Kat Dancing

Breeding season has started. Time to cut my nails.

Gloom.

My nails are one of the few things I'm really vain about. Quite foolishly vain, because they aren't anything special. At their absolute longest they grow maybe a quarter-inch beyond my fingertips, and they tend to be all broken off at different lengths, and they're usually dirty... but I'm a farmer, you see. I've worked with my hands all my life and they look it. My nails, sad as they are, are about the prettiest things about my hands, and it's a lot of work to keep them even as long as they are with all the hard labor I do, and I'm proud of them.

But I'm going to spend the next two weeks (until I move to Canada) with my left arm up a cow's ass, and in general the cows really appreciate it if I cut my nails first.

So out with the clippers. *sigh*

I only cut the nails on the left hand, though. Yes, it's silly. Yes, I realize that having nails on only one hand makes you look even stupider. But it makes me feel better, so screw it.

One of the several reasons I haven't been posting much here is that we've added a couple of new people to the farm. And to the house. This is quite cool, in the sense that there's someone here to take over for me when I'm in Canada and we're not (theoretically) so overworked. However, there are some massive downsides. Like, they live in the house. The bro and I have had to start washing our dishes and living like human beings and stuff. And like training - which none of us is very good at. I was bottle-feeding calves when I was seven, slapping on milkers at eight, and running fencing reels when I was nine, and in spite of being a reasonably bright person I am having trouble grasping the idea that this was an unusual childhood. There's been a lot of incidents over the past week of me leaving and coming back to find one of the new guys standing helplessly where I left them. "Um... so when you tell me to 'run the lines', what does that mean?"

That's not the big problem, though. The big problem is that they're driving us all crazy.

It took a while for this to come out, because we all felt guilty about admitting it. Because they're so nice. They really are. They're sweet, they go out of their way not to be any trouble, they spend lots of time just chatting with us so they can find out how to better fit in with the family, they're hard workers, they're enthusiastic about every job you give them....

The trouble is that I am not a people person. At school, on the weekends, instead of enthusiastically going out partying I would enthusiastically lock myself in my room and read. If I didn't have to speak to another person for the whole two days I was estatic. My idea of heaven is a room with a lot of books, a computer, an excellent stereo system, and nobody else in it. (Oh, and a fridge full of milk.) It's not that I don't like people, because I do, very much. It's more that socialization wears me out. I have to work at it, and I always come away with the nagging sense that I've done something wrong, usually because I have. It doesn't help that, because I'm so very bad at it, I can't do anything else when I'm being social because I have to concentrate on not fucking up. There's a more or less constant running dialogue in the back of my head where I'm writing stories or writing articles or critiquing the book I just read or generally thinking of things; when I deal with other people, that voice has to shut up so I don't. Enough socialization events end on end and I curl up into a small traumatized ball, overwhelmed by the sheer number of social gaffes I have made and social responsibilities that I have not lived up to and the enforced silence of my inner voice.

Both my parents are to a lesser degree antisocial. (My brother is not. We don't know where he came from and we think he is weird.) We aren't much of a burden on each other, both because we understand the whole "leave me alone thing" and because we're used to each other, and don't worry about offending each other too much. We're family. It will be forgiven. The new employees are very social. And they're nice. I like them both a lot, and I feel horrible about sometimes quietly wishing they'd just go away. But I do.

They're also so bloody enthusiastic about working that I feel like a whiner all the time.

Things are slowly calming down, though; they're starting to get worn out, so they aren't so damnably bright and eager all the time, and we're starting to adjust to them, and I figured out that they won't come in and talk to me if I close all the doors. Everything's evening out slowly. In general, the whole thing has served both to prep me for my new life in Canada (where I'll be around people all the time whether I like it or not) and to remind me how very, very lucky I am. Because every so often someone comes along that isn't just cool and fun to be around but is also easy for me to be around, right off; someone who doesn't wear me out; someone who doesn't force me to shut my head off, or, better yet, around whom the inner voice and the outer voice can sometimes be the same. When I find such people I hang onto them like grim death. I have one right now, which is why I'm reminding myself that I am lucky, lucky, lucky, no matter how rough Canada turns out to be.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to go socialize.

I wrote a very long post explaining my sparodic blogging of late, but it was eaten when the contracters putting in the new road who cut an underground phone line on Monday and a water line yesterday cut the underground power line, and I don't have the energy to write it again, not after spending the afternoon running around doing stuff so that my dad and brother would have time to fix the water line that the contractors cut through after we'd fixed the power line.

Y'all are just going to have to wait a while to hear the saga of Why I Am Not Posting, AKA I Lost My Modem And Then Trying To Fix It I Lost My Computer And All My Data And Then A Miracle Occurred And The Computer Was Reborn And I Got Almost All The Data Back But I Still Don't Have A Modem.

Or not. I want some sleep before I decide.

Dan was here, but now he's gone. My bed feels very big and empty without him.

Overall it was a good visit. He didn't seem overly disturbed by my family and their craziness, and my mother did not announce to me that she wanted to put him on the rack and stretch him, as she did with my last boyfriend, so I'm cautiously calling the visit a success. I don't know; I suppose it's always traumatic doing the meet-the-parents thing, but I suspect it's extra traumatic with my family because we're such a damned tight bunch. They're such a huge part of my life that whenever I have a boyfriend (which hasn't been that often) it... stretches me, trying to fit this one more person in and still have room for me. It's a bit like I'm living two lives - not in the sense of deception, my parents know nearly everything about me and approve of most of it, but in the sense of time to be spent and goals to be met and loved ones to keep happy and be made happy by - and, because my family and my lifestyle are so very different, there tends to be something of a crash when the two lives meet. But Dan and the family seem to have both survived the wreck without any nasty rending noises. This is a good thing.

But now he's gone. It'll be a short seperation, anyway: the summer in Canada will begin in, geez, about six weeks now, assuming I can get lodging and suchlike sorted. It looks to be a full summer. Hey, Gord! When were you gonna be in Canada, again?

Forward Motion is running the Story-A-Day challenge again this May, and one of the random story-idea generators Zette listed as fair game for the challenge was mine. A bunch of people have already posted stories that were inspired by my generator.

People are using my generator! *hugs self*

Okay, so I knew it was being used, because I knew it was getting hits. But still. It's just so amazingly cool to read these stories - and some of them have been very good stories - and know that it was something I'd programmed had helped inspire them.

Okay, yes, I'm a geek.

Okay, I'm also very silly to care.

But I do.

I will probably try to do the challenge (and, yes, using my own generator, that's why I wrote the damned thing after all) but short stories are not my forte. We'll see.

Further postage will probably occur soon. One day, dammit, I'm going to be good about blogging again.