I started bleeding yesterday. The few hours before I started bleeding I was so irritable I felt like I was about to start screaming and never stop. I wasn’t angry. No one had done anything. It’s chemical.

But now I’m bleeding and I just am left with the aching joints and general pain I’ve been making worse by bending over on the floor for hours and hours and hours each day. I’m torn between being frustrated the bathroom remodel is still ongoing and good cheer that I still don’t have to hurry. I’m not done with the tree wall yet. I feel like it will need two more days of work. Maybe three?

Then I need to do the other wall of the shower. I’m still not sure how I’m going to transition from autumn to winter there. That will be the space where the transition needs to start happening. That corner needs to be the change of season. That is when everything finishes dying.

When I was a kid I feel that I was barely aware of passing seasons. Mostly what they meant to me was “Is it the beginning of the school year or the end?” I didn’t have many other associations. Now I’m aware that it would have been hard to notice seasons given how much I moved. I didn’t see plants grow up and change.

I love my yard so much. I feel more grateful with every passing year. I did this. I made this. And it is beautiful. It isn’t so much a planned garden the way other people do planned gardens and I don’t care. I am discovering which parts of my yard like which kinds of pants. I’m doing it through trial and error and goodness this year I’m killing a lot of peas.

I have them spread all over the yard. I’m learning about the various levels of health in my soil in my yard. Some areas have been rototilled lots in the past few years. Some areas are barely amended. Some are just new bought dirt. It’s interesting watching the peas. They aren’t doing how I’d expect.

I’ve gotten a lot of the weeding I care about for the year done. I still need to keep hacking at the blue potato vine. It’s… gone a bit wild and it’s blocking the sun for one of my beds. I need to do a little tree trimming maintenance. I need to add more fertilizer to the roses and food beds. Then it’s watering and harvesting and playing until the next time I feel like adding more plants/seeds. I think this year’s garden is established. I’m not sure how much more room I’d have for anything fun.

I feel so blessed. There is so much color in my yard. It smells so nice. I’m still adding. I will add until I’m literally out of space. I will add stuff until I’m gardening on the roof (if it can handle the weight–I’m going to talk to the roofer I actually trust about this project). I’d love to have above ground raised planting beds on the roof. So the actual dirt/water/plants are several feet off the surface of the roof so that it is weight being supported, but not damp sitting on my roof. We’ll see.

I often have trouble tracking gardening stuff because I get busy with projects in the house and I forget. I feel like this year I should very consciously focus outside every day because I put way more variety of seeds into the ground than usual. This is by far my most ambitious year for variety. I’ve had big gardening years in terms of labor and production–a friend gave me an obscene number of tomato starts one year and I grew and processed over 60 lbs of tomatoes from my back yard. (It took three years to use up the jars.) We used so many fresh tomatoes that year that I got over hating tomatoes.

This remodel is hurting my hands badly. So I can only work for so long.

This is why I don’t do handicrafts. This pain.

Pinching is so horrible. My fingers ache.

But! Yesterday I finally figured out that I should put long strips of tape down and then do a whole row of tiles and that is way faster and less work for my hands. It uses almost twice as much tape and right now I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care.

I am going to go through a palette of tape.

The kids are being so patient with this project. It is a nigth and day difference between doing this project and finishing the garage when they were babies. This is so much easier. They are so patient. I suspect my kids are as good at working as I work because they’ve never had a choice. This has been their whole life. Training pays off. They can keep busy forever.

I don’t know many people in the whole world who are as good at finding a way to entertain their brains as my kids. They can find fascination in anything. I don’t do any where near as well. I’m a computer addict. I want to talk to people. I want atttttttttttention.

They want attention too and they will pick talking to people over anything else but if no one is available they still have a great day. If I go a day without talking to people on IM I get sad and depressed. I check in with so many people it is a wonder my fingers aren’t falling off.

But I don’t feel scared today. My jaw is relaxed. My stomach is clearly empty and getting hungry but it doesn’t feel like a knot of tension.

This is a good day. Pam isn’t visiting us tonight. She was invited to a show. That’s not the good part. I’d actually like to talk to Pam right now. I’m not feeling bitchy. Ha. But I’ll get more work done. Sigh.

Because of how badly the tile work hurts my back I’ve been crapping out after about three hours. I still have the full time jobs of being a housewife, home schooler, my gardening is more than a part time job, I write…

I feel like about three hours a day of tile isn’t slacking given how much pain it causes me. But it means I’m going slow.

Good thing the fucking contractors can’t come back to work anyway, right? Shit. Still waiting on a letter. When do I say, please give me the engineers phone number so I can talk to this person and find out if you are lying to me about yet something new.

This is seven weeks now. What the fuck.

If they were going to come back in tomorrow I’d pull a few all nighters and have the bathroom tile done in 48 hours. I could but I’d be a nightmare to live with. The most important factor in balancing all this work is my mood. How much am I going to take out on the kids in the meantime.

So I’m going sllllloooooooooooow so that I can smile and be nice during the process. It’s a good thing.

I’d like to see how nice you’d be doing this work if you felt like someone was holding a burning hot fireplace poker on your elbow all day long.

I need a god damn break from pinchy work.

I don’t get it yet. Not this week. Not next week.

I want to hurry up and finish so I can have at least a week off before my date with my submissive. I won’t be very effective as a sadist if my arms hurt this badly. It’ll be 100% kicking and whereas that’s fun… it’s not the same.

I got eight hours of sleep. I’m glad. I just wish my back hurt less. Whinge.

Deep breathe, deep breathe, deep breathe. You picked this project, Krissy. You could have had an easy, normal looking bathroom with no pinchy work at all. No complaints. This is a choice. This is something you are insisting on when it isn’t easier for other people. Just suck up the consequences. It’ll end. Then you’ll get to keep the work forever.

It makes such a difference knowing that this is art I will keep forever.

Just keep pinching pinching pinching just keep pinching pinching pinching. It will end.

I sorta feel like I want to get dressed, put my running shoes on and go running. I don’t feel like I want to get started medicating for the day.

My lungs are so pissed.

I’m at the point where I feel like I am breathing through a layer of film that must pop like a soap bubble before the air gets through. I need a break. A many many month break.

Ok, I’ll try Gabapentin.

How do you learn to cause less harm to yourself? I don’t know for sure but I’m trying.

I no longer spend a lot of time cutting myself. Is that progress? Now I’m just taking my pre-damaged lungs (growing up with heavy smokers is bad for you) and hurting them more so that my behavior is more under control. It’s like being an adult, right?

I could hurt my arms for a while listing all the various kind of pain I feel right now.

Instead I notice that my heart feels light. Even the thing I’m mad about isn’t actually a big thing. I need to change some of my behaviors to change how that occurs and then there isn’t anything left to be mad about.

Right this minute almost anything seems possible. I don’t know what the future will bring but I’m fucking privileged as all hell. It’s going to be a nice future. There was a line in my life. Before I passed that line I had no reason to believe the future would be any better than the past and the past was pure shit. I have crossed that line. I’m not sure when. I’m not sure if it was teaching. I don’t think it was marrying Noah. I think it actually happened before that and I didn’t notice. I think it happened when I got my first job making more than $50,000/year. It may even have been when I got my first accident settlement check at 18. I was no longer dependent or scared in the same way. I had a future.

At 34 I feel more excited about my future than I ever have. I am going to do incredible things. I am going to go out and talk to thousands of people. I’m going to figure out stuff about incest that people don’t know yet. I’m going to help turn this into a picture people can actually look at and understand.

I believe that. That belief gives me a lot of strength and confidence to go through all the steps between now and then.

Gardening is part of it. I need to learn patience for letting things come up in their own time. I need to learn that every part of the growth cycle has a season and you can’t rush things. Not really. You can force growth artificially for a short time and then you have problems. Early death, deformity, disease.

Talking about incest is going to be like that. If I try to force people who aren’t ready I will damage them badly with my selfishness. I need to figure out what these cycles look like and it is hard knowing that I won’t figure it out until I hurt people. I won’t figure it out until it is too late to do it right the first ten times. But hopefully by the eleventh time I will be less of a fucker.

I need this time with the kids. I need to watch what growing independence looks like within the framework of healthy attachment.

Ok, sometimes I worry that we are overly enmeshed instead of healthily attached. I can’t tell. The thing I’m hanging my hat on is: no one here feels very responsible for the feelings of the people around them. We hang out together all the forking time but we all spin in our own little orbits. We talk about “My body is feeling like ___ so my emotions are doing ____ and I’m not reacting to your tone of voice. Sorry I’m being like this.”

There is so little blame in this house for bad days. I mean, sometimes someone gets mad because someone else did something… but even that doesn’t hit a fevered pitch. I am the one who comes down the heaviest on that kind of thing and I get over things quickly. I get flamingly angry at my kids, communicate why I’m so pissed, then it goes away.

My kids know that breaking rules and fucking up is part of life. They know that you must do these things in order to grow and develop. They also know that dealing with the fact that sometimes your fuck ups piss people off is part of life. How to manage that? You are never obsequious. You never act like you are wrong. You say, “Wow I screwed up. I shouldn’t have done that.” Then you explain in motherfucking detail what you should have done instead. Then, try again.

When my kids get upset and yell something like, “I screwed up” I say, “Yay! What did you learn from this?”

Every screw up has the chance to teach you more than doing it right in the first place. What did you learn?

“What a wonderful opportunity to learn you have now. What can we get out of this situation?”

I love my job. I love my life. I am so grateful that I have the privilege to sit around helping my kids learn how to deal with a complicated world. This is my dream come true.

No, Noah, I have no desire to blow up my life. I am exactly where I want to be.

I just… sometimes want to sneak out to see other people. Or not sneak out. Walk out proudly with hugs and kisses and “I’ll see you soon!” exchanged all around.

It’s different this time than ever before. Even when I went hunting and I found Muse four years ago it was different.

I don’t feel as ashamed any more. I think that part of it is that in the past when I was hunting for new sexual partners there was always this haze over every interaction where I knew the person was probably going to be gone after a night or at most a week. I didn’t have faith that most of my efforts were improving my life long term. I was getting through the night.

At this point I don’t need help getting through a night. I don’t need a place to sleep. I don’t need someone else to buy me food so I can eat today.

Now what I am doing is finding myself intently interested in people who are already part of my soul. I want to know them in ways I haven’t before because I found capacity in myself to love more parts of them than I originally believed I had bandwidth to accomplish.

It doesn’t feel like hunting in the same way. I don’t feel shameful. I feel really happy. I’m scared I will hurt my friends because I don’t have enough to offer. I’m scared that I will not be good at long term balancing the emotional needs of people I care about and I will cause a lot of unnecessary pain.

The only thing I can do is my best. I can try to bring my whole heart with me from interaction to interaction and give the best I have to give in any given moment. If someone feels that what I have to offer is inadequate, they can check out. But I’m not sure I should hide at home because I’m afraid I’m not good enough.

For so long I have felt like such a tiny sliver of myself… I need that to change. I’m a lot of things.

I’m not getting this with the folks I’m pursuing right now because they already know me, but when I talk t brand new people there is this series of things that happen. It is a huge ego boost. There is always that getting to know you period. Asking questions. Have you done ___? Do you like _____?

At the end of this kind of exchange I always have to either carefully edit and not say even a small fraction of my actual lifetime experiences or I answer everything honestly and fully and by the end their jaw is hanging open and they say something very similar to, “You actually did all that?”

Yes.

I’ve received this reaction in dozens of states and in a handful of countries so far. Yup. I did all that. And I’m not done.

I have so many adventures ahead of me it is unreal. Why? Because I’m lucky. Because I spend so much time being scared that the adventures aren’t a hard jump.

Right this minute I don’t feel scared. I’m in pain physically but emotionally I just feel happy. The next few months of my life are going to be glorious.

I’ll miss Pam. She is running off to her own adventures. I’ll call and keep in touch. I love you so much.

What did B & K say? Have fun. Play safe. Come back. Tell stories.

Today and tomorrow are tile, tile, tile, tile, martial arts.

Friday I get to go out with the Professor. He is taking me bra shopping. That was something he wanted to do before I told him I was uhm interested in him. See, I have lovely friends. It is my belated Christmas present.

Saturday and Sunday get tile. Tuesday gets a visit to the clinic for STD testing. LIKE A RESPONSIBLE SLUT, OK?! All of next week Noah is on vacation. The kids are in spring break camps. So we are going to be spending 2 hours each morning playing and fucking because we can in our house, loudly, with no one to notice. (One forking kid only wanted a half day camp. WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME?!) Then I get to pick up a kid at lunch. We are going to spend the early afternoon at the park waiting for the other sibling to get out of camp. It’ll be date time. That is important. Then I get to come home in the afternoons and evenings and do tile. Ahh fun.

Next Friday is another Dark Garden fitting. I’ve done one mock up fitting for the corset dress (she wanted to nip the waist in another inch). I think this is the second mock up and then they start on the actual dress.

When I was called for the appointment the nice gal had a hard time asking me to make a payment towards the total. It must really suck having a job where you have to ask people to give you tons of money for fancy artisan work. I’m sure they get a lot of pushback.

Hey, I’m forking over so much money it is obscene because I think the nice folks who live in San Francisco and hand make clothing deserve a living wage. Could I get cheaper clothing? Yes. It wouldn’t be handmade by people I know. It wouldn’t be custom made to my exact specifications and weird measurements.

I’m going to wear this as my fancy-occasion dress for the rest of my life. I don’t care if you’ve seen it I don’t care I don’t care.

For the record: the corset dress is the foundation garment. There is an over dress that looks more civilized.

But the corset dress is the one people will be carefully peeling me out of for sex and that part is so hot I can barely breathe.

Goodness I like being undressed.

I like being dressed up too. That is something I miss about my Owner. He had strong preferences about how I should look so he gave me a lot of feedback. I liked that part. I liked feeling like I knew how to please him.

Noah… Noah is best pleased if I’m nearby and paying attention to him. Trappings are kinda not noticed. So I just don’t bother much any more. I notice the impact that has on making me feel boring. Complicated.

I’d really really really like to have the tile done by the 3rd of April so I can rest. That isn’t a full week of rest before the parties I want to go to but it might be the best I can do. Ok. Now I feel more motivated to hurry up. Maybe I’ll get a wall done today.

First: running shoes. I’m antsy and my legs feel like they desperately need to move.

I love you all, even those I don’t. (Thank you R, for one of the best phrases I’ve ever head in my whole life.)