This remodel has eaten my brain, my spoons, and my time for a very long time now. It’s been over a year of solid physical work and it isn’t over. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Yesterday the kids and I spent an hour and a half filling the green waste bin with weeds from the back yard. We are prepping for Easter. I talked to the kids about which plants to defend and why; we looked at examples of choking out. We did our best to recite the names of the plants we know we are keeping and why. (I need to look up some stuff again because I forget.

I’m putting things away in the shed that can live there for a very long time. The pantry is almost organized again. The garage is coming along.

I found a tile artist who wants the tile! I’m going to drive stuff down to Santa Cruz to her because that’s way more awesome than hoping someone will find a way to use it in an industrial setting.

The living room is downright livable. The kid rooms are easy to pick up and organize and the kids are enjoying that. They can find their stuff for the first time in almost two years. It’s been a long road.

Physically I’m still in a rough spot. I’m trying to slow down my rate of work so I can maybe stop inflicting damage and work on healing. We’ll see how well this goes.

Mood wise: gardening was smart. I felt so much better when I was done. Gardening is fun and satisfying. You don’t have to do 15 months on a project, you can set an hour as work time and be satisfied with the progress. Sure there’s more to weed (there’s always more to weed) but I’m out of green waste bin space so there is no point in picking any more plants this week. Done. And the plants are coming back to life so beautifully.

At Pantheacon I participated in a conversation that was fun for me. It was talking about the overlap of mental issues and existing in the world. In this case it was about bugs and pests and little creatures that want to live in our houses with us. I said that over the last few years I’ve been getting weirder with every passing year. I don’t like to kill pests or bugs anymore. (My only exception is spiders on the floor of the bathtub. That’s just a dumb place to hang out.) I carry them outside. We have critters who hang out in our yard from the neighborhood. We see opossums. Opossums are good because they eat fallen fruit and keep rats away. But the poop is kinda gross. So anyway, in the conversation I was talking to someone who says they have trouble exerting boundaries with these critters because the critters need to live too.

I said that I have lots of conversations with the bugs and critters and I encourage them to live in my yard, but not my house. You don’t want me in your house because I would mess stuff up and I don’t want you in my house. We can each maintain respectful space. I have corners of my yard that are very devoted to critters and I don’t clean up and there are wood piles and bugs and… that’s good.

It’s funny how the pagan thing is going to hang over my head. I’m woo. I can claim being woo without anyone in the whole world telling me that I don’t “count” because I’m not “pure” enough or I don’t have the right teacher or whatever. Being into woo woo shit is highly unregulated. No one really calls woo woo appropriation: they stick with weird. I’m fine with weird.

I like helping other creatures stay alive. I like that the birds and the bees hang out in my yard now. I like the explosion of beetles and spiders in the yard. I like the ants I see digging in my beds. That’s where they belong. The opossums are wonderful and when I had to evict them from one housing spot (they were damaging my house–I need their house to not be directly touching mine) I did it very gently and I didn’t harm them and I scared them as little as I possibly could. I don’t want to be mean. I just need you to move because we want to paint that wall there. I’m really sorry.

I made some spots further out in the corners where the kids don’t play. That’s a great spot to keep an opossum safe.

I used to ridicule bird watching. Now I spend a fair bit of time getting to know my neighborhood birds. I can’t get the hummingbirds to eat out of a feeder (I’ve moved it, tried different fluids… they hate my feeder) so instead I have flowers everywhere that they love. I can’t wait till they come back in a few weeks. Right now all the flowers are just barely emerging.

It makes me happy when I walk out in the back yard with a bag of bird seed. All the birds explode into conversation. They know me and they know what that means.

It’s kind of funny how much this means to me.

I sent out my monthly donations this morning. I believe with all my heart and soul that we need to #GiveYourMoneyToWomen because that’s the way to correct a lot of problems. As long as wealth concentrates in the hands of men we are in trouble. Which erases non-binary people entirely.

Shit.

Lately I’ve been noticing how much my language is binary and it is bugging the shit out of me.

I can’t say that men don’t menstruate. That’s bullshit. I can’t say that only women menstruate. That’s complete and utter fucking horse shit. But I’ve said it. Recently. I’m a piece of shit. I’m sloppy and lazy and reductionist in how I speak.

This shit hurts people I love. I gotta stop.

I think I had managed to completely ignore how much of it I did until recently. I’m done ignoring that shoddy behavior. It has to move up the list to “actively working on change”.

My child deserves this from me. My friends deserve this from me. Hell, strangers who mean nothing to me personally deserve this from me. I don’t have the right to erase people casually. That’s fucked up.

There are people who have uteruses and people who don’t. It’s not about being male or female. These are separate distinctions.

And male or female aren’t the only options so what the fuck.

I need more words for this. Luckily I have a backlog of books to go through that talk about trans issues. I need to start reading. That’s also waiting on the remodel.

Oh I’m tired. So much to learn. So much to think about. And now I have a lovely daughter who wants to snuggle up with me. ttyl