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This bisque kiln has a bunch of experiments in it. I've been playing around some, mostly in defiance of disability paperwork supposed to be using all my energy. Whether that's a good idea or not, when this kiln comes out of the glaze it'll be super exciting. Another list about it:

1) pendants from the pendant class I taught in there, some with alphabet pasta, to be glazed and distributed to the folks who made them

2) most of a pound of green body stain added to a bucket of white reclaim and mixed in, then some of that marbled with M370. It's very pale in greenware, but one expects it to be much darker after the glaze fire

3) some thrown mugs with a roller applied, and then ballooned out, most then brushed with the stained slip mentioned above

4) several mugs with the wiggle wire used to carve shallow facets into the surface and then ballooned out, some of which ridges are brushed with the green slip above. Either way the ridges tend to channel glaze down them in a very neat way.

5) Some bowls with lids, originally to microwave food without spattering but I think the lids fit too tightly and don't have a pinhole for steam, so maybe just for storing in the fridge?

6) Several lidded bottles thrown in the one-piece style with lids of varying degrees of fit, I need to keep practicing this.

7) The two teapots I made in memory of my aunt, which started my "I'm gonna do it anyway" clay rebellion. They're in dundee red, which is awful to work with but makes a stunning effect under bailey's red glaze. I have not yet made matching cups for them, and now can't until I get them home (I have no ability to see/remember shape in my head so the shapes won't match unless I'm looking at them)

8) Two scoop prototypes, of the kind to be left in oatmeal, sugar, etc cannisters.

9) eight or nine (?) spontaneously thrown bowls in marbled white, red, and coffee with some faceting on the sides, made to hold the pendants, which reminded me how nice and easy it is to throw bowls and not need to fiddle around with handles, spouts, lids, etc.

10) Some of the stuff was made in IMCO Night clay, which I remember how much I love to throw with, though honestly it all felt amazing after the dundee red. Throwing with very difficult clay and then easy clay makes me feel like a pottery god honestly. I can do things so effortlessly. Also I forgot what item was supposed to be number 10.

11) Oh yeah, two handbuilt mugs with douglas fir texture outsides and branchy handles. They look really nice, nice enough to make me handbuild since the texture mat is way too soft to work on the wheel :(

The Canadian Potters group has a mug swap periodically, and one of the above mugs will be for my partner. She says she likes white, black, and blue, a fair size, and doesn't mind raw clay texture so I'm thinking one of the IMCO night ones with the wiggle wire faceting and a blue floating glaze flowing down the grooves.

12) Oh yeah again, I discovered some fun curly handles because I was trying to do something nice for my mug swap partner.

Anyhow, the bisque opening won't be much of a reveal except "something broke" but it'll lead me to glazing and then the finished pieces, which will indeed be a reveal. How does the night clay take my blue glaze? How heavy are the teapots when they're done? How does the green stain look in various uses? How do the new handles actually feel to use? How well do the bottles fit together when they''re done? Is the thin edge on the scoops right or will it chip? Is it worth handbuilding more mugs? How does the red look swirled in those bowls, and do they fire to an ok size, and should I have let them dry before faceting them? Etc.

That's enough thinking for one day. I've been in bed all day except for chores, and same most of yesterday, and I'm doing the thing where after trying to concentrate on a youtube video or podcast for about twenty minutes I get exhausted and fall asleep. Letting myself do this rhythm for several days is very healing; I can feel my brain getting heavy now, so I'll let myself drift back asleep and be grateful for freezer pizza, instant oatmeal, and plenty of firewood brought in.

Something about doing a show at the art studio with the pieces I have lying around, maybe in summer or next fall? "100 pieces of mud" or "100 things I've touched with my hands?" or whatever the number is?

My truck brakes failed the other day: when I went to push the brake pedal my foot went right through the spot it usually stops at, and the truck did not slow down. At the very bottom of the pedal there was a little stopping power, and I slow down way before corners normally because it's slippery here, so I managed to get myself through the couple corners home, and the truck did stop in park when I turned it off.

Luckily the neighbour, who is a mechanic, came over after work and we got it into the shop (a caliper had failed and leaked the brake fluid out, so he clamped it off and added a bit more fluid for long enough for me to drive into town, and he gave me a ride home). The supplier sent the wrong caliper replacement, so I'm without a truck from Thursday through this weekend till probably Monday night.

It's the first time I've had no vehicle access out here. Before I could have walked or biked, but.

I've learned some things.

1) It makes me super nervous not to have transportation even when there's a defined period after which I'll be able to get in and out. It's not like I really had medical access before, it's not like I'm in any way short on food, but I'm still nervous about it.

2) I had over-planned stuff for this weekend: running a kiln, packing seeds with the garden group for seedy saturday, and hanging out at the studio helping folks glaze. It's way more stuff than I should have committed to in one weekend.

3) One of my two worst-case equipment failures in the truck, though scary, didn't kill me.

4) I had been letting "I need to do X" creep into my life, which when coupled with a defiant "I'm going to do X that I enjoy" meant I wasn't getting enough rest.

5) I probably should get a backup ebike type thing that can get me to town and back, and maybe that can load on the truck.

6) Keeping several days' supply of animal feed around is useful.

7) I do have friends out here who will help me with things. Mary at the studio picked me up, helped me load the kiln, and will give me a ride in Sunday to unload.

8) OMG what if this had happened the day before or on my shot and I had to miss it? Luckily it was the day after.

Our cold snap is forecast, the coldest yet of the winter. It should happen Wednesday-ish, in a couple days. We've had a lot of warm, which is unusual, and a lot of up and down, which is much more usual. I still have snow, or at least an ice crust over a bit of snow in some areas and a solid two-foot-high platform of compacted snow in others, so I suspect my plants will be fine. In town there's not a lot of snow left, so the snap may be harder on things even though it's more like a zone 4b/5 type snap rather than our proper -40 forecast.

Though goodness knows the forecasts have been very off all winter, so we shall see. Either way I get my shot on Wednesday so I need to remember to plug in the truck. A dead battery will not improve that day.

I've been wading through disability paperwork and taxes. I think I've correctly hit one deadline, though it's a bit ambiguous. Now I'm working on the next, which is mid-March. The paperwork is going to eat my next doctor's appointment or two; I need to remember 1) to make more appointments if they have them (our town lost some doctors so they're booking pretty far out) and 2) to make a note to make an extra two doctor's appointments at this time every year, since it seems like this will be a yearly requirement.

I saw some stats on how many doctors' hours are used on filling out disability forms and have forgotten them. Good thing we don't have a shortage of doctors or anything. I'd hate to have a real issue like having the doctor read and summarize the last years' worth of treatments on a form when the treatment documents are gonna be sent in anyhow to the same person, who can then compare the medical docs, the doctor's description of them, and my description of them to try and find discrepancies... I'd hate to have that displaced by something like my sinus infection or someone's kid's asthma. Not that we test for asthma here, the waits are too long; if an inhaler helps it's assumed and that's where it ends.

Ok.

So you can see why I've been splitting wood and doing pottery. All the above, both doing this paperwork and feeling bitter about it, use up energy. Splitting wood and doing pottery use up energy too but they help my mind quiet down now that I'm out of books I can easily read for free. Between the stormclouds of whatever is going on with my hormonal experiments and the paperwork which reminds me that my support is entirely unsecure, it's not a good time. I've been triaging and doing this extra stuff, but my baseline is sliding back some. I'm weaker. I shake and fall unexpectedly occasionally. Bladder control is reducing again. To the best of my understanding this can be permanent, so I should stop, but.

Gotta live somehow, right?

Anyhow, I made two teapots thinking of my aunt. Teapots are complex, there are 2-3 pieces thrown on the wheel to assemble, one part pulled, lots of careful angling and cutting. I made these in dundee clay, which is horrific to work with. It took all my concentration and let me go inside the process. It's a break, a space without noise.

(I'd like to make a tree menorah but I don't yet have the skill)

I put green body stain in a bucket of white reclaim and marbled some of it into M370 and made a couple test mugs. I have very little idea how much body stain I was supposed to use so I need to fire these before going further.

I started making seed jars, thrown as one piece closed forms. These are exacting, and require precision and thought. Everything needs to fit, and it's harder to fix things afterwards.

Then today, after the seed jars from the last week, I went into the studio in town. I'm making an effort to be there on Sundays because then other people come and it can be social, and it's probably best if I exchange human voices with someone who isn't my doctor or disability police. No one else came and I marbled some tucker's red, coffee, and M370 together and made some craggy sliced bowls -- 7 of them -- and two cups, one of which is the slurpee-cup-sized cup I started all of this out with in the beginning, when I wanted to gain the skill to make something that big.

I have the skill now, though I never made a handleless cup for this purpose since I got distracted and didn't come back to it.

Making something without any shape requirements except "kinda cup-like" with no pieces that need to fit together was so straightforward and comfortable. I think the bowls will be pretty, too.

It's just not advisable for me to keep doing this until the other stuff is done. If my baseline slips too far I won't be able to do it at all, and then I'll still feel bad but without the option to overstep. And I need to rest up for spring. I need to start my tomatoes soon and that decision matrix is pretty demanding.

Spring is coming, though. It was glimmering light before 7 this morning. It'll be nice to go lie down on the ground next to a dog eventually.

I'm stealing the keyboard from my laptop for this. Again I shouldn't; it takes several days to accumulate about an hour's charge, and it doesn't run off the cord at all, so I should save it for disability and medical paperwork only. But here we are: rebellion by making pottery and writing. Story of my life.

I got home from the pottery studio and couldn't get warm or stop shaking. It's better now but I'd better go to bed for real - I do consider a difference between lying in bed in daytime and lying in bed for sleep, though I couldn't explain it.

Second injection soon, and on the wait list to get the ovaries and tubes out. That should take me 9-12 months (?) on the wait list, so we can test the chemical menopause thoroughly and pop me off the list if it's going to go bad. Hopefully I'll be telling you all about the garden soon. How nice would it be to hear a list of the peppers I'm planting instead of this nonsense?

Someone I know said, of the killer at Tumbler Ridge, that is unfortunate the killer killed themselves because it deprived the survivors of the ability to enact justice. Which, I guess she was implying that just someone dying isn't enough, which implies torture. Very Victorian. I honestly think I'm going to be sick. Pretty much like when my friend said it would be good for society of sexual abuse survivors could go around in groups and extrajudicially assault people (that friend was silent on whether killing should be allowed).

There was an American style mass school shooting in tumbler ridge, a small BC town, yesterday.

People have also been very upset about a bunch of gross stuff released through the Epstein files.

In Gaza they have devices that burn hot enough to destroy the corpses of the people they kill, another step away from us ever knowing.

At least in Iran there will be mass graves to dig up later.

When you look at the genes of humans you can see that, long ago near what might be the beginning of homo sapiens -- that date is a target that recedes into the past every time we learn something, so -- they're was a very small population bottleneck where very few breeding adults survived. A couple thousand.

When you read even just Agatha Christie's stories set in post-WW2 Britain it's clear that kind of post-apoc small-group-starting-over fantasy of the world being cleansed after mass death isn't a useful one.

I expect that even with only a thousand humans left we'd find ways to harden into groups, to find it tasteless to appreciate or mourn *them* because *we* were having so much trouble. Well, they would. I would not survive that kind of a population reduction, of course. Statistically no one would.

Movement helps so I stacked wood, I'm through 2/3 cords split and stacked for next winter, but now I can barely move or think. Whiskey comes and snuggles and helps a great deal. But still, now that I've been in bed a few days, I can feel interest in the future evaporating. I don't really have interest in planting tomato seeds.

I think that's the meds wearing off and my ovaries waking up and pumping goo into my mood signals. The goo always wants to convince me that the external world justifies it. Two days ago I was convinced everyone thought I was a super inconvenience and would be annoyed by any reminder I existed. Yesterday was less that and more a nagging feeling I was forgetting to do something very important that I should feel guilty for not having done yet. Lucky for me both feelings were familiar enough that I could place them as ovary-goo related, though that still *feels* incorrect.

There's gonna be a lot of transphobia on the Canadian Internet today. I guess people are already posting pictures of gender-whatever folks from tumbler ridge saying they did it, absent any information. I can't do pottery all day and I'm out of Agatha Christie, and not there-enough to read much else. I do wish more of my comfort reads were audiobooks at the library.

Maybe I should sort through this year's seeds anyhow.

My aunt played chello, she was in a choir, and she is the person who let me understand I could just go see live music as a human if I wanted to.

Since she died I've had a relatively short playlist going a lot, one that I can sing along with. It helps.

Her fb eulogy was written by someone who clearly knew her. It said "she died as she lived, with courage and grace, uncompromisingly upholding her values of compassion and community"

Yeah. She did.

1) maybe shot is wearing off or maybe emotion last night put me into burnout? Both? If it were fifteen years ago I'd say I'm two weeks away from my period.

2) Northern BC is a zero-degree skating rink: water on ice

3) Not having a laptop to write is more annoying and less restful than I expected, luckily I can print off disability stuff via my phone

4) pharmacist called today, he can't administer the injection and I'll need to pay $500 for the meds so my friend who has been calling the clinic to try and make an injection appointment has to keep calling i guess

5) yeah, definitely wearing off, bloating and digestive tiptoing back in addition to mood stuff

6) people I think get more upset when they have a mascot to get upset about rather than just mass killings i guess

I don't have a keyboard right now -- my old laptop died and another hasn't finished being acquired yet -- but my aunt Katherine is dead. She's the first person who took me to see live music, dressed up in pretty flowing clothing and sat on the grass listening to fiddles and choirs. She would have gone without accompaniment but she brought me with her as a... Twelve year old? Maybe younger?

She was always kind. Starting at her house was the only time I ever slept on a waterbed. She did things she loved, and she did things out of conscience and a morality I resonate with, and she had joy and community.

She was my dad's cousin and I wonder sometimes how the family could diverge so much.

She bought my pottery and used it and told me how much joy it brought her.

She never had an obligation to me and I never had an obligation to her, but we were in each other's lives a little and it brought joy, and her life helped show me what was possible.

She was a real person and a wonderful one, and she's died how she wanted, with her loved ones around her, and I feel this huge grief. Not for her, but for myself. I'm lucky to have known her.

And some part of me, honed my whole life and that I thought was gone sauce the PMDD meds worked, looks at my grief and marvels that it feels just the same. This real, legitimate grief feels just the same as I felt every month for my adolescent and adult life. It's been awhile but the feeling still flips the observer on in my mind and evaluates. The grief can never go, of course, it can just be recorded as more information. And that information is that I miss my aunt very much.

I can't adequately describe my astonishment that folks take seem to care about these two people killed in Minnesota. So many people have been killed, especially recently. I assumed folks always just find a reason to other then, and go about their day with maybe a couple angry words.

Relatedly but not exclusively, it's always so telling when people are trying to describe why someone shouldn't have been killed. They were kind. They helped their community. They had family who loved them and are made sad by the killing.

Certainly that makes more personal tragedy for the folks left behind. And it makes me feel very, very old fashioned for believing no one should be killed at all.

Many things are happening, but my Aunt (not actually aunt, but my step-dad's cousin I think?) Katherine's cancer treatments have failed and she's in palliative care, doing assisted dying.

She was the only extended family I've kept touch with. She introduced me to the Mission Folk Fest, which I attended for the twenty years thereafter. I know at one point she became a UU minister. She meant a lot to me.

Current prime minister Carney made a big speech that people liked.

He's positioning things as "gotta get rid of pesky indigenous people, public servants, and disabled and minority folks if we don't want to live under Trump"

I don't love it.

No giant red flags from medication. I can tell at this point that the pill I was on was bouncing me gently through the 24 hour period I took it in.

I'm having more trouble shifting from one thing to another. My digestive system seems to be settling. My internal experience is different than it's been for a couple years maybe. I'm not sure if my body is actively weaker or I just haven't had enough rest and also have a different mind and time sense and disconnection ability so I'm not able to take the subtle cues they it's time to rest; it took me quite awhile to learn them in the beginning. Also maybe a bit less able to balance or lift my legs as high?

In excellent news I'm doing some germination tests on old corn seeds. Also there's a seed farmer who wrote about the trouble keeping his runner beans from crossing. Runner beans need to be pollinated but a creature, usually bees etc which have a certain flight distance. His were crossing and he realized it was because his pollinator was hummingbirds, which have a much greater flight distance.

The cats will get the corn germ tests as cat grass

The second thing I noticed about the medical clinic was that posters on how to access the patient care quality review board were in every room. It worried me some, but I was so hopeful. This medication has a chance at improving my quality of life some.

My gynecologist (the prescribing specialist) and I agreed that I should make a follow-up visit with my doctor every week while the medication ran its course. Because it's a one-month injection, if it went badly for my mental health there are limited things I can do to pull out of the whole scenario on my own. And PMDD is the closest anything's ever been to killing me, so I treat it very cautiously. I do not want to die.

My doctor agreed too. The meds she'd given me for my gut had helped: less pain, less mess, more functionality. A B vitamin injection had helped with the neuropathy in my legs so I can lie more comfortably in bed. I like my doctor. She read the instructions on the kinda weird shot carefully, made it up (it needed two components mixed together inside the syringe) and administered, told me what side effects to come directly to emerg for and that I should come if I had any doubts, and wrote out a note for the front desk to make the weekly appointments.

The front desk point blank refused -- there were no appointments with anyone, but I could come as a walk-in on one of those days. When I mentioned that I couldn't actually sit and wait in a walk-in clinic, she changed the subject. The nearest appointment she would give me was in March.

Now, this shot lasts a month. I got it Jan 19. The next one will need to be administered Feb 19.

The front desk person was new -- they always are, there is a lot of turn over and I think half the time they are deeply under-staffed? At any rate they rarely answer the phones and there's no message service and of course no email, so one assumes there are supposed to be enough people to actually answer the phones anyhow. This one was not great with customer service for sure, telling me they'd "give her shit" if she did xyz and narrating that she was looking through each doctor's availability as if it was a great trial to her, even though presumably it was her actual job.

I'd already taken the email of the quality review board because when they put me in the room to wait for the doctor, the attendant went in and forwarded the roll of paper on the bed but didn't wipe down the chairs -- I'm not sure if that's supposed to be normal procedure, but I'd always assumed they wiped down the chairs in the rooms between sick people. They definitely did not wipe down the chairs in the waiting room, and I avoided one with a bit of a smear on it, but since it's always occupied I figured they did that periodically.

I was, of course, the only person with a mask.

Luckily the shot didn't do my biggest fear, which was immediate and intense suicidal pressure. In less than 24 hours any assumptions I make about how it's working will be jumping at shadows: I'm observing every single flit of thought, emotion, and behaviour.

These hormones have drastically changed everything about my life experience cyclicly in the past: they make me want to clean or lock me in bed, make me happy and hopeful or pessimistic, tilt my preferences towards interacting with only strangers or people I know well or no one at all, flood me with anger or with love predominantly for days at a time, change the foods my body can tolerate and the ones I want to eat or whether I want to eat at all. I went into that shot not knowing who would come out of it, and I still don't know. I don't know who I'll be tomorrow nor who I'll be when it settles out. Of course I'm curious and concened. Of course I'm watching, like anyone would watch a partner they'd just met yesterday for their arranged marriage.

I'm observing, not measuring yet, because in a month I'll be making the decision: do I do this again or go back? And three or six months after that: do I have surgery to make this permanent? The shots are expensive, and they're a trial to make sure having my ovaries removed is a reasonable choice. I guess I'll need to maintain them on a waiting list too.

And the problem with all this observation is that it's really skewed right now by having no access to reasonable fucking medical care. Gynecologist was very cautious about making sure I had follow up appointments. Doctor told them to make them. And I do not have them. I do not even have the ability to get my next shot on time through the clinic if it turns out great. My options are to go into emergency, which I might be able to tell if it's open or not because some random guy wrote a program to tell whether different emergency rooms were open or closed to due lack of staffing, the actual medical system is "working on" making one themselves.

The point of having the doctor's appointments for follow up was threefold: to catch things before they were emergencies, to allow a better access to the gynecologist since my doctor has a direct channel, and to have something in place so that if I went into the kind of deep depression where it's hard to do anything then going in would be a default and easier than doing nothing until I died (especially calling a switchboard that doesn't answer the phone or have an answering service as if it were the mid-nineties, or go into an emergency room that may or not be open and explain that I'm having a mental health thing that's a known hormonal thing and there are experts on this and what to do about it and be told that it's beyond their scope to prescribe changes in lady's meds).

I feel defeated (side effect of the medication can include "discouragement" which is accurate but maybe not the med's fault) and caught in wanting to just try planning for anything even less, since yet again the system (though not my own doctors) clearly want me dead.

So is it working? I sit like this for a month, then theoretically start peeling off some other meds once I stabilize here. I gather information. I look at every single thing that occurs in my being and try not to over-interpret it. Am I finding it harder to do things like get out of bed and get ready for bed (those go together in my life, I need to rest to be able to brush my teeth and have a shower)? Am I feeling a little more emotionally stable? Is this normal anger for the situation or abnormal anger?

Anyhow, I'm going to try and log what's up this month to help make the decision. I wanted to get this down because I want to contact the patient care quality review board. And I need to call my pharmacist and ask if he's allowed to give this shot since I don't have doctor access.

But of course before I do any of that I need to rest for a couple days.

We had a couple days of rain on our snow the last few days. It brought the pack down a couple inches and no doubt will make things slippery when everything refreezes.

I'm glad it stopped snowing. I'm still basically bedbound, my excitement is walking downstairs and sitting on the downstairs couch in the evening. I only had a couple days doing pottery this winter, and I'm becoming increasingly worried I won't be able to garden this summer. That would be devastating.

But I'm maybe borrowing trouble right now. Probably because getting out of bed to feed the cats feels so enormously difficult, like lifting every weight in the world.

Oh well. To it.

For own reference:

Gyne is always nice to talk to in the rare intervals I can talk to her. Lupron 1month shot starts on 19th with progesterone daily.

Neurologist: as close as can be certain it's not MS. Social worker at his offic and him said hey'll provide suport on CPP appeal.

After those two back to back medical appointments I've been in bed for 4 days, I'd overfed the animals deliberately beforehand but couldn't even make it outside consistently. Significant gut pain, dizzy, passing out, etc. So er, I'm still sick and pacing really really works because when forced not to do it I'm back to this, like I was nearly two years ago when I left work. I have to go into town to the mailbox this week but otherwise rest.

Back to quiet dark room with no more than fifteen minutes of noise/screens/anything per hour.

Not sure if gut pain is just because I have no idea if I'm taking my pills right or not. Trying to be more careful.

Being alive: excellent

Never being able to remember what to eat for breakfast: less excellent.

Every night I have something in mind for the next day. Every morning I forget it and often fail to eat because I can't sort out what, unless I write it down the night before AND remember to look at it.

It's easy to forget what takes thinking. Right now, with all the snow outside, I don't have a lot of ability to do outside and thoughtlessly wheelbarrow things. Even snowblowing, which I try to do every 6" of snow, requires a fair bit of strategizing about where, exactly, the piles of snow will go and how to get them there (it can throw roughly 15' and obviously not through solid objects). Being in the house, I decided to tidy it a bit, and then the skillcult apple seed sale loomed and some scionwood became available elsewhere so I worked on making some decisions about which of those I wanted for next year.

Tidying the house is A LOT of thinking work. And not just tidying, but "should I get rid of this?" and "what things should go together in an area, which things should go into outside storage, and where should things go while they're waiting to leave the house or go into those areas?"

I made my seed order, made inroads on the house, and yesterday and today can't stay awake or think or follow a book. It's been awhile since I had to repeat audiobook spots four or five times, and I'm back to that.

So I guess I need to take it in smaller bites, though I'm not sure how.

There's about eighteen inches of snow out there right now, most of which fell in the last five days. It's good insulation against the -20.

All would be well except that Solly has realized going in the house keeps her from chasing deer away, which is her reason for existing (see: guardian dog). She's escaped from the house and will only come near me when we're nowhere near the house and I've shown her that my hands are totally empty of collars and leashes (she can get out of a collar in about twelve hours, so there's no grabbing her by a collar). She's sleeping in the chicken coop at the bottom of the garden, which is a nice 6x6' building full of straw, so she's nice and warm and dry. It's right where the deer come over the fence. I've been taking her food& medication out there in a bowl (which she stays away from me, since my hands aren't demonstrably empty, but will eat the food if I step back). I'm not chasing her, since she's not supposed to be walking at all.

I've given some thought to putting her in the small fenced garden & greenhouse with the geese. It's a smaller space, but I'm not sure how they'd all feel about such close proximity. She's allowed to stand and lie down, gentle range of motion is fine, but mostly rest. So we need to come to an accommodation we can both tolerate.

It's funny, Solly is such a ridiculous sweetie I'd forgotten just how intense these dogs can be when something gets into their guardian button. This is a dog who loves to lie on the couch or on my lap on her back with her paws in the air, but she's smart enough to connect the dots between going inside for a bit and being kept there for longer than she wants, and being inside and not being able to chase the deer away, and she's fully willing to deprive herself of all those things PLUS food in order to keep those deer away (she won't even let me feed her near the house in case it's a trap). Plus walking hurts her. The pain meds are making a difference but that just makes her do more mobile stuff.

I should be problem solving that but I snowblew her a path around the chicken coop so she doesn't have to drag her legs through the deep snow and I'm letting her chill until my mind is online again. I could catch her in the chicken coop by closing the door, but after a couple days of walking her to pee and otherwise leaving her in there she'd just have the door off. This afternoon I talk to the vet who might be able to do surgery "locally" (only 2 hours away) and then to possible funding sources.

The tornjaks in the province are all sold, so I don't need to make any immediate decisions on puppies regardless. It looks like there might have been some drama in the (quite small) breed group?

Whiskey is headbutting me for snuggles so I should go. I want my legs to work soon so I can get some water. I'm thirsty and the relative humidity is like 13%.

I know I'm treating my body well when I wake up and it asks for movement: a stretch, a twist, just where the prospect of engaging it doesn't cause dread but instead feels inviting. With the animals moved up closer to the house for the winter and snow on the ground I've been resting more and it's been good for me.

(Little Bear appears to have just intentionally pulled the curtains down. He takes increasingly flying jumps at them until the momentum brings them down. I've redirected him to eat a mechanical pencil. Sigh)

Last night I had a dream -- a good dream. I'd flown to a multi-day workshop, it was either in th maritimes or a scandanavian country, and stayed with a handful of other people at the home of the workshop instructor while we did the workshop. I have lots of specific memories of it: a wooden covered seat out front by the driveway, which I stopped and examined to see if I could make something similar when I got home; a back garden with a grain patch; a mostly-underground house profile. But mostly I remember how the house was set up to have space for many hobbies but still had a clear, tidy look with space.

Part of that will be the dream and part of it the size of a house and the type of hobbies. Still, it's a bit of a reset for me in thinking about how my house should be set up. I've known I'll need to shift things downstairs for Solly to be indoors. I think I'm better able to think about it in chunks now, the house I mean. Maybe I can steal the little cabinet under the stairs for something. I really would like to get a sliding door on the downstairs bathroom so I can get into it easily without doing the public-toilet-stall dance. Things like that. The house has been horrible here and I have had more survival-oriented things on my mind; it's also hard to think about how to make something decent when all the tiles are loose on the floor and there are huge holes in the drywall from plumbing work, but. Maybe a chunk at a time.

At this rate I'll never have time/energy to do pottery this winter. The winter is moving shockingly fast. I think it's always this time of year I think the winter is very mild, but the real cold tends to come after solstice.

Speaking of Solstice, I might need to build her a house in the goose enclosure (which is a garden in summer and is right behind the house) and is roughly, what, 80'x60'? Staying inside is no longer a pleasure for her, and she'll be a lot happier to at least be able to watch things. Guardian dog houses need windows or they won't use them.

Speaking of dogs, the Tornjak puppies in this province are still available. They probably will be for a bit, but if I'm going to integrate someone, winter and young is probably better. Four dogs is so much! But Thea and Avallu deserve retirement, and as I learned at one point they deserve sick days and a partner to trade shifts with too. It's heartbreaking because there are so so so many LGDs in California and through the... middle southern states? ...that they're being put down all the time. Between integrating an adult into my setup (probably impossible) and lack of good breeding (including heartworm and hips/elbows/knees) I can't do it, but oof. Tornjaks really are a breed apart and I like to continue their existence, but I'd also like to continue the existence of other, living pups.

Ha! I had another dream. Someone had come to read the meter, onto the property, and I caught Avallu and was telling the meter person "don't you have a note that there's a dog who bites here? But it's ok, I'm holding him right now".

We have a virtual meter or whatever they are, but they were both such ordinary dreams, or I guess would have been. A workshop in someone's home would actually work well for me, I think, where I could pop in and out of rest.

Anyhow, virtual vet appointment on Solstice on solstice (ha) to see if the person in town will actually do her surgery or not, and what it'll cost, and how well it tends to hold up.

I think I've been taking Threshold for granted and haven't been tending the actual house how I should.

(Don't tell me Little Bear tore down the curtains so he could pee in them. He is SO BORED even though I let him hunt in the space between the floors. Poor kiddo.)

(Just licking himself noisily)

Someone may be able to fund Solly's surgery. It's not for sure yet by any means, and I haven't spoken to the surgeon yet even to know if it's possible, but. There's maybe a little hope.

The issue is a couple CCL tear, which is to say, both her back knees are shot. The surgery is very expensive. There may be a possibility to do just one knee, which would in effect leave her a tripod but able to get around.

The meds are starting to kick in and she's moving more easily, which is both good and bad of course. Good because it means she has less pain. Bad because it's bad for her knees to move around more.

Bad because I realize just how much heart she has.

Avallu would die for me and will even listen to me most of the time. Thea takes her guardianship of the house and especially the front approach more seriously than I have taken anything in my life, with patient persistence. Both are made of heart, of that kind of huge persistence of spirit which makes them seem larger than life and certainly more than human.

Solly is newer. Not new, but newer. If it takes me several years to fully settle into a relationship with anyone, it's fair to say that I'm still sort of navigating my way with Solly as she grows and now through her injury.

When she first came she took over my personal guardianship from Avallu. He's taken more shifts lately and I thought it was just because his surgery made him feel better, but I know now that she has been in pain. When I'm on the property I'm never out of sight of one of them. When I start the truck Thea barks out the front gate to announce to the neighbourhood that they better be careful and back off when I come through.

I can already feel I'm not going to describe this right. I keep veering into comparison, but Solly is herself. She is a giant white fluffy mass of joy and love. Even in pain. She's a guardian dog, don't get me wrong: we've trained back the growl that was trained out of her and she has very specific feelings about when cats should be near her, for example. She gets the zoomies and plays with Thea, the two of them cantering around. But she especially loves people.

When she first came she thought she was a lapdog and although she's scared of getting up on the couch because it causes so much pain, she still wants to be in physical contact a lot. When I'm outside she'll come up to me -- she's always observing, and learning when I'll have time to stop and pay attention and when I won't -- and put her chin on my hand. She hates her collar and leash, but she could be led almost anywhere by gently rubbing her under the chin, during which time she'll stare up with adoring eyes and follow and follow.

She's extremely smart, to the point where she can learn something from one repetition, but she can also re-learn if what she picked up the first time wasn't right. She's a little less stubborn than the other two, not because she doesn't have her own opinions on things, but because she's better at assessing a situation and integrating both the realities of the situation and her own priorities into one course of action. It means that she's... I almost want to say not trainable because she picks things up so far.

And she just adores human contact. If I bend down when I'm outside with any hint that I'm not super busy or super hauling things she comes up and asks for a snuggle. Avallu bum-leans to snuggle, keeping his face to the world guarding, and Thea rolls onto her back for belly rubs at a moment's notice, but Solly wants as much leaning, snuggling, licking, sniffing contact as possible. It's astonishing to me that I was able to train her not to jump up on folks because what she wants is that full contact so much -- but she's content, even before the injury, to wait until I come down to her since she's learned that not just me, but everyone, would rather a dog who's close to six feet on her hind legs didn't jump up.

Instead, even more than Thea, she has perfected the melted, adoring stare.

And then when something comes she can't handle, like the herd of deer that were charging her (while she was having serious pain walking) she comes into partnership with me or the other dogs seamlessly. She'd hold ground and protect me when I bent to make snowballs, and advance the couple feet each snowball bought us, adjusting to what I was doing. She soon learned that they couldn't charge her through the fence, so she spent more time patrolling at the right times of day to warn them off before they came over.

I don't know. We'll see what happens. She's just... she's a very good girl.

I have a really good vet.

My animals are actually spread across two vets at the same pracrice, and both are great. As far as I can tell, they charge only a token markup on Siri's meds, and they're happy with me doing home testing to avoid both a trip in and the cost of his diabetes bloodwork twice a year (he goes in for normal senior cat bloodwork once a year). They go out of their way to help the community with things like vax trips, which is a four-t-five hour round trip for them and not a ton of money. They're fully accessible through text and are happy to give advice on things like torn nails free. They actively love my cats.

And when I took Solly in yesterday, after explaining the reason she's been limping, she took a look at my face and said, "she's on pain control now and I know this is a lot to take onboard, so if you like I can call you next week and we can go over this again when you've had some time to think about it"

Solly herself behaved excellently in the car and at the vet's, though when I left her alone to get xrays she was pretty scared. But as soon as we got home she took off like a shot in the -15 snowy dark and I couldn't find her. I assume she's inside the fence and you;d think I could follow her tracks, but no. And it was a long day, and I was kind of woozy from the one-two-three shot of finding my truck battery stone dead in the morning and running around in sandals in the snow trying to start it, the drive to and from the vet which is after all five hours round trip, and the heavy emotion of the vet's visit. The last thing we all need is me dropping in the coldening night, unable to get up. So I went inside with the idea that I'll find her in the morning.

She'll need to stay inside now except for controlled walks.

With five senior animals in the house -- Thea, Avallu, Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri -- I was not expecting to need to make life or death decisions about Solly anytime soon. But here we are.

Compounding everything, Solly won't be able to work. The other two dogs are in semi-retirement, and with the birds I really do need someone who can work in the summer. In the winter they get mostly shut up and it's easier for the pups to patrol. Solly was a superb worker. There's a tornjak pup, like Avallu, available in BC. I do not want a new dog. Getting Solly a partner had been interesting to me but if she isn't going to survive more than a year or two and she is going to transition to almost fully inside I want to mourn. But. The work needs to be done. Or do I transition to the idea that in three to five years I just... don't have outside animals anymore? The dogs pass, I get rid of everyone except a couple cats, I hand mow a couple of acres and have a garden?

That seems terrible. The reasonable terrible thing, like getting a desk job somewhere that thinks good social management is having ladies' nights or politely smiling through someone's kill-the-immigrants screed over dinner once a week or living in a house with nothing to do that's not either housecleaning or in a computer. Smart.

It's 3am. I cried some. Whiskey always comes when I cry, like I'd called him, and he snuggled a but but then I cried a little too much for him. I slept, woke up, pulled out the laptop. I am too old to cry, I can't see well now but I guerss I still have enough adrenaline to remember how to type, which has been going lately in normal circumstances. I expect I'll barely be able to hobble around tomorrow so I'm hoping my pup has forgiven me by then and I can get her inside. I need to rearrange downstairs so she actually fits there but that'll be a couple days.

The road gods were kind to me. Very little ice on the roads, unlike yesterday, and over half of the way the road lines or a reasonable facsimile were visible. We all made it home safe, or as safe as Solly gets to be.

It'smoments like these I realize just how much love I'm surrounded with. There is a lot to lose in my life.

My poor little girl. She's been hiding her pain really well.

I still really haven't recovered from... all the stuff. Teaching classes, pushing to do one more thing and then one more thing as the fall stretched on long without much snow on the ground, PMDD meds wobble and then medical stuff, and a steady dribble of disability correspondence.

The hope was that, from last full moon to next, I could take a month off and just kind of recover and regroup.

Well, what happened is that I did an impromptu cleaning bee with some folks at the clay studio. We've had a ton of people through there, so it was nice to do some of the project stuff together (sand and kiln wash shelves, turn over some reclaim, organize some things) and load the big kiln full of bisque; the one guy who comes in only on his two-week shifts had a crate full of scuplture, the homeschool group had a lot of stuff, and two of the studio people had taken a wheel class in the next town over so they had more stuff too. It was a fun and varied kiln load. I got someone else to do the next-day check and I left relatively early so it wasn't too bad for me, and my mental health really needed a volume of communication with folks that wasn't authoritarian/disability logistics related.

My vet offered a sale on pet dental work, and so I booked Thea in for next week since she has some tooth stuff she's been waiting on. It isn't uncomfortable but it needs to happen at some point, so a sale seems like the right point. It will mean taking her into town (2 hour drive) in the pre-dawn dark (which is admittedly anything before 8:30am these days) in unknowable road conditions, and sleeping in the truck while her surgery is done.

It was inevitable that a -20 cold snap would be forecast for next week. We've been bobbling around freezing or just slightly below, again, still. It's normal in Fort for cold snaps to alternate with warmer snaps, not really fully above freezing or just a little above, where the snow compacts and there's a reprieve from the brutality of real cold. Our last snap was in the -15Cs and was brief; the next is supposed to be in the -20Cs and not so brief. There's supposed to finally be a lot of snow; we have some but not much right now.

The last couple days were warmish so I went out and sledgehammered some things off the ground (things freeze to the ground and ice gets harder the colder it is, so sometimes on the warm days they can be moved. In this case there was a concrete block that had blown down right where I wanted to snowblow, and some pallets lying on the ground. The yard is clearer now, which is good.

Then last night a big wind came up, gusts up to 80kph, and unsurprisingly the pigpen's metal roof started to peel off. I went out with the power drill and climbed up there. The wind was enough to pull some of the screws through the metal and fold it in half backwards, so I folded it back and screwed some wooden strips overtop, so the screws went through wood, then the metal, then into the structure. While I was doing that the roof was bucking and lifting and very slippery since it was angled and topped with snow. I did not slide off (the drop would only have been 4 feet from the back, so I wasn't so worried) but I did get some bruises. It was holding an hour later but the wind continued all night; I have not yet gone out to check. Suspecting the wind might be ab issue, I'd used hurricane ties on the rafters when I made it, so I'm actually quite pleased with myself. Been a couple years since I made a pigpen fix in the middle of Winter Weather. Of course, it doesn't leave me much energy for today.

It's looking clear and sunny through the window. It's inviting me to come out and totter around a bit in the sun, and of course everyone needs to be fed.

But you can see how I haven't had much rest. I've had the mental fortitude to not do too much pottery at least, crawling into bed around 4pm instead of taking an hour of wheel time at night.

Descent into meds:

Oh! Good news from the gut meds I was given by my doctor: things feel weird in there still but these really help. Things seem to pretty much go in the right direction, with minimal pain comparatively, and at more or less the right speed. I don't worry everything is going to fall out of my stomach if I lean over, and I suspect I'm breathing in a lot less gut contents at night. AND I'm feeling a little less lightheaded, or lightheaded less frequently, which I'm chalking up to keeping liquid in my body better. Interestingly one of them (Accel hyoscine or something?) was prescribed to me for gallbladder stuff but I think has additional IBS use? I'm taking it at half the prescribed amount, since that seems to work best.

Anyhow, there we are.

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greenstorm

February 2026

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Greenstorm's Journal

watching the cycle: leaves to mulch to soil to leaves

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