Tag Archives: to do

Lay out the plan then follow it.

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Today I ran 2 miles to start the day. Noah came with me even though he has been having a gout attack over the past week. So far it seems like he is doing better and he’s not in extra pain from the run and that’s fabulous. I tore open an adhesion between my butt and my thigh and it’s absolutely marvelous. It only hurt for a short time and now I can lift my leg higher and I’m thrilled. This will make it easier to get on and off my bike; it’s been a struggle to raise my leg high enough for quite a while.

I took a shower and washed my hair and did all the greasing for my body head to toe. I fixed my pocket/belt doohickey because it wasn’t done perfectly on the first go-round. That’s going to be ok.

I need to tidy up my room some, do some processing of food that is in deep storage out into the glass jars for usage. It’s important. I might even unload and reload the dishwasher because MC didn’t do it before taking off on their walk and I don’t want them staying up super late to finish dishes later.

I need to catch up on budget stuff. I’ve been not getting that done. I have a whole stack of books I want to get through. I have a lot of seeds that need to be started in the next day or two because it is *time*. This is hilarious because I am running out of floor in my bedroom and bathroom.

I have a meeting at 2 with a construction dude who is going to help with the rotting deck outside the apartment. That’s a good thing. Shorty has badminton at 4 and I have to ride her over there. If I have time I probably should go get some slate tiles before we do badminton so I can bring them home with me. I are tired. Then I eat dinner quickly and head right back out to a yoga class in town. All told I am going to be riding at least 11 miles today but it might be more. I get a little fuzzy on some of the exact distances.

It’s a good day.

I did a lot of seed planting yesterday, my bathroom floor is almost entirely covered in plants and the heat is high. I have about three more weeks of needing that room to be super warm and I am deeply ready for the temperature to go down. I think that next year I am going to try harder to figure out how to have a small enclosed space that I heat without heating that whole room. This is oppressive. Also I could really use a place to start plants where the cats don’t try to sleep on them. The cats are unhappy about their current ban from my room.

I continue to have struggles in many ways as a parent. Figuring out how to teach things, how to model healthy behavior, and how to get a kid to give a shit about something that I find important is… hard. Very hard. I am not feeling good at this. I will keep trying though.

Shorty is spending a lot of time on learn-to-read apps and she’s made a fairly shocking amount of progress. I told her she couldn’t have Roblox till she was 10 because that’s about when my older kids were able to read/write well enough to be safe on the platform. She is absolutely determined to get there sooner. We’ll see!

I am by no measure a perfect person. I will keep reaching for the light even though I am stunted.

Fuck your measurements

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I have now finished all of the “soft” entrance to permaculture books and I am on to the textbooks that are deeply impervious to dilatantes like me. No, I am not going to buy a bunch of surveying equipment. I am not making a topographical map. I already know how water flows through my garden. I don’t need a map. I do think I know where I would do well to dig a small trench down the side of the garden that I will line with rocks and mulch with hay. That will ensure that a lot more of the rain that strikes the garden will land in the tree roots near that fence instead of washing into the burn immediately. Of course there will have to be an easy drain area down just before the water would otherwise hit the bike shed as that could become severely problematic.

I am realising I really do need to paint the wall white as that will do a lot to reflect light and create a hotter microclimate. That’s hilarious because ordinarily I strongly prefer not having white walls, c’est la vie.

I need to build a permanent structure for the grapes to grow up. One of the grapes was yanked out of the ground and left on the ground, I presume by Shorty. Building a garden means having to cope with all the other uses the garden has for other people. I feel like I am going to have to get over my fear of drilling into the wall.

I have decided that I need to start making scale drawings between now and the 1st of April (no foolin) because I am going to start putting some seeds in the ground and I need a plan. My property is laid out so that the boundary lines are pretty close to exactly a square with north on the top but my house is laid out so that I have the corners of the house almost perfectly hitting each direction. (Slightly more left as the “north” corner of the house is probably at 10:30 on a clock.) I want to refer to the sections as A/B/C/D starting with A in the NE corner and then going around the clock. The studio is in C block and it takes up a lot of space. D is the bike shed, chicken coop, and a bunch of driveway. A has a fair bit of driveway and the polytunnel. For my sake I am only plotting the parts with dirt I can grow in. I know I “should” have an overall property map, and I think I will, but I’m thinking of my layout in terms of the quadrants.

Around 2/3 of A gets good sun up until around 1pm and the other 1/3 is in total shade all the time.

Ack. Need to just hit send and give up on getting this whole thing written out in one go.

Jot down some notes then get up

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I am thinking about how I am going to make a place for bamboo without spending much money. I will start with digging a trench deep enough to put about 16″ deep rhizome barrier and I will build the raised bed around that going up about 12″ above ground. I don’t want a tall raised bed there but I think that something shorter would be risking a jump over the barrier. Bamboo is super aggressive.

I want it for a few reasons. It would provide evergreen visual privacy along a whole stretch of wall that is usually in full view of everyone who walks by; we are all a little uncomfortable about the fishbowl. Over time I will be able to harvest canes and use them (and share them with neighbors.) They provide a good source of habitat for birds who are currently being ousted by the gorse removal on our road. (Insert big sad face here). It will also deflect the north wind and trap the southern wind thus dramatically impacting the microclimate of my garden into a much warmer environment. Like, that’s pretty brilliant.

I don’t want an absolute solid wall, and thus keeping them in planters rather than letting them fill the whole area by the road with just a barrier between the road/driveways/wall. I have planted a lot of fruit trees very close to the wall so they will grow big enough to be harvested from the road (and so they are close enough to the wall to catch as much extra heat as possible.

It occurs to me that I should paint that wall white. It would dramatically increase how warm the plants got.

Another day

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I didn’t get the trees in the ground. That’s ok. Instead I got a massage and picked up my prescription swim goggles (I am really excited about these) and Shorty got her glasses fixed and I did laundry and I spent time with Shorty setting up the computer and getting her on Minecraft before cycling off to a yoga class.

I keep thinking that I am closer and closer to my goal of being blacksheep when I grow up: cycling all over, swimming, running, walking, yoga, every other opportunity for manual labor…

I also spent some time resting in the middle of the day. I read a little. I feel like I had a really good day.

I haven’t been using the day planner over the past few weeks. I am feeling super resistant to it again. I have tied my usage to the kids and that’s a stupid thing. Because then I combine it with yelling and we all feel shittier. I need to be using it though because otherwise I am going to start missing appointments and we have a lot going on.

I’m trying to track my gardening stuff, medical appointments for everyone, exercise, money, cleaning, planning for EC’s Art Tour, video chats with friends in the US, kid social life stuff, kid classes, along with how much social time I am spending with folks in town. I’m not paying attention to Noah like I was. I feel like my sex drive is kind of napping–not sleeping, exactly. Shorty has been extremely clingy and needy and that is a real buzz-kill. I take a long-term view of this. She won’t need me like this forever and I feel deep satisfaction for the way EC and MC both feel deep in their bones that I will love and support them. This is important.

It is now time to go to bed with her.

Why are you so tired?

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I always feel kind of stunned by this question and I get asked it a lot. It’s weird living in a place where basically no one is familiar with my back catalogue of writing. I do not direct anyone here at all anymore and I won’t start. I no longer believe that reading my blog is a way for people to know me. It is a way that some people have learned some things about me and then they fill in the blanks with assumptions and projections and in the end I feel like maybe they know me even less than if they hadn’t read the blog at all. It’s complicated.

I don’t do all the cleaning in this house, thank goodness. But it’s a big house. What I don’t do myself I have to manage and parcel out and track. In some ways that is better and in other ways it is just as stressful and challenging. The kids alternate between calmly going along and doing what I ask and screaming at me that I am a horrible person who makes them hate their life so that’s fun. Apparently when I spend two weeks saying, “Look at the current chore list and figure out what/how you would like to renegotiate the things on that list” and they say “Oh the current system is fine and I want it to continue” so I continue to remind them to do the exact same thing they have been doing for 4+ months all of a sudden “YOU KEEP INTERRUPTING ME TO TELL ME TO DO RANDOM STUPID SHIT.” Uhm, excuse me?

I write down chores in a daily planner book. I do it months in advance according to a system that I sat down with the kids and worked out. “About how many days can/should you go between doing your laundry? How often should we clean bathrooms and who should do which one? What is fair for doing dishes? How often should we sweep and how do we want to rotate the chore?” The negotiation is long and detailed. It’s not just “Mom Made Me.” The kids talked about at what point they find using something gross and it needs to be cleaned. Professional house cleaners come in every other week and do a basic upkeep so we are not required to do all of it ourselves.

But when I say, “Hey x, y, and z have been assigned over the past three days and you haven’t done them–can you please take care of that?” I am a complete and total asshole who must be raged at. Awesome. That’s not fucking draining or anything.

I ask my kids if they want to do classes and if so what kind. They tell me they want me to hunt around for them and find classes like a, b, or c. I do that. It takes time. The classes cost money. I find what they say they want and show it to them. “Are you sure you want to do this? It is x-distance from the house and will take you at least y-time to get there? It will take z-money out of the budget so I won’t have money for this other thing.” Yes they want it. Then they get 3 days into the class and all of a sudden I am a horrible person who forces them to do stupid things they hate and it is all my fault that they don’t have any spare time because instead of actually fucking riding their bike they choose to push the bike both ways at a speed of approximately .5 miles an hour. Not draining or frustrating at all.

The older kids have locks on their doors. They usually won’t use them. Youngest child is constantly in their room stealing stuff because obviously big kid stuff is cooler and I have to spend a lot of time trying to keep large, towering people from screaming at a small child until my ears ring. It’s shitty and not cool all the way around. You getting louder doesn’t solve the problem. You locking your door solves the problem. But you won’t take responsibility for what you can do you just want to scream about how you feel violated. Cool. That’s not fucking exhausting.

The amount of hoarding and screaming and fighting in this house over food is making me hate my life and everyone I live with. So fine. We are going to buy more shitty food and I am going to stop arguing because they need to learn how to live with their bodies. When you transition out of limiting food it is always rough. (There are actually principles behind this transition and I am too tired and my hands hurt too much to explain them all. I did a fair bit of research on the topic and I am not going to justify it here. If you are legitimately curious let’s schedule a video call and I’d be happy to talk about food scarcity mindset, neurodiversity, nutrition research, and parenting choices.)

Gardening is a lot. This space is so much bigger than what I had in California and I feel like I am working myself to the bone. The kids are supposed to help and every minute of help is difficult to get and involves a big fight. I am so tired. I do most of it myself because I just don’t have it in me to fight. Sometimes I am out in the yard well past dark crying just doing it all because I cannot fight for more help.

My buddy is here and that is complicated. He has lived alone for a long time. He has never lived with a child in his life–his older siblings were much older than him and he has no memory of dealing with kids beyond hour or so visits sporadically with friends or family. There are a bunch of challenges around that. He’s here for a while. He is being *very* helpful in re-teaching me how to use power tools and helping me build some projects I want done. He is also used to working in a defined way always on a dead line to very technical specs that must be met because (reasons). My compost bins and chicken coop are not similar sorts of things. The amount and kind of project meetings he wants to bicker out every single last detail are hard. The frequency with which he wants me to stop what I am doing and focus on his questions is hard because I am keeping a lot of balls in the air and I don’t change focus that well. I can’t get back on track and half an hour of talking (it’s always “I only have a few questions and it will only take a minute” but really it’s many questions and it’s 30-45 minutes) set me back 1-3 hours because I have lost focus and flow and maybe I can’t even get back to what I was doing because now I have lost that window of time and I have another thing that has to happen Right Now. He has a lot of time to rest and chill out in between work times. I don’t.

I started typing this 45 minutes ago. Then I was interrupted to go fix a computer problem for a child (that has to forking start with a multi-hour download of updates because oh boy nothing will work when you are that far out of date) paused to brush the cat because folks noticed some fleas and the brushing needs to happen before the medication. I still haven’t finished my tea from breakfast, done the budgeting updates I’m supposed to do, or emptied the dishwasher and reloaded it from breakfast.

Why am I tired? Oh my god are you kidding? Do you actually not understand? Really?

I also need to finish taking the labels off the little jam jars so I can put the spices in them because the random bags of spices piled on an open shelf that fall down every single time you do anything cause daily frustration and frequent messes and I just can’t.

Oh, and I should paint today, do some weeding, some carpentry work, hang out the laundry that is in the washer and start another load. I also need to put the food in the fridge that arrived from the farm share box because apparently unloading the boxes means “put it all on the counter” to my kids. (One of them was cooking and me putting it all away would have meant getting in their way and they would have gotten annoyed.)

Did I mention that all of my chronic pain is through the roof and I am just about out of Ibuprofen gel and I don’t really have time to go get more? Also I need to go across town because we are about out of a few things that I get from the co-op and that’s about 6 miles round trip. I will probably wait until next week and go when I am on my way to or from the Youngest Child’s swimming class.

I told someone that I was falling behind on responding to emails/texts/messages on various platforms and she said, “Yeah I’m a procrastinator too.” ……. Does being so busy that you rarely have time to think a full thought outside of “What task do I need to be accomplishing full speed in the next 10 minutes” count as procrastinating?

Oh, and I need to respond to text messages from Middle Child’s best friend’s dad because otherwise the kids won’t see each other before the school year starts in 10 days and the bestie has been out of the country almost all summer. Woo. Haha. Got that done. Excellent. It will be great to see her again.

And really I have to close because ALL OF THE THINGS.

There is always a cost

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I am so worn out and I am trying to both rest and catch up and it strikes me that they are diametrically opposed. My growing zone has an annual last frost date somewhere between the last 4 days of April and the first 5 days of May. There was snow on the ground last week. Because of the world-wide problems with insect die off it is widely considered wise to wait until the average temperature is 10C or above. This is slightly hilarious to me because only July and August have night time averages above 10C… the average is 11C. Does that mean we shouldn’t ever disturb gardens here? It’s a thought to ponder. (Waiting until the temperature rises is because bugs hibernate when it is cold and if you go out and tidy up your garden you may well kill off a generation of wee beasties unintentionally.)

Tasks I need to perform:

  • install bike pulleys
  • install trailer pulleys
  • build a better compost unit (my pallets are all rotting and sagging)
  • sift my compost pile and distribute the lovely material around my garden
  • get some fertilizer on my hydrangeas and all the food plants
  • finish taking apart the old shed for boards
  • build the potting benches for my poly tunnel and the raised beds I want to have in there
  • weed, always weeding around the fence borders because the ground elder is fierce
  • get more wood chips and cover more grass with it because by golly in about 4 years I will have subdued it enough to make a serious start on alternative ground covering plants
  • get more seeds because I only had like 5 packets of veg seeds left, and they were mostly gone in any case, and I need to get cracking on starting this year’s plants
  • figure out storage for the mountain of costumes I brought home from Texas
  • respond to cafe owner about holding meet ups for the youth group
  • schedule a walking munch and the 101 workshops
  • clean my dang bathroom
  • tidy up my room because right now it is a royal mess
  • restart the subscription orders from the grocery service
  • do a bit more pushing with the mum bike group to get some activities scheduled
  • figure out when the group camping trip is happening and get myself organized for that
  • install the trailer hitch on the new bike so that I can have towing capacity when I have extra passengers
  • get YC more time out on the balance bike because she has nearly outgrown it and I don’t really want to buy a bigger one I want her to progress to pedals, dangit
  • schedule with a freakin roofer
  • schedule with a plumber for the apartment bathroom (the sink is leaking)
  • schedule getting the retaining walls repaired around the property because it is past time
  • I really should be reading books because, dude
  • don’t forget the damn skin care routine
  • oh yeah I should eventually have sex with my husband
  • all of my kids could do with some one on one time because they are all feeling super needy and emotional
  • I really need to organize group bicycle skill training for my family because my instructions are not adequate to help all of them know what they need to know
  • I need to organize specific training in bike maintenance because this is causing a lot of fighting and fussing and it is driving me insane
  • I should submit data to the national database about when my fucking fruit trees are in flower because tracking this stuff is important
  • the XR people would really appreciate it if I took on more duties, as would the allotment people
  • oh yeah, I also need to schedule some physics experiments because my kids really don’t understand some basic elements that would make cycling go better
  • I need to sit on my kids more industriously about working on their school work because that is literally one of my main jobs
  • I haven’t touched up the sloppy paint areas in my room I was going to come back to
  • I want to move the white board from the kitchen into my bedroom so I can use it to track forking lists like this
  • I also want to change a bunch of how I store things in the kitchen/dining room/laundry room because the current set up is inefficient, sloppy, and difficult to keep tidy
  • I should also be more industrious about exercising and eating vegetables and going to fucking sleep at a reasonable time

Yeah. Fuck me. I still have almost constant headaches and neck aches from the concussion. The sensitivity to light is really bothering me but I have to push through it anyway. I am still feeling stupid and like I am not retaining new information. I feel unmotivated and weary and frustrated at basically every moment of every day.

Visiting Noah’s family was intense. I feel like I understand the dynamics a bit better. I have much stronger opinions about what I would guess for various folks’ diagnostic labels but I try not to say those out loud too much because I am not an expert and I am not seeing any of these people in any kind of professional capacity so it’s a dick thing for me to call out. However, it helps me decide how I should respond in terms of my own behavior and as long as it is my opinion and judgment and it exists in my head and I’m not trying to influence other people I think it is ok. It’s funny to me how much I can now go, “Oh yeah. I’m trying to place a rules system around this topic because that helps me understand it.” I don’t want to make other people agree with me or change… heck I don’t plan to see any of those people again for 3-5 years. I will barely communicate with them through rare letters.

I believe it is important for me to think about things in this way because I have to think in a long term way if I am going to manage the historical trauma my children have inherited. I happen to be a big believer in the epigenetic nature of trauma. The things that happened to their parents impact them. The things that happened to their grandparents impact them. The things that happened to their great grandparents impact them. That said, neuroplasticity and resilience count for so very much. And let’s not discount the benefit of various levels of privilege.

I don’t need to try hard to control other people. I need to know what I need to think about when it comes to my own behavior and what I am modeling for my children. That’s what I am doing here.

I mean, I can worry about the gardening and the social life and the academics and the house maintenance… but what I am actually fucking doing here is figuring out how to raise people who can come from a fairly intense amount of ancestral trauma and thrive. Their mental health, their resilience, their ability to grow and change and find a better path is what I am fucking doing with my life.

I lose sight of that. I get mired in the weeds (literal and figurative) because it is easier to put my head down and just do whatever is in front of me. When I do that I invite inconsistency and acting out unconscious patterns. I invite the repetition of behaviors that have already damaged their bodies through their inherited genetics and what the fuck am I doing; I know better. I don’t need to shove them through survival. I don’t need to create lists of tasks so long that no lifetime can contain them all and then convince my children that they are inadequate if they aren’t working their bodies into dust.

Life is not about grinding yourself in a mortar and pestle. It’s just not. There are costs to those behaviors and attitudes: impatience, lack of understanding, lack of dignity, unkindness, addictive behaviors, unhealthy bodies and minds.

Noah’s grandmother survived, but the costs her children paid were so severe that they cannot bear her presence. There is duty there, some of them still serve that duty, but there is no love. Her grandchildren can barely tolerate her. Her great grandchildren are split on despising her or on not knowing her. She accomplished fairly impressive things. What was the cost? She lies on a bed alone in a room day after day. Most of the people who have ever known her have no interest in her company. Was what she accomplished worth the cost?

Noah’s mother mostly has good relationships with her children. Noah fleeing the nest as early as he did and with such intensity seems to have made a lasting impression. She worked on her behavior. She came to therapy late in life but she did get there. That’s something. Is she perfect or healed or a person I would want to spend much time with? Oh goodness no. But the difference between how she acts now and how she acted when I met her over 15 years ago is dramatic. Not different enough for me to leave my children alone with her, even though she did ask politely.

I have stopped looking at the long run. I no longer weigh and measure how I behave based on the relationships I want to have with my 30 and 40 year old children. I am sloppy. I am messy. I am inconsistent. I am pursuing short term goals at long term cost. That is stupid. I am not modeling what I think should be modeled. I am not showing how to make better choices with a joyful heart. I am dragging myself through a series of tasks and I am short tempered and impatient. I don’t think I am being vicious but that should not be the bar. Frankly I am not happy with how I have behaved for a while. I’m distracted. I’m snippy. I am not performing the behaviors I believe are necessary because I am wearing myself to the bone on things that matter so much less.

This is not what I want my children to remember. Do I think they need to have some challenges and some difficulties in life in order to build resiliency? Of course. That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to be outward focused. I want to be focused in on the people I made commitments to.

Krissy, you know who you are supposed to be. Go fucking act like it. Or you will pay the cost.