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I can't remember what I've written about and what I haven't, so let's just dive in.

This morning is sunny. We've been having very high winds (wind warning has said gusts of 70-90kph) fairly frequently, heralding our bouncy transitions from warm (5-10C) to cold (-10ish or something) every week or so. It's been a strong enough wind to tear the overhanging sheet metal off the roof of the pigpen, though not the part of the sheet metal that is actually on the roof. Luckily I strapped that down with wood, which impedes snow slide off but does hold it better. I need to finish snipping that metal off before it tears all the way through, it's holding by a couple shreds right now and when it flies off it will undoubtedly either hit an animal which I'll need to then do emergency euthanasia on (I have not had to do that for awhile and I would like to not do it again for awhile) or go through the greenhouse plastic and slice it open.

Even with the wind the sun is welcome. Our most recent bout was warm, so the warm wind has eroded ice sheets into ice patches. At the end of the day, with the sun hitting the ice, water would flow down and pool in the door to the carport. Every night, with no sun, it would sink into the ground before the carport could flood. Given that rain on snow events -- which we've had a couple dozen times this winter -- can be the biggest flood events possible, I'm feeling lucky. We still have not been below -30 and I've switched the heat to electric for the most recent warm patch.

The fashion for saying that talking about weather is mundane and trivial highlights just how divorced folks are from their environment and life support structures. I think that idea is fading with global warming and energy being injected into these systems so we get more weird and more catastrophe.

This is going to get a bit dark, if you're not in the mood maybe skip it.

While we're on "people" I guess the innoculations of school shootings and gaza etc -- even with images, or maybe especially because of them -- and the relegitimizing of racism, along with the full collapse of due process and presumption of innocence have all worked together to remove the idea of certain things being verboten, like war crimes, from both US and Canadian society. People might feel bad about it but we go as far as "strongly worded letters", and our theoretically Liberal PM has already committed to smiling up and kicking down with his "middle powers" stuff-- bottom powers don't count anymore. Or rather, power is what counts.

For my own soul I need to recover enough energy to work through this, but the disability paperwork business has dropped my baseline because of the constant grinding. On the other hand my art has got better, when I go it? But I can do it less because my body has been playing with pain lately to see if that can slow me down, where just exhaustion and fuzzy-headedness maybe didn't.

I'm giving serious thought to signing up for an 8-day ceramics thing in medicine hat, that's a 13 hour drive, then the thing, then the drive back, just because if I'm going to do something ill-advised I'd rather do it in service of hope rather than nihilism. Ont he other hand, gas has gone up 30 cents a liter in the last 3 days and everything else is sure to follow, but I guess that's part of "ill advised". It'll be eating out of the garden season anyhow, in July.

The ceramics thing is a cone 1 soda fire, which I would bring back and do here after the experience of it.

I had wanted to write about how one thing autism teaches us is how rules are weaponized -- they're enforced hard against some folks and softened against others, which leads to deniability on the part of enforcers: they can say they're only following the rules, but the hardening and softening of enforcement leads to very different outcomes. A lot of autistic folks take this onboard by wanting to enforce rules hard on everyone, to make it "fair". Then, because they believe the rules will be enforced evenly, they want to fix the rules -- even though having a set of rules that is unbearable if fully enforced is often part of how society sorts its power and suffering hierarchies, which is the system operating functionally to keep itself going.

But there really aren't rules anymore. Internationally they've descended to a "haha, made you look, you're so gullible" level with no pretense of anything else at least as led by Israel and the US, and definitely internally in the US too. I haven't been looking too hard at Canada in the last few months because disability paperwork and my crumbling faith in sources of any kind -- still cannot believe everyone is upset about AI in art and not a peep about what it does to the credibility of video, maybe everyone has accepted post-facts and I'm left behind without getting the memo? -- but yeah.

I always knew that if it came down to it I wouldn't grow food in service of a group of people who chose to withhold it from other people. It's one of the reasons I rejected urban farming and high-end farmers markets (the other being I don't have a parent who will die and give me an inheritance to retire on, which is pretty much necessary for that as a viable career). Now I can't grow enough food to make a difference. I do distribute seeds -- probably only a thousand packets this year all told -- and maybe that makes a difference either way? But it may not. How do I support what matters from here, from this body, from this town, from this illness level? And how do I know when my body existing is support vs a liability?

In a complete aside, autism has taken up the rainbow infinity sign as its logo. Infinity sign has been poly for as long as I've known it, and the rainbow sign LGBTetc, which means I can't always tell what someone's shirt is in support of-- but also it often doesn't matter.

In counseling the other day I determined that not being scared into a corner is important. I just don't know what to do to dig myself out, especially while it feels like someone's backhoeing dirt on top of me while I dig.

This post brought to you by "after setting up for seedy saturday I was too unwell to go, and I'm too unwell to go to the pottery studio today two days after to, but at least I have a laptop and keyboard in bed"
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Despite everything, this summer is truly a glorious one.

The last three summers have been drought and wildfire smoke, and before that the heat dome. 2020 I spent in a state of basically complete panic that was probably a combination of PDA and work from home interacting, along with the ambient covid panic. I can't remember 2019's summer offhand but I think I changed jobs at that time; 2018 was a wildfire evacuation. I moved into this house in 2017 at the end of summer and that was the last summer like this, with birds and the smell of clover everywhere. Threshold loved me as much then as it does now, part of my body, a fully enveloping love like finally having real skin or gravity.

This year I've only closed the windows for wildfire smoke a couple days. We've had actual rain, the kind of rain patters I remember from before the drought: little wandering thunderstorms bringing cloudbursts and sometimes thunder as they pirouette across the landscape. There's no heat dome; outside it drops to about 10C at night and when I wake up the house is cool; during the day the sun can be a little hot between rainstorms but long cool mornings and the endless stretch of near-solstice evening give lots of time for moving around.

There are more bugs than I've ever seen and my body feeds noseeums and blackflies as well as mosquitoes when I go out in the evening. I leave the fan running in the bedroom, facing out the window, and a window on the north side of the house open downstairs; it pulls the cool air in but also disrupts the mosquitoes and any who get into the house can't fly against the air current. I picked that trick up from an Ologies bug episode, where the entomologist said the best way to keep mosquitoes off a patio was to put a fan at ankle level. They're bad fliers, he said, and like to be low, so they can't fight the air current enough to bite. I love that kind of elegant solution. When I came in from the garden two days ago in the evening my face was covered in blood, half from swatted mosquitoes and half from blackfly bites.

The garden rolls out like a carpet and then fills in like details on an oil painting. I'm putting in paths and trees and trellises, a little at a time, and yesterday I picked up a bunch of perennial flowers and they're waiting in the wheelbarrow to go up and in. I've put in a kolomikta kiwi trellis. I've put in a strawberry bed with six kinds of strawberries. I've put in baby lindens and silver maples and elms and ash and oak and hazel. In one tomato and pepper bed the hazel, cherries, and haskap are there, no bigger than the other little pepper plants and spaced in between them to line a path that does not yet exist, to a spot that is still weeds but will later be a portal.

I have somehow become a person with elderly animals -- not elderly in the way they act, but at ten years old they start to get yearly bloodwork at their vet visit to make sure everything's ok. Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri fall into that category and today is Avallu's birthday; he's 9. Yesterday Whiskey followed me out to the garden and followed me as I wheelbarrowed woodchips from down here to up in the back garden a couple times, then got the zoomies and ran along the path very fast, bounced off the wheelbarrow I was pushing, and kept going. He does not feel elderly.

Anything could happen during the rest of the summer. It's windier than it has been, with tornadoes surprisingly nearby, and the wind strips moisture quickly. We're only saved by the little wandering rainstorms that come regularly. There is a lot of fire elsewhere and strange heat anomalies and floods. Politically we've lost the idea of human life as important and human well-being and rights are so far out of functional equations as to be laughable. There are many wars, even if we don't call them that anymore, and no one with resources is interested in holding back the tide of disease. Systems infrastructure frays and I suspect one day we will wish we had our current access the things that right now we think of as irritating because they are becoming inconvenient: border access, medical systems, air travel, relatively free telecommunications, year round fresh foods, so many things.

This won't be the last glorious summer like this but it might be mine. Even if it isn't I draw a line here: I love being alive, I love inhabiting my life, I very very very much want to know what happens next, but this summer would be enough.

Cool wind and the scent of overnight rain through the window. Warm covers and a cat sleeping on the bed while others wait for breakfast. Thai black rice, coconut milk, and sugar in the rice cooker with apricots waiting. Aspens rustling outside silkily. A pile of woodchips waiting for their wheelbarrow, steaming slightly as they compost. Wiggly dogs and the sound of roosters in the distance and beyond that robins and sparrows. Nearly clean sheets and parsley, mint, and tomatoes from the garden waiting to be turned into tabouli downstairs. Reading again! by audiobook, the closest I can ever have to revisiting my childhood home. A nephew? Even a few people in the world who really want me alive.

It's very good to be here.

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