amazon_syren

Hey, you guys!
So I got a call from a temp agency, saying that they want to present me for a PART TIME reception gig that could be one month and could be six (medical leave) for a construction company out on Walkley Road.
Basically, if I got this, I'd be spending $6/day to have a two-hour (round trip) commute for a four-hour shift... which sucks. BUT I'd ALSO be making $13/hr (so call it $35/day after taxes and transit fees), five days a week, for at least a month, possibly more. Also it would be only one bus - the 86 - which is kind of a relief to know. And roughly half of my commute would be walking (lovely during most of the year, doable during 100% of it): 15 minutes to the 86 stop at the bottom of the hill. Then another 15 minutes (or there-abouts) to get from the 86 stop to the workplace. Alternatively, I could take the 95 to Hurdman and transfer to the 192, and that would get me there (in theory) in the same amount of time, but with less walking, if the day turned out to be crappy. Either way.

Anyway. So I'm kind of relieved to hear that there might be a job in the offing, and I'm hoping (sorry, person I'd be filling in for) that the current receptionist's medical leave actually takes longer to heal up than the bare minimum. I would like it if this gig lasted most/all off the summer (I think). Because it would give me some decent work, that I'm already good at, and would net me about $700/month... AND it would see me through to the beginning of September, when my day-time modeling jobs (which I would pretty-much be borked for, if I took this gig) will be starting up again, and also when all the summer employees go back to school and various Help Wanted signs might start turning up a little closer to home.

This could (maybe) be exactly what I need. Fingers crossed for me, SVP? :-D


In other news:
(1) I voted this morning - DONE! :-D

(2) Took a walk around the neighbourhood and chatted up a neighbour about their container garden (she works at the LCBO, and they straight-up gave her a super-dwarf apple tree as part of a promotion - I totally want to work there, now!) -- I have since found her on facebook (we have a specific person in common, so she was easy to track down) -- and I think we will get along just dandily. :-D

(3) My attempts at fermentation continue apace. Right now, my fermenting-tea smells really terrible. As in: It smells less like beer and more like farts. Which is, I gather, par for the course when using yoghurt bacteria (as well as yeast) to do the fermenting. I figure, if I keep it in the fridge for 2 months, and routinely unseal it to keep the pressure from building up too much, then I might just wind up with something ever-so-slightly-fizzy and delicious. But we shall see.


Still To Do:
Write 1000+ words on The Novel
Do Laundry (and change the sheets)
Do some dishes (I don't wanna, but they're taking up a lot of space)
Text Ghost the address, apartment number, and buzz code for my mom's apartment
Get myself out to my mom's apartment (leaving around 5pm) for my brother's 30th Birthday Get-Together

Ghost may or may not actually come to the birthday thing. She had a bit of a work-accident on Tuesday - seven stitches in her arm, but nothing torn or broken except the skin (THANK YOU all the gods(!!!) for that one!), and is fine but rather sore - so she may or may not be up to an evening out, depending on how her arm is doing (she's keeping a pretty close eye on it wrt infection, which is part of what that's about).


TTFN,
Amazon. :-)

So a friend of mine is leasing a chunk of NCC farmland on-which she will be gardening, raising broiler chickens, and sharing a goat with another person.
There are multiple farms (in the 10 to 20 acres size-range) available for lease, typically around $1400/month not including utilities and upkeep.
This has got me thinking.
And looking at the available NCC farms.
And trying to sort out exactly what it is I want to be doing with my life.

Yeah, I went there.

I'm 33. I keep hearing (usually in the voice of my mother, but sometimes the voices of random Old White Dudes who are friends of the family, so take that as you will) the words "I'm surprised you never ammounted to more than that". Whatever the hell "that" is.

What do I *want* to be doing?
I *want* to be diligently working away at my weird, not sure where it's going, novel-in-progress. I *want* to be spending four hours a day (so part-time-job territory) growing, harvesting, preserving, and cooking the food my wife and I (and our various guests and phamily/family-members) eat day-to-day. I *want* to have frequent work as a figure model and occasional-but-more-lucretive work as a glamour/fetish model. I *want* to have a lot of time to myself to do these things in, and also to have paid work (like figure modeling, and like much of the stuff I do for RHO) that gets me out of the house and interacting with other human beings of a reasonably regular/frequent basis.

At this point in time, I don't think I'm actually up for the must-have-a-business-plan requirements of running an actual farm. Even a tiny one. Even a hobby one.


What I want to be *having*, then, is rather more like, well, the home I remember from my earliest childhood (except with the option of geothermal heating, photo-voltaic solar pannels, and lots of sky lights for natural lighting): A small house with a lot of good storage space, located on a 1-2 acre (or so) lot that would allow me to grow fruit (and possibly nut) trees, berry bushes, and other perenial foods along with a lot of moderate-intensity vegetable gardening and buckets of herbs and perenials.

Yes, I totally day-dream about an almost little-house-on-the-praries life where my wife and I go so far as to grow our own amaranth and she does coblerry and various other projects out of her workshop and I make our soap and raise our honey and grow most (possibly all) of our non-animal-based food on the land around our rather Scandinavian-looking green-roofed house, and we have a wind-turbine and solar pannels and a high-efficiency wood stove (and possible geothermal heat) and huge south-facing windows and really amazing insulation... and can basically live off the grid, even though that's not what we're doing.

But I'm not up to it at this stage of the game, and I might never be. I don't know. I do know that, when I look at Ghost's parents' 2-acre lot, I know that (a) I want something like that, but also (b) I couldn't handle working more than that size of a place.



It looks like Ghost has (probably) got the Coblery job with the Ceremonial Guard. She has to fix four pairs of boots as a test-run, but things are sounding pretty good and she's got her materials sourced for the current bunch already.
I hope this works.
Even though I know it will mean she is working, basically, 10-hour days - maybe 12-hour days, over the summer, with a far-lighter work-load over the rest of the year - it also means that our combined income is back to where it was in March (or possibly slightly higher) which means that all those things that got taken off the stove, so to speak, indefinitely back at the beginning of April - like (eventual) CSA memberships and home-ownership, plus possible attendance at various Cons over the course of the next few years - are potentially back on their burners.

Which is wonderful and also slightly frightening.


And which is also leading me to wondering "what am I doing with my life" because, honestly, I'm incredibly content being A House Wife who putters and creates and makes a very small financial contribution to the household through a dozen different and ever-shifting channels, but makes a HUGE contribution to our health and well-being (and thrift, if I may be so bold) by knowing how to make things from scratch and grow them from seed.
And there are a lot of reasons having to do with gender and also power-exchange (and also personality - key point) within my marriage, that make this situation something that helps me thrive, rather than a situation that gives me anxiety nightmares.

...And I'm trying to figure out (a) if it's okay to just stick with this, to do this thing that I love and am good at, and fit all this money-making business in around the corners[1], and (b) why the hell I might think it isn't okay to do just that.

Hoy. So that's what's going through my head right now.


TTFN,
Amazon.


[1] Okay. Maybe "in around the corners" isn't exactly the right way to put it. "Multiple income-streams" and "work-life balance" might be the way to put it. But what I mean is having multiple income-streams, few of which are consistent and some of which have "off seasons" (conveniently when the garden will be eating me alive, so hey), but all of-which add up to an extra $6,000-$8,000 per year - which takes a good chunk out of property taxes and annual utilities, even if it won't pay a mortgage.

Bare

I’m not doing anything wrong
Not even the prudes next door can complain
about a bare-breasted woman
picking beans in her own back yard.

So why do you?

Why does it shock you to see me
collecting veggies
in the same state of dress in-which you barbecue?

Oh, I know,
it wasn’t all that long ago
when things were different
When those neighbours could have called the police
claimed I was “exposing myself”
“committing indecent acts”
Or otherwise endangering their precious Family
Values

You never had to live with that

You didn’t grow up
(age five, daddy explaining that it’s different
For boys...
But not why)
hearing over and over
how your body made you weak
and dangerous
at the same time

You tell me
You think it's unsafe,
That anyone could see me

This from the man who
behind closed doors
grabs bits of my body he knows
I don’t want him to touch

Tell me

How can I bare my soul to you
How can I
take of my clothes
the veils of euphemism
story and
silence

if I can’t bare my body without risking
your hands
your suspicion
your discomfort

You Know This Girl

too skinny
cropped, red hair
face blotchy, she paces
back and forth and
back and forth in front of
bubblicity on sommerset

the word that rises to mind (unbidden) is
meth

any change? she asks me
any change? a sob from
lips cracked open
frantic
her panic is catching
i am afraid
of her

*~*~*~*~*


In other news: My house is officially SOLD. :-D

So that, at least, is off my plate.

Thank goodness.

I have started packing.

Packed up most of the good china and about half the wine glasses (and a lot of the dining linens, given that I was wrapping the dishes in napkins and towels and, in one instance, a tablecloth).

Now I am out of boxes.

But I will have more shortly. I will visit the chapters on my way home from the library and bring home some book-friendly boxes that will be used to pack books once again. CDs, too, I suspect.

I have people - Arndis, Tchang & CSI_Tokyo, as well as my mother - bringing me more boxes on Saturday. This is a good thing. I'm going to ask my mother to bring her boxes in the morning, if she can, so that I can pack all afternoon. :-)


No work contract yet, but I've been bugging people. (Must e-mail resume to Spherion -- anyone heard anything about them? Are they any good?)
Ran into a gal who I used to 'work with' -- she shopped at Cleo fairly often and is a sweetheart -- yesterday. She works for Hunt Personnel (as in: she finds people jobs!!!) and she gave me her card and said 'send me your resume'.
(She also says she likes my email address. ;-)

So, hopefully, she'll be able to find me something. (Networking... who knew? ;-)

Anyway, we'll see what happens. :-)


So that's my big news.


In smaller, related news: I took down all the wedding pictures last night. I put them all into the wedding album that I've had for two years (and a month) and never used before. It looks pretty good, I think.
(How absurd is this? I want to show it off, show off my handiwork and the few note-cards that I decided to keep -- mainly ones that commented on the beauty of the ceremony, rather than the ones that said things like "You're perfect for each other, best of luck in your long life together", y'know, given the outcome...)
I cried while I was doing it.
Three hours, more or less solid, of crying.
Weep!Weep! says I. :-/

But it's done. And I've got the photo-CDs and the extra photographs, and the extra half-dozen or so note-cards that I wanted to keep anyway, all tied up with ribbons (off of various gifts and cards from the wedding). I kept the card he gave to me with my wedding gift. The card, funnily enough, has outlasted both his gift to me *and* my gift to him. Presumeably because all *it* did was sit in a box for two years. ;-)

This morning I made the shadow-box that holds my wedding jewelery. It's not perfect. I was putting it together with scotch tape, after all. But it's pretty. Cluttered, but pretty.

There are two photos from the wedding (one is of us kissing, and the other is a cropped close-up from that same picture, of our be-ringed hands together) plus the little 2"x3" that I kept in my wallet with my bus pass.

The background is made of unused, royal blue not-cards (overlapped) and the wedding pics are mounted on silver, herringbone-print wrapping paper (from a wedding gift, most likely from my aunt Liz).

The rings are nestled in the bottom, right corner (under/in-front-of the picture of our hands), the locket he gave me for my birthday, our first year together (we'd already decided to get married, we were just working on when) is up by the wallet-pic (which was taken during that first year).

In the lower-left corner are two dried flowers: his corsage and a sprig of yarrow from my garden/bouquet. Down the middle hangs the crow feather I found at the crossroads on my way to our first Real Date date (the one I wore in my hair for the wedding).

Like I said: cluttered. But pretty.


The album includes a copy of my wedding vows. I have to say I'm both pleased and relieved to note that I actually *kept* the promises I made that day. (Well, except for the one about sharing a life and a family with him... I *did* it, just not quite in the sense I meant when I made the promise in the first place). Knowing that actually makes me feel a little bit better, y'know? :-)

It also includes the toast my mom made at the wedding. (It's printed on blue paper and everything). She spoke truer than she knew when she said:
Regardless of the outcome, I know we were all very happy on our wedding day.

And I was. We were. :-)

<*sigh*>


Right. If I go on like that for much longer, I'll be drowing the library keyboard in tears (again). So enough of that.

The Bronson Place appartment has been rented (which, at the very least, solves the conundrum of "Do I take the overpriced, wall-to-walled place just so I know that I've got somewhere, or do I give it a miss and maybe regret it later?")
That said, it leaves me with the inconvenience of having to (continue to) look for a place. :-P Still.

But, hey, I didn't really want to live on the 15th floor, anyway. :-)


Anyway, I gotta go. Please continue to send me good appartment vibes and good job vibes. I continue to need them. :-)


- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)

We just moved the bed.

That 7'x3'x2' monstrosity of a bed that hardly comes apart.

But it is moved, and in place, and Paul is smudging the mattress to get rid of any lingering stink (and whatever else is hanging around). It will probably be okay.

I have spent the last three hours clearing out the storage room.

My gods, did we ever have a lot of useless Original Packaging.

Raynedaze: Some of said Original Packaging might be useful in your move, so I'll be showing up with mid-sized but potentially useful boxes when I come to paint tomorrow. :-)

I have scourged the place of a lot of junk.

I'm hoping that it takes a lot of bad-old-energy with it out the door. :-)

There is still a fairly huge amount of stuff in there, but (A) the bed was taking up most of the space, and (B) most of what's left is rubber-maid bins for use in any moves we make down the road.

Paul is re-painting the trim around the doors downstairs right now, so I'm taking a much-desired break to yack about this and maybe get some breakfast. :-)
(Or a popsicle. They're the actually-made-of-fruit kind, so they're not too bad. ;-)

Am feeling mildly buff what with all this lifting and shifting and moving stuff around. :-)

Also fee slightly less hopeless than I did when I wrote that locked post, which is a good thing. :-) (We'll see if it lasts).

Anyway.

Tired and need to wash my hands.

Despite uncertainty about where the hell all this crap (physical) is going to end up, I'm still very, very fond of Dumpster Week this year. :-)

There's still plenty to be done (and I need to go through the main floor, the bedroom and the office too, just to see what else I can get rid of. :-)

This'll be a busy, but productive, weekend. Whee! :-D

I had a marvelous surprise dinner with Ms Amanda last night. :-D

She brought me fresh pasta and we made sauce with garlic and asparagus, and I made dessert (pre-fab sponge cake + vanilla yoghurt + thawed raspberries).

It was fabulous.

*~*~*~*~*

To My Daughter

I was a seal once
before I took off my skin
and became human

*~*~*~*~*

Choices

choice is
picket fence behind me
open ocean before me
seal skin in my two hands
tearing

*~*~*~*~*


There's a story between those two verses.

I need to find it and write it down. :-)



Yesterday I: Cleaned.
The job is not done. But I cleared out all the food-substitutes that the tenant left in my freezer (they are now composting in the back yard and, it wouldn't shock me, making the local feral cats very happy. I will need to cover everything in peat moss very soon, I suspect) and composted a lot of the seeds that have been sitting around my house for years.

To do tonight:

Buy 4' worth of small, sodalite spacer-balls (beading) for the making of two necklaces (there may be some silver pearls involved in this purchase, too).

Re-organize kitchen - make use of that now-empty cupboard to clear a bunch of the pans and stuff off the top of the shelves. :-)

Take out the (copious) recycling.

Clear the shattered trellis out of the back yard (more recycling).

Make sodalite rope necklace (to go with the rhodochrysite and cheroite ropes I've already got).

Potentially help Paul move the Huge Desk either into the office or out of the house. (I think I'd like to put that up on Freecycle - the thing is enormous (and heavy), and we don't really have space for it. It would be nice to get it gone. :-)


To do tomorrow:

Register for the day @ Gaia Gathering (around 11am)

Attend "Lost in Translation", "Personal Revelations of the Goddess", "The Last Fifteen Years", and "Queering Our Magic".

Come home (ideally) happy. :-)

Make dinner.


- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)

Today:

- Pagan Brunch
- Laundry
- Figuring Out Dinner
- Making Macaroni and Cheese for Pot Luck (tomorrow)
- Write "Compelling and Impactful" Poetry (who the hell knows...)


It should be a good day. :-)


Yesterday: Paul brought home bison burgers for dinner! (!!!)

Oh My Gods! So Delicious! :-D


If his stomach is okay today, then we will have them more often! :-D (I am so very filled with squee over this, you have NO idea!
We've been eating Licks' turkey burgers for years - but after the restaurant chain went out of business, the buy-them-in-the-store burgers became... uhm... really disgusting.
Hard to cook completely and with something weird going on with the texture.

So if he's okay on these (maybe we can try some of the other PC ones, too - like chicken burgers, or something), we have a (very handy) alternative to the Icky Ones.

Here's hoping! :-D

I think I've figured it out.

My fear of having (or reticence to have) children (yet).


I once told Ami_B that I want my strangeness to be so indelibly inked (possibly literally) on my skin that I can never pass for normal.


In our culture (hell, in all cultures) it is the job/purpose of parents (from the culture-as-a-whole's PoV) to indoctrinate the next generation of culture-members into the norms and mores and so-on of the culture.
As such, parents (and, in this culture, particularly mothers) are under a great deal of pressure to provide an example of exactly what it takes to count as a Person in the culture. To give the children the right kind of role models so that the behaviour they learn, from the cradle, to imitate is behaviour that suits the dominant paradigm of what is appropriate.


I know that my husband believes that, in order to stay safe, one must stay closeted (as a pagan, as a queer, as an energy-healer, as a sex-radical, as a communist, whatever...).
In areas where one actually will get beaten to death/go to prison/lose one's family/etc. for a given practice or personal/biological trait, this is true. Sad, but true.
In a situation where that is not the case, and one is defining 'safe' not as "not having my life/family/livelihood threatened", but as "fitting in enough so that people who don't necessarily matter won't look at you funny", this is simply not the case.
In this kind of situation, one is safer being Out (as whatever) because if you know people know and don't care whether they know or not, you can't be blackmailed about Whatever It Is.



I am terrified that the wild lightning woman, the Amazon, that is me (the tart, the vamp, the sex-positive woman I'm only just starting to try and be; the woman who takes her shirt off in public because there's no law against it, the strong feminist, the pornographer, the poet, the singer, the woman who literally dances down the street, the goth, the goddess-woman, the openly queer bi-girl whose thoughts, just occasionally, throw a blip up on the Radical Radar), I'm terrified that the Me whom I love, all of the That-Which-Is-Me, will be subsumed/crushed/deleted by the sheer weight of cultural conservative-normativity.


I want to be the mom who wears PVC to the PTA.
I want to be the mom whose kids actually know about sex - not just reproduction + abstinence, but pleasure and boundaries and self-assurance and knowing (and asking for, and getting) what you want, and everything else - perhaps to the point where the other kids are coming to them for advice.
I want to be the mom with the gorgeous tattoo across her entire back.
I want to be the mom who doesn't cave to the pressure to wear a top with her bathing suit
I want to be the mom whose kids (I wish) actually like eating their vegetables
I want to be the mom whose kids know what weeds they can eat out of the back yard, whose got food growing in the front garden along with the flowers.
I want to be the mom who takes her kids and her husband to Dyke March.
I want to be the mom who buys juice in glass bottles (well, that I can start doing now) specifically because they aren't plastic bottles or tetra-packs.

I want to be the mom who, despite wearing four-inch-heels and occasionally wielding a flogger, despite having a strong, well-satisfied libido, despite not having an immaculately trimmed goddamn lawn, despite not fitting any of my societies norms, has bright, creative kids who turn out fucking awesome.


I do not want to be the mom who kills herself, slowly, dream by dream, and lie by lie, in the name of fitting in and looking like a good mother.

So.

On Wednesday, April 23rd (Shakespeare's birthday, no less), my fella and I have a pizza date here, conveniently in support of this.

I'm rather looking forward to it. :-D


Having raman w/ shrimp tonight and working on my t-shirt dress. :-)

I am loving the summery weather. Hurrah! There will be tulips and crocuses and all sorts of lovely things soon enough! :-D

- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)

In addition to getting my B-levels in the SLE, the Government has also just sent me a cheque, announcing that they actually owe me money this year.

Cool! :-D

So I get almost $225 - free! - for... what... not finishing school? Something?

Apparently I still have something like $700 & change worth of 'tuition & text book costs' that I can claim against my taxes in the future.

This is very handy as this year my income WILL put me <*gasp*> Above the Poverty Line(!!!).


That said: Yay! Free money! :-D


I shall put most of it towards my credit-card debt (thus, I *think*, bringing it below a grand! Yay!) and the little bit remaining will go towards... um... shrimp rings, I think. :-)


Tonight: Tofu Korma and possible fish for dinner. :-)


Paul leaves for Europe (or, well, for the airport and then for Europe) in about... fifteen minutes.


[15 Minutes Later...]


And he's off. His mom just came and picked him up to take him to the airport.
I hope he gets to Copenhagen safely, and that he has a fantastic time bopping around Europe (he's never been across the ocean before). I think he'll have a blast.

(He asked if I wanted him to bring me a present from Europe. To this I replied: "Yes! I like presents. Jewelery is good. :-)" So we'll see what he comes up with, if he finds anything. :-)


As for me, from now until about 5pm on April the 8th (a Tuesday, I believe), I am a single-esque gal who will be eating fish, mammals, leafy greens, and other normally off-the-menu goodies, as much as possible. ;-)


- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)