Monthly Archives: March 2023

The trouble with willpower

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I am trying to plow through a lot of work. Between gardening and running there are a lot of tasks that are time sensitive and I have to execute the plan with precision in order to manage to get the end result. We have slid out of cleaning the house again. I literally can’t enforce a clean house and get a lot of other stuff done. For the past few years we have maintained a shockingly clean house and it has come at the cost of many other activities.

I will not choose a clean house over actually completing important work I care about.

The thing about running is it doesn’t just take up the time it takes to go run. It means I have to be rigid about my sleep schedule. It means I have to be careful what I eat because I need proper fuel in the tank. I can’t eat shitty or I will hurt myself. I can’t miss sleep or I will hurt myself. If I hurt myself my ability to hit my targets will slip and I won’t reach my goals.

It is not easy for me to maintain rigid consistency. I can feel the internal fight. This is where I have found it fascinating to research PDA over the past few years. I am the only person making these demands upon myself but I can feel my anxiety spiking. I am not having an easy time with the constant need to refocus and align my attention with a narrow set of goals. It feels controlling and subjugating and it makes me want to completely zone out and go on “vacation” (when I keep the kids alive but zone out and don’t get anything done for a while).

Mostly I shift back and forth in between what pulls my attention and interest most on a given day. I suspect that my obsession with keeping the house clean over the past few years has partially been because I have been in the house all the time and I didn’t have that much else that could pull my attention harder. Now, there’s a lot.

I am going through a really intense period of cross training, too. I don’t think I have ever done this much exercise as an adult and maybe never in my life. I ride my bike a lot. Running is still early days–I haven’t had longer than 5 miles yet and most of the runs are 2-3 miles. But I run straight uphill as I get started and it feels fucking brutal. It is forcing my lungs to be very sad and learn how to control my breathing with a much higher heart rate. I’m seeing improvement in my lap swimming that I do while Shorty has class. My shoulder joints are clicking less and I can make it down the lane nearly twice as fast as I could a few weeks ago. That’s pretty cool. I am really enjoying starting yoga again. I need the overall strength building quite badly. It does so much to improve the pain in my arms and my shoulders and my back.

But it’s a lot. I feel worn to the bone. It’s using up all of my self discipline. It’s making it tougher to continue reading all of the permaculture books. Mostly because I have finished the ones that are most relevant to garden-level work and now I’m struggling my way through textbooks that focus on major installations, city, or true forest level designs. I have a very low likelihood of ever needing to design the layout for a 10+ acre piece of land. It’s hard using willpower to force myself through reading something that is never going to be fully relevant. But some of the details and the philosophy can be applied and is relevant so I really should finish them. Ugh.

I would much rather continue my binge of The West Wing, thanks. I’m already 48 episodes in. (Sure, I’m mostly watching them so I can detect defects…. right….)

I have not been keeping up with budget tracking. I am keeping up with laundry.

Holy crap. In the past 24 hours my polytunnel has had a minimum of 5C and a maximum of 32.7C. That means the soil temperature is staying way over 5C. Time to plant all these boxes! (I love a new way to get data. Yay thermometer!)

And I’m super sick, again. Last week it was an intestinal bug and this week it is a head cold. Ugh. Missing all the first Saturday stuff is annoying because it means no trip to the farmers market and we miss Kidical Mass.

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.

I should be talking to me more.

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I have a whole bunch of broken Wellie boots and broken luggage; I want put them up on the border wall between me and the road with plants inside. (Yes I know I will need to bolt them down if I don’t want them to wander.) Things I want to paint on them:

  • Not all who wander are lost; some are seeds floating on the wind searching for the right spot to sprout.
  • These boots were made for walking but then they got tired and put down roots.
  • With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding. With good compost, comes happy plants.
  • I would walk far more than 500 miles to get to Inverness, this lovely place where I get to build my nest.
  • I have seen 1,000 cities and this I must confess: the only one I want to call my home is Inverness.
  • When you have more than you need you should build a longer table, not a taller fence. Feel free to take clippings from any plants and if you see a fruit tree/bush heavy with fruit, come knock on the door. I’ll probably give you a bag.

I also want to make signs for all the plants in my garden explaining what they give and add to the soil and why I picked them for this spot. I would really like for people to be able to walk around my garden and get a mini-course on permaculture. By “people” I mean me because I am totally going to forget this shit if I don’t write it down and reread it a bunch of times. This is not a project that is going to get done this year, but eventually. In the meantime I am taking way better notes than I did in California.

It is really nice feeling like the time I spent in California in my garden was an absolutely fantastic beginner course in gardening. I had the time/money/sunshine/city water to make quite an oasis. Gardening here is very different in dramatic ways. I mean… for many months of the year I shouldn’t dig in the ground because the wee beasties are hibernating. I would take December off from gardening (and sometimes January) but really I was outside in the garden 10-11 months a year. There were different seasonal jobs; I didn’t have the same routine week to week. Here I really shouldn’t disturb the earth any more than absolutely necessary from November through May. Well, I’ll be honest and say there is some amount of tidying up I can do in November and December but it’s more clearing off the slippery leaves off the driveway and doing a compost turn. I also begin starting seeds in February.

Ok so maybe it is about the same.

Only it really isn’t! This is gardening on hard mode. I can start seeds in my bedroom and bathroom, which have to be kept shut from the rest of the house the whole time. I don’t have a single other place that could be warm/away from the cats. It’s pretty funny. If I got a thermometer in the polytunnel I could chance leaving some of the seedlings out there for the weeks of Fool’s Spring just to give them a little excitement with extra air movement but mostly I wouldn’t bother because it is too much work.

Mostly here in February and March I can read and research and plan. Planning is a Big McFlippin deal here. In California I could throw tomatoes on the ground and a plant would start growing in any month of the year as long as I watered it. Sometimes there would be a cold snap that would keep a specific plant runty, but I’d get a big tomato haul. Here I have barely been able to get tomatoes to ripen at all because I haven’t figured out how to keep them warm enough. This year I’m going to grow them in the polytunnel and see if that works better.

I can’t help but feel that I am keeping all these records because I have this horrible Cassandra-like feeling that my children are going to need to be able to look through my trials and failures so they can make sure they eat someday. Yes, reading blogs and books are an ideal way to start an education in the general sense but knowing your unique microclimate isn’t available unless you learn from someone who has stood in your garden.

I am sure my weird prepper shit is just a continuation of my same old, same old and yet this feeling is different in a way that is hard to define. I love my children, don’t get me wrong, but at this point I don’t see any sign that any of them are going to be a shooting star. They are bright people who will arrive at adulthood with a better than average emotional education and a lot of ability to learn new things and do jobs that interest them. I have a lot of worry around the ways they want to work earning them much money and in this late-stage-Capitalist-hellscape I have deep fear around them suffering in the future because I entirely failed to instill that motivator.

Somewhere along the way I discovered that my goal was to give them time. Time to figure out what brings them joy. Time to explore things and fail and try again. Time to become their own best friend. Time to do what they want during the day instead of what can earn them money. I recognise deeply that Noah pays for this time. He earns and we invest and maybe someday his children can have an easier burden. In many ways he has sacrificed his life on the altar of me and our children. He has taken the provider role very seriously and combined with all the advantages he started with like picking the right hobby at seven and a family that could pay for a very nice school.

Noah has given me time. Time to think about who I want to be. Time to figure out what I need to learn in order to become that person. I feel awed at the magnitude of gift he has given me in this life. I think often about how my entire life as it is now mostly exists because of Noah. I mean, I have friends I made on my own but I live where I live in the house I live in with the children I wanted so very much because of Noah.

The children who make me feel crazy and hostile and overwhelmed and like I just want to hide in the bathroom for a few years. I would not walk away from this life for all the money in the world. There is literally nothing I would rather be doing, even though I complain like it is my job.

Today I walked around my garden and thought about all the ways I am going to shift things around towards being a food forest and a playground. I started out with beds in the front lawn but most of it doesn’t really get enough sun anyay so I am going to move some plants, change around where the logs are and put playground stuff running through the middle. It’ll work. You’ll see. I measured with conservative edge allowances.

By playground equipment I mean a climbing structure and a slide and a separate swing. Both the swing and the climbing structure will be very amenable to hosting climbing plants for the guilds. It’s going to be fantastic. It’s kind of funny how much of this thought process is shaping up around my birthday party. My friends are going to be old as fuck. I am going to need to have a garden full of places to sit and admire the lovely plants. It will be good to have pretty flowers right at face height because a lot of them aren’t going to see that well anymore.

And some will climb up to hang on the climbing structure because of course they will. I will have swings that my adult friends can use. And they will get to walk through a forest of food to get there.

Trees take time. Building soil takes time. I only have 18 years to go. That means it is bloody important I get as much of the bones in place as possible this year. It takes time to fill in a forest. Buddy, I am already training branches.

How am I going to lay out walking paths so people don’t step on my damn plants? How am I going to create convenient congregation places around the garden where it would be lovely to linger and have a chat? Where will people be able to pick a snack in September? Oh bloody hell. It’s a lot to plan!

After a search it looks like apples are going to be my best and most obvious choice for the whole top side of the garden as it is literally lined in apple trees. Raspberries will hold down the bottom side. There will definitely be runner beans all over the place. Maybe I will have magically figured out tomato ripening. Courgettes, potatoes, and onions are not really snacking foods but I can cook with them. Ok. This will be good.

Hm. Unfortunately my birthday falls on a Tuesday the year I turn 60. Well I suppose it will be a week long house party. Oh wow, that’s an interesting thought. I wonder who I will still know.

Longevity in relationships is extremely important to me. I put up with some serious bullshit from my oldest friends. Because if somehow they have decided to have some appalling belief it is now my job to somehow embody a different point of view without sounding like a preachy asshole. It’s a tightrope some moments. I believe that most relationships involve some degree of masking and setting special boundaries for people in ways that create a lot of extra work for yourself. I don’t know how to “just be one thing” all of the time. I can’t. I know that large parts of me are not particularly acceptable in a great many settings. It was true in California and it is far more true here. I have to be mindful of what I say and where.

It is utterly exhausting. Every conversation goes through this at-speed filter of “acceptable topics” and I am glad I have expanded my range of special interests so that I can usually find a couple if I try a few different mannerisms and approaches. I assume it is kind of trippy for the people I go through four or five approaches with. If I feel waved off after the fifth I start treating them like furniture and I will probably never make eye contact again.

I need much more stringent filters here. It’s not that everyone is closed minded it is that the process for sussing people out takes a lot longer and I’m sure I’ve “gone too fast” a couple of times. Mostly I haven’t horrified anyone but I take very calculated risks with self exposure.

I acknowledge to myself that in my mind I need a triad of close friends that I talk to at least somewhat consistently and we have very few filters with one another. There is no such thing as a relationship without filters. Not for me, anyway. It has been three women for most of my life, not always the same three women. Now there is a man, well a demi-boy as he now understands himself and I can understand what he means when he says that. I can feel myself consciously and deliberately allowing myself to be filled in my “imaginary bucket” as I talk to the kids about emotional energy. I feel like a vampire sometimes. I feel ashamed sometimes. But I don’t stop and I know that none of them would like me to stop because the way we take and give to each other is mutually satisfying and not draining.

Sometimes I tell my children that when there are times that they don’t love themselves then they are welcome to borrow some of my regard for them because it is endless. That is really striking because it feels like such a lie. There are ways that I judge and think harsh thoughts and feel impatient in ways that are probably ableist and deeply unfair of me. I am by no means doing my job perfectly.

I’m not getting into that self-flagelation tonight. It’s too late to go down that road.

I just need to think about the fact that sometimes when I can’t love myself I allow myself to be carried forward by the force of the regard of other people. I don’t particularly go for “likes” but I have a deep and intense respect for the people I allow to judge me. For the vast majority of human beings on this planet, I don’t give a flying fuck how you judge me because you are not actually seeing what happens. You are not a reliable narrator. If you actually know me then you can judge me based on the interactions we have had, but not that many people have spent much time with me. There are just a few.

The people I have kept close for a decade and a half, or a quarter of a century are people who have enormous wells of experience with me and my family and they have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. They get to judge me and when I fuck up they call me to the carpet.

It’s kind of funny how these power dynamics and social dynamics work because it’s not as if this judgment comes without strife. I have simply decided that for whatever reason I am willing to accept that strife as a sign of love in that relationship. They would not bother to say this to me if they did not have deep love for me.

Except when they tell me that I am Borderline during fights.

If I am at all honest I am partially leaning on my triad because it allows me to fill my bucket enough for me to go deal with all of the other places where I am in some sort of position to feel like I need to share the resources I have in ways that benefit folks. A lot of the in-person stuff is hard because my life is not shaped like most folks. My time comes in different shapes and blocks than average in many ways and it makes it hard to get the requisite hours to become a friend at this age.

I do have a few young friends in town but with all of them the level of filters is still pretty high. I have talked about myself more with them than other people around here but I’m not random California neighbour casual yet. Oh my god it’s so different. I find myself struggling to be as reserved as is appropriate here.

Dude, just go to bed.