unicornduke | It has been a long week

I'm looking forward to having tomorrow completely off work. Well, mostly. I worked Monday last week due to urgent pumpkin planting and the heat wave and I actually took a nap yesterday afternoon on the couch after lunch and didn't do all that much work after lunch. My last day off was Saturday and I spent all day at the SCA event. Sometimes the body just is done.

My plan to wake up early, work until it got really hot and then spent some time in the creek worked extremely well. I literally just change into shorts and my rubber boots and head down. The creek is extremely cold at the best of times, it's all spring fed from the mountains and mostly shaded by trees in our neck of the woods, so it cools me off quick and makes my feet nice and cold within 20 minutes of being fully submerged and they stay cold for several hours. It's fantastic.

I'm not actually sure what days we did what, but there was field prep of plowing and disking various fields in various states of ready, laying plastic (biodegradable plastic), my dad planting bare ground with the planter, and both of us planting into the plastic with the dorker planter (not sure why my dad and uncle call it the dorker, it's not the brand or anything), transplanting the giant pumpkins, irrigating and fertigating the vegetables and strawberries, and setting up the selling area for opening for raspberries and blueberries. I had employees working as well, although on the hot days, I sent them home at noon. The 14 year old forgot his water bottle on tuesday, so I gave him two from the cooler that we sell, told him to take at least a five minute break in the shade every hour and take another water bottle when he walked home. He was mostly weeding things. I had my other employee using the cultivating tractor, weed wacking the deer fencing. I started setting up the deer fencing in the strawberry field by the house since the deer are eating it, just need to buy handles when I go to town tomorrow and I'll have it up and electrified by Tuesday. And we opened for raspberry and blueberry picking. One of the hot days, I drank six bottles of water by 2pm, two of which had added electrolytes. Sweated most of it out. There was a breeze that day, so it wasn't fully torture. Just mostly.

We got so much done this week holy shit. I did other stuff too. And so did my parents. They had their first event in the church this weekend, so we spent a lot of time whipping that into shape. I feel back to full normal after being sick thankfully.

The urgent stuff is all done, so I spent some time this morning doing less urgent stuff. Weeding the raspberries, primarily the new patch to help keep the perennial weed problems down. And cleaning up the elderberry planting. It's definitely in rough shape, we probably won't have much of a harvest at all. They're european elderberries and a bunch of them have died, so we'll replace them with american elderberries which seem to thrive locally anyway. They're in the rockiest part of the farm as well, so it's good to have something perennial there. My dad and I talked about expanding the planting because there's so much interest in them, so that will be on the list for next spring. Shouldn't be too hard, all the irrigation is set up already, just would need to place landscape fabric and plant them in. A lot of the small crops have suffered for lack of attention. I've been working on the kiwiberries every time I'm nearby them and I trained the first canes perpendicular across the trellis the other day. Exciting!

I've spent some time contemplating my social life or lack of. All the things I would do to make friends, volunteer, meetup groups, etc rely on a more consistent schedule than I can manage right now. To be fair, I have social things three nights a week right now, monday crafting, tuesday video games with sibs, saturday watching baking with J but those are all online. I need to do some things in person. I've texted one person who I've met up with inconsistently the last few years who lives locally, originally one of J's friends but we've chatted a bunch now and it's been enjoyable. Last year was so chaotic that I failed to meet up with her, so I apologized for that in the text. There's a Wed afternoon knitting group at the local library, but unless it's raining, I can't make that, especially with employees working. My dad usually has computer work Tues and Wed, so I have to be supervisor to workers. I should aim to find something going on Thursday or Friday nights since I now don't have employees working that late (high school kids worked after school this spring and early summer so my evenings were busy). The SCA stuff is shaping up to be good but only if I can commit to going to things, there's another event this Saturday that I was hoping to go to, but we're open all day sat for picking and it looks like it'll be sunny.

But I'm the most content I think I've ever felt in my whole life. It's wild how solid I feel even with all of the irritation of my parents not moving out yet. I'm not anxious. I'm not worrying. I'm enjoying the work and the days are long but they don't feel that long. Some of that might be the testosterone and the joy I'm feeling from it. Some of it might be the work. It's just nice to be out doing physical work without the driving from previous jobs. So fun! I get to move and look at the beautiful views and the neat stuff on the farm. All the lilies are blooming right now! Growing things! That other people pick and enjoy! Spending time with family! I dunno. It's nice to enjoy this even while the political situation is *gestures*. did have a good convo with someone about USDA cuts to grants that help farmers, so that was a good win.

Also I just finished Emily Tesh's Incandescent while sitting here on register and I am SCREAMING, I got 2/3 of the way through and rolled my eyes a bit and THEN THE THING AHHH