It is a mystery

As expected, the time change has absolutely fucked up my sleep schedule. Not helped by a skunk spraying something in the front yard at 4:30am this morning so my bedroom smelled intensely of skunk while I was laying there awake for no reason and the house still smells faintly. We are going to have to trap it if it's living under the porch. And also not helped by covering the boiling for an hour until 10:30pm last night. 

We have successfully started boiling sap although I'm not super involved in it. I don't know what I'm doing, never really have done it, so I panic a lot about it while taking over for my dad so he gets a break. Like last night, the sap started drawing off but the container with the filters nearly overflowed because the filters were ??? and there was some panicking. My dad said it probably wasn't going to draw off at all in the hour he went inside. So you know. Normal stuff. My sister is in town for a couple of days to help with it at least. Once I get some better idea on how it all works, I'll make a post about it. Currently, we are producing delicate grade, which my sister called cotton candy tasting. That changes over the tapping season as the microbes change.

I finished splitting all the basswood on the ground, just need to stack it. Not sure we have quite enough wood for the season, but I think it'll be a bit shorter anyway. I have started shifting focus to the field season, it is time to start outside work. Blueberry pruning is up first since that needs to be done dormant. I should crank through that quick. Then moving and mulching with woodchips. I need to order grow lights for our starts, I need to get peppers started in the next two weeks or so, figure out pumpkin orders, etc etc. 

There's some health stuff going on with my parents that we are waiting to hear on, so I am scaling back farm stuff that was going to be a bit of a stretch to complete. The weird fruits like currants and expanding the elderberries. 

I am working on sidejob stuff and need to bill that client. Need to nap and eat more food. I made chocolate cake and pizza the other night. Also split three loads of wood for the burner once I got the bobcat tire fixed. I took the bobcat tire to the tire place to get fixed on the day we had freezing rain, not my best move and there was only one hairy moment on a backroad until I kicked it into 4 wheel and slowed way down. Skipped that road on the way back. Main roads were fine. The bobcat had to come back to the main farm to pick up the sap totes because of where we put them for good gravity feeding since regular tractor forks can't lift high enough. 

Also went to a grower meeting about christmas trees, looks like a really good enterprise, don't have the capacity this year, but should next year if all goes well. Interesting thing, a lot of the christmas tree farms have been in business for 50-100 years. Wildly long time. 

I keep focusing on farm stuff because the world is such a shitshow. My local rep emailed me some propaganda so I sent back a little rant on how immoral bombing Iran is. I don't think it will do anything. 

But yesterday instead of going to spinning group, I drove an hour and a half to an event put on by the regional trans org which was performances and a makers market and I felt like such shit driving down, but afterwards I was so happy. It was so nice to just see all the queer folks, and so many! And bought some weird art. And saw some performances. What a delight. Did get to talk to someone who is localish to me and they said they are trying to get some more folks together up our way at various places, so I'm excited to keep an eye out for that. 

Friday morning we spread three loads of straw before the wind picked up too much to spread more, personal best for me and I was pretty sore for it. But I sat around the rest of the morning and then went out just before noon to clean bale strings out of the shredder. That went fine, it goes pretty quick if you don't let them build up too much. I was putting it back together, I took my glove off to thread the nut, started tightening it, the wrench slipped and I jammed my left index finger onto one of the shredder blades. To be fair, the nut is under the shredder, so I was working crouched on the ground up over my head (equipment chocked, always always always), but it felt bad. 

The cut is parallel to my fingernail and wraps around the front and went quite deep. I sat on the couch for about an hour after rinsing it and it was still bleeding decently, so I took myself to urgent care. The good news is that they weren't busy at all, so I got seen immediately and it was rinsed and I got a couple stitches in the front of my finger to help stabilize the skin flap. The shot to numb my finger hurt way worse than the actual wound. 

It was bitter cold yesterday morning (3F), but dad and tried to shred straw anyway. However, we are using the Kubota which is the newest tractor and has a very fine mesh fuel filter. And it was so cold that the diesel had thickened and the tractor would start sputtering every time we tried to turn the PTO on. So we gave it up. I went back inside for a few hours. Went to cut some wood and somehow during my cutting ,the chain jumped the track and dinged up the new bar and chain. I think the side nuts loosened up somehow but now the chain won't fit on the track, so I need to see if it can be fixed. Deeply annoying, stupid mistake to not check.

Then I started moving tractors under cover. Even in the afternoon it was so cold and I ended up having to jump the 395 and still need to jump the E this morning. I split a little bit of wood with the 395 while I had it running but there are log chunks so big that I need help rolling them. They're huge. In that time, the wind died down enough and I put the 395 away in the metal shed and headed down to west. It was 11F and the kubota worked fine. We got the last two loads of straw down, working past dark even if I bunged up the final row we did by accidentally dropping two bales off the wagon and being short of what we needed. We were worried about safety after dark with making the step between platform and wagon, but it turns out the hardest part was not seeing the bale strings. Don't recommend, won't be doing that again. 

At some point, I bonked my finger despite my best efforts and reopened it a bit, I think it was the wood splitting or when I whacked it on the railing. Probably not smart to split wood. I have been keeping it wrapped when out working and that's been okay, not too bad to grab bales since I can flex it backwards enough to stay out of the way.

I did drain the downstairs bathroom but I think it froze in the faucet since it was just a trickle that came out once I reopened it. I think I'm going to switch to letting it trickle instead of drain, we are suppose to have overnight temps down around zero all week and it already partially froze. Plus I'm getting tired of having water go down my sleeves when I drain the pipes. And it's annoying to fill the back of the toilet from the kitchen. Toilet line shouldn't freeze since it's closer to the basement. ETA: cleaned the faucet filter and we are back on full blast! going to trickle it at night still

The snow has started here, just about an inch or so but it's coming down fast. The plows went by once already, which is surprising but they are probably going to try and keep on top of it. I haven't seen any vehicles go by, so everyone is staying home if they can which is very good. I need to go pick up the wood I split yesterday and jump the E so we can park it under cover but otherwise we are good. I'm planning to bake today and lay around and do not much useful things

things melted last week and everything was mud, so I got a couple days break from spreading straw. weirdly, my problem elbow hurt more when I wasn't using it constantly than when I was. Not sure what's up with that. The temperature dropped again, so the ground froze again. Did another load at dawn this morning but discovered a belt had worn weirdly on the shredder, so I need to run to town today and get a new one before we shred more. 

The pottery class I was going to take isn't actually available on Wed, their only evening hours are mondays from 5-8 and they only just updated that on facebook and haven't emailed me back. I'm busy that night, so that's out. I could theoretically do day classes but with how short the days are, any daylight is needed for work hours especially if I need extra warmup time between morning and afternoon. ETA: I found another studio with wed classes and easier signup procedures. done.

 I did go to spinners guild on sunday and it was a gosh dang delight including one of the longer term guild members coming this time who is queer in so many ways and everyone was lovely to him. It was so so so nice and relaxing. I think for the next meeting I'm going to get either my electric wheel battery up and running or take my smaller wheel and start an alpaca spin on it. My CPW is too big and loud for the space we've been meeting in. I got there right at 1pm and was still one of the later arrivals, so clearly I need to get there even earlier :)

We have started the wood stove indoors back up, so that's nice. I missed it. We ran out of wood that size and it had gotten warm, so there was less point in running it. Dad got on the roof and cleaned the chimney out while it was off, so that was nice and split some of the wood at the rental into wood stove size for both their house and mine. 

I did kickstart my parents into doing work on their house! I sanded their office floor and then mom cleaned it and we sealed and finished it together. Definitely one of those times where it would have been faster with just one person, but so be it. My dad has been working on their living room wall drywall which is next in line. They do have renters moving into the rental Feb 1, so there is painting to be done there, plus some other small misc stuff. Parents' house also needs paint so I will be helping with some amount of painting. I didn't do drywall in my upstairs bathroom yet as expected, but I'm planning to later this week when dad is around to help me move the drywall outside to cut and then upstairs to get in place. They do have an extremely firm deadline of house renovations of June when my dad's college buddies are coming to visit, so there's that. We did discover that nice foosball tables are extremely heavy and it would be good to have more than two people to get it in a bilco basement door. I didn't get squished but it was very very heavy. After we got it down there, my dad said, you know, I think it did say something about being over 200lbs. hmm. thanks dad. Although we would have had to get a cousin or something to come help, which my parents are slightly allergic to asking for help, so I dunno if that would have happened anyway. We do have a vague plan to get the floor done which is good and there is progress happening. Given my parents hated the smell of the seal and finish, we are waiting to move them into the house until the living room/dining room/kitchen are all sealed and finished. 

Winter is one of those times where I am just sleepy a lot, so I do accept this as a fact of life but also am fully aware that I am relatively isolated from the local area. In NY, I had an established friend groups, I had places I could go when I wanted a little socializing or crafting with folks, all sorts of things. Here I don't have any of that, so I'm trying to find something. Over the summer, I was so busy with the farm that I didn't really notice, but now I really can tell. To be fair, I have three nights a week where I have weekly social opportunities, but they are all digital. I know I need to push myself and get out there but it's hard and farm work is a bit unpredictable with when we need to run for straw and things. So spinners guild was excellent. I'm hoping to go to a meetup this saturday, although I'll be missing gaming with Jade that night for it. I need to do something thur/fri nights. And maybe some saturdays during the day. Hmm.

Almost done, just two group outings left, one Thurs night, one Fri morning. They had been scheduled for the previous Thursday but it rained a lot, so we rescheduled them. I had my employees start cleaning things up yesterday, emptying displays, cleaning up unused tables, etc. Today is the day a lot of people are stopping by to get pumpkins for their animals, so I'll have them pull off the displays and out of bins first, then from the field. 

My to-do list for the next day or two: 

• nap - today, woke up at 3am to use the bathroom, only managed to doze on and off until 7. and I had gone to sleep late. curses upon time changes for sleep schedule disruptions
• grocery store - overdue
• clean out fridge - there are things alive in there that shouldn't be
• fill out a form and mail it
• make pumpkin pie - lots of edible squash left, so I'll keep a bunch and a bunch will go to the food pantry this week
• crack garlic, get rototiller on tractor and plant it real fast

I've been playing video games and relaxing this morning, doing some spinning too. delightful

And the easiest one is last. This week will be busy, we've got three huge daytime outings tomorrow and Wed. I still need to text all my employees today but that might be the last work task of the day. that would be nice. we've got fun things planned for this coming weekend so I just need to make sure we're all ready. 

I need to dig through my yarn this afternoon, I'm planning to sell some at the weavers guild show and sale and the deadline for inventory is Wed. So I gotta get it done. I won't take much, I've barely worked on making things from what I've woven. Just piled it up. I will be tying off my current warp and planning to disassemble it for the move to the house since I'm contemplating how cold that shed will be and deciding I don't need to weave in that. I can't even wear slippers since I need to feel the treadles with my feet. 

I completely mucked up some farm things, my garlic didn't get in the ground and neither did any of the cover crops. mulling over what to do with that, not sure it's worth the seed.

I'm going to nap again today, more the better

Another good busy weekend, excellent practice for the employees. I was very cranky Friday night but pretty sure I hadn't eaten enough lunch or dinner. Much better feeling Saturday, but I also got the chance to drive a tractor at night which was lovely and nice. I was tired again yesterday but that's because it was so hot. 

We picked 24 tall bins of pumpkins this week and 8 short bins of various things. This isn't even half of what we have planted. I'm spending today, tomorrow and wed picking weird stuff because we have definite frost coming wednesday/thursday (predicted 36 and 34F so we'll be lower) and the weird stuff is often frost sensitive. Face pumpkins usually aren't to a light frost. Also rain coming tomorrow night, thank goodness because I haven't irrigated anything arg. Then thurs/fri picking big pumpkins. Plus all the group outings during the weekdays

Did find gluten free fig newtons at the store which is delightful. not as good as my homemade ones, but as good as OG fig newtons so I'm happy. 

Sleep has been hard to find, I get so keyed up with farm stuff by the time I get up to the house, eat dinner and do all the things i need to do, it's 9pm and I'm not quite tired, so I read for a bit. Plus calls and emails and reservations. it is go time. thankfully mom has been feeding me, I know my temper varies entirely by how hungry I am. 

Did enjoy browsing this collection of spindle whorls on the internet archive housed in the cleveland museum of art

much to do this week. at least I will have 2 hours of crafting tonight

Monday, I worked a half day, primarily running errands to pick things up for the farm. I took advantage of this and went to Wegmans and rediscovered how amazing it is. The gluten free section is huge! And clearly labeled! I gotta say though, the gf naan I got is far inferior to the pita bread I've been making. But I stocked up on things and found some new stuff to try. I was particularly impressed by the gluten free soups. 

That night during crafting, I was so fed up with how annoying it was to craft in the hallway between the spare room and my room (because there wasn't enough floor space for a 4 ft folding table to iron and assemble sewing stuff) that I spent an hour and a half of crafting cleaning and organizing. First, I took all the stuff that was stacked in my room that are important, plus all of the blankets and misc stuff that had been living on top of the box piles and tossed them all onto my bed. Then I took all of the boxes of my stuff that was in the spare room (fleeces, roving, yarn primarily) and stacked them up. I did put them in front of one of mom's shelves, but I determined nothing of urgency was on the shelf, reorganized so I could use one small shelf for my delicate keepsakes and then stacked my boxes floor to ceiling in front of the shelf. They are all light and there was enough of a corner next to my dresser that I was able to get three good stacks. this was almost every box I had in the space room. all light but bulky things

Then I took all of mom's bins that were in front of my closet, at the end of my bed and behind my door and put them in the newly cleared space in the spare room on the table there. Then moved my small shelves into my room and they are now usable! Shoved my book boxes, plus big luggage at the foot of the bed in between the bed and a shelf and then put all of my soft stuff onto the shelves. 

So in the end, I actually gained floor space in my room plus storage space plus I can possibly move my little crafting table into my room monday nights. it's so nice!

Then I had an absolutely baffling conversation with my mom which went something like: me: I cleaned my room and reorganized! her: why did you do that without me!!! I needed to look in there for a small bin!!! Me: but you'd turn it into an ordeal! and why would small bin be in my room? and you never mentioned this??? her: I told you I couldn't find small bin so you'd look for it in your room! it's gone forever!!! me: you never said it was in my room??? is that why you told me to keep an eye out for it? her: yes!

turns out I had opened small bin without ever looking at the label on it, been baffled by its contents, moved it to the spare room on top of her pile of stuff and she found it in less than a minute. if I had let her be involved, it would have been probably five hours of nonsense with lots of debate. I love her, but dear god, living with her and working with her on some farm stuff is too much. everything needs to be debated to death and back. the conversations I've had about the baked goods we're going to buy for the fall weekends is so incredibly irritating. I guess I need to get the kitchen in the church up and running so I never need to have that debate again. lol who am I kidding

tuesday night I made rice, curry chicken and roasted delicata squash and chickpeas, ate it all week, so tasty. 

Myself and employees have been slowly harvesting the first pumpkins of the season. Ours are all very late but the specialty stuff is what we need harvested, so tiny pumpkins, gourds, white pumpkins (since they go yellow in the sun easily), edible squashes. We bought a load of pumpkins from the auction to supplement until ours are ready. 

Yesterday, we had a big workday to get things done. I woke up at 4am and couldn't go back to sleep. We had five employees coming, one for her first day of work/training. There was an equipment auction, so my parents both went to the auction to see if any of the UTVs there would be good. A working UTV would be great but aughaugh. Trying to keep five people working on all different tasks that take different amounts of time and support is really difficult. But I managed. New employee is great so far, worked fast and came and found me when she finished things. I'll have her come back one night for training more. We're actually in decent shape as far as things go. My parents did buy me 11 nice new produce boxes with false bottoms, which are excellent for displays so I guess I can't complain that much. Me and the employees got a lot done so now we need the big stuff done, which I don't know how to do yet (hayfort, canopies) so I'm bothering dad about getting that done. Hayfort got done late yesterday, canopies this coming week.

Still absolutely baffled by the number of people that will come out to the farm without checking our facebook page, website, instagram page and/or answering machine to actually check if we are open, all of which I keep updated regularly. I think a lot of people just go: oh the grocery stores have pumpkins, so everyone is open for pumpkins

I have been irrigating so much. I'm trying to get the new grass seed to germinate that we no-tilled in, so I borrowed rainbirds from my uncle. Just. so much watering. I probably spend two hours a day on irrigation. Over a month without rain here and our total rain since beginning of August is around 4 inches. Pretty dire. But we have a 70% chance of rain on tuesday, so I'm hopeful we'll get something good. I guess I need to cover all of the things I've just been leaving outside because it hasn't rained in so long. There's also a 30-40% chance of rain the rest of the week, so we probably won't get any of that, or all of it. 

On Saturday nights, Jade and I have been watching the new season of Bake Off as it is releasing with text chat and then playing stardew valley on discord voice chat afterwards. it's been so nice, I miss her a lot. We go on break in October with the farm and catch up in November. 

I sent my parents away today to a n-scale train convention out in central pa somewhere. my dad sounded so wistful about going, so I decided that he should, my mom went along for fun. my dad said as he went out the door "us leaving the farm a week before opening is a sign at how good things are going because of you" which was nice to hear since I feel like we aren't ready yet but not to an extent that I can't let him go do something fun for a day. the house is nice and quiet right now. tasks for today: move rainbirds and irrigate, harvest some things, start display setup, look at phone stuff. I woke up at 4:30 and couldn't get back to sleep until 6 or so when I should have gotten up so I'm sleepy and slow to start work today. ah well.

I'm staying up late to extra enjoy the quiet house right now. okay day, got some work done like all the drip tape pulled from one old strawberry field, but also something related to the oil on the cultivating tractor went, maybe a burst o-ring. I thought about texting my dad but they're away and I don't actually need the tractor for tomorrow. irrigation is going slowly. one place we irrigate from is a little bay but right now the creek is so low the bay doesn't refill fast enough, so I'm irrigating those blocks 45 minutes at a time with a 15 minute refill period. deeply annoying. I'm moving the pump again tomorrow to the next set of blocks but that section of the creek fills fast so it's easier

also discovered why my truck had the check engine light on for the last two days. flat tire. or deflating tire. small rock punctured it, so I left the rock in it for now and reinflated it so I can still move it around if needed, but I'm using the farm truck to run around and actually get stuff done. I'm going to put my spare on tomorrow or monday and see if I can remove the rock and patch it and then that will be my spare tire.

I did get to meet a fellow weaver. my grandpa's partner has a friend up visiting who is a weaver, has sheep, spins, etc. they stopped by since they wanted to see my weaving stuff, so I showed them the shed, my wheels, my loom, the little bit of handwoven I had over there. it was a wonderful chat with a fellow fiber artist. she's got Leister longwools and has offered me some fleece if I stop by, so I'm going to take some of my handspun over to show off tomorrow. she recently came from a class at the John Campbell Folk School with Deb Robson (which I'm a little jealous) but she said I should go take that class even though it's expensive and it felt weirdly like a sales pitch almost. it was odd. but we got away from that soon enough. it was like she couldn't fathom there might be reasons why someone wouldn't be able to take a week off work and also pay a lot of money to learn stuff. 

things I haven't had at the same time: free time, money. but also if I had all the time and money in the world I wouldn't take a spinning class first. honestly. there's so many other things to learn about that I'm not an expert at already. aaaand I just looked up the cost of those classes. pricy!

she was really nice and invited me down to her place or maybe a local friend's place (reedrover  I think she knows your normal shearer so she might be vaguely in your area) for some kind of fiber gathering in October. It was nice of her but October is too busy. I felt a little bad because my grandpa's partner is a nice lady but she knows so little about fiber stuff that she just said some weird things to try and be relatable in the conversation but it came across very oddly. I have some feelings about her that aren't always positive so I try and let stuff go (she is a Deeply Normal Person and sometimes attempts to make the rest of us be normal which like, l o l, good fucking luck. also I got the impression that when she started dating my grandpa, she wanted to be a grandma to us cousins but none of us were having it, we already had a grandma and we'd all grown up extremely close to Real Grandma and didn't appreciate it especially because most of us were at least teens before B arrived) funny how moving makes one contemplate relationships and things

I have packed one weekend in september with both a Ren Faire trip and a fiber fest trip back to back days, so that's uhh. good I guess. bad for getting farm work done but oh well. I'm hoping some of the local weavers guild will be at that fiber festival so I can talk to them. I might try and join it for the winter. I am 3/4 done threading heddles on the loom and I've been doing some spinning, so project progress! I need to get back to posting pictures of things

nothing horribly bad, just odd. it was really hot, hit 90f with 60% humidity all day. closed early, sent my workers home early, spent the morning doing some irrigation. I didn't have any urgent tasks, so I weeded, which I find quite nice and soothing. 

part way through the morning, something was in my eye causing blurry vision. not anything large enough to make my eye hurt and I couldn't see anything, but it was deeply disconcerting to have a blurry section in my eye. it might have been weird sweat? eventually it went away once I blinked a lot. may have also been something from my new spinning project

one of the pumps stopped pumping water and I didn't notice until I went down to switch the blocks, it was running dry for probably an hour after running fine for 20 mins while I fixed a line, so it's probably shot. unsure what caused it but it only started having problems after the o-ring fell out of the feed tube and I replaced it, but it was watering fine last week. augh. so we're down to one running pump. tomorrow I'm going to work on pump #2, which is down due to carborator/gas leak problem from earlier this year. there's a spare pump in the metal shed, which has a bad motor, so we might be able to take the pump off that one and slap it on the other. 

it's been so dry here. we got a quarter inch of rain on sunday and we're parched again. all the sludge puddles at the ends of some of the veggie rows dried up in a day. we might get more rain thursday, but three days of 90+F weather requires watering no matter what. super looking forward to three days of beautiful weather in the 70s later this week. we're going to do a campfire friday night

I have my new atom L mostly set up and ready to go. I figured out that my secondary instagram account (fiber arts) is 2FA locked out, only options are: previous device, authenticator app, backup codes. I have none of those. So I decided to get a new tank mini screen. It feels silly to do that, but given my track record, I will break another phone within a year and it can be backup. And then I can get my instagram account unlocked properly and change the 2FA

I finished a yarn yesterday, spent some time in the shed, rotated the loom and repaired my skein reel, so once I whittle a new peg I will be able to skein off the yarn I've spun and post about it. 

and it's only tuesday. 

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