As The World Turns

First I didn’t post because there wasn’t much happening — just going to work, walking the dog, and making slow progress on my reading and cooking projects.  THEN I didn’t post because there was too MUCH happening and I didn’t have time! 

The big change is, I now have a housemate.  I’ll call her K (but it’s not the same K who was going to lease the fields from me when I first moved here — that plan fell flat almost immediately when K acquired a herd of goats and no longer had time for any other projects — her time was filled by a series of one “goatastrophe” after the other).

No, this K is a friend of one of my employers, and we met at a potluck a few years ago.  She recently moved here to work for the employer/friend, at least through spring, and her original housing plan didn’t work out, so I offered her a room here.  She’s very nice, with two great dogs that are getting along fine not only with my dog but also with my cat, about whom I’d been a bit worried.  She cooks and gardens, and will help me learn in both arenas.  She doesn’t know much about computers and if she wants I will help her learn about that.

Today we had a nice relaxing Thanksgiving.  We went for our usual dog walk but extended it into a longer hike up the hill behind the house where there is some spectacular scenery.  I dug one row of potatoes from the garden and boiled them up for some really yummy mashed potatoes with sour cream-horseradish dressing.  K made gravy (and I watched and learned).  We made stuffing from a box, opened cans of cranberries and mandarin oranges, steamed some fresh broccoli and celery.  I cooked half a local pumpkin, intending to make pumpkin pie, but it took so long to cook (on the woodstove on a not-so-cold day when the stove was only puttering along) that I postponed the pie-making until tomorrow.

We talked all day while we were hiking and cooking and doing other chores.  Then we ate dinner and watched “Strangers In Good Company”, a delightful movie that had just enough display of “survival skills” to fit my movie genre criteria :)

So, things are a little different for me these days.  I have lots of reasons why I prefer to live alone if I’m not living with a life partner; but there are also lots of benefits to sharing a house, and this time I decided it was the right thing to do.  So far (it’s been nearly a week) it’s working out wonderfully.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

In one of my work situations, I’m in an awkward position — my immediate supervisor, with whom I usually work alone (meaning no other employees around) absolutely hates the “big boss”.  My supervisor, who I’ll call D, spends most of her time complaining harshly about the big boss, who I’ll call B.  D regularly and frequently doesn’t follow the rules and procedures that B has established, and therefore I generally don’t/can’t either, or I will appear to my supervisor to be 1) in defiance to her, and 2) allied with the hated B.  For similar reasons, I can’t directly tell B (with whom I don’t always agree, but generally have a healthy and pleasant relationship) about all the places where D isn’t following the rules — because D and I work in isolation from other employees, there would be no doubt of the source (me) if any tales of disobedience were to reach B.  This much I have explained to B and she understands.  Sometimes B or another employee joins us for a shift, but on those occasions, D’s behavior changes dramatically, so there is much less for B to notice (though the physical condition of the office, as well as the progress or lack thereof on assignments, would seem to be pretty blatant).

I’m sure this is really confusing to read — it’s confusing enough to experience, and although I’m quite sure neither of them would ever read this, I’m not going to be more explicit here anyway.  Too much at risk.

The bottom line is that, while I’m in a good spot in that they both think *I’m* doing well (and the big boss understands that she can’t ask me to elaborate on conditions in our office, she needs to interact with D separately), it’s mildly stressful to me for several reasons.  First of all, the potential hatred of D that would be aimed at me if she were to ever suspect that I don’t hate B with all the passion she does.  Actually, I’m exaggerating, she does know that I’m “cordial” with B, which makes me, in her mind, already suspect.  But D sees the world in terms of alliances, and if she ever thought that I actually was *more* on B’s side than on her own, I’m sure I’d never hear the end of it, and might even experience bad job juju as a result (bad review, misplaced blame for problems, etc.).  At the very minimim I’d experience the silent treatment and be on the receiving end of direct hostility at work.

The second (and primary, at this point) reason it’s unpleasant to me, is because D experiences her job as overwhelmingly stressful, almost to the breaking point, and that’s all she can talk about, and I’m the only one there to listen.

Ironically, D’s stress gets in the way of her doing a good job — the job is not so complicated, and D is fully smart enough, that she should be able to do it without much stress at all, even if she doesn’t like B’s rules or management style.  But D is one of those people for whom complaining is apparently her primary mode of being.  I’ve directly seen her choose complaining over fixing a problem — even a simple problem.  If she was the source of the problem, she’ll deny it and instead blame the boss or complain about the boss’ overbearing style (as if that negates her mistake?  hello?)  But if D wasn’t the source of the original problem, then watch out!  Especially if the problem came from B or anyone she thinks is allied with B.  D would NEVER dream of fixing a problem that someone else created, not when there’s the opportunity to complain about it instead!  Again, it puts me in a bind — each time that I move to solve a problem that she hasn’t solved, I’m at risk of “showing her up.”  As if my solving a problem in thirty seconds might make her huge blowup about it seem out of proportion?  Or as if my willingness to act instead of complain makes me appear to be on B’s side?  (these are MY thoughts, not hers — this is what I worry about that D might think when I step in to fix in thirty seconds what she has just spent an hour whining is an insurmountable hassle…)

The sad part is that this is in a work situation that involves dealing with the public, and wouldn’t you think that serving the public would be of primary importance here?  Certainly more important than pointing fingers or whining about the boss.  But no, not for D.

Ironically, as unpleasant a work environment as this creates, this job is my favorite of all my part-time jobs…  Go figure…  I think partly that’s because I truly enjoy the work, and partly because I’m in a favorable position in the sense that I personally am managing to get along with everyone, and I am productive and getting a lot done.  I think (biased though I might be, lol) that I do several *times* the amount of work that D does per shift.  She spends so much of her time complaining about the boss (and then complaining about how stressed she is) that it’s a wonder she gets any work done at all!

This situation has built to a head in the last few months, since a new computer system (and its attendant need for training) has caused the boss to join us frequently.  And during the boss’s visits, she has noticed some of the OTHER backlogs that had piled up in the office, and is now asking for those things to be taken care of.  While I think this is perfectly reasonable (the backlogs had bothered me too, see above for my view that D spends her time complaining instead of working), B’s interactional and management style have many people irked, D most of all.  B comes across as condescending, it’s true.  She talks to us all as if we were kindergartners.  For some reason I don’t understand, this doesn’t bother me, although I’ve certainly taken offense to being talked to like a child in other situations.  And for some other reasons that I also don’t understand, D is way beyond bothered by B’s style, all the way to hatred, hostility, and the edge of explosion.  She takes such great offense that she’s nearly reduced to tears each time B talks to her.  Each conversation revs the hatred up higher.  And yet D would never be able to consider actually expressing her feelings to B.  Because D doesn’t see the problem as herself being offended, so she’d never consider attempting to solve it from that angle.  Instead, D is so certain that B is “wrong” in every way shape and form, that all she can do is seethe and vent, before and after (and lately, even DURING) each interaction with B.

Seems to me that honest communication could eliminate this problem.  Or at least 90% of it – D might not ever like B’s style of interaction.  And B might not be able to change her style much (though I’m sure she would try if she realized how people perceive her).  But at least B could factor that in to her management style and actions, and D could learn to not take it personally.  I might have an opportunity to talk generically about this with B, and if I can, I will.

Another thing that’s so ironic about it is that, while D is offended by being spoken to like a child, she is, in fact, BEHAVING like a child, both in her pouty whining, and in her refusal to do her job in favor of finger-pointing and complaining.

Sheesh, you’d never know we are all adults here!

Anyway, as I said, things are coming to a head, and I personally think it’s possible that D might either tell B to “take this job and shove it”, or have a breakdown, or actually get fired, if B decides to pay more attention to the actual work that is or isn’t getting done.

Gonna be an interesting winter at “Dog’s Little Office”…

Restart: Blogging

Well, I’ve had a nice break from the blog, and I think I’m feeling ready to start posting again.

I’m in a different place mentally than I was a month ago (or however long it’s been since I posted).  A better place.  Much better.

I moved forward over the past month in the post-relationship mental processing — a giant leap forward.  This was really necessary for me, even though it’s been over six months since I moved out – I’d gotten stuck in a place where I recognized that my thoughts and judgements and opinions had been forced into his mold, but I was in denial about how dramatic that was, and I couldn’t step out of the mold quite yet.  Especially since we were still spending lots of time together.  In fact we’d been spending more and more time together, and I’d begun to wonder if we might not have a chance at getting back together.  I initiated a conversation where I started clarifying some of the things that hadn’t worked for me during our time together, and it blossomed into a dialogue of crystal clear communication (VERY rare for us, that was one of my issues actually) which, while encouraging in and of itself, made it very clear we are NOT getting back together.  As soon as that conversation was over, like magic, I felt freed up.  Freed up from constraints I hadn’t even realized I was carrying.  I apparently have a HUGE tolerance for walking on eggshells to accommodate another person.  For taking their perspective and denying any other (even though I usually have a personal view that’s a conglomeration of several perspectives).  I’m not sure that’s a wholly bad trait, but I guess I’d gotten rather carried away with it.  Discarding it, now that it doesn’t serve me, felt really good!

Anyway, so here I am back.  When I first started the blog, I used it almost as a diary, just posting tidbits of what happened each day or every couple days.  I think I might like to go back to that, instead of feeling like every post has to be so SIGNIFICANT.

Unfortunately, my first diaric post is of a vegetative day in which I did nothing except water the garden, surf the web, and make a pseudo-omelet for lunch with eggs (local), avocado (not local) and bleu cheese (not local).  The garlic was not local either, although I do have some local garlic, but I’m using up the pound from the co-op first before I get to the local heads.  Oh, and I added in a half a jalapeno from my own garden too.  As I’ll describe another time, my garden this year was truly a bust – hardly anything grew.  But there are bits and pieces that grew, and three jalapenos is three more than none.   Then tonight I made a salad from store-bought greens and tomatoes, and feta, and another avocado, and some other non-local stuff, but some of my own chard went in, plus slices of a local leek.

Yep, Another IDC Update! What A Surprise!

This past week:

Planted:  Transplanted banana pepper sprouts.  These guys hadn’t gotten any bigger in weeks, but they didn’t die.  It might be too late for them to produce fruit this season, but I planted them anyway.  I planted the whole “tray” the seedlings were in, since I’ve had almost zero success with my transplanting this year, especially with seedlings that are still small.  I dug a hole the size and shape of the plastic tray, then flipped the whole sheet of soil, seedlings and all, into the garden.  Then watered thoroughly, of course.  We’ll see if this is any more successful than the breaking apart each seedling method.  I now understand why doing many seedling per tray isn’t a good idea, and next year I’ll be using individual little pots instead.  One friend who does a gangbusters garden told me that she doesn’t even use the really little divided pots, because transplanting into a medium size pot and then transplanting again into the garden was just too hard on the plants.  So she starts her tomatoes, peppers, whatever in 3″ pots, which are big enough they can stay there until they go straight into the ground.  I’m taking notes for next year.

Harvested:  Apricots, peas

Preserved:  Nothing

Managed:  Mulched the potato bed?  Does that count?

Stored:  Nothing new.

Prepped:  Another firewooding trip with R.  I took home a half cord of top quality lodgepole.

Reduced waste:  The only thing I can think of above and beyond the ongoing composting is that I used yard-trimmed alfalfa to mulch the potato bed.  I spent some time gathering more cut thistles for the next trip to Kate’s, but didn’t deliver any more yet.

Advocated for local food economy:  Wore my Locavore Farms T-Shirt to my job at the library, and it got commented on by someone who didn’t know about the full extent of their farm!  They say their you-pick option will start up in early August, so I’m hot to spread the word about them as much as possible before then.  I also bought some stuff (jam, relish, onions, cabbage, zucchini bread) at this week’s farmer’s market.  Didn’t set up a table or sell anything, as R and I were heading out for the woodcutting day.

Cooked Something New:  Hard-boiled eggs in a solar oven!  Wasn’t sure it would work, but it did!  I just set two eggs in a small dish, no water.  I left them WAY too long (hours!) and they did get a bit overdone, just as eggs would if they were boiled way too long, but they were still tasty!  Next time I’ll pay attention to the time and see how long it takes to get soft-boiled and how long for hard-boiled.

Learned a New Skill:  Nothing I can think of, though R and I did have some challenging conversations this week that required me to interact with him in a different way than I used to.  There’s something about getting frustrated that makes it really hard to explain to someone WHY you’re frustrated, at least in a way that they can hear you and not shut down in self-defense.  We had some interactions where I tried some new approaches to expressing my concerns.  I’m usually a pretty clear-headed communicator, and it was really hard to realize that I had no idea the right way to say things so that he would understand what I was expressing.  I don’t think I actually learned a new skill, but perhaps opened a path that might eventually lead that way.

Sloth, and a Strategy

I can say it now, out loud even: I am a sloth. Some might say lazy, though in my defense I’d argue that it’s selective laziness – there are certainly lots of examples of accomplishments on my part, including some that distinctly non-lazy people might respect. Some might think it borders on depression, and there might be a grain of truth in that too, but mostly not – I sleep well, I don’t feel overly or inappropriately sad (relationship breakup notwithstanding), I’m interested in lots of things, and I look forward to the future (though, given the current world, not without some trepidation, for sure). My preferred term for my condition is low-energy. And I have always been this way. Always.

As a child it manifested mostly by being a night-owl; I’d stay up late into the evening, reading or making plans or sometimes even cleaning out the closet. In the evening I’d feel high-energy, mentally – rarin’ to go on whatever had my attention at the moment, except for the fact that it was late and I was physically tired. But oh, the enthusiasm! Then, in the morning? Gone. No enthusiasm whatsoever. I wanted nothing more from life than to be able to go back to sleep. It didn’t take me long to learn that when I did sleep late and got up at noon, once I was up, that felt pretty bad too – I usually went straight from “ohhhh, I feel good but SO sleepy, Must.Sleep.More”, to “ugh, I slept way too long, now I not only feel yucky, but the day’s half over and everyone else has accomplished lots of things already!” However, recognizing this did NOT inspire me to just get up earlier instead of going back to sleep. Somehow that magnetic pull of the head back onto the pillow was just irresistable. I even used to set my alarm on weekends, because waking up early and turning off the alarm and going back to sleep was SO much more satisfying than just sleeping later in the first place! I know, I know, wacky, eh? Anyway, what I remember clearly, and still experience sometimes, is the feeling of high mental energy at night, when the physical energy is low, and wishing “why can’t I just carry this good mental feeling over into the morning, so that I can act on it?” But mornings never felt the same. I don’t know why, they just didn’t.

Over the years I trained myself to be less of a night owl, which made a HUGE positive difference in my life. Now, if I stay up “late”, that’s 11pm or midnight, when that used to be “early” for me. And if I sleep in, that’s until 8am or 8:30, not noon. But the general dynamics of low energy have stayed with me. I have to “make” myself exercise; it’s never what I FEEL like doing. And although I have a rather extreme reverence for the natural world, my reverence doesn’t require much of my direct experience – I’m perfectly happy staying indoors all day, reading or computering, working in an office setting, whatever. I know this is contradictory for many people, but it works for me. My reverence for the natural world is because that’s what I believe is right, not because it meets my personal life experience needs. Don’t get me wrong, I truly enjoy hiking and camping, and I absolutely treasure living close to nature on a day-to-day basis. It’s just that it isn’t something I HAVE to do to be satisfied, and there are so many other things I do feel drawn to do, that I don’t end up spending much time in those activities.

So, back to the present: I’ve been feeling rather overwhelmed. The changes going on in the world are frightening for me to contemplate dealing with on my own, since I just spent four years preparing to deal with these changes together with another person. And, of course, Peak Oil aside, I’m still dealing with the emotions of the end of a relationship – one that had a stronger hold on my views and my habits than I’d realized. I sometimes feel like I’ve forgotten how to think for myself, or how to make a decision on my own. Now, I realize this might not be all that unusual, and I’m sure I’ll be back to myself before too long. It’s just that I feel like I’m racing the clock to decide how to set up my new life, before options (such as jobs, relocation possibilities, mortgages etc) start being removed from the picture. In addition, I had used my relationship, rather successfully, to help me ward off my low-energy personality, to banish that part of me to a hidden memory – I followed R’s lead in terms of activities, projects, etc. He didn’t work himself too hard day by day, yet he managed to accomplish a lot, and usually in a fairly short time period. His secret was to make some progress every day. Didn’t have to be sunup to sundown nonstop, just whatever one could handle, make progress. I still do use that technique and think it’s a gem.  And it was easy to do when there was someone else doing it alongside you.

But now back on my own, I’ve found that I’ve lost my ability to self-discipline: when I have a free day at home, I might think to myself “oh, I’ll do this, and that, and that, and that…” and not pay attention to what’s realistic. Then when the day comes, I’m not “in the mood” to work on those projects, and I spend the whole day online instead, reading blogs or discussion boards or whatnot. Each time I look at the clock, I say “okay, just one more hour and then I’ll go do XYZ.” I can pass a whole day that way! Or, as I did last Saturday, I go outside, spend 15-20 minutes working on a project, then “reward” myself with a break indoors at the computer. Problem was, I was only working 15-20 minutes for each 1-2 hour break! Not the way to get a whole lot done…

I want to give myself permission to feel lost for a while, permission to grieve for my relationship, permission to feel tired from the stress of that and of the unexpected move, permission to feel afraid for being alone. But I also want to reclaim my ability for self-discipline, and to move myself forward with whatever my current plans are. And I recognize that my current weakness is spending time on the computer. In earlier years it might have been TV or reading or coffeeshops or bookstores. Now, I have no TV reception, and while I’m in the midst of reading several books, not to mention behind on my few subscription magazines, and I’m not so much for hanging out at coffeehouses anymore, and the one bookstore in town holds no more spell over me, my truly addictive weakness now is spending time online. That’s where I fall to, instead of focusing on the things I truly want to focus on.

So I came up with a strategy for my at-home days: no computer between 10am and 4pm.

Now of course the very first thing I did after coming up with this strategy, was to come up with the exceptions to the rule. :) First exception is when I have work-related reasons to be on the computer. Second exception is, if I shut down by 9am instead of 10am, then I can have a lunch-hour check-in from 12-1 (or whenever I stop to eat).

So, today’s “make progress” projects to choose from are: garden beds, garden fence, pruning fruit trees, kitty door, making naan. Other projects I might work on: setting up the solar oven and the food dehydrator, putting the bags of bulk beans/rice into mouseproof buckets. And of course there are daily tasks like doing the dishes, putting away the laundry, a little cleaning, not to mention some generic unpacking/rearranging tasks still left undone.

It’s 9:45 am.  I’ll sign off shortly and be back at 4pm.  Wish me luck!