February 2021

Okay, something weird happened when I went to post this article.
I was looking for a quote, I had the Chuck Palahniuk stuck in my head “all god does is watch us and kill us when we get boring, we must never, ever be boring.” But that wasn’t it.

I have been boring lately, I admit it. I said ‘I lost my voice’ and someone took it literally. No, I just lost a huge part of myself. I can’t think of anything to say, mostly because I not doing anything.

Anyways, after 19 days of solitude and staying home I went out and did stuff, but we will get to that in a minute.

I was looking for a quote, had the wrong one stuck in my head and decided to google “god and plans” because my theory is that the gods think its funny that when we do make plans, it’s just an open invitation for them to fuck with us. That’s been my experience anyways. (gestures broadly at my life)

So, wow I am rambling…I google the thing and God’s Plan by Drake comes on, which happened to be crazy popular my first few months in Newfoundland and Stompy Magoo, the stripper that made my life miserable used to sing it at the top of her off key lungs at really inopportune times.
In the way that a lot of things become funny years later, I giggled. It is funny. That someone so inconsequential had so much sway on my life for a bit.
She had all the strippers convinced I was an evil witch. Witch yes, evil no.
It got better when I leaned into it. All the girls who were making fun of me started asking me for wishes and spells.

So I watched the video. The beginning is a black screen with the words “The budget for this video was $999 000 and we gave it all away.” I almost cried a couple times, it was really sweet. Also, a million bucks for a music video is insane by the way, but what he did made me feel good.

I am currently in a rocky relationship with money and hope it turns around soon. I wish I had money to throw around like that. I could help so many people.

So anyway, Back to the post I meant to write.

I adulted yesterday and got my taxes done.

I owe money. I don’t recall if that has ever happened before to be honest.

Lil mad, no gonna lie. But I am not surprised.

This year, so far, has been a bit of a financial drain. The first leg of my last trip was budgeted beautifully. But everything since the beginning of January has been one bit of fuckery after another. Broken snow shovel, grocery delivery, crazy phone bill, car fixing, customs on a suitcase of dirty clothes.

No, wait it all started with paying $275 USD for the extra bag on the plane. December 9th, things started getting stoopid.

I was supposed to leave January 9th and stretched it out another 26 days.

That’s on me.

Add the zero income and ya. I need to get my ass to work. I am guessing it will take me this 2 weeks of schedule to get me back to zero, then all gravy moving forward. I am officially breaking this cycle. Money comes easy and frequently.

The last day of my first stretch is a full moon, go big or go home I guess.

The way my current work works is we get booked for one or 2 blocks at a time. A block is 4 days on 3 days off. We stay on premises with the option to leave on our 3 days off. Once the weather gets better I can see myself sticking around. It is a 3 hour drive and it is truly beautiful up there. My lake is there. And the summer shifts are 5 on 2 off. Seems silly to drive home for one Monday just to turn around and go back again.

I am actually really looking forward to this summer now that I think about it.

I left my home town  in the 90’s and didn’t go back for 20 years. I do miss it.
Thinking about it prompted a memory which turned into a montage of memories of me leaving places to start over other places. I do this a lot.

I have been sitting here making imaginary budgets in my head. Imaginary because the particular county where I am currently employed is in yellow and could easily slip back to red, I have no idea when surgery is and there are 1000 other reasons why I can’t really plan anything.

I know what not to do which is get involved with a mediocre dude and go live somewhere expensive. I have done that way too many times now.

My grandmother passed away the year before my friend Greg died and she left me a bit of money. $7000 to a minimum wage 19 year old kid seemed like a million dollars, and I used that money to leave my home town and move up north.
I felt that Greg’s death and the events that surrounded it coupled with the sudden boon was a sign to leave, and mayhap it was.
A year later I was pregnant on a greyhound bus moving to Toronto and I love my kid more than anything, so sure, let’s call it fate.

I enjoyed living in Toronto too. It was mostly a fun decade. Especially after 24. I wouldn’t go back now, but it served me well. I left to move to the farm 14 years ago?
Moving to the farm put me in debt and trapped me there after I had been doing quite nicely on my own for a while. I miss the apartment (and job) I left at the behest of ex hubby. It was a beautiful spot. Well, I made it beautiful and I think he was shocked I paid for it just fine on my own after he left. Lord save me from men who need to be needed. 

And my last pilgrimage east, well, let’s just say the money I made on a two week stint as a new girl in the fall was about as much as I made in 2 months in the dead of perpetual spring. I was reliant on a piggy bank stuffed with $2 coins and $5 bills. Just getting there was expensive. The moving, the storage etc. I did not plan that so great but it all worked out eventually. Somewhere around the end of March Tina 2 Chainz and I landed a whale in the VIP and suddenly all my bills were paid and there was food in the fridge again. I had a lot of $1000 nights after that first one.

Something in me decided that if I ever do another leap of faith, I want to have x amount of dollars and this and that and the other fucking thing.

I realized this morning, that isn’t a leap of faith, it is a life maneuver of preparedness.
Who am I?

When I did my budget in December to move where I wanted, I had 6 or 12 months rent put away and/or paid before I left my current house, in my head. The plan now is different, but I am chuckling at myself for being so pre-prepared. 

I know from 30 years of anecdotal experience you can think you have all your bases covered and think you know what’s coming and the hand of god will come down and flick you into a different direction entirely.

I used to pay big city rent, feed myself and my son on minimum wage. $229 a week. I used to feed 4 people at the farm for that same amount every couple of weeks. Like I do know how to do this. My second grocery order of $90 was a stupid splurge, add the indian food take out and that could have been my food budget for the month. I have become spoiled somehow.

Most of my exes sponged off me, so the last 7 years of being single I have had more money than I am used to. I am no longer looking after adult children that I didn’t give birth to. This is a good thing. I have traveled, had adventures, bought (and left behind) some beautiful furniture, lived in lovely places and never gone hungry or without anything really.

And I keep saying it, because I cannot afford to forget it, 9 years ago I could have started building my tiny empire but instead I moved back to Toronto because my crappy boyfriend at the time wanted it and then we struggled for a year and a half. But at least he got to get beer and wings at the pub 5 times a week.

Not repeating that cycle, I refuse. No man is cute or sexy enough for that shit. Yes, my vagina is yodeling her song of starvation and loneliness, but this too shall pass. 

And in the immortal words of Aerosmith “can’t say baby where I’ll be in a year.”

I can’t, I do not have the slightest clue. 

But right now I am warm and safe and tomorrow I go to work and I think it is going to be good for me on 57 levels.

I need out of my house and out of my head. I need some structure and discipline. And the money will be nice too. 

I have a leg up as far as survival goes.
And this is all coming too late to help anyone now, but serves as a good list going forward, plus a reminder for me.

My mother and father raised me in a converted Mennonite farmhouse, with no indoor plumbing until I was about 22 months old. The story goes, she told my father she wasn’t going to potty train me with an outhouse and the bathroom got built. 

We moved from the country to a subdivision when I was 7, but I remember remnants of the time before running water and electricity on the farm. The well outside with the hand pump provided fresh clean potable water. The bureau in the kitchen held several well maintained kerosene lamps. We had one of those ancient wood fired oven + stovetop, and that is how our food was cooked, bread baked and house heated when I was little. 

I heard stories of the renovations that I couldn’t possibly remember wherein there was no insulation against the cold of Canadian winter, save some newspapers from the late 1800’s.

And that is another thing. I am Canadian.

We understand cold, our houses are built to withstand it. That being said, I have had a burst pipe (once, my bad) and many a flooded basement in my day.

I grew up in that farmhouse and the power went out a lot. But we didn’t need it. My mother had the radio on from the minute she woke up to get my father off to work, until we went to bed. If there was weather coming, she knew it. The bathtub was filled with washing/flushing water, the lamp wicks trimmed, the kerosene filled. And the garage always had enough wood to get us through for months lining the walls from floor to rafters. We had a root cellar and a deep freezer lined with ice, just in case. My mother had an impressive one acre garden and canned or froze everything she grew, all lined up in organized rows in the pantry. Of course we went to town for coffee, sugar, flour etc. but in the dead of winter where the roads were impassable, we never once went without.

I wonder what it was like for them to adjust. Both of them from Michigan, both from sizable towns. My mother and her best friend had been heads of the house at a commune for years and my father’s stoicism and capabilities to fix everything are the things of myths. But they weren’t raised on farms, they chose that lifestyle in their 20’s, before I came along.

I made a similar choice and was pretty dumbfounded about the lack of preparedness when I went to live with my husband on his farm. The garden was in ruins, the soil tainted by a leaking rototiller. A barn full of his hoarded mechanical crap instead of providing shelter for the sad looking chickens. If the power went out it was dark and miserable. And I had to give my horses lake water to drink every summer because our well would inevitably go dry, 2 trips a day, 13 buckets in the back of my jeep. I bathed in various lakes 3 months of the year too. But I made it work.

In retrospect I think it might have been easier for me to flip a Mennonite farmhouse into a productive homestead than it was to deal with his patched together hoarders paradise. Start fresh instead of constantly fixing what hadn’t been done right in the first place.

But I kept the animals alive, got the garden going for a couple of years. Fed us 100s of meals sourced within a 30 km radius by cultivating the land, raising meat birds and goats and forging good relationships with the neighbors, and when the power went out, we were fine.

I also remember the big eastern seaboard blackout of 2003, we weren’t so lucky. It was summer and my ex wouldn’t stop opening the fridge. Lost a lot of groceries and I actually had to walk home 2 miles uphill because transit stopped working when my boss finally let us close the restaurant.

We were in a grid of mostly industrial businesses, actually, our building was not zoned for residence so we were one of the last neighborhoods to have power restored. But at night we had light, because I had my mother’s kerosene lamps, wicks trimmed and ready. And I traded food with the upstairs neighbor for the use of his barbeque. I do remember how amazing it was to sit up on the roof and actually see the stars.

10 years later the ice storm of 2013 had us powerless for 8 days.

But, I was living in the snowbelt far out of town and everything I learned as a kid growing up in the nether reaches of nowhere had already been put into place.
Lamps, candles, batteries, non perishable food that didn’t need cooking, a freezer lined with ice, plentiful jugs of potable water.

Mostly prepared I should say, my piece of shit (now) ex boyfriend didn’t bother to fill the tubs and sink up so we scrambled for washing and flushing water. I was 2 hours away at work battling an ice storm to get home. But it did force me to completely drain the pipes so none of them froze. 

I had a big beautiful fireplace, we stashed the contents of the fridge on the back porch and lived quite happily until the power came back on. Even had wood fired pizzas from scratch and I made a mean batch of fajitas. We lost some produce sure, all got a bit ripe a few days in, which could have been avoided had my pos ex filled the ample tubs we had with water like I asked him to. But we made it by melting snow.

It pointed out to me that there is a huge juxtaposition between city preparedness and country living. But with the weather getting weirder by the year, everyone should have 

1. Enough potable water on hand for 3-5 days of power outages.
   1 gallon per person per day. More if you are me.
   That means one of those 5 gallon jugs each, stashed away somewhere in the house. And a hand pump for the tops.
2. Sterno pods and/or a camping stove and fuel (alternatives listed below)
3. Canned goods and a non electric can opener, other non perishables 
4. A battery powered or crank radio, also batteries.
5. A cold temperature sleeping bag for each person in the house
6. Candles, candles, candles. You can heat a room with a few tealights and a terracotta pot. Ikea sells 100 pack tealights, get 3 packs
   (I’ll post a link to a “how to” below)
7. a) leave your taps to run a bit on cold nights or
   b) know where your main shut off is for your house and empty the pipes completely.
   Fill your bathtub(s) prior to a power outage so you can wash dishes and flush toilets. (Good way to drain the pipes too in case of freezing)
   Potable water treatment tablets work too, if you can’t boil water.

Every item mentioned above can be stored in one rubbermaid (per person) at the back of a closet, labeled with the name of each member of the family. Make it fun if you have little ones, stash colouring books and crayons or non electronic games and treats in their bins.
Just make sure to rotate the canned goods and pick nonperishables that you actually want to eat.
Do a deep freezer clean out and layer bags of ice underneath everything, you lose a little space but it is better than losing all of your food and you know you aren’t going to eat those freezer burnt tater tots anyways.

I lived a long weekend of -20 degrees Celsius in a house where our oil heater went empty on the Friday by barricading myself in the living room and nailing blankets over the windows and doorways, I had one tiny space heater, candles aplenty, snow pants and 2 dogs. We made it until Tuesday morning.
A tent in an insulated room in your house also conserves heat when sleeping.

I am writing this, not to gloat or brag, but as a warning of sorts.

I grew up knowing how to do these things and I have realized how many people don’t know what to do and the weather just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

Rotate your food goods in conjunction with time change, just like the batteries in your smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors.
Also, any combustible source of heat can lead to carbon monoxide poisoning, so be careful.
Stash an extra cord of wood in the garage if you are lucky enough to have a fireplace and a garage.

I plan on living in a tiny house living starting next year and have had to mentally reconfigure my space allotment in my head so I have all of these things on hand. Down south trailer living sounds great until the snow falls where it isn’t supposed to. I am currently looking up the pros/cons and specs for installing a tiny pot belly woodstove in a trailer.

We live in a technologically great age, but we have gotten away from being able to make it for a few days without power and running water, and it scares me. A quick trip to the camping supply section of the department store and basically the same amount of money you would spend on a couple dinners out, plus a little forethought and knowledge about how your house works is enough to save your ass when the weather gets weird and the government does nothing.

***Please note anything that produces a flame also sucks the oxygen out of the space you are in and can cause carbon monoxide poisoning, and in the last video with the pop can/alcohol stove 91% alcohol or higher and 1983 penny or older to be safe.

Sometimes, often, when things go wrong I get an urge to light everything on fire.

Wait, that is not entirely true. 

I’ve stayed and fought to preserve things that were not worth preserving. (gestures broadly at 7 years of farm life)

Let’s talk about that for a minute shall we.

Examine my stubbornness and folly.

He used to call me his sexy chocolate alarm clock.

At the beginning of our relationship, I would drop my son off at school and had 2 hours between then and when I had to be at work. So I would stop at the Starbucks on the corner, grab us coffees (he liked mochaccinos) and jump on the streetcar in the opposite direction I needed to go, back to his house and wake him up with a coffee and a blow job. It was a $15 venture 3 or 4 times a week now that I think about it with the coffee and the extra trips. 

This is who I am as a girlfriend. I figure out nice things to do for my partner and I do them.

If I am awake before you, you are getting coffee and a blowjob.

So, a month or two in, I went into his room, he was sleeping, I did my thing and started to gag, not in a funny sexy way, he wasn’t very big at all. No no dear reader, I pulled a long auburn hair out of my mouth. My hair was black. It had been wrapped around his cock and ended up in my mouth. So gross.

Took me about 30 seconds to realize what was happening and I started crying and left.

He was obviously cheating. I obviously didn’t want that. So I left the key on the coffee table and bailed while he was still naked in bed, half asleep trying to figure out what happened.

That could have been the end of that story if the streetcar had come to take me away.

But it didn’t.

He caught up with me at the corner and gave me this bullshit story about how his brother’s girlfriend put her laundry in with his and it must be her hair and I was being silly and stop crying and did I want a ride to work.

I am not a stupid girl, but I wanted to believe him, even though logic and physics dictate a hair cannot get coiled around the head of a dick under the foreskin from laundry transference. Its scientifically impossible. But I was cold and tired and sad and the streetcar wasn’t coming and that moment changed my life for a long time to come.

He got a way with it once and kept pushing the envelope.

Had I known then even an inkling of what was to come, and maybe I did, my gut was doing somersaults and not from my chai latte, I would have said no and save myself the $60 bucks a week and 7 years of cheating, fighting, financial abuse and bullshit.

He is the one who extolled the wisdom upon me that ‘we train people how to treat us in the first 3 months of a relationship’ anything we start or let slide, becomes habit. The ex before him never grocery shopped, cooked, cleaned or did laundry, that was all on me for 5 years. Because I did those things for the first while we were together without question or hesitation. Again, I figure out nice things to do for my partner and I do them. Sometimes to my detremement.

I would love to tell you that I have found some balance, but if you ask any of my recent exes, they would all tell you I was generous and kind and nice. Final Boss got me out of bed repeatedly to go get him wherever he was after multi day benders and back out of bed making 5am sandwiches when his hangover would kick in.

I am too nice, and part of me is still holding out for the person that will appreciate me as is. I don’t want to become cold, I have had so many opportunities.

But what does that have to do with anything?

After I left him finally, I lit a match and set that whole part of my life on fire. Purged everything, including friends. It has been 9 years and 5 days since the Valentine’s Day hotel incident that was my last straw of a million that broke my back. I have maybe one thing left that I owned when I lived at the farm. So much of my shit is in storage that I can’t even be sure about that one thing anymore. I tossed all of it 3 moves ago. And I had some cool shit. I just don’t want to remember.

Wolf pointed out that I was having an abusive relationship with social media. He isn’t wrong wrong, but I did that thing wherein I complained about it more than I explained why I liked it.

I also left the blog as is for its entire existence and never allowed it to evolve or grow. I would write a post, post it to Facebook, people would read it and I would do it again on Thursday.

The Catfish Poet proposed years ago that I get rid of everything, and then backpedaled when he saw the numbers and potential and wanted to use me and my platforms to sell his shit. I have almost walked away 3 times now.

There is a post in there somewhere called “Before I Go”. 

I left it up for continuity even though it was folly and turned out not to be true. Same with the couple of posts about the fake soldier, the year of Lumberjack wherein he had a secret girlfriend the whole time. I think she had his babies, good for them.

So, I finally got out of my abusive relationship with Facebook and I thought a full purge was the only way to go. Fuck the blog, fuck everything really. I was torn between filling a shopping cart with my belongings and going to live in a tent city and getting a mediocre job and a mediocre husband. Barring those things, just going back east and doing a do over. Reno another room in Brian’s house and wait to be rescued, but accept that I wouldn’t be.
I am not exaggerating for dramatic effect, those were my 3 choices for the better part of a month. 

Except, I still want all the things I wanted 7 years ago. Little trailer down south, revenue streams from writing so I wasn’t tied to rent in one place or one job.

I have proven that I can write a novella from idea to published in 60 days if properly motivated. 

Selling them/myself is the challenge now. But it always has been. I just keep being good and hoping someone notices.

It doesn’t matter that I am a really good writer, the market is saturated.

I have a month of bed rest post surgery looming. Instead of migrating the blog to Patreon, maybe keep both instead of setting my life on fire. 

I don’t know what I am doing to be honest.

I had a very long talk with a very old friend last night and he kinda kicked my ass a bit and offered suggestions. Mind you he is ‘mister technical web guy’ and I am a luddite. But 7 years ago I didn’t know how to navigate wordpress either so there is that then. I still don’t use it to its full potential but the groundwork is there, so much groundwork. And he pointed out that women writers have to work 10 times harder than our male counterparts, he is not wrong.

The things I learned and the skills I honed over the 7 years of living at the farm have made me what I am today. Self sufficient, good in a crisis, I can fix a car, unflood a basement, live without power and even my polyamory is a direct result of what I lived through there. I also know I never want to have another farm in Ontario or Canada really, ever. Nor live through another winter here.

I must have learned something good from the blog over 7 years. I just have to figure out what.

“Its only after we have lost everything that we are free to do anything” Fight Club

There are parts of me that are fighting to remain. Including this blog.

Extras still available here

https://www.patreon.com/sarahthegoodwitch

It is the lunar new year. Smack dab in the middle of a very intense retrograde. Well, not the middle, 8 days left. Fuck the first 8 were rough, the 3 in the middle sucked so bad.

I followed the rules, or so I thought. There are always rules.

I watched a YouTube video of a woman telling us 18 things not to do on the lunar new year and I was like “shit shit shit I did ALL the things”. But in a weird stroke of good luck. I did them right before they would have been bad luck. The washing of the hair, the dumping of water outside, the sweeping all done in the time called before.

Phew.

Moving on.

The Facebook download of the last 12 years of my life is complete and now sits in 2 bizarre files on my laptop. Everything is there whether I want it to be or not.

I think I am going to do what I wanted to do before, get a new laptop and start fresh. AFTER retrograde. No buying electronics or large purchases while papa is dancing backwards.

My whole life, social media, storage both physical and digital is full of so many old pieces of me, there was no room for the new.

Same with this blog. I am embarrassed of some of the stuff on here, but I left it because it felt ‘complete’. The life of an archivist.

Giant organizes his music like I organized my life and I always found it weird.
Alphabetized complete collections organized in albums.
But what is the fun in that?
Where are the infinite playlists of awesome, wherein I can listen and remember driving to the quarry?
Driving to Ohio, driving to Newfoundland.
I did a lot of driving.

I pick and choose what songs I like. I loved U2 until Rattle and Hum, I loved Tori Amos but she got weird too. People grow and change, artists do things that don’t jive with what we loved about them. And then Miley Cyrus does a bunch of covers in her backyard and I have to admit, I love her voice.

The only constant is change.

No matter what I do or what I keep, doesn’t change the fact that all of that is water under bridges I probably already burned, or wouldn’t cross again if the were still standing.

I don’t need to keep everything. Just the good stuff, and maybe in 12 years the good stuff will look like the mess of old farm photos on my laptop that I was so scared of losing once, or the Facebook I was scared of losing, or the men or the friends.

History dictates no matter how hard we try to hold onto the past, it’s gone.

I did that with someone in my life too. I wanted things the way they were. I was taking his pontifications and predictions as gospel. They ain’t.

We don’t know how we will react until we are reacting.

People, places and things I thought I couldn’t live without are gone. And here I be.

Well, not here…

This blog is undergoing a slow migration to Patreon.

The new content is there, some of it is free.

I can’t count views like I used to, but there is money there for me and that is what is necessary, not some arbitrary number counting my imaginary popularity and giving it false value.

Still same old me. Well, not same same, I am evolving. We all are.

Different website

https://www.patreon.com/posts/no-secrets-in-of-47412802

Anyone else remember Tobias Funke’s audition for the fire sale in Arrested Development?

I am having a fire sale of sorts and his over the top performance is perfect for the commercial.

I am honor bound by my patron planet not to do or say anything new, plan anything or exist really. Just staying in my loop and in my lane.

Since Papa Mercury is doing his first backwards dance across the sky and I will be in strict quarantine for the duration I just wanted to let everyone know what is happening here.

I am going to go back through the 700+ articles I have written here. Mild edits, some full deletions and every single one will stop halfway through and be linked to the patreon account to finish reading.

Now, it is not a pay-per-view situation.

Not exactly. You CAN pick and choose if you wish.

If you want a pdf copy of any article, comment below the article and I will find it along with your email.
$1 per post, bulk discounts available.

Otherwise…

SOME CONTENT WILL REMAIN FREE, THINK BLOG AND FACEBOOK PAGE PLUS A DIARY.

Or…

$1 per month gets you uninterrupted access to the archives and all posts moving forward.

$2 per month gets you access to ‘patreon only’ posts plus all archives, and new articles.

$5 gets you digital copies of both books plus the stuff above.

There are other more expensive tiers and ‘offerings’ in trade, instead of subscriptions are also an option.

Once I hit 100 subscribers, I will post teaser chapters of the 3 books I am working on and I will be adding a patreon only snapchat account once I get back to my space and equipment and find my fucking center.

I am trying to figure out how to do yearly discounted subscriptions to patreon to make it easier for everyone, including me, but you all know I am a techno peasant at best and I am at the whim of both retrograde and friends helping me out.

This wordpress platform is crumbling, I never used it to it’s full potential, nor maintained it properly and it is entirely possible that I will not renew my godaddy web ownership et al.
But I think that is August, so a long way off.

You have time.

I wanted to thank my dedicated readers, say hello to the new ones and express my gratitude to you all for getting me this far.

Yes, I am having a massive existential crisis.

Maybe it will pass, maybe it won’t.

But you can be damned sure I will write about all of it, just not here.

With love, light, lust and very little grace, warmest regards and best wishes

Sarah