dragonlady7

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So I wanted to make myself the kind of organizer that hangs over the back of your car seat to hold your stuff, to keep the things that ought to stay in my car in, because with my old car, I hauled so much cargo and loaded and unloaded the thing so often and wound up with so much random junk in there that I lost my tire inflator, foldable shovel, and most of the rest of it. I thought, if I just attach those to the back of one of the front seats then it doesn’t matter what I do with the car, if I’m hauling baby chicks or small humans, passengers or cargo or what, I don’t have to worry.

I shopped around but I didn’t see anything like what I wanted, so I went down in the basement and poked around.

Thus follows not exactly a tutorial, but a description of my thought process. This took forever but if I had to do it again I could do it faster, I think.

I had a weird but perfectly-sized rectangle of heavy-duty polyester canvas (twice as long as I needed, but exactly as wide, so I could use it double thickness), some suit interfacing, and then several yards of an all-plastic but beautiful brocade I bought from Jo-Ann’s back when I didn’t know how to shop for fabric.

So I bought myself a new tire inflator and folding shovel, and then measured the jump-start powerbank I already own, and made pockets exactly sized for those three things. I also guesstimated a pocket for my motley collection of ratchet straps. And then I laid those out on the bit of canvas, and figured I had room for a wide short pocket across the top– gathered the bottom, and put a channel at the top and pulled elastic through, then sewed two seams down it to hold it into three separate pockets.

I did french seams on the first square pocket then realized that made it too small so I had to piece a little extension around the back of it. Then I realized that all-plastic brocade ravels horribly… unless you run a lighter along all the cut edges. Bickety-bam instant selvege. So I melted the edges of all the rest of my fabric, and no more French seams means no more excessive seam allowances.

(I didn’t exactly follow this method but I did find a good tutorial here for how to make a cargo pocket https://sewmesomethingcourses.com/courses/cargo-pocket/making-a-pattern-for-your-cargo-pocket/. It might have worked better than what i did, LOL. I only made one pocket pleated, and one gathered, the others I tried mostly to make to size.)

[image description: a black panel of canvas lies on a table, with three pockets made of brown/black/gold polyester brocade lying atop it, chalked around like crime scene bodies.]

Laid them out, traced with chalk, futzed with the placement. Realized I didn’t have to center that top one, and if I off-set it, I could fit the ratchet strap pocket next to it.

Attached the pockets to the canvas, then spray-adhesived the interfacing to the back, then folded the canvas in half, sewed it right sides together leaving one short side open, turned it right-side out, gingerly ironed it (everything is plastic). I had some of those huge thick plastic strips they seal around big boxes sometimes in the garbage in the basement so I pulled those out, carefully ironed them flat under a press cloth, and then cut lengths of them– it was heavy-duty stuff, I think a dehumidifier had come in the package, solid plastic an inch wide– and used those as horizontal boning at the bottom, middle, and top, securing in place with a line of stitching above and below wherever there weren’t pockets. The top, I closed up by just folding the front over the back; it was the selvedge edge, so I left that raw, and zig-zagged it shut with the piece of “boning” inside, then pushed the boning up against the seam with my fingers and sewed the other side of the channel with a straight stitch.

I could not for the life of me figure out how to measure the straps. so i went out and sat in my car with a lighter, scissors, needle, thread, a pair of old shoelaces, a length of 2" wide elastic torn out of an unsuccessful earlier make (i have a roll of the stuff… at the farm, not here), and a length of heavy-duty twill tape I don’t know where I got.

I held the organizer up to the seat, safety-pinned the twill tape to the top, threaded it around the headrest, safety-pinned it to the other side. Decided it needed more support, as the upper corners wanted to flop. Used a drawstring threader to pull the shoelace through the flap at the bottom of the seat, where all the cabling for the heated seat is stored– there’s upholstery covering it, open at both sides, so I threaded the shoelace through that, just to pull the whole shebang in taut against the seat instead of letting it swing freely into the knees of whoever might sit back there. Sewed it down on one side, safety-pinned it to the other. Cut the shoelace off, then sewed the remnant to one upper extreme corner, wrapped it past the headset, safety-pinned it to the other side. Finally took the 2" wide elastic, sewed it firmly down on one side, passed it around the seat, measured it, then passed it behind the seat to sew it down un-stretched to the other side, then put it on properly. So the non-stretch fasteners are only sewed on one side, and can be unpinned on the other if I need to take the thing off.

Then I loaded it up with stuff.

[Image description: the rear of a car driver’s seat, taken from the rear seat behind it, with an organizer hanging from the headrest, brocade pockets stuffed full of objects. There’s a green object hanging from a keychain at the top left– it is a folding knife patterned to look like a leaf.]

Now the things that ought to just always be in my car can (mostly) just always be there. I should check that the tire inflator works, and I should periodically charge up the jump pack, but I already checked if the foldable shovel works (it does), and I carefully bundled up the ratchet straps into bags I made out of the cuffs of old crew socks, which sewn shut where I cut the threadbare foot off make perfectly-sized padded stretchy storage bags for light duty ratchet straps.

Top left to bottom right, it’s got:

Ratty old work gloves, a clipped-on keychain with a decorative rosary and a functional folding knife, a sock-cuff bag containing a multitool screw driver, a little baggie of tampons, and some Kleenex The tire inflator kit, the jump pack kit three ratchet straps, a folding shovel multitool thingy, and a bag of toiletries with spare socks, chapstick, hand cream, a travel toothbrush and dry toothpaste kit, and a couple other things– most of it is shit that was handed out the one time I flew business class on Icelandair.

Then, to the right, around my center console, I took a vintage like circa 2004 Old Navy nylon drawstring backpack, threaded those heavy-duty twist tie things they use to close disposable coffee bags through the drawstring bit of the mouth to keep it open, sewed some of the twill tape to the top, and added a magnetic catch to hold a plastic bag in place. The magnetic catch didn’t do enough so I have some half-broken old hair clips holding the plastic bag in better position: that’s now my car’s trash bag, and the backpack’s two tiny zippered pockets hold spare plastic bags.

Now the last thing I want to do is to get some hooks to hang from the passenger headrest, and get loops attached to my snow brush and squeegee, and hang those from the hooks, because otherwise they are always scattered around the floor of my car in the way of whatever I want to do.

Anyway. Ready for the inaugural road trip Sunday, when I drive back to the farm. (Your picture was not posted)

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It’s been a long couple of weeks, I worked six ten-hour days the week before last, and then this week I started off working hard and mildly fucked up my back on tuesday, and all day wednesday i suffered thru it, and then i was sitting at the kitchen table talking to my non-farm sister and suddenly my back went cr-CHK and was all better, which was disconcerting. It has remained a little sore and clicky but it’s better, mostly.

i’ve been sitting down whenever i can because i just. feel. like i’m real tired. is all.

but yesterday and today i kept finishing my work and not having more to do right away, which has been awesome, and in the middle of today i took three hours to take my mother to a follow-up appointment because yesterday she had this kind of newfangled cataract surgery on her second eye, so now both her eyes are bionic and have plastic lenses in them now forever and I sort of didn’t realize that’s what was happening? but it means that she doesn’t wear glasses anymore. she’s worn glasses since 1959. This is weird. I don’t recognize her.

“I need to draw eyebrows on now,” she said. “There’s just nothing to my face.” We both have very pale eyebrows on pale skin and pale blue eyes and pale eyelashes and our faces just melt into white blobs without the anchor of glasses frames.

I told her my trick. Just For Men moustache dye, the color of your hair or a shade darker. Use it for a minute or two. Make sure you put vaseline under your brows in case it drips. it won’t though. rinse it out. voila. you have eyebrows now. “I"m going to try that,” she said.

“There’s a ton in the little tubes and you can mix it up a tiny dose at a time,” I said. “Then it takes you like. Five minutes if you count washing your face. And then you don’t have to draw your eyebrows on for a month.”

Eyebrow pencil is such a racket.

Anyway. Now it is drizzling rain slightly, and I just put on Mazzy Star’s “So Tonight That I Might See” (1993) real quiet so I can still hear the birds and the rain and it’s really peaceful.

and OH did i say i went to an estate sale last weekend with my middle-little non-farm sister and bought myself a cushy comfy chair and an ottoman so i can sit in a comfy chair in my cabin instead of a folding lawn chair. i’m really cozy now. i’m contemplating making the chair a linen slipcover for summer though.

i probably won’t. but it’s cozy and the birds are enjoying the rain and the field is enjoying the rain and mazzy star is fading into you, quietly.

Happy Midsummer. The strawberries are finished but the kohlrabi’s first planting is going gangbusters, there are sweet crunchy things to eat and i’ve worked out most of my schedule for the summer and next weekend i am going to maine with my beloved and it is all going to work out just fine and i will get enough rest, someday. but tomorrow i have to work the farmer’s market in the rain again, though not all day, so probably it will be fine.

and yes i am getting some writing done and it is going to be good, i promise. (Your picture was not posted)

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we did a second turkey processing yesterday. 10 birds for a “retired” farmer– really astonishingly beautiful ones, they were all like 23-25 lbs and flawless fat symmetrical specimens– and then 92 for another local farmer, and his were highly variable. Two of them were five pounds. We put them into chicken bags, to give them a bit of dignity in death, rather than having them swim in the turkey bags. His biggest were 26 and 27 lbs. It was quite a range. Some of his were very young though, he’d had them die and had replaced them with new ones and there just hadn’t been time for them to size up. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to farm, but he mostly is a cattle farmer, so turkeys are low on the priority list. He had some ideas of how to improve.

When he’d come by ahead of time to drop some stuff off, he’d had his very young son in the car with him, and while he was talking to my sister, the boy had been nodding off in his car seat, snuggling his favorite comfort toy: a measuring tape. Like just straight up a regular old 25-foot retractable measuring tape like you get at any hardware store. “He loves that thing,” the farmer said.

(I first met this farmer when he was pretty little; his cousin was one of my best friends in elementary school, and I’d attend her family reunions because she was an only child and what’s one more kid anyway. It’s funny to think that of course the whole time he was only a couple of years younger than me, and that means nothing now.)

The second turkey processing went so smoothly. We finished killing before 10:30, so we just set up and packaged right away. That went smoothly too, and we were done at lunch, which was awesome.

I’m ready for a long break, but there’s a lot of shenanigans upcoming– family has already arrived from Maryland, the Teen Boy nephews are hunting deer, that BIL is apparently cooking all the meat for thanksgiving in the commercial kitchen and then is making a bunch of deer meat into sausage using our equipment there, and so I’m probably just going to have to ride herd on that process because i know how to use all the equipment, so. Just gonna set myself up with some beers and let it all happen.

ALso am attempting to convince the Teen Boys that they want to help me put up the ceiling in my cabin. Or at least, help me take all that expensive finished lumber and load it into the cabin so it doesn’t sit outdoors under the snow all winter. That’d be a really great idea, honestly. So we’ll see if they’ll do it, in return for me having shown them how to use the Huge Meat Grinder.

hokay gotta go see about the various Doings (Your picture was not posted)

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i am alive, i promise, sorry it’s been all queue of late

i made 28 quarts of chicken stock today– well, packaged it– actually i made it too, we’d cut the chickens up yesterday and stuck the stock pot in the walk-in cooler overnight but today i put the water in and plonked it on the stove, an enormous stock pot, and simmered it all day while we cut up the rest of the chickens. (yesterday’s chickens we cut up were for sausage, today’s were for sale as parts.) tomorrow we’re ostensibly making the sausage, we’ll see how that goes.

since CSA is over, Farmsister was available to help us today– but just like last time she helped us, mostly what we needed her to do was to take everything out of the upright freezer in the commercial kitchen and find other places for it to go, which was a heroic undertaking and took her like two hours. it was a lot. she had to restock the farm store just to make room. so it was good, things are beautifully restocked, everything is organized and beautiful, but like, good lord, at what cost.

anyway i just stuck 28 quarts of chicken stock in there so tomorrow we’re gonna have to ask her to do it again, but i believe in her.

i have done like. zero writing this week. lots of 10+ hour days of work, so. oh the insulation in my cabin has been great though. i know it’s november now so i should expect it to be chilly but it’s been like– warmish during the days mostly, and then in the evening it’s fine and i have actually woken up too hot and sweating twice in the last few days because i was still wearing pajamas and dressing my bed like i expected it to be in the mid-40s in the room where i’m sleeping and… well it’s not.

there’s a mouse making so much fucking noise though, and i haven’t been sleeping well because the fucker like, pitter-patters around the room while i’m trying to sleep. he’s louder because he has to rustle in through the insulation. the roof edging isn’t on properly yet so i cant’ exclude him. so a side project is that i’ve had cayenne steeping in water most of the week, and today i set it up with coffee filters and rubber bands over the mouths of jars, and filtered it into a spray bottle, and i’ve just sprayed cayenne water all along the bottom of the insulation where he’s been coming in. (I know because i can hear him and also see him.) so we’ll see how much noise he makes tonight. i don’t know that cayenne will actually deter him.

anyway i’m gonna have my queue post this tomorrow morning so idk, i’ll hopefully know by then. but i’m so tired, using the queue gives me a minute to proofread and then if i wake up in the middle of the night like “i used that word wrong” i have time to look again when i wake up.

i have so many writing projects underway and no time to work on them. i spent a bunch of time today while i was packaging cold dead raw meat thinking about various projects. it was a nice escape.

here is a surprise snippet from a background bit i’m working on, going slightly back in time to before Ciri re-established the Upper Aedirn Free State, featuring a new OC i’m going to make room for– a very elderly elf named Faerveren who has aged out of the concept of gender, to give us some unexpected backstory.

Faerveren leaned in the doorway, giving the dh’oine who had so rudely knocked a once-over. He was tall, handsome, self-assured, though he looked a little tired and travel-worn, and the haughty arrogance of his expression was covering a bit of uncertainty.

“I’m looking for Caerulia Fitzhugh,” he said.

“I bet you are,” Faerveren said. “Since she lives here.” Faerveren xerself hadn’t lived here terribly long. The Fitzhughs had kindly offered xer a place to stay after xe had come to them injured and ill after the battle for the city. Many elves had needed treatment, but only Faerveren had merited the permanent invitation. Perhaps because the Fitzhughs could appreciate xer age. It was restful, being among others with a similar perspective on the passage of time.

Faerveren watched the dh’oine’s expression go through disbelief into indignance, and relented slightly. “Are you here on behalf of someone who is sick?”

“No,” he said, frowning, “I need her help.” His frown deepened. “I believe it is not a matter that your kind could understand, elder brother.” He used an Aen Seidhe term, showing that he wasn’t entirely ignorant.

“Ah,” Faerveren said, “I’m no one’s brother. But I see, you are not the dh’oine you look.” Neither were the Fitzhughs. This was vampire business, then. Another of the reasons Faerveren had been invited to stay was likely the complete lack of reaction xe’d had to the revelation that both Fitzhughs were bruxae. But Faerveren’s people had lived in peace with higher vampires, never their prey and never their antagonists, so it hadn’t been alarming to figure it out. It wasn’t as though they were particularly secretive about it. They tended not to shift or fly where anyone could see them, but Caerulia had a habit of gliding around without touching the ground because of an old foot injury, and nobody seemed to notice. The dwarves of Vergen were singularly unconcerned about vampires as well.

“No,” the man said. “Can you tell her, Dettlaff is here? She knows me, though it has been years since we spoke.”

Faerveren sighed. “Perhaps you should come in and sit down,” xe said. (Your picture was not posted)

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[image description: a turkey roasting pan, oval and silver, with handles on the short edges, sitting on the long middle burner of a large stovetop, taking up the whole thing, full to the brim with red chunks of tomato stewing in their own juices] I’ve got five more big fat Brandywines to fit in here and I’m just letting it cook down a minute so I can fit them.

yesterday:

[image description: a close up of a big expanse of small tight bright yellow goldenrod blossoms, many many of them, so profuse you can’t see the bucket they’re probably in I don’t remember how I took this photo, the blossoms just opening and many of them still closed just about to crack]

this is the smaller bucket I harvested of this stuff, the one too open already to dry– there’s twice this many now hung up to dry in the granary attic, in the stage just before the blossoms pop open. Goldenrod stays bright yellow when it dries. It also gives a bright yellow dye and I’m thinking about using it on a muslin dress I brought, I’m just not sure I’ve got time to really do it. Might, today, though.

anyway. mid-late summer days! not so hot this week so I can actually enjoy it. (Your picture was not posted)

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(Title taken from the contents of this excellent slideshow https://www.instagram.com/p/CeyZie5Orih/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D from Sylvanaqua Farms, do read it if you want to know what financially goes into raising poultry.)

313 chickens yesterday, with some fine-tuned adjustments to the process, were done by 12:30 including cleanup, and then we packaged in the afternoon, just the whole birds. I dragged a stool over and sat down every 45 minutes or so during the packaging, just for a couple minutes: if I can sit down and take all the muscle tension off my frankly useless hips, then I can re-set and not have pain in my hips for a while. Last night my back was tired enough to hurt, my lower back all across it, and I couldn’t find a comfortable position, but it wasn’t my hip so I’ll take it.

(I can feel that the back just needs more exercise, so I need to figure out what’ll actually help, there. I resorted to an old roller derby trick, which is that if your lower back is giving you trouble, do a bunch of crunches; the tension on your abs will pull the tightness out of your back. It does work, though largely by distraction. Still, probably I need to just do more crunches in general. Like, why not I guess.)

I’m creaky today but not limping, so. Thumbs up.

Did some VHS transfer work in the evening out in my cabin, now that there’s power– I have a single extension cord but that can power a VCR so I’m doing work-work too. And the tape was that someone had recorded a show off MTV in 1998, so it was a Journey Thru Time lemme tell you. Holy cow. Anyway–

Today we’re cutting up chickens, me and BIL, and we have enough vacuum seal bags to hopefully forgo Ziplocs entirely. We shall see. And we have about twice as many birds as usual, sort of by accident. I really want to get through them all but we shall see.

And then this afternoon after 4pm i’m borrowing Farmsister’s minivan to go help Middle-Little pick up a futon for her new house, and then cram the minivan full of assorted things from her apartment so that she’ll hopefully have room to pack the rest.

I did discover that the narrative she’s using to herself is that I’ve forced my way in to help her pack and she didn’t ask me to do all this, so that’s– well, I guess I did, I said I don’t want to be doing this at the last second let’s start now, though I haven’t actually helped her pack that much, the frantic cleaning last time was for the landlord visit, so I reminded her of that. And like… no, I wouldn’t do this if she asked, I’m only doing it because I’m offering! So anyway. I bought her dinner, after we went together Monday night and bought a rug in Albany (it wouldn’t fit in her car so for some reason i thought it would fit in mine? it did not but I have a roof rack and they have a guy with some twine so it was fine).

But apparently she’s taking next week off work and getting a different friend to help, which is fine and great and I am somewhat relieved. I am tired and I am going to be really tired after tonight. But we’ll figure it out, it’ll be fine. (Your picture was not posted)

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heh so as i was packing up Friday evening to go to the farm for this week i was texting with my supervisor. “I have a sinus infection,” he wrote. “Bruh you have covid,” I wrote back. “No, I tested negative,” and then like four screens full of justifications why it wasn’t covid, and I was like “u should test again tho bro” and kept doing what I was doing.

When I woke up, figuring on leaving that morning, it was to a text from him at 1am that he did, in fact, have Covid.

I expected him to ask if I had left yet, but he didn’t. I had other shit to do so I kept myself busy for a number of hours, but at the end of the day he still hadn’t said anything. I finally texted him, “so do you actually need anything from me for this week?”

“Oh,” he wrote back. “I’d assumed you’d already left, I was trying to figure out how to cover things without you. If you’re still in town that’d be way easier!”

“Well,” I wrote back, “so the store is closed on Monday,” because it is, that’s a a holiday, “and the really important thing I have to do at the farm is Monday and Tuesday, so if I leave now I can come back Wednesday. Can you find someone to cover a single day?”

“Just go,” he wrote, “I can figure it out,” and I know he was being dramatic and martyr-y about it and wanted me to insist, but I also know they genuinely do need me at the farm, so I just sent back a thumbs-up emoji and left.

Currently it’s 6am and I woke up an hour ago when a bug tried to crawl into my ear but I am currently watching a pair of extremely large wild tom turkeys dither in the farm road about getting closer to the barnyard. They’re enormous. It’s amazing.

This week is not just the first chicken processing day, it’s also that my sister and my friend bought a house and I’m eager to help them move. And also Dude needs to wear a mask around me for five more days and I was so lonely I was becoming deranged, and I need to be here. (Your picture was not posted)

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well i’m. sort of declaring defeat on all social media, idk what y’all have been up to and i’m sorry and i haven’t been replying either and some of you said really nice things about my cold and i appreciated those and some others of you said nice things about the dragon threesome erotica and i appreciated that too and actually really wanted to have conversations about it but was not online.

anyway i did manage to get a bunch of stuff done. On Friday I went to my mother’s house and borrowed a tool of Dad’s, a pickaxe only the back side was a mattock, which is a fiendishly useful device. It looks just like what the dwarves in Snow White carry so like, i had slight trouble using it because I kept needing to pause to whistle.

cut for length, there’s a picture of some work anyway, and some bittersweet dog news at the end, but that’s how dogs work, isn’t it.

Anyway I used it, eventually, to dig a very narrow trench around the tiny house, and I was trying to make it a foot-deep trench but somehow I just couldn’t manage that. I maybe cleared like eight inches. Anyway then I stapled a 24″ wide roll of hardware cloth (¼ inch holes, tiny) around the base of the house, so I could hopefully exclude rodents and like, groundhogs, from living under there and making burrows and gnawing their way into the floor and such. I went to a lot of trouble making that fairly vapor-tight and I’d be pissed if mice fucked it up. I’d also be incredibly pissed if groundhogs dug under it and made the whole thing unstable. So. This is my first organic-friendly overture, which is to just physically exclude them.

[image description: a view of the cabin under construction, new wood sitting on skids, and a shallow trench scraped in the visibly-gravelly ground, and a 100-ft roll of 2-ft-wide fine mesh galvanized hardware cloth sitting upright leaned against the porch while an expanse of it is unrolled next to the trench down the long side of the cabin. The tarp covering the bare rafters of the house is visible hanging down the side of the wood.]

Another set of plans for a shed had called for burying concrete board in a similar fashion, but Maryland BIL had thought that might be harmful– no airflow under the whole thing might make for a damp time of it, which could eventually cause trouble. Having the netting instead would mean air could flow, though how much it would I don’t know. So we’ll see.

(Yes, I probably could poison them as well, but I hope that won’t be necessary, introducing poison into the food chain is not a great thing. But if there are problems this doesn’t forestall, well. We’ll have to see.)

It was a devil of a lot of work to do, which it shouldn’t have been– the entire site was excavated and backfilled with loose gravel that only got tamped down a bit– we used a tamper where the foundation blocks were going to go, and we drove on it a little with the tractor, and we let it get rained on for a couple of months by sheer coincidence of timing of the work, but. Anyway it couldn’t have been any easier to dig that trench and it was still difficult for me.

In the midst of it, I paused to come in to the house for a drink of water (having forgotten to bring myself a water bottle) and was met by Veg Guy, who was coming out to me with the bag of black walnuts my niblings had gathered from Dad’s trees at his funeral. (Dad loved black walnut trees, not sure why. He didn’t care for the walnuts! He just loved the trees and planted them every chance he got.) I’d consulted with Veg Guy, correctly deeming that he had more interest in the farm’s forestry at this juncture than my overwhelmed sister or BIL. So he and I took the mattock and my planting knife and went up to the gravel bank and to the edge of the creek there, which is all populated currently with sumac scrub-trees and goldenrod and brambles, and has no proper trees. It clearly was cleared at some point 20-30 years ago, and Veg Guy has frequently wandered there, and said “I’ve been here eight years and assumed it was going to go through a succession to some other phase during that time but it hasn’t changed so I think if I want it to return to forest I’ve got to do that myself,” and so I gave him the mattock and he wandered and dug holes wherever it struck his fancy, and I put two or three walnuts in each hole and scraped the dirt back over (I don’t know what planting depth to use so I figured I’d plant them at different depths in the hopes one would be right) and then caught up to him as he dug the next hole. We planted at least a dozen, possibly more like 20, and found a fox’s den. And then closer to the road he planted some handfuls of paw-paw seeds he’d saved. He’s tried several times to start paw-paws as seedlings in pots and then plant them out, and it fails every time, so this year he’s just going to direct-seed an enormous number of them and that’s his plan.

“This,” he said, as he dug a hole, “is what I have that the average home gardener does not,” and he straightened and looked around with a kind of grim satisfaction: “Sheer volume.” People ask him for gardening advice all the time and he’s like “well see what I do is that I research the right way to do it and then I do it several hundred times and probably it will work one of those times, and maybe I write it down and maybe I just do it the same way the next time.”

We took the remnants back and planted several more of each kind of tree around the cabin, in the hedgerow edge there, where there’s sun, filling in gaps where older and bigger trees had died or been removed.

Who knows if any of that will work.

Anyway, during this I got a handful of burdocks wedged into my hair down at the roots, which fucking sucked. And I had to do several more hours of work on the tiny house ditch, with these burdocks prickling me. And then the tarp started to come off the roof so I had to hastily ask for help and get BIL to come fix it.

But I also got BIL to change my car’s oil over lunch, and we discovered all the ways that my garage has been carelessly mistreating my car, so I won’t be going back to them alas, and will probably caution Dude’s mother, who’s been a customer of theirs for years. The last time they did my oil change, I brought it in for that and a state inspection and they just didn’t do the inspection, and– I learned that when you do the oil on a subaru there’s a disposable crush washer that goes on the drain plug on the oil pan, and you gotta replace that every time you take the plug out? Pretty basic, a fairly common practice, the washer costs pennies and it’s a standard part of the oil change. WELL they didn’t, they just didn’t put a washer on, and then they attempted to rectify this error by over-tightening the drain plug. So my car has leaked oil for the last five thousand miles, and there’s nothing to be done because of course if you pull the plug out to put a washer on you’ve just drained the oil pan, that’s what it’s designed for.

ANYWAY. BIL managed to get the over-tightened plug out, and I’d had to go to the dealership since no auto parts store had the correct washer in stock, and I’d had to buy an entire new drain plug assembly of course for ten dollars, so. At least it’s done now. And my car doesn’t leak oil. And I need to find a new garage.

I did eventually manage to get the burdocks out of my hair but it had to wait until evening, as my sister was cooking dinner and some friends had come over. (Farmkid’s BFF’s folks; her dad is an auto mechanic, and BIL had called him to ask advice about that drain plug– dare I use excessive force to try to get it out? he asked, and FK’S BFF’s Dad was like ‘yeah go hog on it, if it wrecks the threads I have the taps to fix that and it’s only like 1pm on a Saturday, we have time, also fire that garage’, so. We did not need him but it was really lovely to have the knowledge of him as backup.)

(Absolutely fascinating character. Unfortunately he works at a Volkswagen dealership, so I cannot make that the garage I always use for my Subaru. I have brought it in there before though, and his coworkers think it’s funny– he works on my sister’s Mitsubishi sometimes too. I got to walk under my own car while it was on the lift and I can’t recommend that enough as a totally wild thing to experience.)

I think the only way I got the burdocks out was that I hadn’t washed my hair in a week or two. I didn’t add any oil or conditioner or anything, and I don’t have a good history with combs and this hair, I just used a brush and my fingers and more patience than I had, but I was mostly sitting there on the verge of tears anyway because i was so tired, so it worked, I just zoned out and got it done. It took about 45 minutes.

Now, the other big news of the week I haven’t addressed at all but it was on Thursday and it was horribly sad, but we were prepared for it and had made our peace, and I don’t think I’ll discuss it much except to say that the vet made a housecall and poor Dini the dog’s confusion and suffering have come to an end and she is now safely at rest in a new spot of garden, in front of the solar panels, surrounded by a beautiful sweep of well-established comfrey plants and next to a sapling elm tree, and there will be a new garden atop the mound come spring. Probably we’ll put a bench there, too, as it gives a great view of the picking garden.

[image description: a green hillside with clouds and blue sky overhead, and in the foreground the sign for my sister’s farm (I’m standing next to the highway as I take the picture, waiting for the bus for my niece to get off it), and up on the green hillside, small with distance, a red tractor with a small backhoe arm on the back and my BIL in a blue shirt sitting in the seat controlling it to fill in the hole, and my sister a tiny figure in khaki-colored trousers and a red sweater hugging herself next to the hole.]

She was a good dog. (Your picture was not posted)

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so Sister raises pigs on her farm

anyway. her daughter, 7, went for a sleepover at an adult friend’s house. this friend was helping an older woman clean out her house preparatory for downsizing, and was helping organize an estate sale. the older woman had a large collection of pig-themed items, and Farmkid used some of her piggybank’s quarters to buy a few pig-themed items to give to her friends and her mother.

the punchline of this is why the older woman had a collection of pig-themed items:

in the 60s she’d done some work with the police, and her friends thought it would be funny to give her pig merch.

anyway Farmsister has a silicone potholder shaped like a pig face now, only lightly used. (Your picture was not posted)

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i’m just trying to collect myself. i feel very off-kilter. i was up super early yesterday so i went to look at the eclipse. really nothing visible to the naked eye, but there were some eclipse glasses willa’s bff’s mom had dropped off, and through those i could see a chunk was missing from the sun, but it wasn’t above the horizon until after the apex of the whole shenanigans, and. anyway. it was a pleasant interlude of watching the sun rise, but then i was exhausted all day.

It’s feeling like much later in the season than it is. Everyone is exhausted, it’s hot, all the equipment is broken, everyone’s cranky, I’m just spending all my time validating people’s feelings and attempting to smoothe over interpersonal conflicts. I swear to Christ I’ve said “It’s so understandable that you feel that way” to my sister so often that I don’t realize I’m saying it anymore. I had not realized what a middle child I was. Well, maybe I did know that. It might be why I’m here.

Wednesday in particular Farmsister was like “I don’t know! Arghh I don’t want to be in charge of stuff!” whenever I asked what I should be working on, so in the afternoon I just started following her around and waiting for her to be like “oh I don’t have time but need to do x” and I’d pop up and be like “what do I need to know to do X” and she’d tell me and i’d do it, and that filled about four hours and meant the day was a productive one.

I spent yesterday with Farmkid and her bff, who is at this point basically another niece, which is lovely to have. Oh I never did tell the whole story of how I got my car inspected by bff’s dad, and he wouldn’t let me pay for it. That was awesome. Anyhow, we had some challenges with school but in the afternoon we spent two hours in the creek. Both girls are learning to go underwater with goggles on and look around at things, and I facilitated this by standing on the bank throwing in large rocks for them to look at the bubbles that made. (They’d been doing it for one another but were exceptionally bad at spatial perception and I had very vivid and warranted visions of someone getting a giant rock to the head and me having to fish the bits of them out of this creek and try to put their brains back in. No thanks. Not my area of specialty. So I took over rock-heaving duty.)

I realized I have to leave this afternoon, to go to Rochester tonight, because we’re apparently going on a pontoon boat tomorrow, and it was one of those things that in the depth of winter and the pandemic sounded amazing, and now i’m like wtf are we going to do on a boat in a lake. but. whatever. it’s my other pseudo-niblings, so it’ll be good to hang out with them, I’ve missed them!

So now I’m wildly off-kilter and running around trying to sort out what I need to do before I go, and accomplishing nothing. Whatever man, whatever.

Gotta make lunch. It should be vegan, it’s Friday and VegMan’s orthodox thing means there’s no mat Friday, and that’s fine. I can come up with something. I think I’m going to do like a stir-fry of vegetables over wheatberries (because i did rice yesterday and there was rice Wednesday too), and I’ll cook a pan of baked eggs in the oven to be the topping for the non-vegans. I could do a side of bacon for topping too, but I also could just not bother with that, Beautiful Livestock Manager’s the only one who bitches about not having meat and he’s out today…. OH i could toast some walnuts? That might be kinda keen to mix in. I don’t have a recipe but like. Recipes are overrated. I need to go find a shitload of onions and some kale, now. (Your picture was not posted)