Straw Bale Goodness & Monster High Doll

Now onto good things, and let us leave the bad things behind us. I’ve been throwing myself into new things. The doll project (I’ve paused in painting because my anxiety has made my hands shaky and the quality of work is suffering). This is what I have so far painting wise. It will require refining

I have to refine the smoothness of the irises, and add detail, lines etc. She also lacks
eyelashes and whatnot. But this is layer 2. There are a few more layers to go.
When my hands steady themselves.

. Now onto the great garden experiment.

We live at about 1200 feet in a rain foresty part of the Mount Hood Wilderness. We are only a few steps away from the Sandy river, which is a lovely background rush that we enjoy.  There are lots of trees. It's dark.  However a few years ago, our neighbour hacked down the trees in his back lot, and made a garden, opening up the area in our back yard.  Then our septic died and we had to have it redone, leaving our back yard a moonscape. It's been kind of messy back there for a while.

Well, I've always wanted a garden. The soil here is mostly volcanic sand from the last lahar from Mt. Hood's eruption 200 or so years ago. The soil has difficulty holding organics. Planting things just for an ornamental garden is a challenge. My dream of a lush English garden will not come to be here. Ony natives really thrive. And some really scraggly grasses. We get trillium, and oregon grape and ferns, and in summer, foxglove pops up everywhere. The neighbour brought in tons of manure and compost and tilled up his garden into a lovely fertile patch. But he still has issues with the shorter growing season because of the elevation and location.

I read an article on straw-bale gardening, and for a few years now, I've talked about it.  My hubby decided it was time I got my garden (he still says no to chickens though). So we went out and bought six bales to start with. We also put some tires my sister left here to use for garlic and potatoes.

Here's the garden as it stands: 

I will be adding herbs in pots as the growing season progresses. I have rosemary
as of now. I'm hoping this one will live. Hubby got me some hazelnut/filbert shell
much to make the ground around it nice and dry and mud free. I love it.
We need to clean up the moonscape still, throw away the old grill and trim
the wild grass. But the garden is a start. 

I've dedicated one tire bed to garlic. I loves my garlic.  The other tire bed is only
half constructed, and I will be breaking it down to start the potatoes.

I wil add a tire and soil every few weeks to keep the plant growing upwards, adding
depth to the space where the potatoes grow. In late summer, I shoudl be able to
remove the tires and harvest the potatoes all the way down to the ground.

The seeds I planted are quicky coming up.
I think I overdid it in the radish department. 

So excited to see these little guys grow.

My green onions are coming up too! So cute.

Peas are coming up. The strings are at the ready for them to climb on.

Pretty little baby radish. :D

This year is the great experiment. If this works, we'll add to the bales next year, and add more crops. I've already planted the carrots, cauliflower, cabbage, onions of a few varieties, garlic, leek, asparagus (that won't likely yield until next year). There are other seeds waiting their turn. I'm hoping this won't be destroyed by opportunistic raccons or deer. So far, they seem to be doing well. :)

The Bitter Pig-faced Lolita (was *that* offensive?)

I’ve had it with Tone Bullies. Well, one Tone Bully in particular—who I thought had been blocked but whose inexplicable return came with the inevitable negative encounter.  You see, Facebook is rife with these people. The embittered, mean-spirited, hyper sensitive narcissists, who view every post and every comment as something invariably about them; as something about their issues. This one in is a particularly volatile example. I know her through the ORS. She made a brief appearance in the group. It wasn’t brief enough. Armed with an arsenal of bad seamstressing, personal issues and dietary and medical problems, every event she attended became something about her stomach, her health or her personal offense. She left one of our retreats early because she felt ‘unwelcome’. Stop the world! Nobody likes me! (Probably because you’re a whining asshole—FYI)

My first encounter with her is also documented in this blog somewhere. Unknown to me, a friend of mine posted a humourous meme or movie or something that laughingly mocked vegans. This person, (who I will dub henceforth as ‘Balding Pink Haired PigFace McEverythingsAboutMe’ or BPHPFMcEAM), being dietarily ‘sensitive’ (but also being as overweight as me if not more—obviously not *so* sensitive that she can’t eat like a Roman in a vomitorium), posted a bully missive that made my friend feel compelled to remove the post. She made a comment about having to do so, and that raised my hackles.

I.  Hate. Bullies.  HATE THEM. So I replied to the comment telling my friend that she should have not removed her post, that it was her wall, and that it isn’t up to someone else to tell her what should and should not be there. If that person is offended, that’s their fucking problem.

Now let me interject something here… A few weeks ago, someone posted a meme that was basically a statement about white men being more respectable than black men, simply by the way they dress; the meme showed black guys with droopy pants and flat-billed caps, next to a photo of a couple of white bros in suits and ties. Now that meme was stupid and flat out racist. There was no ambiguity, no lack of clarity; it was racist. And I told that person that it was. I also told them that there was no shortage of white guys running around with droopy pants and douchey flat-billed caps.  However there’s a stark difference between a full-on racial commentary and a meme making fun of vegans.  Vegans are not a culture of people being marginalized by society. They’re vegans.

So there’s a fine line here. The issue here is that this post by my dear friend was not about BPHPFMcEAM. But to her it was, you see, because SHE had dietary issues, and that would be offensive to people with dietary issues and blahdefuckingblah. I got into a fray with her, in which she did what apparently must be habit for her, she made some comment and then blocked me so that I could neither see it or respond to it further. No big deal, good riddance, yes, it’s cowardly to shout something before slamming the door, but I am used to the ‘attack then retreat’ tactic, my narcissistic mom did it all the time.

Life was quieter without evidence of BPHPFMcEAM’s existence for quite some time. But I noticed her name and the image of her pig-face popping up again on another friend’s profile under comments. I ignored her. But invariably, because she doesn’t like me, she found a reason to start her Tone Bullying again. This time, she hijacked this other friend’s post about the hyper-masculinizationß(not sure if actual word) of mens’ products.  It was a fake ad for ‘manpons’. It was funny. Funny as shit. Here it is:

Yes. It’s funny, and it’s totally true, the ads would TOTALLY be like that.  Anyhow, I made the comment beneath that, seeing as most men are total babies when it comes to pain in comparison to women, if they had a period, they’d more likely spend it curled up into the fetal position whining for a week.  And sound the horns, the TONE POLICE came a-ridin’ in on a Special My Little Pony Lolita Unicorn.

You see, apparently because she has a trans partner or friend, this was suddenly about the Trans community and my comment was horrendously offensive to them. I was dismissing trans men who DO suffer from periods, you see.  I was erasing their pain by making fun of guys being weenies about being in pain or sick.

I asked her to not turn the content of the thread into something else.  But she continued on, dropping a litany of inane and boring buzzwords and yammering on about how this was INDEED about what she wanted it to be. When I responded the last time, saying that her response had nothing to do with anything other than the male gender born with male bits, and that trans men could not be included simply by the fact that they experienced the heartbreak of menstruation. And in true form, she posted a response I could not see because she immediately blocked me.    

The above video, and the commentary about men being weenies about pain became something about this unfortunate woman. I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like to look at everything with her eyes. Seeing offense where there is none; digging for maliciousness where there never was any. But the part that chaps my ass the most is the active desire to hijack someone’s feed and turn it into something about themselves. Every shred of opportunity, people like this latch onto it and whine and flail until someone notices them.  Everyone deserves consideration and kindness, but going about like some embittered, angry fool, trying to force everyone’s narrative into something that doesn’t offend your overly sensitive viewpoint, well that’s just plain bullying.

There are lots of other things that prove that this person is just generally an angry, nasty person in general, and who projects a great deal of her shortcomings on people. She didn’t last long in the group because of it. She blamed all of us for it, naturally, rather than her own social deficiencies. I am kind to everyone. Always. But when they try to make me out to be something I’m not, that’s when my kindness goes away. That’s when I stop giving a shit about their overly sensitive nature. And when they start hijacking threads, and bullying people into removing posts because they want the attention drawn to themselves, then that’s when I just call them out for what they are.

And since I have been blocked in a cowardly manner from saying so…. I will call this person out for what she is. She is a loser. An attention whore. A mean spirited, tone bully. A sour, pig faced, cow with shoddy costumes that no amount of pink Lolita wigs and bows will cure. And no amount of spouting PCness will change that. You don’t get social-credit points for fighting the acceptance fight where there is no battle. You don’t get to be sanctimonious and self-righteous because you have dietary issues; contrived or real, or because you are married to a trans partner. These things don’t make you a better, more accepting person. The fact that you can’t view a conversation of any kind unless you see it through your defensive lens makes you a non-accepting person. The fact that you can’t let people have a good laugh, or an opinion that is benign and NOT ABOUT YOU IN ANY WAY, without making it so, means you’re a bully. A nasty, ugly bully.  And you think that by defending the cause du jour (where no defense is required) will absolve you of that, well that’s deluded and pathetic.

Reflect on yourself, you sad human being. Don’t let a cause define you and make you bitter. I will not calculate my words, restrict my sense of humour, edit my postings, to keep from offending you. I know I’m a good person. I KNOW I am. I am not without flaws, which I often own, and some I deny… but I am not overtly mean, racist, intolerant, bigoted or cruel. I’m snarky, yes. I own that. I’m blunt, and forthright. And I will call people out on their shit. But I don’t like to be called out for shit when there is none. I won’t tolerate that.

You are not the decider of my character based on your own twisted standards—turning benign words into bad ones because it suits you. You can see me any way you want to see me, but don’t you dare tell me how I should speak, try to censor or control my speech or correct me. Unless I am overtly condemning trans people, or saying that all vegans should be put into death camps, you have nothing to say. If you don’t like me, keep your stupid words to yourself. But don’t paint me into the person you want me to be because you’re a nasty, insecure, obnoxious, self-righteous, sanctimonious bitch. And if you want me to be offensive to you, here it is, you pig faced ugly cow. Now you can go cry what a terrible person I am. Asshole.

God I can't stand that idiot. She didn't even deserve the politness she got when she was around.

End of ranting session. TYVM