Greenstorm's Journal

Everyone was really nice.

My supervisor was like, "I don't want to overwhelm you, if you think you want to keep your laptop to check on things you can, but we're short on laptops so if you don't you could leave it here".

So I'm not just off, I'm really off, in 20 minutes, until mid-June. I'll touch base with my supervisor in a month to share what's up, but.

Tidied up my cubicle, put sticky notes on things that people might want to use that require passwords or secret information ("this is the non-rechargeable radio battery, it opens and takes AAs, this is the rechargeable battery, it's getting weak so keep an eye on it"). Left a list of things that 1) need to be done, how to do them, and who I think best to do them and 2) things that can wait till I get back, it's super ok, don't even worry about these.

Kind of impressed I could put that together in two days, but it emphasizes that-- like, I spent yesterday putting it together, and then last night actually couldn't walk down the stairs to do bedtime things after 7pm so had to not brush teeth/turn off the lights until 4am when I woke up to first light, in my clothes, on top of the covers surrounded by worried cats. Then at 4 went back to sleep, slept till 7:45, and didn't have strength to lift my torso so WFD's till I could walk.

So yeah, obviously I've overdone it in wrapping things up but things are completely wrapped up.

Having lots of feelings. My favourite coworker is doing a super fun, useful thing that I was gonna do: I ordered every available species of climate-migration tree to do several mini-trials. Those trees have arrived in cold storage locally so they need to go in the ground in the next month, I left him with a longlist of places they could go, a couple criteria, and he gets to go plant them and record the planting data. It is SO COOL to be involved in this kind of science and it's my favourite part of my work. I love testing and measuring. And not the theoretical part, the actual operational technician part. I'm sad to be missing it.

I'm not sad to have handed off the contract work except that I can do it pretty fast these days and it'll take someone a long time to ramp up.

I'm saving my favourite thing that can be put off until I get back in June, theoretically, assuming I can get to the field and things aren't on fire and I do come back and and and.

Sad to be leaving the job for awhile. Not sad to be leaving the environment.

Hope things stop getting worse if I can stop overdoing it.

This week I need to figure out summer tires for the truck, and I want to plant some things. I want enough greens to eat when I come back from my trip, and throughout the summer: money will be an issue and veggies are so expensive here. If they get into the ground they'll survive but theyt can't all be watered the whole time.

Oof. Ok. Writing is just self-soothing right now and it's about time to go.

Oof. Out from work, for two months.

It's been awhile since I wrote. I had that truly terrible cluster of migraine symptoms at first, then work was extremely busy -- we did a last minute heli flight that lasted a full workday, then I was helping with a conference one town over, then I was recovering, then I was helping with our seedy saturday, then I did a tiny bit of pottery at the studio, now it's now. It really took everything I had to get through that. I gave up on non-masked human social stuff for that couple weeks, on doing more than minimum for food and house. Now I want to sink into the deep pool of peace that is my house and my life. I want to watch my cat sleeping and intermittently pet him for hours while my mind unspools and processes.

There's a lot to process.

It's spring and the geese are all over the yard looking for nests and there are melt-pools everywhere. I can hear gregarious honking through my dog door.

While I was at the end of the conference, but still in it, before the drive home, I was sending off a quick email to my supervisor about how my work hours supported the yearly priority plan. I used the term "DEI" and he didn't know what that meant; I sent him a copy of our organization's new DEI plan that had come out and been circulated something like last fall and he said thank you; he didn't dispute (and never does) the time I spend on this but wow.

I introduced my colleague to proper vietnamese food for the first time and as I was dressing and flipping my pho he asked how I knew how to eat it. He loved it, even the (truly phenomenal) fish sauce.

I gave away 8 mugs as door prizes and several hundred packets of my own seed at seedy saturday. They had someone else as a speaker this year talking about "proper" seed saving (how not to cross, for instance) so I spent my time at the seed tables. First I was stuffing envelopes with seed and directing people to label them as I stuffed, but we quickly ran out of packets. Then I showed people how to do the origami seed packets, the librarian used her paper cutter and a pile of recycled paper to make squares, and we folded, filled, and taped. People kept coming in with big bags of seed. Someone came in with elaborate origami seed packets with a crane folded into them. We had such an incredible richness of local seeds come in, I felt so honoured, like a conservator of a community treasure. Several thousand packets of seed went out, free, to people. My mugs, some plant starts, other folks' homemade wine went out as door prizes. The space was packed. Everyone said it was an amazing event. One of the speakers brought 75 varieties of tomato seed to give away. They say that in the coastal indigenous cultures your wealth was measured by what you give away, and I always feel that, and last Saturday I felt wealthy. All the extra seeds go to the new seed library in the library there so anyone who missed the event can still grow things. A+ use of my time but following on the end of a long week it was a lot, and by this time I was really missing talking to my people.

Dogs finally got treated for the fleas Solly picked up when she went on her walkabout. I hadn't seen any in the last month but that means very little. I've been watching videos of a professional dog groomer doing livestock guardian dogs on youtube and trying to figure out how I could wash my pups. I'll settle for getting the mats out and doing a deep brush. Avallu's been loving this; I think it's time to start treating Solly for it. Thea has realized it gets her attention so she's settled into it.

My pepper seeds are all up except for the african birds eye. It's getting on time to start tomatoes and separate the peppers, which means setting up more lights, which means clearing a shelf or two, which means doing some work on my storage container. My first round of seeds, tomatoes from Jan 1st, is doing well-- some of the micros are flowering, and the F2s exhibit the breathtaking diversity that hold me in awe and that I'd always hoped to attain.

The headache seems to be somewhat recurring, but not as constant as it was. Nausea is a near-constant struggle. These two things may (?) be correlated to air quality, as they may get worse when I turn off the CR box or have the windows closed? On the other hand it's warmed up and I can keep a couple windows cracked open so my body just feels lighter in a lot of ways.

In two weeks I'm driving to the coast for a couple days to visit Tucker and bring him (and some clay) back up, maybe disseminate some mugs.

This Wed is a bisque kiln and possibly the following weekend a glaze kiln, that doesn't leave much time for glazing.

Odds and ends, unprocessed. Spring is coming. My mind doesn't think well. Still I'm doing what I love and am happy; I only hope this life doesn't have that fall expiry date.

Did things every day over the weekend. Brain is mush. In the office but very ineffective.

Kiln openings very interesting.

There were no issues with the bisque kiln, whatever weird loud cracking noises I heard was I guess normal.

The glaze kiln opening was very interesting. The kiln had fired to a pretty high cone 6, we didn't have a cone 7 witness cone so who knows exactly what it got to but it was overfired for 6-- maybe because it was so sparsely packed?

My black/white spiral mugs seem like they're just gonna bloat under glaze in there. I tried clear glaze on a couple test ones and they bloated, so I imagine both the flux in the glaze and the high temp did that? Maybe they need a longer bisque? I should shatter one to check for carbon coring, but also when I have my own kiln I can play with firing temps.

The studio clear glaze over non-Night spiral ware was full of bubbles, not big bubbles you can feel but tiny bubbles that make it cloudy. Honestly it looks like a deliberate effect it's so intense, like foam almost with a smooth surface, but I want to be able to see the swirls and not the glaze. I'll have to experiment with that on my own.

My Georgie's clays turned out nice. The pioneer dark is a good brown colour but it's hard on glazes. One of the two reds, the hardest one to work, is absolutely gorgeous. That's the one I labelled mazama. The other is more orange and I've labelled it dundee. I may have switched labels accidentally? Though these clays do a lot of s-cracking and need very careful drying the red and the brown are very pretty and maybe worth keeping, especially since they seem to vitrify well.

Night clay remains magic in the way it metallic spots.

Coffee clay is a nice solid workhorse, as is m300 and m370.

I did very few glazes in various combinations; I'd been putting Spectrum texture chowder from the studio on my rims but this time it peeled a lot, which led to crawling. However it stayed on over the studio's plum and led to some gorgeous orange-over-grey-purple runs. I wouldn't have thought those would be attractive colours but they're actually lovely imbolc colours. Some nice standard opal/seafoam colours where they didn't jump off the pot.

The studio had made up five glazes we'd never used before and one we had. We added too much water to most since they seem to be allergic to checking specific gravity there, but the tests turned out nice if a little thin. A little more work on them and they should be very nice: bailey's red 2, pike's purple, oldforge floating rutile, oldforge misty forest, cedar hill white, and the classic licorice. I'm looking forward to using them and to having big buckets of them once we figure out water percentages. We'd also like to do about 5 more glazes, will be fun to have those. The glaze-making process was great, there are definitely a couple people at the studio who can mix them up on their own now.

I'd further tested some opulence glazes I'd bought dried. The instructions said to add "4.5lbs water or 2.5 kg water" which... are not the same thing. I added 2kg water and they turned out nice, maybe a hair thin but decent coverage and nice breaking on my carved mugs. This may have been the end of my long-suffering immersion blender; it's probably time to get two more, one for the kitchen and one for hobbies.

So, fairly good. Now I have to think about how I want to use all these glazes, which direction I want to go in for shape and materials for what I make to glaze, and what I want to make for my home studio glazes when my materials and later kiln arrive.

But, tired. It took me several hours to write this and there's more to think about.

In addition I realized that in the time I've been doing forestry, no one's actually asked me a question about the state of the forests, though many many people have shared strong opinions on what should be done. It made me more tired. Oh well.

Ohmygosh, just talked with my supervisor and I'm going to get the accommodation of an available standing desk (which I'm not supposed to be allowed) and being able to work from the couch at work when I need to, which is what I requested (it really is sitting in a chair for 8 hours that kills me). He suggested there's now precedent for full-time working from home except for meetings/fieldwork if we need to rework that. This feels... ok? Like I'm being cared about.

My boss' boss is watching Ted Lasso and now is willing to voice that he thinks mental health is important. This is positive?

Anyhow, I'm writing a bullet point per month on mental health for our safety memo. The first one is the very standard "here's the employee assistance line" but it also has the https://www.askamanager.org/2021/04/interview-with-an-employee-at-an-employee-assistance-program.html link. I didn't have much turnaround time for it, and it's a good place to start.

Next step is to figure out how to get somewhat subversive about it. Not that they're opposed to mental health stuff, they just really suck at it and they're being particularly bad at managing morale lately on all levels. and there are a lot of levels.

Okay. Some of this might be edging into language now.

I've written a lot about how I generally have been able to surround myself with people who liked or could tolerate me even when I present more as my actual self. I have ways of flagging, innoculating, etc so that happens. It happens best in situations where there are lots of people to choose from, so folks who aren't into being around me can select away.

Moving up here was at first not a problem because I selected into a workplace with people who were compatible. When that company went under I landed at one of only a very few places in town I could work in my field. While I thoroughly screened my direct co-worker and he's an excellent fit the rest of the workplace is not. Additionally the professional society is... extremely not, and both hit my PDA pretty hard. Note for later that the professional society is required in order to do forestry in BC.

Meanwhile there are plenty of people who I think are similar to me up here but I haven't figured out how to form community with them. Most of them are women, supported by a spouse, whose free time is during the day. Most of them have lots on the go.

And then the pottery studio started up and there were a couple folks with dayjobs who were also really interested in doing things. I was hopeful. It was and is a chaotic startup. As it falls out, though, the people with power in the situation are people who seem uninterested in actually doing pottery. One of those people at least is someone with whom I'm an anti-communicator, which is to say we completely misunderstand and badly interpret what each says completely every time (for instance, pretty sure when I tried to say I was happy to help get things off the ground she thought I was saying I was burnt out and reassured me by saying I was only supposed to come in a couple times a year, then when I pointed out the misunderstanding she said she went by what people said and not by the fluffy things they meant). The other is frequently on vacation and overwhelmed, though I think she and I are slowly learning to communicate.

And these people, for whom pottery is on par with going to see an occasional theatre event or going on a little vacation, seem like they'd like to populate the studio with other similar people: folks who make five or six things a year, who come and talk about their grandkids, who are a little uncomfortable with glazing but aren't really into learning about it. So when I come in and I want to learn about glazes and am happy to do research into them and put together a collection of synergistic recipes that don't need a huge variety of ingredients and a shopping list, or when I want to try and make sure people's work is finished before their access to the studio ends, or when I practice on the wheel a lot to reach a skill goal (which I still haven't done) they... don't know what to do with that, are suspicious of it, and functionally or systematically reject it.

That level of enthusiasm, of doing things more than on a surface casual level, is of course a deep part of my personality. So now the place I was hoping to connect with folks, to form community, where I could go and spend time and casually socialize without the demand of hosting an event... that wants to spit me out. I get along great with the attendees, it's the people running it that are the problem.

And to add just a little sting, the pottery studio is part of a nonprofit and they charge a membership fee "to make sure it isn't just a group of friends doing it for themselves" but actually serves the community. But. I'm not the community, I guess. I never really am.

So what I'm feeling is a lot of alienation, but not the cheerful kind I felt previously where I recognise that I'm different and accept that there's lots of diversity among people and I just need to sort myself into the right places. Instead it's feeling more personal.

And I think a lot of that is because my support system is kind of slipping away, and also because my PDA is overwhelmed.

But, more about that later. I think I've done well to get this far. It all feels very intense and uncomfortable and I feel somewhat helpless in the face of it. If I thought I could live in the states I'd run away to stay with my pottery mentor for awhile; she's encouraging, she appreciates that quality in me that drives me to learn things, and she's one of the old guard geek bipolypagan folks so I feel culturally at home with her.

I guess it says something that my escapist fantasy used to be running away to do canopy science where no one knew me, back when I was in a big group of people who I got along with, and now it's to run away to someone who knows and accepts me now that's what's lacking.

This is a post about impostor syndrome, neurodiversity, and power.

At least I'm still a good public speaker?

In past years they talked about fire on the landscape. This year the landscape is fire. Small fires that started during the lightning in June and July and didn't have enough people to put them completely out flared up in August and even the beginning of September and their outlines are creeping across the https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map map. No doubt if I circle back to this post in future years that link will be defunct, but right now it's very lively. All the international firefighters have gone home; most are in the southern hemisphere where their skills will be needed, and where our folks will soon go to help. But. Our fires aren't out, we're only getting a sprinkle of rain, and Canadian firefighters are burnt out and demoralized, in part because of the high number of deaths this year. Most years no one dies.

At this point it's likely that both the drought will continue in stage 4 or 5 for a third year (when in fact most of BC hasn't hit level 4 or 5 in the history of the system previously), and that the fires will go underground into the duff, the forest floor which decomposes so slowly up here and the peat in all the wetlands that dot the landscape, and they'll pop up as soon as the snow is gone.

That used to matter to me. The Waste Land still reverberates in my head moment to moment:

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

Not that we have cicadas here. But the thing is.

Last week I was hooked up to electrodes for 19 hours. I slept, and then I napped four times, two hours apart. After each nap, after half an hour, someone would rap lightly and then open the door a crack, letting the light in, and say "good morning". I don't think that's happened since I was a child? Then she would ask, "did you sleep? Did you dream?"

I don't know if I slept. I think I did. Isn't the point of sleep that you're unconscious, so you're not aware of it? In November I'll talk to the doctor who will interpret the results, and he'll let me know whether my assessment of whether I slept lines up with whether I actually slept. I'm curious. There were a potential 5 naps, and if I fell asleep in less than 8 minutes in at least two of them, and entered REM sleep within a short time after falling asleep, that's a narcolepsy diagnosis. They sent me home after 4 naps, which I believe to mean they got clear information one way or another, so one more nap would not make a difference to the findings. So either at least two, or zero, met the criteria.

I'm genuinely curious. The whole experience also basically flooded my PDA coping mechanisms for the week: I had to prep the farm, drive in for a certain time, bring a day's worth of food, be confined in a place and kinda forcibly relax myself, then live life in 1.5 hour chunks with those half hour naps in between. I had trouble doing anything else.

The idea of it being or not being narcolepsy isn't stressful. What was stressful was that day there were anti-LGBTQ+ protests across my country, and counter-protestors. Someone I know ended up in the hospital, and it kind of threw off my last nap. Someone threw a rock at her head.

Over the last several days I've learned that two more of my people were injured: one just bruised, from having a full waterbottle thrown at them, and one punched in the face.

There were protestors in my town. I don't know if there were counter-protestors. I was in this room, you see, with electrodes attached.

I might be able to shrug that off, but tomorrow and the next day I've signed up to help present to some high schoolers about the non-stereotypical parts of forestry: how ecosystems are connected, how figurative shit flows downhill and ends up in riparian areas so they're a good litmus test for how the system is doing, how it's important to always monitor so we can make decisions from a place of knowledge. I have a couple fun stories to back it up: how beavers were airdropped into a valley to successfully fireproof it ( https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/environment/2015-01-14/parachuting-beavers-into-idahos-wilderness-yes-it-really-happened ), how willow evolved in waterways to be broken off by floods and then the pieces float down the river and root, colonizing raw soil and turning an environmental liability into a strength. We were going to wade around in a creek, look at the fish, and count insects and talk about abundance vs diversity.

The protests were about keeping talk of people like me out of schools. Letting kids know that folks like me, genderweird and with love for folks outside whatever normative bullshit, that's called pedophelic grooming, child abuse, all that. You probably know the drill by now.

Yeah, if I wore a rainbow shirt to the thing I could maybe help out a kid. But.

I'm partly angry. You don't want me in your schools? Don't expect volunteer labour from me. Don't expect me to support you in maintaining your normal of having kids stay in your community supporting your economic bullshit.

And I'm partly scared. But when I'm scared and angry my power move is to come out loudly and basically say "yeah, are you all talk, or are you going to try and enact consequences"

Which. A coworker just came by and asked how I was, and I explained the above to her, and the organizer of the event walked by, and I said I was basically at the point of wearing a rainbow shirt and introducing myself as "they/them" and coming out at work properly and she was very supportive of both. So. But it's not something that can be taken back.

Anyhow. Last week was a mess, this week is a mess, we're getting overcast skies but bits of drizzling rain.

There were two club meetings this week, simultaneous, the clay and the garden clubs. One was shorter than the other so I flitted back and forth. At the garden club someone who is deeply respected in the community for being from an old family and making paintings went on a multi-minute tirade about how awful my house and yard look, full of "geese and ducks and garbage", and that she was thinking of calling the district on me. It went on long enough that everyone else there was very uncomfortable for quite some time while she was talking, then there was a long silence.. Like, this wasn't a short outburst, it was ignoring very loud "shut up" social cues from everyone else there for those long stretched-out seconds.

I want to do pottery. I want to make beautiful bowls imprinted with goose feathers that say things like "one girl's flight is another lady's garbage" and "the garbage is always greener". I want to do a series of heart-shaped cups with a rainbow of blues on them that say "I exist. I still exist."

I want to make rock-shaped red bowls that cut you when you pick them up that say "there is no water, there is only rock" with tiny hints of glossy blue glaze deep in the cracks.

I want to do this work with the kitten sitting on the back of my neck as I sit at the wheel, as he is wont to do, drawing blood as he gets older and heavier. I want to do this work with my dog sitting behind me on the dog bed and occasionally sighing. I want to go sit with the silly chickenlings, the silkies and showgirls and my chantecler lines, and turn off my mind and watch them peck around.

Instead tomorrow I go down and tell kids that the world is all connected and that as humans we have a responsibility to be involved, to know the consequences of our actions.

That's all.

That's been less than a week. That's all.

The week after I feel happy and secure

My dog is hurt
I come to the end of my credit card
I need to stop raising pigs
The first frost strikes right as the tomatoes are about to blush
My workload is increased at work
With plenty of commendations to the people whose work I'm covering
But with the warning that everyone will be watching me
And then, suddenly, knowing my career might be over
Because of a quirk in my brain.
My lover was too busy to talk to me
As is my friend.

I spend the day in bed
Crying
Reminding myself I never should have felt safe
And lamenting the heady taste of things having been ok

Someone makes time for a call. An hour or two.
Somehow there's nothing to say.