it warms up. I’m thinking of repurposing my chick brooder for a mini greenhouse on the deck so I don’t need to haul in and out.
Meanwhile the apple seedlings are thriving, they’re outside all day and any evening there isn’t frost (only one so far). Peppers had poor germination but I did plant two flats so I’ll have enough to grow. I also had poor germination on ground cherries.
I started messing with the raspberries the other night. Started cutting out last year’s fruiting canes and cutting the east fence one into rows, leaving a stub so I can dig out the extras.
Outside is beautiful but weird. Stinging nettles are coming up, rhubarb is up, sweet ciciley and apple trees haven’t budged yet. Favas are in the ground. The pigpen is almost dried out, it could almost be tilled already. The lake is lower than folks remember ever. They’re forecasting a big wildfire year for the whole province. Eep.
Pottery: so looks like we’re crystallizing into an actual functional group, or at least moving towards it, without me having to shoulder the whole thing. A previous volunteer, who burned out because she didn’t have help, seems to be back. The first kilnload of bisque is currently cooling down, I’ll get to see it on Thursday. We’re going to glaze. The plan is to meet regularly on Thursdays. Hopefully that doesn’t fall apart. I really do want to do a bunch of throwing until I can do it confidently.
Tucker/stupid/mystery: a lot of stuff is percolating on this one. My therapist suggested that what keeps drawing me back is that he’s unpredictable. Or, I mean, she said “mystery” and that’s maybe accurate? Which offers me the lens that his unpredictability throws me off in both directions: I appreciate not always knowing what’s going to happen, but I really struggle without any sense of certainty or agency in the relationship. I also feel stupid every time we go through the dance where he distances, I distance, and then he comes closer after I distance. It is kind of predictable, after all, and if someone doesn’t explicitly commit to me I feel uncomfortably ambivalent about my right to complain when they suddenly don’t act committed: on the one hand they didn’t say anything for me to rely on, on the other hand if someone does a bunch of stuff with typical societal meanings about commitment for years and then stops it was in fact fair to believe they’d go on as they had begun unless they said otherwise. Anyhow I’m chatting cautiously with him again. We’ll see how it goes. He tends to schedule himself pretty full and I’m not great at “I can only talk to you on Tuesdays for the rest of the year except when I’m too busy, then we skip a week”.
Willow: the basketmaking course was nice. I’ve harvested a bunch of willow, some from my property and some from the side of the road last time I drove the highway. It’s supposed to be harvested before buds start to open. I may have been slightly late? And just a week or two later it’s definitely too late. We’ll see if the stuff I got is ok for basketmaking or not when it’s done drying and soaking. I have a couple friends interested in learning too so we’ll see how that goes. I guess practice baskets are fine even if they’re not perfect.
I really enjoy the way the willow smells, and the way it scents my basement while drying.
Poetry:My friend did that wonderful poetry month daily challenge, and I’ve taken up a PDA-compatible “30 poems sometime in 30 days” challenge starting randomly on April 29th. It’s a real joy. I’ve written a backlog of poems to put out one at a time (I did write them all in the first couple days) and in the meantime that frees me up to write new ones without PDA last-minute pressure. Writing feels so good. Manifesting the inside of my mind on my outside is empowering-feeling. Also it’s neat to see what’s on my mind.
Well: my water pressure is a real problem. There’s also sand coming up through the system. I cleaned out a bunch of my little faucet screens last night; the kitchen water had completely stopped and I pulled maybe ¼ tsp of sand out of it, which fixed it. Apparently the sand is a big thing for everyone on my road right now, so for everyone on the couple layers of aquifer. We think it’s because the water is SO LOW right now, and I think on a karst system it shifts around very quickly. Anyhow, my washing machine is struggling – it’s the thing that uses the most water in my house right now, and loads are taking an extra hour or two as the machine fills up so slowly. I need to order a pressure tank and try to figure out how to put it in by myself or get a plumber to come out for an hour. The money is definitely hard right now and I’m waffling between the same sized tank (25 gallons of “useable” water, aka drawdown) or get one step larger (35 gallons of drawdown) to help protect me through power outages. Either way I may need to sell random stuff to make it happen.
Starlink: the provincial government said something about wanting broadband to every rural household in the province in 4 years. This comes 1-2 years after almost removing it completely from some remote communities, and after funding it being put in south of me along the whole highway of tears (which is definitely taking longer than they expected). My internet right now is a hub that runs on cell service, it’s very very slow but it’s reliable and it’s $90/month. It’s getting worse as the local cell towers decay (as with everything owned by businesses, they cut the nonprofitable stuff for small groups and focus on what makes money, which is not rural stuff). Starlink (and the truly awful satellite internet) are the only other options.
I hadn’t wanted to get starlink since there’s the $700 equipment cost up front and if the gov ever does get some other kind of broadband internet up here I don’t want to be stuck with the sunk cost fallacy keeping me on it. However… the other day I learned that starlink is offering its equipment to rural Canada, NZ, and Australia at a very very steep discount ($200) that makes it palatable amortized over even just four years. Soooooo… I’ve ordered it. I am not thrilled to be supporting the organization, I firmly believe it should be a government service, but my government is failing me here.
I am looking forward to making youtube videos again! I wasn’t able to upload them in less than 20 hours or so before. I wonder if IO can find a used gopro or something?
Anyhow, that’s a lot and mostly good.
Uncalendar days
Dec. 29th, 2022 08:46 amThe butcher was supposed to come today and do the biggest set of pigs yet; Josh and I did a ton of prep to set up. Turns out he's sick in the hospital (!) and will try to come in a week, when Josh will not be here, but in the meantime today and the next couple days isn't a huge absorbing rush.
Josh brought me up a sewing machine, a Singer 401 Slant-O-Matic, and I've been slowly getting acquainted with it. I've never used a drop-in bobbin before; I find it surprisingly hard to thread the bobbin. It's a nice machine; it runs smoothly, it has lots of ways to adjust everything and a everything is adjustable in very fine increments. It also smells like a proper sewing machine. It has a very weird pedal, not a lever but instead basically a foot plate with a button it it you press with your heel, that will take some adjusting.
The plan for the next couple days is now to tidy up odds and ends (put in the yard light, deal with the downstairs fridge that makes that awful noise, maybe shell some corn and cook some food) and probably also now to can everything in the freezers so they're empty for the butcher. Not that there's so much left in there, honestly.
I've realized how much of an effect being with Tucker has had on me. When something relating to a relationship is on my mind I don't bring it up anymore; I used to assume that folks I was in a relationship would want to hear about stuff relating to the relationship, and would be open to conversation about it. That has definitely been trained out of me. There are a couple things with Josh where the relationship has changed over the last couple years and I've been thinking about them when he's here but not mentioning them; last night once I knew nothing was happening today I mentioned them. It was hard? That's not normal for me. And now I'm nervous about it, even though it went well. That's... really instructive, and I need to remember this. It's a stupid and counterproductive way to exist and any situation which exerts pressure on me to not mention feelings and changes in interaction is not a situation I should remain in.
So I guess I'm slowly healing here. The cats are getting lots of brushing, the chimney got cleaned, the house is getting gradually put in order. There's space for me to exist here, and exist I will.
Josh brought me up a sewing machine, a Singer 401 Slant-O-Matic, and I've been slowly getting acquainted with it. I've never used a drop-in bobbin before; I find it surprisingly hard to thread the bobbin. It's a nice machine; it runs smoothly, it has lots of ways to adjust everything and a everything is adjustable in very fine increments. It also smells like a proper sewing machine. It has a very weird pedal, not a lever but instead basically a foot plate with a button it it you press with your heel, that will take some adjusting.
The plan for the next couple days is now to tidy up odds and ends (put in the yard light, deal with the downstairs fridge that makes that awful noise, maybe shell some corn and cook some food) and probably also now to can everything in the freezers so they're empty for the butcher. Not that there's so much left in there, honestly.
I've realized how much of an effect being with Tucker has had on me. When something relating to a relationship is on my mind I don't bring it up anymore; I used to assume that folks I was in a relationship would want to hear about stuff relating to the relationship, and would be open to conversation about it. That has definitely been trained out of me. There are a couple things with Josh where the relationship has changed over the last couple years and I've been thinking about them when he's here but not mentioning them; last night once I knew nothing was happening today I mentioned them. It was hard? That's not normal for me. And now I'm nervous about it, even though it went well. That's... really instructive, and I need to remember this. It's a stupid and counterproductive way to exist and any situation which exerts pressure on me to not mention feelings and changes in interaction is not a situation I should remain in.
So I guess I'm slowly healing here. The cats are getting lots of brushing, the chimney got cleaned, the house is getting gradually put in order. There's space for me to exist here, and exist I will.
Meet up from a dating site, have a nice walk: don't hear from him for months
I start dating his friend: he's suddenly interested in me
I move away: he moves to be with me
I initiate relationship talks about moving in together: he moves to a distant city
I de-escalate from anchor to comet relationship: he asks me to travel to meet his parents and college friends
I start dating his friend: he's suddenly interested in me
I move away: he moves to be with me
I initiate relationship talks about moving in together: he moves to a distant city
I de-escalate from anchor to comet relationship: he asks me to travel to meet his parents and college friends
So on Saturday I went in to pick up Tucker from the airport. It's just under two hours' drive in summer, about two and a half hours safe winter driving, and we'd scheduled his flight for midday so we'd have light to drive home in.
Saturday was the first real snowfall, and the first strike of deep cold. Because it was the first snowfall the ground wasn't frozen yet, and the snow fell, froze onto the roads, and then turned to iron as the temperatures dropped. This happens sometimes, where there's a literal sheet of ice and the ploughs can't get it off. You drive slow, be careful. There's no real telling where the lines are on the road, there are just alternating stripes of ice, clear asphalt, and sometimes ridgy strips which can be either the rumble strips on the side of the road or the fancy textured part of the plough but there's no way to tell which.
Driving in this requires a lot of concentration and I don't like it, but the day had cleared up by the time I was on the road so visibility was good, and there was supposed to be lots of daylight to drive home. Tiring, but fine.
The plane was delayed, and delayed, and delayed. By 4:30 or so the temperature had dropped to -10. The little airport has dropped masking requirements, so I was hanging out in the truck getting pretty cold, and the sun was going down. I ended up at a hotel where I turned the heat immediately up to 80F and made a cup of tea. By 7 the flight was cancelled; I'd been hoping the flight would come in late and we could hole up at the hotel and drive back in the morning.
I'd fed the animals already, anticipating a late day, and settled them in for the cold. I knew they'd need water in the morning, though, and extra food - everything would be frozen solid. There still isn't really enough snow to "drink" and that's not ideal anyhow, dehydration makes both consuming enough calories and keeping warm difficult, the air when it's that cold is super dry, and water is as I said mostly iron. So I was prepared for this.
The flight was rescheduled for 11 the next day, which I figured, fine, that's about as late as I want to push the animals but fine. By the time Tucker got to the airport and lined up, that flight was cancelled too, and I headed home.
The drive home was a lot. There was roughly 50 miles of solid ice, the kind where if you're going straight and holding speed you're fine but even slowing down just slightly the ABS kicked in. My truck is pretty light in the back normally anyhow, and though I got up to 90kph for very brief stretches most of the drive was done at 70 (yes, my truck's odometer is in miles and I track speed in kilometers, don't ask). The saving graces were that it was a clear sunny day and almost no one else was on the road, so I could creep along without worrying about a train of folks behind me or whether I was on the wrong side of the invisible road lines.
Halfway home Tucker called to say he'd been rebooked on a flight and could be there in a couple hours. I was in full on meltdown mode at this point, but it didn't matter that much because within an hour that flight was also cancelled.
I made it home and just decompressed: fed the fire, gave the animals nice fluffy straw and food, brought milk in to thaw for the pigs (the chiller went down at the grocery store, so I have gallons of milk) and just sat and stared for awhile, then crawled into bed. Exhausting.
It was honestly not the best weekend.
The airline Tucker was using had some sort of system outage, which is why there was such a long issue, but in general airlines seem to be less reliable lately. I guess they've crossed over from rich people travel to normal people travel, and started to erode just like anything accessible to normal people: food, housing, equipment, etc.
The plan may be to try it again this coming weekend, I'm not sure yet. In all that waiting time Tucker could almost have driven up and back, and that may be the option on the table in the future. We'll see. I am glad he wasn't driving that iced-over road at least.
Meanwhile the cold continues, down to -22C tonight. That's fingers sticking to metal and deep breaths that make you cough. Anything that was sitting on wet ground is welded there for the winter. There is sunlight, though, in the brief daylight over the snow and the night with the full moon is enormous and bright.
Saturday was the first real snowfall, and the first strike of deep cold. Because it was the first snowfall the ground wasn't frozen yet, and the snow fell, froze onto the roads, and then turned to iron as the temperatures dropped. This happens sometimes, where there's a literal sheet of ice and the ploughs can't get it off. You drive slow, be careful. There's no real telling where the lines are on the road, there are just alternating stripes of ice, clear asphalt, and sometimes ridgy strips which can be either the rumble strips on the side of the road or the fancy textured part of the plough but there's no way to tell which.
Driving in this requires a lot of concentration and I don't like it, but the day had cleared up by the time I was on the road so visibility was good, and there was supposed to be lots of daylight to drive home. Tiring, but fine.
The plane was delayed, and delayed, and delayed. By 4:30 or so the temperature had dropped to -10. The little airport has dropped masking requirements, so I was hanging out in the truck getting pretty cold, and the sun was going down. I ended up at a hotel where I turned the heat immediately up to 80F and made a cup of tea. By 7 the flight was cancelled; I'd been hoping the flight would come in late and we could hole up at the hotel and drive back in the morning.
I'd fed the animals already, anticipating a late day, and settled them in for the cold. I knew they'd need water in the morning, though, and extra food - everything would be frozen solid. There still isn't really enough snow to "drink" and that's not ideal anyhow, dehydration makes both consuming enough calories and keeping warm difficult, the air when it's that cold is super dry, and water is as I said mostly iron. So I was prepared for this.
The flight was rescheduled for 11 the next day, which I figured, fine, that's about as late as I want to push the animals but fine. By the time Tucker got to the airport and lined up, that flight was cancelled too, and I headed home.
The drive home was a lot. There was roughly 50 miles of solid ice, the kind where if you're going straight and holding speed you're fine but even slowing down just slightly the ABS kicked in. My truck is pretty light in the back normally anyhow, and though I got up to 90kph for very brief stretches most of the drive was done at 70 (yes, my truck's odometer is in miles and I track speed in kilometers, don't ask). The saving graces were that it was a clear sunny day and almost no one else was on the road, so I could creep along without worrying about a train of folks behind me or whether I was on the wrong side of the invisible road lines.
Halfway home Tucker called to say he'd been rebooked on a flight and could be there in a couple hours. I was in full on meltdown mode at this point, but it didn't matter that much because within an hour that flight was also cancelled.
I made it home and just decompressed: fed the fire, gave the animals nice fluffy straw and food, brought milk in to thaw for the pigs (the chiller went down at the grocery store, so I have gallons of milk) and just sat and stared for awhile, then crawled into bed. Exhausting.
It was honestly not the best weekend.
The airline Tucker was using had some sort of system outage, which is why there was such a long issue, but in general airlines seem to be less reliable lately. I guess they've crossed over from rich people travel to normal people travel, and started to erode just like anything accessible to normal people: food, housing, equipment, etc.
The plan may be to try it again this coming weekend, I'm not sure yet. In all that waiting time Tucker could almost have driven up and back, and that may be the option on the table in the future. We'll see. I am glad he wasn't driving that iced-over road at least.
Meanwhile the cold continues, down to -22C tonight. That's fingers sticking to metal and deep breaths that make you cough. Anything that was sitting on wet ground is welded there for the winter. There is sunlight, though, in the brief daylight over the snow and the night with the full moon is enormous and bright.
Looking for the resistance
Oct. 3rd, 2022 09:43 amI'm still sitting on my autism screening. This part is a virtual "answer a bunch of questions and do a bunch of questionnaires" and, much like the ADHD screening I posted about recently, I want to answer a lot of the questions with "it depends" and "I need more information" and also "how am I supposed to know that?"
Josh was up last week and he said it's been super helpful for him to know about PDA. He said it gives him a framework for understanding me, my behaviour, and useful behaviours for him to choose. I noticed that this visit felt frictionless (I actually took a second to cry here) in a way that almost never happens for me with other humans. It didn't feel like a tremendous energy drain. It felt energizing and fun. I think that's because he had picked up on some tools to use, like... he'd stand up and say "I'm going to go work on the deck" and I could say "I'll be along in a minute, I'll clean the chimney right next to you" and then he'd go down, and I'd go down a second later and start splitting wood. So he wasn't trying to get me to do anything, just giving me the information (very helpful) and then moving himself to a place where I could choose to do something close by, and in this particular case it didn't matter what. So I announced one thing as a kind of "I'll go down and do something within conversation distance" but then could sidestep my PDA by doing a different ting within conversation distance and it was ok. There were other things we did actively together that also felt pretty smooth. It was really nice. And it was really nice to do things together, to not just talk, to experience Threshold together. It felt like such a connecting visit.
Meanwhile Tucker, who figured out that smoothness early on, has been more open about his feelings and what's going on with him. He brought an interpersonal thing to me that he was proud of the other day, something that involved saying no to someone. I've been watching his ability to make choices evolve over the years, to say yes or no to things, and for him to be actively proud of something and then to tell me about it (and specifically ask me to engage with it on that level) feels kind of world-changing? He couldn't share that stuff with me when everything was self-loathing, but now we can talk a little bit about his decisions and he can let me know what kind of feedback he's looking for. That adds a different kind of smoothness to my interaction with him, one where I'm not guessing what's going on with him all the time because he can tell me. It's lovely.
These are two people who have been working for years to be good communicators with me, and in both cases there are what feel like huge recent breakthroughs.
Meanwhile I have this autism assessment where I'm supposed to communicate something important and central about me, but I can only do it in writing in answer to specific prompts. I've been wanting to feel seen and understood in this assessment, to have it say "these are the ways I'm different" but effectively I'm the person doing the assessment. If I could straight-up answer the questions I wouldn't need an assessment, I'd know, right? The problem is that I don't communicate like other people, that when I use ideas instead of very practical operational data I can't communicate. My abstractions don't translate, and these questions are relatively abstract.
One possible solution is to answer the open-ended questions on here, which is my "communication with humans" mental space. Then maybe if I'm completely wrong in what I think is normal for all the "how do you do x or y different than normal people" someone will catch it.
Hm
Josh was up last week and he said it's been super helpful for him to know about PDA. He said it gives him a framework for understanding me, my behaviour, and useful behaviours for him to choose. I noticed that this visit felt frictionless (I actually took a second to cry here) in a way that almost never happens for me with other humans. It didn't feel like a tremendous energy drain. It felt energizing and fun. I think that's because he had picked up on some tools to use, like... he'd stand up and say "I'm going to go work on the deck" and I could say "I'll be along in a minute, I'll clean the chimney right next to you" and then he'd go down, and I'd go down a second later and start splitting wood. So he wasn't trying to get me to do anything, just giving me the information (very helpful) and then moving himself to a place where I could choose to do something close by, and in this particular case it didn't matter what. So I announced one thing as a kind of "I'll go down and do something within conversation distance" but then could sidestep my PDA by doing a different ting within conversation distance and it was ok. There were other things we did actively together that also felt pretty smooth. It was really nice. And it was really nice to do things together, to not just talk, to experience Threshold together. It felt like such a connecting visit.
Meanwhile Tucker, who figured out that smoothness early on, has been more open about his feelings and what's going on with him. He brought an interpersonal thing to me that he was proud of the other day, something that involved saying no to someone. I've been watching his ability to make choices evolve over the years, to say yes or no to things, and for him to be actively proud of something and then to tell me about it (and specifically ask me to engage with it on that level) feels kind of world-changing? He couldn't share that stuff with me when everything was self-loathing, but now we can talk a little bit about his decisions and he can let me know what kind of feedback he's looking for. That adds a different kind of smoothness to my interaction with him, one where I'm not guessing what's going on with him all the time because he can tell me. It's lovely.
These are two people who have been working for years to be good communicators with me, and in both cases there are what feel like huge recent breakthroughs.
Meanwhile I have this autism assessment where I'm supposed to communicate something important and central about me, but I can only do it in writing in answer to specific prompts. I've been wanting to feel seen and understood in this assessment, to have it say "these are the ways I'm different" but effectively I'm the person doing the assessment. If I could straight-up answer the questions I wouldn't need an assessment, I'd know, right? The problem is that I don't communicate like other people, that when I use ideas instead of very practical operational data I can't communicate. My abstractions don't translate, and these questions are relatively abstract.
One possible solution is to answer the open-ended questions on here, which is my "communication with humans" mental space. Then maybe if I'm completely wrong in what I think is normal for all the "how do you do x or y different than normal people" someone will catch it.
Hm
Tucker was here for a brief weekend visit.
He's doing really well. And I don't mean that he's happy, necessarily. He's taking up space in the world, including the space that is Tucker-shaped and which he was terrified of before. It's really good to see.
It was really good to have him here too. I haven't been in word space lately, and with him especially (maybe him only, frequently) if I can't do words I can still feel safe and connected. All those little check-ins and feeling-cared-for communications can come through the body and don't have to be laboriously strung into justifications and explanations and grasping for enough precision that someone can figure out what I want, and then there's still interpreting their response.
Then, because I didn't have to talk, I could, and that was nice too.
We watched Sandman. It was.. I can see why a lot of geeky folks imprinted on it in their teenage years, I guess?
We talked a little bit about relationship and future stuff. He doesn't know anything, to let me know. I let him know, as I've done in the past, that I'll keep doing the parts of this which serve me but that I'm not committing time or energy to it without an answering commitment, and he understands that now I think.
He made sure that the visit didn't financially overextend me, which I appreciated a great deal.
It was really good. This is how the best long distance relationships are; a string of jewels that adorn my life rather than being integral to it.
He's doing really well. And I don't mean that he's happy, necessarily. He's taking up space in the world, including the space that is Tucker-shaped and which he was terrified of before. It's really good to see.
It was really good to have him here too. I haven't been in word space lately, and with him especially (maybe him only, frequently) if I can't do words I can still feel safe and connected. All those little check-ins and feeling-cared-for communications can come through the body and don't have to be laboriously strung into justifications and explanations and grasping for enough precision that someone can figure out what I want, and then there's still interpreting their response.
Then, because I didn't have to talk, I could, and that was nice too.
We watched Sandman. It was.. I can see why a lot of geeky folks imprinted on it in their teenage years, I guess?
We talked a little bit about relationship and future stuff. He doesn't know anything, to let me know. I let him know, as I've done in the past, that I'll keep doing the parts of this which serve me but that I'm not committing time or energy to it without an answering commitment, and he understands that now I think.
He made sure that the visit didn't financially overextend me, which I appreciated a great deal.
It was really good. This is how the best long distance relationships are; a string of jewels that adorn my life rather than being integral to it.
Gratitude? Love? Connection? These are the moments I make a shrine to in my journal tonight anyhow:
After a breakup I need space while I heal, before I reset. I've healed from this city, I can come back to it now with familiarity but without the old pain of rejection. It's so familiar. I learned to look like a human here, and here I'm good at it.
Wandering around downtown with Angus in the grey with occasional rain felt like a limb being unamputated. I didn't even know that was a feeling. He knows exactly when to laugh at me. He hadn't heard my stories: we've only really talked once in the last ten years. For so long my heart was ground glass and maybe it was even absent for awhile but now it's Atwood's flayed biceps in its own ocean of no light. It's an alive wet thing. I was neither living nor dead and I knew nothing. Which is to say, I carefully never looked into his eyes more than twice and then never even for a full second because I was afraid. We walked for six hours. They say you can never go back but sometimes forward is enough. We've both grown up so much. I like him as a grown-up.
Vancouver food makes me so happy. Oysters, sushi, chinese bakeries: this is the sensory-seeking I love. Fresh veggies that are actually crisp. Probably even fruit.
If I cut the neck and sleeves off a t-shirt right along a seam it immediately becomes a hundred times more comfortable. Stellar life-hack actually, and I got it from an autistic podcast.
Tucker and I talked yesterday. I'm still sad but it's more comfortable. It didn't get left till last minute. He's taking good care of me while I'm here. When we're in person it's easier and it's easier in his space than mine. I feel I can be honest with him here.
Tomorrow I don't need to go anywhere if I don't want to, though the plan is to go to Guu for dinner. My feet are sore from city shoes (I couldn't find my other city shoes before I left, something about tidying the whole house) and the idea of laying around and doing sex and food and maybe watching shows all day is very appealing.
Warm rain through sticky air and everyone scatters except the two of us sitting on benches. It's good.
Shoulder rubs.
Home being kept safe for me while I'm gone.
The way Tucker makes his home look the same every time, even though the spaces are very different. It feels familiar.
I've been happy the last two days? It's like an old scent I almost recognise and I turn my head side to side to try to catch it, to recognise it, and there it is. Happy. My people make me happy. Skill in my acclimatized element makes me happy. Some sort of consistency in the world makes me happy. I wasn't sure I'd be able to be happy again, and here we go.
My friend posted about how it used to be so effortlessly out-loud in how it lived, how effortlessly self-advocating, and then went through a patch where it couldn't do that for itself and now was coming out of it. This friend, my shared pronoun-person, is so like me in so many ways. If it can come out of a time like tat maybe I can too? Maybe I can reclaim myself, living in the open as myself, without it being a thing? It could. This gift of a shared story that brings hope, I'm grateful for it.
When I get home I'll plant apple trees.
My self. None of this can happen without me.
After a breakup I need space while I heal, before I reset. I've healed from this city, I can come back to it now with familiarity but without the old pain of rejection. It's so familiar. I learned to look like a human here, and here I'm good at it.
Wandering around downtown with Angus in the grey with occasional rain felt like a limb being unamputated. I didn't even know that was a feeling. He knows exactly when to laugh at me. He hadn't heard my stories: we've only really talked once in the last ten years. For so long my heart was ground glass and maybe it was even absent for awhile but now it's Atwood's flayed biceps in its own ocean of no light. It's an alive wet thing. I was neither living nor dead and I knew nothing. Which is to say, I carefully never looked into his eyes more than twice and then never even for a full second because I was afraid. We walked for six hours. They say you can never go back but sometimes forward is enough. We've both grown up so much. I like him as a grown-up.
Vancouver food makes me so happy. Oysters, sushi, chinese bakeries: this is the sensory-seeking I love. Fresh veggies that are actually crisp. Probably even fruit.
If I cut the neck and sleeves off a t-shirt right along a seam it immediately becomes a hundred times more comfortable. Stellar life-hack actually, and I got it from an autistic podcast.
Tucker and I talked yesterday. I'm still sad but it's more comfortable. It didn't get left till last minute. He's taking good care of me while I'm here. When we're in person it's easier and it's easier in his space than mine. I feel I can be honest with him here.
Tomorrow I don't need to go anywhere if I don't want to, though the plan is to go to Guu for dinner. My feet are sore from city shoes (I couldn't find my other city shoes before I left, something about tidying the whole house) and the idea of laying around and doing sex and food and maybe watching shows all day is very appealing.
Warm rain through sticky air and everyone scatters except the two of us sitting on benches. It's good.
Shoulder rubs.
Home being kept safe for me while I'm gone.
The way Tucker makes his home look the same every time, even though the spaces are very different. It feels familiar.
I've been happy the last two days? It's like an old scent I almost recognise and I turn my head side to side to try to catch it, to recognise it, and there it is. Happy. My people make me happy. Skill in my acclimatized element makes me happy. Some sort of consistency in the world makes me happy. I wasn't sure I'd be able to be happy again, and here we go.
My friend posted about how it used to be so effortlessly out-loud in how it lived, how effortlessly self-advocating, and then went through a patch where it couldn't do that for itself and now was coming out of it. This friend, my shared pronoun-person, is so like me in so many ways. If it can come out of a time like tat maybe I can too? Maybe I can reclaim myself, living in the open as myself, without it being a thing? It could. This gift of a shared story that brings hope, I'm grateful for it.
When I get home I'll plant apple trees.
My self. None of this can happen without me.
I was going to be taking a summer student out into the bush, maybe for the first time, today. Instead he's off sick and I can go or not as I please. Before I decide I'm going to steal a couple minutes to actually write.
Last night I was out in the garden. I came in and mom was on the phone in the livingroom, the kind of phone conversation where even though it's theoretically not on the speakerphone I could hear both sides. I puttered in the kitchen a moment, went up to the loft to mess with my door, and I could still hear the conversation. They were talking about me. The guy on the other side kept referring to me as "your daughter" to mom. He was talking about how farming was a lot of work and didn't make a lot of sense to do, something like that, and mom was agreeing: "I don't know where she got it from, we did it a bit when she was a kid and you'd think she'd have learned" and "probably for a few more years before she gives up, it's a lot of work" were fragments I heard.
I said, "I can hear both sides of that conversation, just so you know" and they shifted topics a bit and talked about the pigs and more details some. But.
Two things. That's when I realized just how unknown I am to mom. We do not talk about our feelings - she was the main policer of my feelings as a kid, particularly she tried to shut down my meltdowns when my emotions just got really big, so I know not to take my emotions to her from that experience even though our roles now are so different. Further, and I guess possibly because of that, she doesn't know that I love this. I describe the garden to her but I don't tell her-- you know, I think most of my people understand, when I describe the garden, that I love it; they know the detail and the knowledge and the attention I give it are my way of loving things. I don't think mom knows that I get fulfillment and completion out of what I do here. I don't know why she thinks I do it.
I think it would be good for her to know? Reassuring? But she might not be able to understand it. If I got married to a person, or-- I don't even know, what are the typical markers of success that are supposed to be happiness? Maybe she'd understand that. I think she was glad of the possible A&E thing, even though I don't think she understood it. I don't know.
So there's that. And there's also Tucker, who I'm honestly too tired to write about I guess. Mostly, when I'm done dating someone in an intense, full-time way, I end to take a break for a year or two to reset. This doesn't mean no communication but it does mean not much, nothing that can pull me back into the old patterns of behaviour. It lets me get free to reshape my life without them; then they can be added back in when those habits are broken and replaced by something else.
He's-- you know, always right after a breakup you think things might change, someone might use that as a wake-up call and start doing what you needed from them. Sometimes they even do it a little, around the edges, for awhile. But my way of relating to him is the same as it's always been, which is definitely no surprise but also definitely not great for me. He's not going to plan the shape of his future to make this easier for me or more likely to continue, he is going to do short term things to make it easier, and at some point he'll get frustrated and burnt out on those short term things and become resentful. Long-term planning would make those higher-effort short term things easier but that's not his way.
We're still talking sometimes, on the phone, in the evening. A couple nights like that in a row and it feels like before: it feels like the kind of connection I'd be expecting someone to make time and space for me, and where I make time and space for it. That can't stand, it just kicks this ball down the road some. I can probably skip across it like a stone over a lake: when I feel that connection I can pull back, stay away a few days, then dip back in. I can set some structure to ensure it doesn't happen, like maybe I'll only talk to him on weekends, or on weeknights, or on Tuesdays, and only if we're both free.
I go and see him this weekend and I honestly don't know what it'll be like. My expectation is we'll argue a bunch at the end, like we did at the end of the last visit, because I'm shit at sticking my fingers in my ears and pretending everything is the same, and he is hurt by overt acknowledgement of relationship change. It's also possible it will be fine. I really do not know, but I will most certainly see. It'll probably be good information to decide if how soon we'll do something like this again.
Last night I was out in the garden. I came in and mom was on the phone in the livingroom, the kind of phone conversation where even though it's theoretically not on the speakerphone I could hear both sides. I puttered in the kitchen a moment, went up to the loft to mess with my door, and I could still hear the conversation. They were talking about me. The guy on the other side kept referring to me as "your daughter" to mom. He was talking about how farming was a lot of work and didn't make a lot of sense to do, something like that, and mom was agreeing: "I don't know where she got it from, we did it a bit when she was a kid and you'd think she'd have learned" and "probably for a few more years before she gives up, it's a lot of work" were fragments I heard.
I said, "I can hear both sides of that conversation, just so you know" and they shifted topics a bit and talked about the pigs and more details some. But.
Two things. That's when I realized just how unknown I am to mom. We do not talk about our feelings - she was the main policer of my feelings as a kid, particularly she tried to shut down my meltdowns when my emotions just got really big, so I know not to take my emotions to her from that experience even though our roles now are so different. Further, and I guess possibly because of that, she doesn't know that I love this. I describe the garden to her but I don't tell her-- you know, I think most of my people understand, when I describe the garden, that I love it; they know the detail and the knowledge and the attention I give it are my way of loving things. I don't think mom knows that I get fulfillment and completion out of what I do here. I don't know why she thinks I do it.
I think it would be good for her to know? Reassuring? But she might not be able to understand it. If I got married to a person, or-- I don't even know, what are the typical markers of success that are supposed to be happiness? Maybe she'd understand that. I think she was glad of the possible A&E thing, even though I don't think she understood it. I don't know.
So there's that. And there's also Tucker, who I'm honestly too tired to write about I guess. Mostly, when I'm done dating someone in an intense, full-time way, I end to take a break for a year or two to reset. This doesn't mean no communication but it does mean not much, nothing that can pull me back into the old patterns of behaviour. It lets me get free to reshape my life without them; then they can be added back in when those habits are broken and replaced by something else.
He's-- you know, always right after a breakup you think things might change, someone might use that as a wake-up call and start doing what you needed from them. Sometimes they even do it a little, around the edges, for awhile. But my way of relating to him is the same as it's always been, which is definitely no surprise but also definitely not great for me. He's not going to plan the shape of his future to make this easier for me or more likely to continue, he is going to do short term things to make it easier, and at some point he'll get frustrated and burnt out on those short term things and become resentful. Long-term planning would make those higher-effort short term things easier but that's not his way.
We're still talking sometimes, on the phone, in the evening. A couple nights like that in a row and it feels like before: it feels like the kind of connection I'd be expecting someone to make time and space for me, and where I make time and space for it. That can't stand, it just kicks this ball down the road some. I can probably skip across it like a stone over a lake: when I feel that connection I can pull back, stay away a few days, then dip back in. I can set some structure to ensure it doesn't happen, like maybe I'll only talk to him on weekends, or on weeknights, or on Tuesdays, and only if we're both free.
I go and see him this weekend and I honestly don't know what it'll be like. My expectation is we'll argue a bunch at the end, like we did at the end of the last visit, because I'm shit at sticking my fingers in my ears and pretending everything is the same, and he is hurt by overt acknowledgement of relationship change. It's also possible it will be fine. I really do not know, but I will most certainly see. It'll probably be good information to decide if how soon we'll do something like this again.
Today was the first field day of the summer at work. It was nominally a training day, but in practice it was kind of a diplomatic/relationship-building exercise with some folks. I liked some of them a lot, it was a nice day, but I am also exhausted. I also send three more piglets to new homes (and three yesterday) and worked out a place for the currently-house-piglet to stay for awhile.
I need to can a ton of stuff. I need to make soap: bear soap, elk soap, and a lot of lard soap. Instead I watched an exquisite episode of Elementary with Tucker that had some incredible relationship-building between men, incredible nonsexual partnership work between a man and a woman, great characters that were weird but not treated poorly nor pedestalized or exceptionalized, a very good hook in the beginning, and a serviceable mystery. Now I'm trying to get together energy to figure out what to eat, to shower, and to get myself to sleep.
I need to can a ton of stuff. I need to make soap: bear soap, elk soap, and a lot of lard soap. Instead I watched an exquisite episode of Elementary with Tucker that had some incredible relationship-building between men, incredible nonsexual partnership work between a man and a woman, great characters that were weird but not treated poorly nor pedestalized or exceptionalized, a very good hook in the beginning, and a serviceable mystery. Now I'm trying to get together energy to figure out what to eat, to shower, and to get myself to sleep.
Always something
May. 9th, 2022 09:04 amI went away for the weekend, for a short enough time that I could just load everyone up with food and be back before the next feeding. Tucker flew up and we got a hotel in town (saves us the 4-hour round trip back to my place and removes my farm distractions).
We watched the new doctor strange movie, which was fun but ( had these deeply problematic and related-to-mothers-day spoilers ).
It was a great visit and I had a ton of thoughts about it to write about involving my relationship with Tucker, how I feel about the A&E thing, possibly buying a proper rear-tine tiller, etc. However.
When I got home the little piglet who had been struggling along - mom didn't have much milk, she was a singleton born a little prematurely, she started to eat pig feed with the big ones but kept getting injured from being stepped on - came out running like she's been doing lately, and I gave her a thing of yoghurt outside the fence like I have been at feeding time, to help her along. She was covered in mud, it was cold, she's still real tiny, and then Avallu started nipping at her. When I was done feeding and she was done eating she wanted to be close to me, so I brought her in.
The original plan was to wash her off, dry her off, warm her up, feed her a bunch more, and put her back outside. When I started washing her off, though, I noticed that in addition to a little degloving on her tail from a couple days ago she was missing an auxiliary toenail (pigs walk on two of their toenails, like goats, and have a couple extra remnant ones higher on their legs) and that area was swollen. I figured that a combination of not-great nutrition, the yard being a bit of a hazard for her because of Avallu (he needs to be introduced to her individually and watched a bit before I can trust him with her, though he can't go into the main pigpen), and two seperate wounds one of which looked like it was getting infected, meant it was time to break the no-piglets-in-the-house rule.
I stashed her in the bathtub, which was the wrong call - she kept trying to jump out and turned on the water while doing so. Repeatedly. Not ideal.
Eventually I got her to fall asleep in my lap wrapped in a towel. My fellow pig-owning friend says they like something warm to snuggle with, but she seems interested in being close to me especially and I'm scared of giving her a hot water bottle which she punctures and gets all over. Never underestimate the destructive power of a pig of any size!
Anyhow, I got her to sleep and calculated a miniscule dose of long-acting penicillin for her. It's unfortunate, I only had a 20 gauge needle, which is huge for her bit tiny for most of the animals I care for - I'd use it for a goose, generally. It's supposed to be an intramuscular dose but she had very little muscle and wasn't super still; I did get it into her leg and didn't hit any veins or arteries so that's what I could do. Anyhow, cue several rounds of eating yoghurt-mixed-with-pig-feed-and-formula-powder (thank goodness she can eat from a dish) and sleeping hard like babies do, twitching and dreaming and once with her tongue sticking out. I managed to put her down in the bathtub once she was hard asleep, get a crate cleaned up, and get her into it with some food so I could eat dinner, shower, and sleep.
This morning she woke up and was hungry (I'd left her with some feed and she'd eaten all of it) so I got her more food, snuggled with her, transferred her back to the kennel, and here we are. Not entirely sure what happens next. She's putting weight on all her feet fine, but there's still a big swelling (maybe even abcessed) on that one injured leg. I've cleaned off her body but not her head - I didn't want her inhaling water, because if she's cold and injured she's a pneumonia risk, and pigs are generally a pneumonia risk anyhow. I think I need to get the mud off her face and ears today. My bathroom already is smeared in mud, not much to lose there.
She can go out with the other piglets eventually. I do not want a house pig and I suspect even if she became a regular yard pig (rather than a pigpen pig) she'd learn the dog door pretty quick. I also suspect she'll stay small, even for an ossabaw, with this level of rough start. There's a mama pig about ready to pop, I've been considering trying to introduce her into that litter. She's big enough to fight the new ones off the teat, but if there are only a couple there might be enough milk for all.
Meantime I'm supposed to be working, I have a medical appointment today, the butcher is coming in a couple days and I'm not ready, and I'm supposed to be sorting some stuff out with A&E. On the plus side my tomatoes are hardening off nicely, I have the biggest garden I've had in my life, and that little piglet hops into my lap and falls asleep pretty quickly at this point.
We watched the new doctor strange movie, which was fun but ( had these deeply problematic and related-to-mothers-day spoilers ).
It was a great visit and I had a ton of thoughts about it to write about involving my relationship with Tucker, how I feel about the A&E thing, possibly buying a proper rear-tine tiller, etc. However.
When I got home the little piglet who had been struggling along - mom didn't have much milk, she was a singleton born a little prematurely, she started to eat pig feed with the big ones but kept getting injured from being stepped on - came out running like she's been doing lately, and I gave her a thing of yoghurt outside the fence like I have been at feeding time, to help her along. She was covered in mud, it was cold, she's still real tiny, and then Avallu started nipping at her. When I was done feeding and she was done eating she wanted to be close to me, so I brought her in.
The original plan was to wash her off, dry her off, warm her up, feed her a bunch more, and put her back outside. When I started washing her off, though, I noticed that in addition to a little degloving on her tail from a couple days ago she was missing an auxiliary toenail (pigs walk on two of their toenails, like goats, and have a couple extra remnant ones higher on their legs) and that area was swollen. I figured that a combination of not-great nutrition, the yard being a bit of a hazard for her because of Avallu (he needs to be introduced to her individually and watched a bit before I can trust him with her, though he can't go into the main pigpen), and two seperate wounds one of which looked like it was getting infected, meant it was time to break the no-piglets-in-the-house rule.
I stashed her in the bathtub, which was the wrong call - she kept trying to jump out and turned on the water while doing so. Repeatedly. Not ideal.
Eventually I got her to fall asleep in my lap wrapped in a towel. My fellow pig-owning friend says they like something warm to snuggle with, but she seems interested in being close to me especially and I'm scared of giving her a hot water bottle which she punctures and gets all over. Never underestimate the destructive power of a pig of any size!
Anyhow, I got her to sleep and calculated a miniscule dose of long-acting penicillin for her. It's unfortunate, I only had a 20 gauge needle, which is huge for her bit tiny for most of the animals I care for - I'd use it for a goose, generally. It's supposed to be an intramuscular dose but she had very little muscle and wasn't super still; I did get it into her leg and didn't hit any veins or arteries so that's what I could do. Anyhow, cue several rounds of eating yoghurt-mixed-with-pig-feed-and-formula-powder (thank goodness she can eat from a dish) and sleeping hard like babies do, twitching and dreaming and once with her tongue sticking out. I managed to put her down in the bathtub once she was hard asleep, get a crate cleaned up, and get her into it with some food so I could eat dinner, shower, and sleep.
This morning she woke up and was hungry (I'd left her with some feed and she'd eaten all of it) so I got her more food, snuggled with her, transferred her back to the kennel, and here we are. Not entirely sure what happens next. She's putting weight on all her feet fine, but there's still a big swelling (maybe even abcessed) on that one injured leg. I've cleaned off her body but not her head - I didn't want her inhaling water, because if she's cold and injured she's a pneumonia risk, and pigs are generally a pneumonia risk anyhow. I think I need to get the mud off her face and ears today. My bathroom already is smeared in mud, not much to lose there.
She can go out with the other piglets eventually. I do not want a house pig and I suspect even if she became a regular yard pig (rather than a pigpen pig) she'd learn the dog door pretty quick. I also suspect she'll stay small, even for an ossabaw, with this level of rough start. There's a mama pig about ready to pop, I've been considering trying to introduce her into that litter. She's big enough to fight the new ones off the teat, but if there are only a couple there might be enough milk for all.
Meantime I'm supposed to be working, I have a medical appointment today, the butcher is coming in a couple days and I'm not ready, and I'm supposed to be sorting some stuff out with A&E. On the plus side my tomatoes are hardening off nicely, I have the biggest garden I've had in my life, and that little piglet hops into my lap and falls asleep pretty quickly at this point.
