I am slowly checking things off the last time list.

Last time I'll see a lot of my coworkers in person
Last time I had to work that conference
Last time I had to deal with name tags

The conference went well for sure, but all I could think was thank goodness I don't need to do this again. I feel very jaded and tired compared to one of my coworkers who is only two years into a job similar to mine. Probably good that I'm leaving. Plus, my position is more covered by grants than the people I support including federal grants. Which are all in limbo. Someone said ag stuff wasn't going to be cut (lol that's wrong, there's already been cuts) but no grant reviews are happening until this all gets figured out. The team keeps a bank of money on hand for the salaries of the specialists if something goes wrong, but I'm not a specialist and would just get laid off. C'est la vie.

I wore a mask the whole time as did my nice coworker who I like a lot. I already told her about my plan and she's reliable and trustworthy, so she's kept quiet. I told her anytime she wanted to come down and visit the farm, she was welcome to.

I think I need some lawn furniture for outdoor parties. Fire pit in the backyard. Maybe some bushes.

I deleted a bunch of videos off my phone today to make some space (backups in two places) and it made me sad because I had a bunch of videos of Mara from before she started having mobility issues. She was so happy. It doesn't hurt me as bad anymore, not so sharp. It's been almost a year. I miss having a dog and I miss Mara.

Big work trip Tuesday, I need to leave for the airport at 3am which is probably too early for my flight, but I can't help it. I'm doing laundry and packing today. I've been grinding through sidejob work because I had a lot of requests come in this past week and I'm only taking my work computer with me and can't do sidejob work on it. I won't get them all done, I had to send back around half for questions or clarifications, so I'll get to those after I get back. I am getting around my sidejob computer struggles by using my personal computer for 99% of it, including purchasing pdf xchange editor as an alternate to adobe and only using the side job computer for the single piece of software I can't get yet. This seems to be a good work around because the side job computer will give up on being alive if I open too many programs and I need to have multiple things open to do this work. So if I only use it for that program, it's fine.

March is rapidly approaching and it's alarming. I think I'm just feeling a little maudlin this morning. Lots of transitions and it's making me reflect a bit. I wonder if I'm making the right choice and if I'll be happy. I wonder if I should move back down. Ah well. No answers from the universe. There is a cat yelling in the other room, but he doesn't have any answers because he's got no brain cells

before the break, when I broke my phone, the backup phone didn't have my work email on it and I had forgotten to submit my hours and time off and missed the reminders. I remembered last week and my boss only submitted them for me today even though I asked her about it last week when it was more fixable. when I get the paycheck today. So this first paycheck will be short but I've emailed HR to see how to get paid for that time. I should be okay on money, I got paid in cash for some things recently. ETA: HR said as long as my hours are in I will get paid next paycheck. whew

I went off my constant hormonal control to start testosterone next week and I feel hideous. Tired, achey, kinda nauseous, feel really fuzzy in the brain. Can't seem to get enough sleep. 

It's really windy outside and so far nothing has come down but I'm slightly worried about internet connection. I'm starting an intensive ASL class today and I'm worried about that. 

Yesterday was a surprisingly busy work day given the tasks C listed out were move a tarp and get the seed trailer ready. In the end we: harvested lettuce seed, organized all the seed that we'd harvested and cleaned over the past two years, loaded the seed trailer, move the tarp much farther than expected and switched vehicles.

I also packed before I left and grabbed groceries on the way home. Had a minor meltdown at home, my parents had both been texting me separately about stuff that could wait, giving the impression they needed an answer in the middle of the work stuff, plus grocery store plus I called a number I had been given specifically to book an appointment, called and the person said their office calls people once they have the referral and absolutely refused to make an appointment. This was after wed, when I called, the person said the person who made appointments was out and would call me back and she called me back during the only time I had a meeting I couldn't step away from and she left me a message to call the third number. I might try again this afternoon but I was pretty upset.

Got over it though, deep breathing and then loaded the truck and hit the road. Got to my parents in good time and talked through the things that had come up. Went to bed on time.

This morning has been an assortment of things, going over staffing, going over painting a wagon, figuring out a push to talk app for the phones that works well (Zello is what we're going with I think). Then I cleaned out the combine so it could be put away for storage. Very fun. I worked with the air compressor and a shop vac and did my best. Got very gross but its way cleaner now which is awesome.

I'm debating whether to make a run with my dad to look at a corn binder tomorrow but I think I'm going to stay home and work with mom on her stuff. The corn binder is for making corn stalk bundles because our workers are very slow at making them but they're really in demand. Mom admitted today that handing things over to me should make them go faster simply because I'm much faster at computers and the new system is automating a lot of things. I've been wondering lately what technology I might be bad at later in life because I haven't been doing it for so long.

Currently obsessed with wheelchair rugby and watching all the matches at the Paralympics. The speed! The precision of movement and turning! The strategy! Extremely fun and the rules are way more understandable than running rugby.

Ate my first 2024 apple for lunch today, a Zestar. Pretty tasty. Mom also ran out and got me a gluten free pizza and some kind of gluten free dessert from the grocery store because I lamented my lack of options last weekend. She's sweet.

Middle of the week was packed. 

Tuesday, I checked traps, dropped supplies south to a coworker, went home for an hour and answered emails, then ran west to pick up 4h kids plants (turns out you can fit 15 flats of plants into a toyota corolla if you're good), and did the 4h stuff. Day ended at 8:30pm when I got home.

Wednesday I dropped the fleet car to be serviced. It has terrible brakes and no AC. That afternoon, the dealer called and said the fleet person was hemming and hawwing on what to do, and fleet guy sent me an email about giving me a call about it which I didn't see until after he had left for the day. I helped set up a laser scarecrow in blueberries and then we looked at some sweet potato slips which we'll plant out next week probably. 

Thursday, yesterday, was shearing day. We went back to a farm from last year that I just never wrote about (big farm, commercial meat sheep, I did 14 last year, oh here I wrote one sentence about it) and there was ~65 sheep to shear. This farm is in the middle of nowhere up a hill with no cell service and J is apparently not that good at navigation so we got lost again and were late arriving. 

This year, J caught all the sheep for me and either flipped them on the way out of the pen and I dragged them over to my shearing spot, or handed them over and I flipped them. I'm pretty bad at catching sheep to be honest, so this was great. It took me a couple sheep to get moving and at one point, I did an easy sheep (clean belly, no poop around tail) and did it in the same time as J did! But the sheep had been on green pasture and were gross and poopy and so I got a lot of experience with that. I've definitely improved my technique, I was able to do the necks properly on all the sheep, I only had J do the poopy butt on one ewe where the poop was embedded down to the skin, I improved on rolling the sheep on the second side and shearing down as I go. I also worked on making sure I extended the belly blows all the way to the sides since I've had to go and clean those up later as I do the sides of the sheep.

All in all, I did sixteen sheep! Number 15 was the biggest, of course, but she only got out of my grip once and was really well behaved. For a while as I was shearing, I was working 2-1 with J, where he'd hand a sheep to me, catch his own, he'd finish that one and do another as I finished up mine, so I could jump on a sheep when he went to catch his next sheep. Once I hit 8 sheep or so, I started slowing down once my back started to get sore, so it was 3-1. I munched some food between shears, wish I had brought more cucumber because it was really nice to eat. Lots of sips of water. 

The nerves are my biggest problem with shearing currently, I'm nervous the night before, which upsets my stomach, which makes me nauseous and I don't want to eat breakfast. I usually can manage to get it down but not anything else, so usually two hours into shearing, I'm really hungry. I was really anxious about being lost trying to find the farm. Once I settle into the work, the nerves are completely gone but I have bad thoughts about nicking sheep on the udders and teats, or slicing them open badly or letting one go and it runs over J while he's shearing. Irrational. Now that I'm done, I'm starving and have been shoveling food like there's no tomorrow. 

But anyway, it went well, I'm pretty sore today and I kept waking up overnight as I moved around in my sleep and made my back hurt. That's probably the last big job for the year, J has some more small flocks and stuff but it isn't always worth me tagging along to those. I'm working from home today with few to no tasks, so I'm taking the afternoon off as comp time for tuesdays long day and puttering around the house. I'm usually too sore to do anything the day after but I might try patching some of the carpenter bee holes.

Tomorrow I'm hitting the farmers market, the co-op and *whispers in horror* the mall. I need nice clothes to go to a friend's engagement party next weekend and no longer own even vaguely nice clothes that fit and are gender-good, so I have to brave the mall. The last time I was in a mall was March of 2020. 

Saturday I woke up a little sore from shearing but not too sore so I decided to Do Things. First, I took a load of recycling and trash to the transfer station, including so many cardboard boxes that had been piling up. Then I took a combined C&D load and metal and junk plastic (including styrefoam, how neat is that!). 

When I got home from load two, F was in the kitchen and commented that I had left the basement door from the first floor down open about two inches (oops) and how it was good she didn't see either cat go down there since she had come downstairs right after I had left with the second load of stuff. We'll come back to this later.

Also took down fence that I put up on the septic leech field for the dog since the grass was growing up and causing issues with drainage. Mostly my fault, I wasn't weed whacking it, but easy up, easy down. Short fencing bits will be used for tree protection, long sections for future hill garden someday.

I went and mowed the lawn until I ran out of non-ethanol gas (arg), but I did the most difficult part of the hill first. When I started mowing my way down, I noticed the mailbox was open, when it hadn't been when I got home. Weird I thought. Went over to close it and a mouse had built a nest on the mail that was from the day before. What the fuck. I evicted the nest and babies in the next into the swamp and continued mowing. Later I relayed this to F and realized I hadn't actually gotten the mail. Went back down and discovered the mouse built another nest, was in the mailbox under the mail and had brought another baby into the mailbox. I swore at it and evicted everyone again. F checked the mail again today and the mouse came back again! So she's trying dryer sheets and if that doesn't work, a mouse trap will do with a sign for the mail person, who has gently been pushing the mouse nest out of the way when they deliver mail. 

In addition to the mailbox mouse, we've had a mouse infestation in the house. It's in the junction between the wall of the first floor, the ceiling there, the wall of the second floor and the floor there. There's one little ledge in the first floor area where the mice have been dropping insulation onto the floor. So F put mouse traps up there and we're up to seven mice. I had to kill one, she had to kill one and the cats have been delighted by mice falling from the sky that they don't even need to chase. 

So I was laying in bed Saturday night, watching GBBO with J online and I heard a funny noise coming from that way. I texted F and said I thought she'd be getting a mouse present shortly. Instead, she came downstairs and said she hadn't seen Willis all day and it was a little weird. The other cat, CJ, had acted all normal all day and had accompanied F downstairs and looked in the basement but hadn't gone down. Oh no. Willis went in the basement. 

F attempted to get the cat to come out with treats, but they are former ferals, so I went looking in good hiding places and found him under a shelf, behind some boxes, scared out of his tiny brain. I sent F upstairs, put some gloves on and pulled him out. He only got me a little on the arm before he wiggled out of my grip. Hid behind the washer, so I just grabbed a plastic pipe left from the living room baseboard heating project and shooed him out. He bolted up the stairs and is apparently completely unbothered by this entire experience. 

Sunday I went grocery shopping, picked up more fuel and then did some baking. Original plan was bread and vanilla cardamom ice cream. However, it was 60F in the house that day, so I figured I should run the oven to make the bread rise well. So I decided to make chocolate cake which makes three layers of cake. And cake needs icing and I have so many eggs whites left, so I made chocolate swiss meringue buttercream. I almost made a double batch, but as I put the eggs and sugar in the bowl, realized it was way too much to whip, so dumped it in a bowl to deal with later and made a single batch. I was going to toss it but F said she'd eat meringue cookies if I made them, so I ended up making two trays of vanilla and two trays of mint meringue cookies. Mixed reviews on them.

The two layer cake and some cookies went with F to family dinner which I didn't attend, half of final layer of cake went in the freezer to take with me to my sister's later this week. I haven't churned the ice cream yet but that will happen soon. Baking! 

Yesterday, I ran out to my boss's place and picked up a load of sand on the way and we made sandbags all morning. Then in the afternoon, we seeded corn into trays for transplanting. Fun stuff. I was out and about this morning and will be again tomorrow. 

After I hit post on this, I'll be going out to finish mowing the lawn.

 My boss double booked herself tomorrow, with an event four hours away, and teaching a different event closer to home. So I'm at the event four hours away since it isn't teaching and mostly being present. I also didn't mind taking this one because her partner is in California until Sunday, when she needs to leave for a work retreat for specialists Monday to wed and they just took in a foster kid three weeks ago. So me taking this is not the biggest deal. I'm currently staying at a hotel that backs up to a corn field. But tomorrow I should be leaving by 2pm or so. And I get to talk about saving seed which is always fun.

Dinner just got here which is pulled pork shepards pie and it's delicious. 

I'm here to print things out and the 4-h kids are having a big event in here today. Not ideal, but it'll be fine. Conference, then a new evening course to teach starting tuesdays next week and the wed night course is almost done, so they'll overlap for two weeks or so. Bleh. Printing list is currently 21 items with a minimum of 10 copies and a maximum of 300 copies, averaging 50 copies, some need stapling (thank you wonderful auto stapling printer) but these things take time. 

I spent yesterday baking stuff since I had the day off from working Saturday, I baked oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, roasted a squash, squash pie (no crust), chocolate squash cake and bread. I'm unsure of how I feel about the chocolate squash cake, it's very spiced, probably needs some icing. I also made approximately taco stuff last night, so I'm ready to eat my weight in food to keep me going. 

I had about 10 side job requests come in during the last three or four days. It's fine, I'll chug through them starting this weekend. There's two newer folks requesting plans and so they don't quite provide me all the information I need sometimes, so getting those done takes longer compared to my favorite person to work with who emails everything all at once. 

I"m currently alternting between printing jobs and stuffing name tags. weeeeee

Work has been busy and tedious. We're gearing up for our big seed course again starting next week and the videos we're using from another organization don't have closed captions. We knew this from last year, since they're the same videos but we super didn't have time last year. But I figured out that office 365 word has a transcription ability and it honestly pretty solid. So I've been running all the videos through that, editing them since the program gets a little confused sometimes and uploading transcripts. I'm almost done with the videos that students have access to right now and waiting to hear back from our support person if they're able to add captions to other videos. If not, more transcript work for me. It takes about an hour for a fifteen minute video, which includes the time to play the video and have the program work. ETA: and my boss just said to add two more people into the course, which takes the same amount of time as adding the first 100. :\

We are settling in for a storm tomorrow night, predicted 6-12 inches of snow with some wind. I need to do my storm prep tomorrow morning, get out emergency bin, fill buckets of water, move things under cover that need to be under cover, make sure I know where the backup heater is, bump the heat up, make sure to have some made food on hand. I didn't get the generator fixed yet, it's on my list for next week for sure but with this amount of snow, I wouldn't expect the power to be out for more than a day. If it is, the backup indoor rated propane heater will get us through.

It's going to rain Wednesday and be 50F, so it'll just turn into a nasty mess.

I've been taking advantage of after-holiday sales and ordered some fabric (hoodie fleece and denim), and PowerBlock weights. I felt bad for the poor fedex delivery person who dropped them off, they're heavy. I need to figure out some kind of storage thing for them, my yoga mat and resistance bands in the living room. They're just in a pile right now. Maybe a tiny cabinet or something. If I build something, I need to buy more planks since I'm out of the nice stuff. 

I finished warping my next weaving project with only one counting mistake so that's good. Hopefully I can start getting it on the loom soon. It feels like I'm cranking through a lot of crafting stuff because I've had time even with work being busy. I started spinning on my electric wheel laying in bed and that's been wonderful because my feet can be toasty warm while I spin. I somehow lost the pattern book I was using for my sweater, I can't find it anywhere and there's not that many places it could be. I wonder if it fell out of my project bag at my parents or something, but I haven't seen it in months so I don't really know. I ordered another copy because it was $10 and it should be here soon which is great because I'm getting to the point where I need to do the arm gusset and I don't know how to do that. 

Mara's hanging in there. still happy enough and eating and drinking and sniffing everything. 

Sidejob work suddenly got busy, I had three requests this week, so that will start taking up some of my crafting time. 

The hot water is being weird, it only comes on occasionally, randomly. And apparently the part didn't come in. So we're scheduled for Monday to get it repaired. Poor F was upset about having to take a potentially cold shower, but she was heading to her sister's place to pick something up and I suggested she just shower while she was there. Oh yeah! she said, and was much happier. I took a cold shower after sweet potato harvest because I was just covered in dirt. I think I've come to realize that I'm the kind of person that feels warmer after taking a cold shower. 

I made ham and potato soup yesterday with a ham end/roast thingy. I let the ham slow cook in water for a few hours first, then added potatoes, carrots, spices. I then took the ham out of the pot, pulled some of the parts off and threw them back in because I overfilled the pot. I then pressure cooked it for 30 mins. I then added sweet corn from the freezer after and shredded the ham and added that back in. It is super delicious. I froze a bunch of it and then threw the rest of the ham back in the instant pot for more stock which also went into the freezer.

However, I need to boil water to clean the pots and such if the water is going to keep being inconsistent. 

My supervisor was out of town all last week, it was fine other than the deadline for a conference sign up happening. I expected that I would be going to an event six hours away for three days in November, when C got back and we chatted, they said not to go to the conference for funding reasons and also lots of travel for an event that isn't really worth it. C is speaking at the conference, so is being covered. I would be going for a related but not covered event. In any case, I'm not going to that one, and I will hopefully be able to get signed up for the conference two days later that I missed the deadline for. It should be fine. But it's much less travel and overnight stay time so I'm not unhappy about it. I should have checked in sooner about it, but ah well.

The last of the field work is happening next week. The actual in the field work, potato harvest. We have seed processing and grading the sweet potatoes and regular potatoes but that's barn work, not field work. We're starting into work from home season, so getting into all the tasks that I've neglected all season. 

Working out has been decently successful so far, with my field work days taking the place of the workouts those days. The coach has been responsive to emails, seems to be bumping up the difficulty in reasonable amounts as I've been recording what I've been doing. The early morning workout has been a great success and I found the secret to making it work: watching SDHL games as I workout. It's a visual tracking thing to keep my interest but not super loud since it's no commentary and I work out in the living room. I now have resistance bands and I'm keeping an eye on craigslist for a specific set of adjustable weights for future workout stuff. 

I kept meaning to make posts about all the things I was doing in the past few weeks but didn't feel like it. I went to a fiber festival, hosted a in-person crafting meetup, taught someone to spin, did a lot of work preparing a lot of seed equipment for travel and use, plus figuring how it would work for various crops. Posts to make this week: Crafting roundup + fiber festival haul, book reading roundup

This weekend I accidently double booked myself a couple weeks ago, but worked it out so that I could do both things. So Friday morning, I left to my parents, arrived at noon, ate food, then worked for 9 hours. I primarily was getting the fall displays in order, which involves running around with the bobcat skidsteer moving bins and tables around so it all looks good. Then filling the displays. I did most of the prep work on friday by myself, making false bottoms for the wooden bins (so the items appear to fill a bin but they make great tall stacks and no one actually wants to get things out of the bottom of a bin), cutting up the spare planks that I had painted earlier in the week to make price signs, moving tables and bins around so that we could fit more in each of the areas. 

Then Saturday morning, I was given two minions to help me. They were decent workers and I worked near them on other important stuff while they did tedious things like, take all the tiny pumpkins out of the bin and put them on a different display so the first one could be filled with something else. Or splitting up the items that have different prices onto different displays. (I have a whole system for these things that I can't fully articulate but I Just Know what each display needs to work for each item) I worked on the RST (Rolling Selling Thingy, a moveable tiny barn thing that my parents use as a checkout building), because it was filled with boxes of stuff and not a ton of display room. I moved the extra stuff out, moved the table against the wall and made a hanger bar to hold farm sweatshirts and tshirts for sale. Then I assigned a third worker to label and put out the jars of honey, preserves and other small things in there because they all needed labels before they went on the shelf. They ended up labeling every item, which was awesome, so they can just be put out for sale. I also set up a selfie area in front of my favorite tractor, the international 140 cultivating tractor, which mostly consisted of putting a bench in front of it with some cornstalks, haybales and pumpkins, plus one for the seat so no one would climb on it. 

Then we opened for business and I helped with that until my alarm rang at 4pm, then I grabbed my food from the fridge (I had packed everything else in the morning) and drove home. I had left Mara at home with F taking care of her because she just adds so much time to the drive and also she wouldn't have enjoyed it. Plus, my parents had to put their dog down recently (RIP Iggy, sweet little puppo) due to cancer so it was a quiet house. 

Yesterday morning, I got up at 5, packed up my supplies for the day, walked Mara and hit the road by 7 to get down to a work event by 8:30. I was early and folks ended up baking out too but we had some people come by and do some seed processing. The main benefit was getting to know the other folks working on seed in the area and collaborate with them and hopefully keep in touch for future things. Otherwise, it was fairly miserable. We were parked right next to the music stage, and in the afternoon, I gave up and put on ear protection. 

I was able to leave around 5 but C was stuck behind the band until 7 when they were able to pull the trailer out and leave. Things I learned: rudbekia (black eyed susan) seed heads produce tiny slivers, not unlike plexiglass splinters that make me itch and then I have to pull out of my hands. Gloves and long sleeves next time, but also very fun to run through a thresher. I got home a bit after 6, took care of Mara, then laid in bed and watched tv. My hands are sore typing this from all the things I did in the last three days. 

We're supposed to hit 80F on Wednesday which is so weird. Technically we're in frost watch time. Shrugs.