It is a mystery

Friday afternoon, my aunt hosted the 4th party. I'm really unsure why friday at 2pm was the time, but I closed up the register at 1, did some plowing, ran the irrigation pumps, then showered and headed up. The heat was miserable to work in all week and a lot of my time was spent running irrigation. 

The party wasn't any cooler, my aunt and uncle don't have AC, not even window units so their house was pretty warm even with the fans running. Most of us just migrated to their porch because it was just as warm outside as in and there was a decent breeze plus a view of the orchard. A small storm rolled through but it didn't even do a tenth of an inch but it hailed 20 mins away so I'm okay with it. I left around 7 to do tractor setup for the neighbor to help me and went to bed early after my mom decided to have a lot of feelings about the upcoming trip at me. I did not appreciate this, I was so tired. Being cranky back wouldn't do anything, so I just went to sleep. 

Saturday, we were open, I still haven't gotten someone to cover weekends, so I was on register. It was only 85F, positively cool! But I got up early to finish the plowing, wrapping it up just before we opened at 8 and by the time I got off work at 1pm, I was already tired. But I ran the irrigation for an hour, packed, put away all the equipment that shouldn't get wet, then pulled the pumps, showered and hit the road to my brother's. I almost didn't go. I was so hot and tired. 

The drive down sucked. It is becoming clear that my truck AC is not keeping up anymore and I mildly sweated all the way down the turnpike. I stopped and used the bathroom at a rest stop solely to wake myself up. Despite the day, there was basically no traffic and the drive was easy down near Philly. I arrived at my brother's place around 5pm where they reheated food for me and I ate a ton of fruit. My dad and I kept an eye on the weather back home via the weather station app and the radar, which was 0.6 inches of rain in 20 mins plus high winds. I have to go out this afternoon and start cleanup on some of that.

We hung out, watched the thunderstorms that rolled through, I got the tour of their new place which was absolutely beautiful and cool. The younger crowd of us stayed up until 1am playing Bomb Busters which is basically fancy collaborative go fish. It was a lot of fun! 

I slept in until 9am on the couch but was one of the first up anyway. I got lots of dog snuggles, ate brownies for breakfast (absolutely amazing gluten free brownies) and we all slugged around until after lunch. I hit the road, taking the long route and avoiding the turnpike and the traffic snarls on 95 and got home just about in time to get an inch and a half of rain in about 45 minutes. I had checked on the pumps and the creek levels as soon as I got home, then decided to fully pull the pumps and pipes after that rain came through. One of the creeks had risen over a foot due to the storm. It's back down now, but we still have a flood watch. Rain total for the weekend is three inches and we're getting more tonight.

We are hitting the point of desperately behind, the corn maze is not in the ground yet, there is time sensitive spraying to be done and one of my main farm employees just texted that he has a fulltime job starting next week. And my parents are out of town this week. Great. Well, oh well. I'll figure it out. Or not. 

the raspberries are ripe a week or so early. I was hoping for a break between strawberry and raspberry picking but uhh. nope. the early blueberries are just about ready too, I ate the first one today. this is way way early. we have raspberries ready to pick.

this morning first thing (on the tractor and in the field by 6am) I finished the between-plastic-mulch spray that took me three tries because I broke the sprayer twice in two different ways that were easily fixed but if the fix takes more than an hour, I have to delay until the next morning or evening since it needs to be dead calm. my to-spray list is four items long. much to do. my afternoon break has been sending the email newsletter, facebook page, website, answering machine update about the raspberries and figuring out what the schedule for the rest of the summer will look like. we are going to be open part of sunday but I'll be able to get to pride after we close. I have to spray again tonight to finish the 3 acres of pumpkins on mulch if the wind dies down although it's pretty breezy right this minute.

it's fine. my sister was in town visiting for the last few days and what a gosh darn delight to see her again. She took some of the pressure off me by spending time with my mom and helping her around the house and also made us food. 

She also did some lovely support for me as well, by listening to me rant about the parents for 45 mins and also her and her partner came with me to home depot and the grocery store monday to help me not have a mental breakdown in the store which helped so much. there was one point in the grocery where I was covering my face with my hands while they found the stuff they needed for chili but we got out of there pretty quickly after that so it was fine. home depot was fine, I had no issues there. why are grocery stores so terrible. surely someone has done the science on this. they're the worst. actually walmart is the worst but grocery stores are a close second.

apparently Z's support was all I needed to get me through the week because I haven't felt this calm or focused in about two months and I've been tackling my to do list this week and it's going well. support? helping??? wild. I think I haven't been ranting to friends or on the crafting zoom because there's only so many times that I want to complain and I'm sure listening to me complain about the same stuff over and over gets dull. so I type it all in here and you can respond if you want or tell me sister who has heard it before but not for a couple months. 

anyway, I need to go fill the sprayer and put out cones to mark ripe raspberry rows and maybe take a quick nap 

It's so satisfying to check most things off my work to do list in the time I thought they would take.

Last week's to do list
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It's a scorcher today and tomorrow, 89F both days, so I'm off today and will work early hours tomorrow then go and dunk myself in the creek for a bit to cool off. It worked fantastic last year. Then it will cool right off which is great.

Today has been a day of weird things and it isn't even noon. I laid around in bed for a while which was nice. My mom decided to go and replant strawberries this morning for some baffling reason, they could have waited until wed. She offered her help and I accepted since that's a task that requires thinking about what varieties go where and employees are not so good at that and I've been busy irrigating things. I went and grabbed groceries and picked up food for the cookout friday night. Biggest struggle was finding the graham crackers and hot dog buns which were in the forbidden aisle I never go to since everything has gluten in it. Sent out all the text invites to everyone local for the cookout we are hosting this friday over at the church pavilion. My idea. I was planning for saturday since Jade is away and not able to game but the weather looks gross so I said friday. Should be nice. Realized I was out of cash, so couldn't hit the local place for cheesy kielbasa sticks but I can get those another day. Headed home.

Five minutes from home, I get a frantic series of texts from my mom that the back door won't open and she can't get into the house to cool off. But she figured out there was a whole other house and went and cooled off over there. I came home and had thankfully left the front door unlocked when I moved my plants outside. But it doesn't have a knob on the outside and it is original to the house, so I had to get a pair of pliers to open the door. This door is so old it still uses a skeleton key. Once I was inside, I fiddled with the back door and determined it was broken broken, something in the mechanism wouldn't let the jam move inwards. So I got the picks we use for equipment seal replacements, moved one thing in the mechanism so I could turn the handle and then jammed a second pick into the door jam and forced it to retract enough to open the door.

Then I replaced the doorknob with one from the basement. And then realized how hot it was getting inside already and fetched the rolling AC unit from my mom's shed and set that up. and then my dad texted that he had forgotten to remove one woodchuck trap from the woods line, so I ran down there and picked that up so we wouldn't leave an animal to suffer all week. Made yogurt in the middle of all that and remembered I had bought a new kitchen thermometer so I got that setup.

I think I might take a nap. Jeez.

I'm trying some chocolate milk today to see if all chocolate milk now makes me sick or if it was just that one bottle that was bad. I love chocolate milk. I had vague plans to bake or make pastry cream but honestly, no. I'm done doing stuff for the day. I might do one sidejob plan, but otherwise probably spinning the rest of the day.

My little daily/weekly task list has been excellent, I set a reminder for 7pm because the daily tasks take in total around 30 mins and it's easy to get some stretching in right before bedtime.

ETA: I forgot I had a 1:45pm dentist appointment, so just got that done too. hooray for phone reminders.

Monday was supposed to be my day off work this week, I spent it setting out row covers and row cover supplies and getting the tractors/sprayers setup for dad. I was supposed to take today off with the INCH OF RAIN, but my dad convinced me that we needed to put the row covers back out for tonight and tomorrow's potential cold so we did that this morning. he wanted to wait until 4 or 6pm tonight when we got another half inch of rain. I said this morning or it isn't happening today because the row covers will just rip if you try to unfold them while wet. I wanted to do it tomorrow night because I don't think it'll freeze tonight with how wet it is and they'd dry out tomorrow. I'm getting real sick of my dad's absolute ridiculous optimism, today's example was: it'll take less than an hour to spread the row covers, it's easy. it took 2 hours and it wasn't easy. I want him away from day to day grunt work and doing special project stuff with no timeline because that's what he's best at. or a deadline but not urgent. 

I did get my grocery shopping done first thing and hit an estate sale where I picked up some fleece fabric and a bunch of linens and blankets new in the bags of various sizes. I always feel bad at estate sales because a lot of times it's clear the person who lived there wasn't having a good time. This person was a crafter clearly but also someone who spent a lot of money on stuff and never used it. The linens were all new in bags, there was fabric ordered online sealed in bags. The house was absolutely packed with stuff and this was the second sale they had put on already and they'll have more in the coming weeks. I also picked up a set of bowls since I own so few sets of dishes. I'm going to store everything I got in the shed for now. 

hormones are giving me hell this week so I have been fighting the pit of despair by eating chocolate chips because I ran out of food to snack on except for those. I got granola bars and snyders of hanover now makes thicc pretzel rods gluten free and they're perfect and wonderful. expensive tho. I guess gluten free oreos aren't wildly expensive relatively so there's that for scaled up production

When am I supposed to make food??? how do people do this??? how did I do this??? my first job out of college I worked 60+ hours a week and it didn't feel like this??? and that was right in the middle of figuring out I had to eat gluten free??

this feeling is exacerbated by my parents. my mom makes all of my dad's food and does all of his laundry and all of the cleaning. literally. every bit of it. and sometimes I get the feeling that he expects me to work the same hours he used to despite the fact that I don't have a wife who does all the housework. I have to fucking eat and make my own fucking food all the time because I can't/won't eat a lot of premade food which is also expensive! My dad is the "how much could bananas cost" meme except old person style because he hasn't gone to a grocery store in 30 years. I suspect this is also the pit of despair talking. thank goodness for my past self making triple batches of pita breads and freezing them. and my rice cooker. all hail my rice cooker. would love to get my instant pot back into the house to use as a slow cooker someday. I managed to cook the hot italian sausage I bought for calzones and have been eating that over rice with marinara sauce, the cheese for ricotta and canned chickpeas. a little odd, very edible. I have supplies for more food, no clue when I'm going to make it .

I don't understand why this is fucking me up so bad. people move back in with their parents all the time. I cohabitate with people. writing out my feelings hasn't helped. not writing out my feelings hasn't helped. I kinda just want someone to pat me gently on the head and tell me I'm doing my best but no one I want to do that is within a three hour drive. actually that list of people is maybe like, two people total, I don't want people touching me. 

anyway, the local drag bingo that was supposed to be next weekend got canceled, which I was looking forward to. I bought tickets for a concert in western MA for august to hang out with B. maybe my sister and her friends are coming to visit in July. but holy shit I need some social time in the next two months. oh wait, that would require days off l o l

the pit of despair is having a lot of feelings right now. I also ran out of fruit a couple days ago so that's not helping. and I ran out of yogurt and couldn't get to the store or had time to make more so my breakfasts weren't normal and I've been out of hazelnuts for breakfast for ages. okay, the pit of despair is very valid for all those feelings, this is too much away from normal routines. I also just ate lunch so hopefully the pit of despair will go away for a little bit. 

Farming work has been going well other than the frost risk so that's been nice, just my personal life is a disaster. We did lose some strawberries to the 21F we had the other day despite the row covers, so there basically was nothing else we could do there. We figured out there was a missing bolt on the plow that would keep the cylinders going sideways and breaking in a specific way. Most of the raspberries are done being pruned. One of the workers and I cranked on the wood mulch pile and reduced it by 2/3 over the last few days and I got a lot of it spread on the blueberries. The strawberry fields have been plowed and disked once. They need fertilizer and a second disking but closer to planting next weekend. I got three sidejob plans done. 

I don't know! I've told my parents both to their faces that I want them to move out and I will help them with whatever needs to happen to make it happen. But I can't force them to. 

A smart person would go make food right now but the kitchen isn't clean enough to bake so I can't make more stuff for this week. I should try and make food tomorrow night but I still have leftovers and we'll have our evening farm meeting tomorrow and then crafting monday and gaming tuesday. arg. I might be able to bake tuesday? if it rains more. maybe. anyway, last PWHL hockey games before playoffs so I'm just crocheting and watching them because that's what I've got. I might see if I can get another sidejob task done today. 

The farm has abruptly moved from winter to summer mode and my to-do list is long and complicated. I have moved into pruning raspberries which is way more unpleasant than blueberry pruning in that the raspberries will try and stab me in the face a lot. A baseball hat helps protect my face but my arms take a beating even with long sleeves. But I'm making good progress. I need to contact all of our workers from last year and figure out scheduling. I have started plowing. I'm currently digging up old drip tape. Doing cleanup of things we didn't get done in the fall. 

We are t minus 3 weeks to strawberry planting so there's a ton to do. Technically we are ahead of where we were last year but also ack. 

The bobcat was down longer than anticipated but all the parts were found and it only took an hour to fix. Ha. It took five hours to take the damn cylinder apart which was a process that we ended up using an eight foot breaker bar attached to a chain around the hitch of the truck via a come along to crack the nut holding things together. Like, human power was simply useless even with the 8 foot bar. But the actual seal replacement and putting it all back together took about an hour. But since I was working with my dad on it, that was a whole day of work that I was set back. I'm trying not to resent it because it was extremely valuable time for learning mechanical skills and spending time with him but also I know how much shit needs to get done and a whole day is a ton of time. 

I have a lot of sidejob work built up that I'm struggling to get through without a lot of time off work. My evenings are pretty busy between crafting, game night and the farm meetings we keep having late at night because that's when we have time to meet. 

I went up to the pottery studio to see if my stuff had been fired but apparently that was happening today despite being assured it would happen within two weeks when I was there a month ago. But the person who owns the studio had done a bulk buy with Azure so I got to ask her a bunch of questions and assured me it was easy to sign up and do. and I know ranunculus has used them before, so I've committed and I'm going to buy a bunch of bulk goods because I've been needing bulk baking supplies. 

I nearly had a meltdown in the grocery store today, I knew going was a bad idea but I needed food and timing wise, I needed to be there later than I would like to be. I'm just tired and not handling things well. 

I have been trying to write up my feelings on the house situation so I stop being mad but honestly my dad used my toothpaste last night because he "couldn't find any other toothpaste" and that is just icing on the annoying cake. The worst part is that they aren't deliberately using my stuff or piling things in front of my stuff or moving my stuff to piss me off. They literally just cannot imagine something in their house not being theirs to use or move around as they want. 

Seriously the most inconsiderate roommates I've ever had and that includes the ones that got busted for smoking pot in the dorm room at college. Part of the problem is that my previous roommates all had schedules that were offset somewhat from mine, so they would be up and using the common spaces slightly offset. They also had social lives and would leave me the fuck alone. Previous roommates also didn't sleep in the living room constantly or if they did, they didn't expect me to be quiet about what I was doing. At least 2 hours, probably closer to 4 hours a day either one of my parents is sleeping in the living room. It's nuts. They had two whole ass bedrooms to use in two different houses, but no, they have to sleep in the room that is joined to the two rooms I use the most (crafting room, my office). Probably I've never just had very inconsiderate roommates? I don't know but my autistic ass is not handling this well. The week while they were away was so lovely. 

I'll admit, I am not exactly coping well with current work stress, parents and also the wider world although I have to say, trump beefing with the pope is just making me laugh so much. Fuck the catholic church but also shoutout to the pope for getting his ass. other than that, fucking stressful.  

I have tweaked a muscle in my neck sometime in the last few days, possibly saturday. I think it was during pruning saturday since I stood up from pruning and was weirdly sore but I have no idea what would have done it. It's fine most of the time except when I turn my head in one direction but that's not the worst it hurts. Worst it hurts is when I'm doing stuff with my arm and turn my head or when I put my elbow on the desk and rest my head on my hand. I can sleep on that side without it hurting. But it's annoying. And makes my shoulder feel funny. I'm trying to baby it but I don't know what hurts it so ??? And honestly, pruning seems to stretch it out and it feels better? So who knows honestly. 

The good news is that I'm nearly done pruning the blueberries, I've got 7 rows left and only one row of the irritating varieties that produce a lot of shoots. Something went wrong with the battery of the electric pruner, I think charging it in the unheated garage when it was below freezing. Now it only holds charge for an hour or two of pruning, so I alternate pruning with something else while it charges. The batteries are really expensive, so we're going to run the winterizing routine as soon as there's a good rainy couple of days or I finish the blueberries, whichever comes first and see if that helps. 

I have been ravenously hungry since I got back from my trip and can't seem to eat enough. I need to make a grocery store run and do some food planning. I've hit the craving fruit point of the season so I've been digging into my chest freezer to bake desserts with fruit. I made a ton of progress on my knitted sweater and actually bound off the sleeves during crafting last night, the end is in sight! 

My dad is making progress on the floor of their house, actual boards are being laid but it won't be finished before his surgery on friday. They will be down at my brother's thursday through monday I think, so I'll get some peace and quiet while they're away. That's okay that the floor won't get done. There is progress.  I need to get his help moving the drywall piece before his surgery, the drywall is upstairs but there's no room to cut it there, so I need help getting it to the front porch. It should be easy to move after I get it cut since the piece will be much smaller. 

Spring is abruptly here, it's been warm and sunny, the crocus have emerged, I uncovered the strawberries the other day and have been sweating as I prune. Ahh spring. Much to do! 

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