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Erin

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Spoon
Predator pressure
Of cats and women
Soul of winter
Needs
(no subject)
Up the slide, down the slide
Atmospheric Blanket
Together
Sunlight
Stir Crazy
Seconds to breathe
Wheel of the year: animals
Limits to the System
Water hard as iron

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Today I took Siri back to the vet, with meds, to get blood and urine tested. He's been drinking a lot and if his food intake is disrupted he gets diarrhea, so I knew something was up.

I'd been overextending myself so I made no plans other than a quick trip in to the vet, stopping at the grocery for a pickup order they'd bring out to the truck, and going home.

I got out of the vet earlier than expected -- I've learned to put padding between things in town, so the pickup order was going to be a bit. I decided to pick up some sushi, then I got to the grocery store. As I pulled in to the pickup spot I got a call from the vet: Siri has diabetes, she wanted to catch me while I was still in town, there were 3 options:

-Put him down, she knew he was a stray I'd just found and this was going to take some commitment to deal with

-Insulin shots, which would require him to go into the clinic for a full day, then once every couple days for a couple weeks, then once a week for awhile, then once a month. He'd get the shots twice a day. The vet is a 5 hour round trip from me if nothing goes badly.

-A new drug she doesn't have much experience with, which he would take by mouth once a day, along with diabetic food. It would still require monitoring but some of that could be done by phone maybe. The drug isn't cheap but the vial should last a couple months.

I had pulled my truck really awkwardly into the parking space -- it's too long to super comfortably go into most of them, and I was trying to answer the phone. I'm sitting there on the phone in the row of 12 pickup spaces with someone pulled into the one space beside me that I was partially cutting off, while all but 1 of the other spaces were empty, sorting through this in my mind. The person in the other car, also on the phone, was glaring at me.

I went with the last option, the once a day drug that probably didn't require as much monitoring. This is why I can't keep my credit card empty, I guess.

I had ordered a bunch of frozen food because the plan was to go straight home. Even though I'd brought a kinda cooler thing running up to the vet was going to add an hour to me getting home, but so be it. I loaded my groceries into the truck, covered them with blankets and jackets, and drove the half hour back up to the vet, then back down again in pre-long-weekend-rush-hour (which, to be fair, is probably less in Prince George than nearly anywhere else people might live).

Got onto the highway, air conditioner blasting -- it had somehow gone from 19C to 27C -- and slowed down because the car in front of me had their flashers on. They were part of a line that stretched to the horizon, which at this point wasn't too far because of a hill. No one was moving.

After about twenty minutes the line of cars started creeping forward. Nothing on facebook about what was going on. Cars had been coming the other way intermittently, so I knew it wasn't a logging truck fully jackknifed or anything. Why weren't they alternating traffic past the blockage? Why were we creeping so slooooooooowly? At this point the cars stretched to the horizon behind me too.

Crested the hill finally and could see the long stretch to the next hill a little over a kilometer away. There were police lights flashing but it was too far to see what was going on. Creep, creep, creep--- never really stopping enough to leave the truck in park.

Turns out the police were worried about a suspect in the area (?) ahead and wanted to stop each car, make us roll down our windows, and say, "don't pick anyone up or stop for anyone in the next bit". They weren't screening cars on the way out of the area, just letting us know on the way in, and this was the way they decided to do it during the busiest time on that highway. When I got past the area, the line in the opposite lane was over a mile long.

I was in the line for about an hour, so that added another hour to my freezer groceries timer and "I'll eat this sushi I picked up when I get home" lunchtime delay. Between emotional stuff about Siri, stress from running all over and waiting in that line without knowing what was up (they had phone blockers deployed, so no internet, unless it's just that so many people were using all the signal), heat stress, and being already tired I'm impressed that I managed to get the truck into my driveway without ending up in the ditch. Most of the groceries were even still frozen, yay survival blanket supplies.

This is the kind of situation where, even if I'm figuratively crashing, there's not too much to do -- I can't really stop the car by the side of the highway in 27C with $300 of frozen groceries and a cat and nap or rest. The trip itself is pushing my resiliency, so then when enough events occur it's really not great.

Also someone should tell the cops around here about things like writing and signs. They could have slowed us to 50 and flashed a sign without having us stop drive-through style and have that poor guy repeat the same message to what must have been a couple miles worth of cars in the end.

Anyhow, Siri is home and recovered from the trip. Thank goodness he's such a good car and carrier cat. The other cats are loved on. I'm in bed, contemplating ability and a new symptom (random pinprick feelings, yay! I didn't notice a wasp had stung me earlier because I've just been getting that sensation kinda randomly throughout my skin).

We will see what tomorrow brings, but at least it will bring me a still-alive cat and some time in bed.

I walked down to the highwayside of my property today to hang a red dress along the highway. I very very rarely go there -- it's a wildlife corridor along the highway, in my mind, and not really for me to mess with. I noticed a bunch of stuff.

For one, there's a lot of water down there. The cattle dugout behind my fence trickles down into the aspen woods, and at the far end of those woods by the highway there's one of these ephemeral ponds. I had to look closely to make sure it wasn't a beaver pond, but of course there's not enough of a stream for it to be beaver. When the glaciers scraped over this land not too long ago, and when the big glacial lake was settling into the Prince George and Stuart Lake areas, a lot of clay-bottomed wetlands were formed. These are basically impermeable shallow basins that fill up with overland flow water, and then dry out by the end of the year if there's no reliable inflow.

There are also a lot of trails. They're obviously animal trails; it's unclear to me how much of the paths through grass, wildflowers, young trees, and larger forest are Solly, how much are large animals, and how much are made by smaller ones. That said, I saw droppings from the young moose, deer droppings, and at the southwest corner of the property many poops from a very large bear. I also mostly didn't have to duck for the paths through smaller trees. So it looks like my wildlife area is doing what it's supposed to and providing habitat, kind of as a tithe for using the rest of the land.

I think they also recently did some culvert work under the highway down there. My highwayside ditch is significantly wetter than I ever remember. We're still in a low-level drought, and the last couple years have been heavy drought, and it really matters seasonally what time I go there as to whether there's water. But still. Lotta water.

I didn't see clear signs of smaller predators like foxes, coyotes, or lynx but I also wasn't really looking. I know foxes hang out at my neighbours. I also see them on the highway or in parking lots every once in awhile.

Anyhow, Solly is doing a fantastic job in the back and she's a very good girl. Now if only she could stop eating her collars. Everyone has a microchip and their vaccines now (I would have assumed everyone who was neutered got a chip but turns out they didn't. That's now remedied) but as the stray cat reminded me it's nice for people to know someone is owned by some sort of clear sign, especially since she's so skinny. She is in fact skinny enough from jumping the fence and running around that I'm going to put her on a puppy or performance food for awhile and see if that helps.

Today was a very active day -- planted several garden rows with corn (gaspe x saskatoon bicolour ears), gold rush beans, batanka wheat, dango mughi barley, zesty green x silvery fir tree F2 tomatoes, some napa kind cabbage starts, and then marker calendula and radishes in with those seeds. I'm just doing a couple rows at a time but I'm working through it. Then there was the walk back to the highway.

So I spent the rest of time splitting love among the cats. I can't imagine how someone can dump an animal that is so openly affectionate. Normally my imagination is pretty good, but my neighbour who's done some cat rescue says this is "the season" and having enough folks do it that there's a season? Ugh.

Let me tell you a story. It'll start out dark but end up better, I promise.

It begins with a big issue in the North-- the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. I live near what's called the Highway of Tears, Highway 16, where hundreds of women have gone missing and been reported to police but never really followed up and found.

The highway is basically required to get to services -- anything from medical to a welfare cheque -- but for a decade had pretty much no public transportation at all after Greyhound pulled out and before a raggedy string of municipal busses got put in very inconveniently. To access services you still need to sleep in downtown Prince George for a couple days if you don't have hotel money or relatives. So you can imagine a lot of people hitchhike, not on a lark, but under duress. Attend a funeral? Hitchhike. Visit family? Hitchhike. Get your government checque? Hitchhike.

Between that and the legacy of residential schools it's a very dangerous place, especially for people who society views as disposable. This is the same area where the police (RCMP) keep getting investigated for killing indigenous people but... well, let's just say that the most recent acquittal the indigenous guy died less than an hour after being hit, kicked, pepper sprayed, and punched by a bunch of police but it was ruled accidental and nothing to do with the police.

Anyhow, First Nations aren't thrilled about any of this, and there's a tradition of hanging red dresses by the highway to represent people who should still be here but who are missing. Additionally there are various kinds of demonstrations. Right now there's a gentleman walking from Takla Landing to Burns Lake to... raise awareness? Heal himself? Make a statement? about this. People from town are joining in-- not all indigenous, but that's beside the point.

He'll be walking along the highway by my property today. It was going to be yesterday but he's getting pretty sore after a couple hundred kms and has slowed down. My dog Solly jumps the fence, and although she's very friendly lots of people are scared of dogs so I've been keeping her indoors during the day while he's walking, just in case she decided to jump the fence and go solicit love from humans who might not welcome it.

Normally Solly jumps the fence several times a day and runs towards the forested area by the vacant cabin on my neighbour's land. He likes wildlife there, and there are a bunch of animals that hang out there-- lynx and bears sometimes, definitely foxes too, that sort of thing. I've been less concerned about this than I might because she normally chases into that forested area then comes back within twenty minutes or so, doesn't go towards th road or the highway, and it's much easier to keep predators away from the space when you can cross the fence so I've had the least predator losses ever so far.

But, Solly was in yesterday, so she wasn't jumping the fence to chase away predators. A goose had died (suspiciously close to an electrical cable, I checked it and didn't see chew marks but he wasn't touched though there were some signs of a seizure. He also wasn't super young, so) and I left picking him up and dealing with the body till later.

Well, when I went back later to get him, after Solly was inside, something had eaten the easy meat off the body. There was a pie of feathers where this had originally been done, and then the body had been pulled up against he fence where more feathers were scattered. As I went to pick him up I noticed... a small orange cat that came up, I meowed at it, it meowed back fearlessly and started ravenously chewing on the body through the fence.

He was not my cat, nor a known neighbour's cat, and his fur looked a little rough, like he'd been eating very cheap cat food or something. We meowed at each other a little, then I went and got him some kitten food because he looked Very Hungry and I had some kitten food in the house, which, high calories, he seemed like he could use.

Well, he was still there when I came back and wolfed down about half a cup of kitten kibble in just a few minutes. Solly came to take a look and was very polite (he was still on the other side of a 2" x 4" grid wire fence) and some other cats came around too and the cat alternated between wolfing down food, prring as I petted him through the fence, and hissing/growling at my dog and cats, mostly doing all three at once.

He kept meowing and purring when he had eaten all the food, so I went back and got another half cup, then another quarter cup after that. I probably sat there for an hour, petting him, petting my cats and dogs as they came around, observing interactions, and trying to figure out what to do. He was clearly a male and probably fixed from what I could see, ultra friendly, had an ear tattoo. But he was also very very thin -- I could feel the knobs on his vertebrae, and his pelvis bones -- his ears were abraded or sunburnt, and his claws were a combination of razor sharp and dirty/broken. Basically, he didn't look like he'd been home in a bit.

I wanted to pick him up and bring him into the house because of those predators in the field he was in, and so I could be sure to feed him more, but I couldn't get through or over the fence while holding a cat. So I figured I'd feed him at the same time every day there, and then Tucker and I could capture him in a couple days, when Tucker comes up for solstice.

Well, the cat finally slowed down eating, I finally got up and went to feed the pigs and shut the ducks in for the night... and on my way past I noticed him clinbing up over the fence onto my property. I went to take a look and saw him curled up under the quail shed.

Now, I have baby birds in the quail shed, it's secure. There's a space full of straw under it. Something in the last several days to weeks has been shredding the lumber wrap around it, which just gets whatever is outside into some plywood but it's been noticable that something was trying to get in, and something Solly doesn't completely freak out about. So I'm thinking, ok, this cat has maybe been living under here a bit, that'll make it easier to feed him and catch him.

As I walk up to him he pops right out and lets me pick him up. I carry him into the downstairs bedroom, set him up with some food, water, and a litter box, and he demands love and food for awhile.

I've posted his picture and as much of the tattoo as I can read on the town fb groups, emailed the neighbour (it's not hers), and called the vet with the tattoo number (the last digit is a bit faded though). I've done a bit of reading on tattoos, he may be 5-6 years old from Windermere? The vet hasn't called me back yet. No one on FB has claimed him yet.

He's drunk 3 cups of water in less than 24 hours, eaten a ton of food (I'm giving him small meals) and peed in the litter box nicely though he's not pooping yet (I think he was pretty empty). He snuggles and purrs whenever I go into the room. My cats are pretty ok with him being in that room, though Little Bear is unsurprisingly curious.

So that's the story of how I have a stray cat in my bedroom, how Solly is an effective predator control that the farm notices when she's kept inside, and how institutional cruelty and neglect lead to bad situations but people are struggling to right them.

Also holy man, what are people on when they say cats are aloof? I can't walk three steps without getting mobbed by cats who want love, and this strange cat who doesn't know me was no different. I guess there's very strong selective pressure for it, though I wonder what effect neutering has on that?

Every day there's more sunshine.

We had a fresh blanket of snow two nights ago and through into yesterday early afternoon. I popped out on work breaks to snowblow, working from home, and it was the kind of fine dusty-sand snow that blows all around and is easy to snowblow but hard to walk through.

Today it's very sunny, -20C. That sounds cold but with the sun at least making it above not just the horizon but the trees there's so much directional radiant heat and everything is bathed in light. The air is cold enough that it's full of glitter, sparkling like a christmas card or fantasy movie set.

I have a friend at a similar latitude in maybe Sweden whose geese are starting to posture. I should split off a couple groups for breeding before they pair off inappropriately.

I started seeds for the garden club meeting in two weeks, we'll be splitting the tightly-packed seedlings at the first leaf stage and everyone will be potting up some micro tomatoes and small pot-friendly peppers. It's much too early to plant indoor starts for planting outdoors at the end of May, so this is a way to get our hands in the dirt and play with seeds and build some community without having overgrown seedlings later on. Plus it introduces people to micro tomatoes and I do have a ton of micro seeds. The club is providing soil and pots (I am also bringing some pots scavenged from the grocery store program's poinsettas). This makes me happy.

My apple seeds will arrive soon and I will soak and stratify them. I have no money right now but am hoping to order a couple more haskaps and some oaks for this year. Maybe I'll sell some pottery to do it?

Speaking of selling pottery, I have the kiln lined up to buy from my mentor in spring, but money is a definite issue. I'm considering doing a "help set up my ceramics studio" kickstarter/indiegogo/maybe patreon sales type thing, though it makes me nervous. I do love the idea of crafting items for people based on a couple data points though (big or small, handle or no handle, texture or no texture, colour family, choose a word if you like).

I really appreciate the perspective that ethical animal training literature has brought me with regards to "bad behaviours". When Solly is sharking or Bear is wanting to practice the cat death-bite on my wrist I can see this as trying to fulfill a need for play, much as eating fulfills a need for food. This isn't an animal "acting out", it's an animal who knows what they need and who is communicating that need.

It's also probably one of the more common examples in these articles, but now that I'm not afraid of a dog's growl I am so glad for the communication: it's a request for space. It isn't a symbol of a vendetta or a threat, though I guess for many people being asked for space can be considered a threat. It's just very clear communication of a desire. My cats and myself both are very capable of understanding these communications and responding in a respectful way and in all cases the dogs are relieved and grateful. The dogs trust me so if I need to invade their space momentarily to fix things they actually welcome it, like when I need to pick up a piece of meat Thea is chewing on and put it in her doghouse for her so she doesn't have to protect it from all sides, or when I help Avallu into the safety of the house when there's a stranger he doesn't like.

Solly has had the growl trained out of her a little -- this is typical when folks punish a dog for growling instead of giving them the space or security they are asking for -- and it makes it challenging for the cats to figure her out. I'm starting to train her back into it a little. It's remarkable how similar the whole thing feels to, for instance, a human who's been told what they want isn't ok learning to advocate for themselves, and of course "don't use aversive methods" is starting to be a cause in the autistic community, where there's advocacy around how we treat children.

This post brought to you by my sweetest Avallu and by the teenaged Bear-kitten.

The last 24 hours have been expectedly rough. I've been keeping Solly on the front porch and Avallu in the basement, and rotating which one has access to the yard (Thea always has access to the yard). The front porch is screened by trees etc, and so Avallu didn't realize Solly was up there til yesterday afternoon.

He had a bit of a meltdown, which isn't unexpected. It's funny, I recognise that level of what I want to call trigger, where he's not able to think and will not even accept food (he's very food motivated). It's not a state where he'll attack me or anything, but he doesn't listen to commands and he can't really sort his way through things.

We've been working together on how to disengage when he gets to that level, where I can tell him to go into the basement and I'll close the door and deal with it. Generally this involves me waving my hand in front of his eyes to get his attention (his hearing is very poor), and then gesturing towards the carport, sometimes, walking with him and gesturing every couple feet as he starts to get distracted and want to go back, then looks at me for direction. This work has been ongoing for a couple years now, though intermittent.

His meltdown yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to regulate him while we could still see Solly on the deck, but it wasn't subsiding so I put him in. I did have to touch his collar and put a little pressure on it for him to listen, which hasn't happened in a bit. He was really upset, and rightfully so from his point of view.

Well, as afternoon and evening went on he would run around to the front deck to see if she was still there as soon as it was his turn in the yard. He would bark some and whine and be quite upset generally.

This morning he had chosen to sleep inside instead of by the deck to guard it (he had the yard for the night).

Midmorning he was able to eat a whole pack of salami while watching Solly and still being somewhat upset.

And just now, at lunch time, he came around and saw me on the deck with her, barked maybe three times, whined a little, double-checked that he couldn't get up onto the deck, and took himself to the basement to sleep in the cool (it's pretty warm, 27-30ish celsius here, and the dogs get much less energetic and enjoy sleeping on shaded concrete).

I am very proud of that dog. He's getting much better at regulating.

I also recognise that his brain and mine work very, very similarly. There's a trip over into the state where nothing else except the bad thing exists, and so I have a lot of empathy for how hard it is for him to handle life when he's in that place. That's why most of my management of him involves giving him safe places to go when people come over, rather than having him try to work through that just because I want guests or a plumber. If someone will be over frequently that's a different calculus, of course.

Meanwhile when it's Solly's turn in the yard she continues to be a giant puppy. We're still working on sitting for attention rather than barking and pawing (!) but she's catching on pretty fast, given that this is a brand new home. I'll need to keep an eye on her because her "hello" energy is very big and I could easily see it turning into a game of chase that ended badly. Luckily she's very respectful of the geese so far. She also seems very interested in Hazard, and he is ok with her.

Now if only I had the energy to stay sitting or standing up for more than an hour at a time. I'm going to have to find it because I need groceries. It's too hot for baking.

I hovered a moment at the top last night, during solstice. I planted more tomatoes -- there are 220 in the upper field, the wood field, now. The day before that I think, I made a deep water culture hydroponics installation on my deck which took 10 more tomatoes, and a few days before that I'd done the 14 pots on the side of the house to bring my potted tomato total to 41 or 42. I have some more to put in but not many -- plug some holes left by the frost on the 18th or whenever that was, fill in a couple edges with the extra-early reds.

I guess I plant in the evenings now. I used to do these things in the morning but mornings are most often difficult now so the evening feels like my stolen time. The tomatoes from earlier plantings are greening up well, and my gaspe corn is maybe 3" tall.

Also my dinner came from here, partly: duck-egg pasta, tossed with blanched lamb's quarters, some feta cheese, and some self-canned tomato sauce all with a squeeze of lime. Half spanakopita, and it made a great pasta salad cold for lunch today.

It's astonishing to see the difference in my indoor hydroponics/aerogarden and my outdoor pots. The indoor plants are a foot tall and putting out flower buds; the outdoor ones are maybe 6-7" tall. Very curious to see whether the outdoor hydroponics split the difference, that's pretty much why I did it. It would also be super fun to make some hydroponics boxes out of marine plywood and caulk instead of plastic bins. They'd want to be raised slightly off the deck so they didn't rot it, or maybe that volume of water would be better against the south side of the house. Maybe in a greenhouse there even...

My house is messy and dirty but I'm picking away at cleaning up after the plumbing thing still.

Oh, and also--

I'm getting a puppy. She's 10 months old, a maremma/caucasian shepherd cross with both parents in a working pack at 100 mile. Like Thea, she was got to be a sheep guardian. Like Thea, she is flunking out of guardianship at the sheep farm because she keeps escaping the fence and going up to the house to get people attention.

Guardian dogs are famous for escaping fences to wander -- one pyrenees the next town over escapes the fence to guard two herds of cows at once over a total of about 400 acres. I want my dogs to guard my property, but my house is the epicenter of the guarding area and I don't want it fenced off from the dogs, so a dog with a strong homing sense is much better for me than one that shows wandering tendencies. A very people-oriented dog is likely to be more easily trainable, too, insofar as one trains guardian dogs (only half a joke; they can only be trained to redirect somewhat, and do things within their character). Plus, a lot of guardian breeds are from lines that don't actively guard, especially caucasian shepherd/ovcharkas who are often bred either to fight and be aggressive, or just to be huge, at the expense of everything else. It's good to know her parents were both working dogs.

Even though she's 10months and not freshly weaned, this will take a lot of work. Caucasians are a handful, they're a more headstrong breed than maremmas generally. She hasn't been trained to poultry yet, though I suspect Thea will do an excellent job mentoring her there. She's already spayed, thank goodness. She's housebroken. But I'm most worried about introductions. We'll see how it goes. I need to do some reading, I'm not even sure if it's better to introduce her to both at once or one at a time. I'm concerned but also very curious - Avallu is a lover of tiny baby things for the most part, and he's a good friend to Hazard the cat. Thea is more friendly to people but I'm not sure how she'll feel about an actual dog in her domain. She definitely disciplines Avallu when he does something she doesn't approve of. I'm prepared for it to take 6 months of separation and management before they are ok being left alone together but I sure hope it takes less time than that.

Her name may or not be Solstice, since that's the day I knew I was getting her.

So that's big news.

I swear it's above -20 this morning, and 4" of snow with more falling. Outside feels soft, comfortable, like it's cherishing my presence. I can go out in a polar fleece jacket without a big coat.

The water tap hasn't thawed all the way yet - the wall is open where it comes into the building, so the inside heat can thaw it, but I'd stuffed rags into that hole for insulation during the very cold and I've just pulled those off. It won't take long.

Carrying food to animals through the snow is a bit annoying. I need to snowblow soon, and I really need to shovel the deck.

Avallu has come inside. Negative whatever is fine out there, but snow? Even in his covered house? No way.

The cats have stopped fighting and they're napping in front of the fire, all three curled up together.

I was rushing around to get to the airport and my ring flew off outside. It bounced off the icy, frozen-goose-poop-studded driveway with a surprisingly loud clang. The truck was running, had been warming up. I'd just fed the baby pigs and was going to grab stuff and go, to be on time.

Now I was looking for a gold ring in a varying field of sparkly cratered tan-through-brown in varying textures.

The last several days had been a lot.

It's been so cold, and cold with no snow insulation. We have maybe 8" on the ground, if that, which means that the cold drives right in. I've been working hard and more or less constantly to make sure everyone is ok, which means running a lot of water and food and straw; with no snow to insulate the outside of animal houses, straw inside is the best bet. But the straw clogs up with poop and needs to be refreshed every day or two, the pile of straw in the animal houses climbs higher (great for the garden, all layered with manure, but too much and I run out of headroom) and then every piece of clothing I own has prickly stabby awns and slivers of straw in it but I need to wear clothing all the time because it's cold. Water goes out a couple times a day from inside, which is fine, but then it freezes in the containers and needs to be removed either with a lot of brute force stomping if I'm extra strong or by being carried into the house and set by the stove until the ice plug loosens enough to slide out.

My insulated gloves are MIA, or at least, I seem to have the right hand from several pairs. I sewed myself fingerless polar fleece gloves which lets me carry the coldest things in my palms and leaves my fingers free to open feed bags, but the first couple days especially it takes my hands a long time to rebuild the circulation they need to function in weather like this. My fingers go numb, I finish what I'm doing and go in, I warm up, I go back out, rinse, repeat. Several days into it my hands maintain warmth much better. The skin on my face goes numb too, but I've figured out some sort of system with two tubes of polar fleece that keeps my breath from freezing on cloth but covers my cheeks.

Nothing behaves. Water acts like wax poured from a lit candle: it forms that film first, then solidifies. A good bucket of water can stay mostly thawed for an hour or two, but a little spill instantly makes a spot that will be slick all winter, and a spill in the wrong place can weld a door closed or wedge it open. I spend a surprising amount of time walking around with a hammer knocking ice out of inconvenient spaces. Plastic snaps. Thank goodness my staple gun is a plain mechanical object; once I warm it up inside so it doesn't burn my hands with cold, I can take it out and staple old feedbags to the inside of the bird houses to block draughts and provide insulation. Starting the truck, even with a battery blanket and block heater, sounded like the end of the world for awhile.

The cats, trapped inside, are bored. They form new relationship with each other, trying to entice each other into playing but too irritable to respond reasonably so they squabble and zip through the house at full speed with tufts of each other's fur in their mouths.

The plastic of the special, insulated, triple-layer dog door has gone hard which means that when Thea comes in and out every three minutes to check in here, the door doesn't shut properly and the temperature in here drops, sometimes as much as 5 degrees in 3 minutes. It takes the stove awhile to recover that.

The stove, meanwhile, has a stupendous chimney and so its heat output fluctuates with the outside temperature and the wind and goodness knows what else. I carefully swing the cycle around so I can go into the airport for six hours without the house getting too cold, but the flight is cancelled and I have to set an alarm for 1 and then nope, 2am to refresh the wood so we stay warm enough in here since I'm not up already driving home at that time.

The floor is covered in fragments of bark, and straw. I can sweep it three times a day or not, it makes o difference. The patio doors in my cathedral-ceilinged livingroom leak air like a sieve and I haven't had the wherewithal to move furniture to put window wrap on them. I close the curtains but the draught still comes through and the floor in there feels like ice.

So when the ring that symbolizes my commitment to whatever part of this is meaningful slips off my finger and I can't see it in the field of goose poop in first glance, and I have an appointment that symbolizes the outside world that wants me to give up on this, I wonder if it's a sign. Do I leave the ring wherever it is (still can't see it) and come home and write a post offering all the outdoor animals to someone and just-- go? Create a life where the weather doesn't dictate my actions, even if it continues to inform my choices?

I decided to leave the ring there but I kept standing there, looking, anyhow. This is a symbol that this is enough, I thought, I'm leaving. But. I kept looking for the ring. Eventually I spotted it: gold, the colour of shiny goose poop, in piles of frozen shiny goose poop.

It turns out that was the morning after the coldest night. It was supposed to get colder the next night and it never did. At 9pm I took water out in buckets, watching the animals drink by headlamp, and fluffed up straw. My hands were acclimatizing and I didn't need to come in and warm up, they felt fine. At bedtime none of the animals was shivering, always a good sign. The forecast wind never appeared and in the dead calm it felt almost warm.

They say tonight is the last of the hard nights for awhile, or at least, the last of the deathly cold ones. The next forecast is for snow and, somehow, freezing rain which is of course any ran that lands on a ground that has been seared by -35C for days. Several daily runs with water will be replaced by trying to start the snowblower and trying not to knock the blades loose on towers of frozen goose poop. Carrying so much straw will be replaced by several days of butchering and then carrying much less straw.

I took water and straw out tonight again. No one was shivering. We got through last night, which wasn't as bad as expected. We got through the night before that, which was way worse. We got through several nights previous to that where the cold built and settled like a malevolent beast. Somehow the pigs were trotting around and even the tiny, densely-furred little ones were roughousing as I fluffed the straw for them, and the adults got down to business grabbing mouthfulls of it and pawing it to fluff it up by my side. They drank two buckets of water and grunted interestedly and went to bed. The chickens fluffed up perfectly round on their perches (2x4s turned on their wide sides, so they can perch without frostbiting their toes) with little frost spots where heat could make it through those feathers. The ducks tried to climb into their bowl of water. The muscovies were alert under their lamp and not shivering and were walking fine-- if somonee is going to get frostbite it will be them and I've lost some over the years to frozen feet. Their cushion of straw seemed to be working though.

Now the dogs are both burrowed into straw in their chosen locations. The cats are strewn across the woodstove room as the embers burn down and down until there's enough room for me to load up a night's worth of wood. Everyone is nestled in their beds. A thousand scratchy shards of straw poke through my pants, needling at my legs; upstairs I have piles of fabric that, maybe, won't hold straw if it's sewn into new pants. My ring gleams once more on my finger. In eight or nine hours the worst of this one bit will be over, and the next bit will begin.

Hunkered down against the cold all night - my bedroom is pretty comfortable - but when I got up the wall thermostat came on, and when the sun came up it was -36C on the deck. That's Too Cold, and the temperature isn't rising with the daylight as we'd hoped. I was waiting for the temperature to rise a touch before I checked the animals -- no one is up and about out there, they're all staying in their warm shelters -- but it doesn't look like it's going to to that. I am displeased.

The house is making loud sharp noises from time to time. Some of them are icicles breaking off the chimney and falling onto the roof; others are just things shifting and settling. It's over a 50C temperature differential between in and out so I can hardly blame it.

I can see where all the draughts are this morning: the north window has ice on a spot on the frame, the crack between the patio doors (which to be fair always freezes like that) has frost for an inch or two on either side of the bottom, and the dog door seals at the bottom but not at the sides so frost creeps in there too (and the plastic gets a little stiff at this temp, so the outer of the three flaps doesn't always close perfectly, which is non-ideal). It's not cold enough for ice on the inside of the downstairs doorhandle yet.

I cut back the big peppers by the patio door and drew that side of the curtains, which I think means putting a light under the desk for them. Next up will be filming the north window so it can stop blowing cold air onto the sofa. It's a -- do you call it a dormer if it's got a flat top? -- kinda bay window thing and from the ground it looks to not be sealed under the eaves so well either, a piece of wood and some spray foam may go a long way out there. But, not at -36.

I also popped an oil heater in the downstairs bathroom, which doesn't have its own heat, and made sure the dryer vent flap was closed (lint tends to accumulate and prop it open a crack, so I gave it a good clean-out the other day, it does seem to be closing well now). That whole laundry room could use better insulation, including the 6' of dryer vent that I am certain has ice on it right now and including the plywood that the fuse panel is set into (but that's challenging because there are a lot of wires and I'm not sure how to insulate around them).

Work discourages outdoor work below -20C (must work in pairs, etc) and forbids it below -35C. I have to say, it does make me a little nervous to go far in this weather. If something happens I won't have my phone, because the battery doesn't work at these temps, so little things can quickly get big.

Having said that, it's not getting any warmer so I'd better go out and take care of those animals in the scary cold. Bets on whether the water tap is frozen? If it's not, my little polar fleece sewn faucet cover gets "object of the year" award.

It's cold.

Thea has reverted from dignified guardian to six-month-old pup. Every time she sees me outside she races in circles, chases her tail, gallops in circles around Avallu and grabs his tail.

Hazard has taken up mat-wrestling, wherein he runs down the hallway, jumps on the mat and skids it across the floor, then rolls over, hugs it, bites it, and kicks it with his back claws until the threads shred.

Demon is still Demon, though he occasionally approaches Whiskey not just to snuggle but to playfight.

Whiskey wants to be ON ME unless he's fighting with Demon or runnning up and down the stairs. ON ME.

Avallu has taken up life outdoors. I'm not sure where he sleeps; sometimes it's in the old goose run on the side of the carport. He comes to visit me from time to time and do the lean-snuggle against my leg. He no longer follows me everywhere.

Prepping for the trip still in odd moments at work. It's going to take a bunch of prepping.

o Talked to the abattoir, I can pick up either around 5pm the day of (fresh) or 2-3pm the day after (frozen). Neither of those really allows me to drive home across full daylight. Processing what I'll do.

o Keeping an eye on the weather. Snow is supposed to hit afternoon/evening of "the day after" (so maybe I should load the fresh birds up in coolers with ice and try driving straight home? But it's a 4 hour drive, and I'll have done the 4 hour drive in at 5am that morning, but I'll maybe avoid snow?)

o Updated BCAA/roadside auto insurance, just in case

o Got grain last night, need to offload a bunch of it still, which means...

o Need to cut and power wash a couple more grain barrels (and need to powerwash carriers and coolers)

o Still researching possible places to stay, there's a nice place (The Creamery Inn) in a small town nearby, but that isn't close to restaurants. There's also a treehouse place in that small town that would be fun if Tucker was coming along. Hotels in the bigger town are an option. Keeping an eye on budget, of course, this will cost me a couple hundred in gas and more than that in butchers' fees.

o Got snow tires put on.

o Slowly acclimatizing the ducks to eating in the goose shed, so I can put them in there Wed night, close the door, and get them in the carriers on Thurs so I can leave at 5am Friday.

o It would be great to get the mat off the truck bed and wash under it.

o I definitely need to put the top on the truck, which I haven't done singlehandedly before. It's several hundred pounds and very awkward, I think I have a system that involves scootching it along 2x4s. I should probably find someone who can be a safety check-in after I do that. I guess that'll happen Wed evening, since I need to unload tires and grain tonight.

o I need to choose which geese are going, I have three selected but need to select the other couple.

o Also need to pull my breeder ducks.

o Need to get lumber and other odds and ends under cover suddenly, since it's supposed to snow and if it sticks then everything is there forever/until May or June.

o Really should cover straw.

o Need to pack, including birth control pills and pads since this of course will be happening over my period.

o Need to make sure the truck has emergency supplies if I need to sleep in it, patch a tire, etc.

o Need to figure out how to get both full carriers and coolers into the truck, this is a lot of items that take up space. Tetrisy.

o Need to load the animals up on food/water on Thurs night.

o I'm tired.

Feb: pigs usually farrow
Feb 1: goose eggs begin. Geese into breeding pens.
Feb 15: duck eggs increase
March 1: chicken eggs increase, goose egg max production. Ducks into breeding pens.
April 1: geese out for spring maybe
April 6: bring out hoses, will need to disconnect and drain at night for awhile
April 10: let geese sit for max grass for gosling
April 15-30: move pigs to rear pasture
April 20-30: let ducks sit
May 1: last chance for cool butchering weather for pigs
June 1: goose eggs mostly done
June 15: geese start into back pasture as babies get big enough
Sept 15-Oct 15: butcher ducks and geese, good pig butchering weather
Sept 20: pigs into cornfields
Oct 1: hoses in, birds in from summer pasture
Oct 10: pigs into brassica fields
Nov 15: ducks and geese indoors for winter
Nov 15: pigs into winter pen when ground freezes

I'm trying to sort out my animal situation. My energy is deeply limited, so I need to figure out who to spend it on and who not to.

Animals take a lot of constant work, unlike the garden which requires bursts of seasonal work. To some extent that constant work is important for me since it gets me up and moving every day. To some extent it's a problem, because it makes vacations etc difficult. To a large extent it can be ameliorated with infrastructure where more $ = more freedom. For instance the difference between hauling water from indoors, hauling water from the spigot on the side of the house, short-hosing water from a field standpipe right next to the pig field, and having an heated or geothermal automatic waterer is a tremendous gradient from a ton of daily work to a once-daily stroll. Likewise feed has a work gradient from shoveling off the truck and hauling daily through tractoring to the location and finally tractoring to automatic feeders.

I had hoped to be in a different place with infrastructure finances by now, but between my 2019 job loss and shift and the chimney/roof repairs and the covid/abattoir situation I am not. So it's time to make some decisions.

I love geese. I'm at 28 right now - white chinese, brown chinese, roman, pilgrim, embden, and saddleback. They're low-care except for winter water, and keeping them inside in the cold of winter and then in breeding pens is probably going to make my spring a lot better. When they were free-ranging in spring there were significant poop issues on my driveway. I'm happy to increase my goose population (highest ever was 44 and that's an ok summer number, as would be a slightly higher number). I'd like to add a couple brown chinese females, several classic roman geese (non-poof-headed), maybe one saddleback pair or trio, and eventually either cottom patch or shetland (shetland probably aren't genetically viable anymore and are thus a functionally dead breed, which is sad because I love them). They are almost all rare, they're great lawnmowers, I find them super rewarding. I think it's fair to cap myself at 1-2 males and 3-4 females of any of the breeds that aren't vanishingly rare, with a cap of maybe 3 males and 6 females of roman, saddleback, or shetland (hahahaha, that would be the largest or second-largest shetland flock in north america but I can dream) and only 2 very rare breeds in that case. I'm not concerned about having too many geese, really, except insofar as I have housing for them. They will always be worth the feed bill for me and a bunch of people seem to like the meat so I seem to be able to sell them ok.

Ducks are very hardy, good layers, and ornamental. They're entertaining. They smell weird. They mess up water. In winter they eat a lot, and they're expensive to slaughter. They make a really great size bird for me personally to eat, unlike a goose which is so huge. I'm involved in Anconas, which are a newly created breed, cayugas which are basically living jewels, the snowblower duck line which is excellent farm utility, and pekins which I want to incorporate into the snowblower line for size but hopefully retain some of the great laying/brooding qualities. So I do want to keep ducks, they can hang out with the geese in winter outside of breeding season, but I don't want to overwinter more than two dozen-ish. I can sell ducklings pretty well in spring if I hatch them out, and probably hatching eggs. Selling whole ducks for food is less worth it between abattoir costs and how small they are; adding some size to the line might help.

Chickens make chicken eggs, which I like scrambled or fried or mostly boiled (duck and goose are too rich for me when cooked that way, though I think I could get used to duck soy eggs). They also make chicken, which isn't super replaceable by other meats for a bunch of things. They're good at turning over the litter in ways ducks and geese don't, and they likewise turn the top inch of soil pretty well in a garden while de-bugging and removing weeds. I'm settled mostly into hardy breeds (chanteclers and americaunas) and the longer I keep breeding here the better I'll be. Keeping a couple chickens is great. Keeping a bunch of chickens is a pain, this despite the hatching eggs and chicks selling pretty well. A dozen or eighteen chickens with two to three roosters, replacing about half every year? That sounds about right. I'll keep playing with my chantecler/americauna mix with a bit of whatever will bulk them out a bit.

Dogs keep everyone safe, they stay.

Cats are not completely aligned animals, they catch some vermin which is good but I'm allergic to them which is bad. However, I have these cats and they live here now. I manage them by controlling access to parts of the house and I should probably get a hepa air filter.

All of the above need minimal alteration/infrastructure changes except maybe more goose houses. Now for the difficulties.

Pigs. Oof. I started pigs as tillers for the garden and they're fantastic like that. Like chickens they'll eat anything. Ossabaw pork is unrivaled and can't be bought. Lard for soap is a lot of fun. I really believe in this breed and it's vanishingly rare and getting rarer by the day with the way feed costs are going. They require the most outside inputs in terms of feed and I was going to say butchering help, but that's not entirely true. They require more labour from me for butchering because there's no one who can do them justice, who works on regular pigs. Handling 3' of backfat and a 2" loin eye instead of 7/8" backfat and a 4" loin is just... folks who butcher commercially run on muscle memory for grocery store cuts, and my pigs are nowhere near that even a little. Also castrating them is really, really emotionally difficult; there's a shot in europe you can give boars that essentially functions like castration and I wish that would hurry up and be approved here. Breeding is less controllable: with birds you remove the eggs and you don't get babies, sometimes you even need to put them in an incubator to make babies. With pigs it's super difficult to keep a boar separated from the females when they're in heat, both of them will go through most fencing, and then a boar can't be kept alone so he needs a companion, and she needs a companion, so that's at least four pigs if you're separating the boar. Pigs can be artificially inseminated but Ossabaws can't since there's no frozen semen for them. So anyhow, I really, really want to keep pigs on the landscape but they're a tremendous amount of work. I need to reduce the numbers I have and keep them low. I wish so much there was a vet within a couple hours that would castrate for me and/or that shot would be approved (I just looked this up and Improvest* was I think approved and starting pilot trials in 2010, it was in a 2016 piece of legislation that's now defunct, but I can't find it in modern legislation, gotta look into this more so this is super promising, it reduces boar taint and keeps girls from getting pregnant, this may let me keep pigs! Yay!). I also need to keep extending my fencing if I want to keep pigs and extend my gardens, but I guess that's true anyhow (I'm lookin' at you, deer/moose).

Muscovy ducks are not entirely practical here, but they are lovely. They're sweet animals, they make beautiful sounds, they're beautiful. Their feet will frostbite in ambient conditions in winter so they need to be confined either with electric heat or with deep-bedded compost. They make a completely different meat to other waterfowl, basically a clone for beef, they lay sporadically but prolifically when they lay, and they are good incubators. Locally there is a disease (?) which kills them when they are young and go out on the land, so they need to be kept indoors when young until they're a considerable age. So, these are an optional pet-slash-incubator, and they require an indoor either heated or deep-bedded composting space

Costurnix quail are weird in the practical/impractical scale. They lay like champs, year round, tremendous volumes of eggs by body weight. The eggs are annoying for practical purposes but really great in salad dressings, tartares, etc. A couple in a greenhouse are tremendous helps in reducing pests. They make lovely noises. They take up almost no space. They're fiddly to eat, have short lifespans, and need to be kept in groups with many more females than males so they're not the most practical meat animal. They need to be kept enclosed at all times since they have no sense. Their infrastructure is out of scale with everyone else's so they really need their own setup, though I'm having some success sharing a completely enclosed space with chickens. I'd love to have a couple in each greenhouse all summer, which requires the greenhouse be sealed, but it's hard for me to have animals for the summer and get rid of them over winter. Along with muscovies these are definitely on the luxury list. Unlike muscovies these are one-more-different-thing, since the muscovies can go in with chickens/ducks in a deep bedding situation, but also unlike muscovies they can be set up with significantly easy auto-feeders and auto-waterers.

Ok, those are the animals. Now what increases my capacity?

-Pig immunocastration shot. Look into this.
-Automatic feeders. Easy to make for birds, harder for pigs. Might be worth it to buy one in for pigs. Have to figure out how to keep them from being buried by deep bedding for the birds (deep bedding rises the floor by 2' slowly over the course of the winter). I should make the bird ones anyhow.
-Hand-filled automatic waterers. Easy for chickens or quail. Hard for waterfowl in winter (55-gallon-drum with a hole cut on the side?) but easy in summer, and not really a thing for pigs unless I built a tank that filled their bowl via float valve and somehow couldn't be destroyed.
-More livestock houses. Working on it one at a time.
-More rotational pastures. Working on one or two added per year.
-Standpipe by the barn. $$$. This might happen in the future but won't happen now.
-Tractor. See standpipe issues above.
-Plumbed-in automatic waterer. I should probably actually cost this out but it would make chores into basically floating on air and so I suspect it's nor affordable.

Ok, gonna let that marinate for a bit.

The real cold is coming. -30C was forecast this week, and -20ish for the last couple nights, but two nights ago I woke up to -26 and now boxing day night is supposed to be -40. There's a significant difference between -20 and -40 from my perspective, though I think for most people inside it's mostly just all cold.

I'm thinking of rigging some heat lamps for the other chickens and the geese. It's challenging with waterfowl (the other chickens also have the breeding anconas in with them) because chickens are reasonably polite with indoor water but waterfowl are not: they will stand in it and splash it all out, or they will get in, get out, and promptly freeze their feet to the ice that was water they splashed out a second ago. If the water is above freezing it's much, much warmer than the outside air so it's a good place to stand and warm toes from their POV. It just isn't sustainable. So I need to make the heat lamps high enough they won't get splashed or hit by wings, low enough they actually heat something up, and the water needs to be covered enough that no one can get into it. If I have heat lamps over the water, it needs to be covered with something non-flammable and that the birds won't freeze to when it's covered in ice and they try to stand on it. I rig something up every year; I have no idea what this year will look like.

Additionally, moisture from the warm water & the animals' breaths is very dangerous. Because the ambient air is so cold, the moisture condenses on skin and can cause frostbite in temperatures that would otherwise be fine. Chicken combs tend to get this kind of frostbite which is why I keep chanteclers and americaunas: chickens with combs flat to their heads that aren't as vulnerable.

Everyone will get more deep straw as insulation - I am so glad I managed to get two large bales of straw last week, and Josh and I rigged up a rope to a tree so I could drive them off. I'm not worried about running out of straw at all so I can bring everyone fresh everyday if they need.

I'm hoping with all the geese pooping all the time I can get some heating from deep bedding going in the woodshed: it's got a deep mixed layer of straw and manure right now, but not enough manure to really heat it up. It's harder to get good bacterial action going in winter when it's already cold, but their bodies on top of it warm it up some. We'll see: it worked the first year I got muscovies.

This is really hard on equipment too: when water freezes in a bucket it freezes fast and often expands enough to pop the bucket. I've lost several of what I thought were indestructible rubber buckets to these temperatures because the bottom blew out. Plastic gets very brittle and tends to snap. Machines aren't thrilled, though I just got some of the recommended 0W-30 oil for the snowblower when it's below -20C, it came with I think 10W and that's what I've been using. It should help. I think the truck might have the wrong oil on it too, it's showing noticeably higher oil pressure when it's cold, but if I use the plug-in heater it seems ok. Plus, equipment-wise, my tap has been hard-frozen since Josh was here despite the temp warming to where it shouldn't have frozen. I'll try a hairdryer on it but I'm worried I may need to open up that wall. Ugh. I'm not sure how much it would cost to run a frost-free standpipe to the pigpen but that couple thousand dollars might be worth it, or at least it feels like it on days like this.

I met a person at a salve-making workshop the other day who remembers this house when her friend lived here long ago. Apparently, in addition to the wire and water to the back barn, there were also garden standpipes for water. Barn, wire, water everywhere: that infrastructure would have been so precious to me. I wish it hadn't been taken out, and I kind of wonder why it was.

Anyhow, I have some chicken stock to can, and some bones on the deck to turn into pork stock to can, and I'll run that through on the coldest day to boost the house a little.

Below -25 or so I get pretty tired when I spend a bunch of time outside so I'm revising my accomplishments down a little for this next week. If we're all fed and watered and no one gets frostbite I'll consider it a win.

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Erin's land journal

Because thriving ecologies are the best apocalypse insurance.

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Of cats and women

Soul of winter

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Up the slide, down the slide

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Wheel of the year: animals

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