Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 450)

Hello Everyone!

A deep rest, Stove-top espresso maker foo, An awesome bath, The writing practice, Fiat is lame & Another freeze!

It is much later in the morning than when I usually begin writing because I slept in quite late which is fine and all given how soundly I slept and just how rested that it left me feeling. I am beginning to feel better than I have felt in a while and did not awaken feeling all that moody or anything so perhaps all my efforts to break my habit of over-indulging in the 'news cycle' are beginning to pay off. All the anxiety and stress that stuff stirs in me (when I over-indulge in it) is not something that I will miss if I can successfully free myself from said habit.

The weather is looking like it will be nicer today than it has been of late so I do not know how much time that I can spend here writing today because I want to get some stuff done before the temperatures start plunging again later in the day. Since it will get below freezing tonight I will need to take the water system offline and get it drained but I think that at this point I could do that in my sleep given how many times that I have done it lately.

I also want to get in at least one good hike since that seems to be one of the things that have been helping me not feel so cooped up and to generally feel better. I do sort of wish that during those hikes that I was also being productive (meaning that I was clearing trails and such) but for now I am content with just getting outdoors and ambling around the place looking at stuff. It is not like 'doing the work' bothers me or anything but hiking purely for leisure purposes just seems like the right thing to do at the moment.

On a different note, I failed to mention it yesterday but I finally got a new stove-top espresso maker! Well, technically I got two of them but one I am saving as a backup for when I inevitably wear the first one out. Back around the beginning of the most recent pandemic I had tried to replace my nine cup maker (that I had worn out) but after ordering it the supplier canceled it because they had run out of them which lead me to ordering two six cup makers instead.

I am not going to recap everything about that experience but in short going from using solely the nine cup maker (the one I wore out) to two six cup makers... was in short a pain in the butt and remained so until I wore them both out and finally (just recently) ordered those two new nine cup makers. What happens is after lots of use the aluminum expands and contracts to the point where the top and the bottom of the maker no longer marriage together well and I wind up wrapping the threads with strips of paper to help them form a seal.

Imagine fumbling around first thing in the morning with two six cup makers with bad seals and what a pain in the butt it is to either get the already applied paper seal to 'hold in place' or have to create a new one all together and get it first cut to the right size, then wrapped around the threads and then getting the two parts to screw together and remain air tight!

In short it was a really frustrating way to start the day and sometimes (like one out of six times) the paper seal would not hold once the device(s) got heated up on the burner and then would bubble the hot water out the sides and only a small amount of brewed coffee would actually make it into the top portion of the device. Which yeah is not just a waste of coffee but also of water, electricity and time. Plus after all that I would not be left with the amount of espresso that I wanted to start my day off with which just compounded my annoyance!

I have been having to use those paper seals on the espresso makers for almost a year now and having to use the two six cup makers (instead of one nine cup maker) for over two years and well I just reached a point where I was like: This is really messing up my morning routine! Which by and large is super important to me if I want to start my day off on an even keel, so to speak. It did not quite 'piss me off' each morning but it sure was a frustrating and annoying way to start the day... and I just had to do something about it!

Anyway, there is just no way to accurately convey what a relief it was to easily brew my espresso this morning and it really felt like I had 'started a new chapter in my life' which is kind of neat given that today is the day that it is. To put that in some sort of framework/perspective my first series ran for nine hundred and fifty-seven days, my second series ran (I think) for four hundred and forty days and now this latest series has reached four hundred and fifty days.

So far, I think this series assuredly 'tops' the others as far as 'quality of writing' goes but that is just because I have now been doing the daily writing thing for around one thousand eight hundred and fifty-three days (not that I am counting) and of course I have finally began to hone in on my techniques, catching my bad writing habits and generally giving more focus to 'quality' instead of just trying to get whatever I am writing 'out of my system' so stuff does not nag at me. I am neither my best (nor worst) critic but I do think there has been a good amount of improvement during this series.

Alright, it is a bit later in the day now and whoa I just had the most wonderful bathing experience in the new tub inside the greenhouse setup! The 'sauna effect' inside the little shelter is so amazing and all that I have had to do to mitigate the steam from being overwhelming is to leave one of its two windows open. Being able to spend some extended time submerged in the hot water during the colder season is a game changer and I am truly amazed that I never thought of utilizing that particular setup before.

Honestly, most of the baths that I have had in that tub over the years have not been all that enjoyable. Usually that unpleasantness is from the wind and cold and this new configuration eliminates both of those things. Something else that is really nice is that I have just enough room inside there to be able to stand in the tub and dry myself off!

I am still considering using the open space in there for something but have yet to decide on what even though I am heavily leaning towards the idea of making a small platform to stand on so that I can dry off my feet without standing in the dirt. A few pavers might be all that it would take but I am hesitant to put any stone (or concrete) in there just in case I slip and fall so that there is not something there that might harm me.

Okay, it is almost sunset and the day did not quite go according to plan because I got derailed sorting out a bunch of financial stuff so that I could get my phone bill paid. I am not going to detail all the hoops that I had to jump through but basically my debit card quit working because the bank it was tied to apparently has been sold twice in the last year and unbeknownst to me the old card got axed in the process.

Since I had already dumped all my money into the bank for the month I was basically screwed because my phone bill was already late and I was operating in the grace period they give before nixing the service. I wound up having to liquidate pretty much all my liquid crypto holdings and then dump the fiat from them onto a card that I have that does not use a bank.

It may sound simple but I spent frigging hours on it racing against the clock of the phone service being turned off. The reason that is problematic is that once service is gone... so is all my two-factor authentication abilities which is the stupidest thing ever in my opinion. I mean think about it... if say I dropped and broke my phone I would then only have the property's internet to use and I would be unable to do jack-shit financially to get a new phone or for that matter anything else.

I wish these stupid companies would get with the damn times and just switch to accepting crypto already! Just the fees alone to get everything sorted out today cost me like three days of my earnings not to mention hours of my time that I would rather have spent hiking or doing some of the stuff that I was wanting to get done. If it sounds like I am deeply annoyed by it all... it is because I am!

Anyway, not long before dark I wound up scrambling to get the water system taken offline which of course also involved pumping the water from the tub with the sump pump so that I could flip it over the coils of PEX to keep them from freezing tonight. I got slightly smarter in my approach to dealing with the pump this time and laid it on its side before plugging it in. It still kicked pretty good but at least this time I was ready for it and did not get whacked in the face by the piping like I did last time!

Well, I am going to keep this one short and sweet. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.