The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 158-164)

Day 158. (TFC Doing A Bunch Of Chores, Editing My Book For All Too Many Hours, Troubleshooting A Satellite Internet Connection & Trying To Break The Phone Typing Habit That I Have Been Doing For A Little Over Three Years)

All in all the weather was rather nice today other than some high winds that occurred early on in the day. The only calamity caused by the winds was that they blew my empty dog food bag off the roof of my shelter and broke the ceramic soup cup inside of it that I have been using as a scoop for the food the last few years. I should have considered that happening before putting it up there after emptying it the other day but alas I did not. I almost got cracked in the head by it as it flew off the roof and landed in front of me on the entrance ramp so perhaps I will take that as a hint not to do that sort of thing again.

I just ran out of dog food the other day and have been waiting to go to the store that I have been getting the food from because they are closed on Sundays. Luckily there are other dogs than mine here and I have been able to feed my dogs with some of their food until I can get out to the store. I probably would have made it a few extra days on the food I had for them if I had not doubled up their portions a few times as a reward for being so good during all the hoopla of New Years when folks were shooting their guns and setting off fireworks.

I spent a good bit of my day troubleshooting the satellite internet here and after a lot of reading online and digging through the modems configuration I discovered that there are 'state' codes displayed on the modem's web administration panel that (once deciphered) told me what the heck the problem was. Apparently the place where the base stations for the internet provider are located are under heavy snow and several of them had lost connectivity and were down. I also found that there is an 'acceleration' feature in the modem (which I think is just a caching service) that I could disable and thus not have to rely on utilizing some of the servers (for caching) at the base stations.

That last bit (about caching) is entirely conjecture but I read in a forum where one of the technicians from the same ISP suggested to someone that was having the exact same problem to do it (disable acceleration) to help mitigate their frequent loss of connectivity and I figured it was worth a shot. It actually worked so that was nice because it has been very problematic the last few days trying to get anything accomplished online because I kept losing connectivity a lot. By 'a lot' I mean like every seven to ten minutes and then I would have to wait another seven to ten minutes for it to correct itself so you could imagine my frustration!

Throughout the day I also spent several more hours working on editing my book and I am slowly making process and am now somewhere in the seven hundred day range of the 'daily log entries' and whoa it is some slow going because around that time is when the entries start getting longer and the things I am expressing are a bit more complex which sometimes results in me having to re-read things a few times to make sure that it is not only comprehensible and not overly confusing but also that I actually caught all the typos. Overall I am making progress and I guess that is all that really matters.

Anyway, late in the day I did a bunch of random chores around my little shelter area like shoveling dog shit, spreading straw on the mucky areas and picking up sticks from along the main trail. Although I often like to stay caught up on doing those kinds of things, the previous week I neglected doing much of them because I have been absolutely obsessed with spending as much time as possible each day working on my book. All total I put in somewhere near one hundred hours on editing the book last week so it is no surprise that my other duties suffered.

On a different note. I am trying to break myself of doing all my writing (for these daily posts) on a phone because after three years of it I am absolutely over doing it that way and of late I often find myself internally cringing at the very idea of picking up the phone and tediously pecking out one word after another. So now I am trying to retrain myself to type these entries out on an actual computer, inside and actual text editor and with an actual keyboard. On a scale of one to ten my typing skills are somewhere around a negative four but perhaps if I just keep doing it every day I will get better at it.

Well, that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

That little dot near the center of this picture is the moon!

Day 159. (TFC Going On A Supply Run, Adding Low-Grade Bio-Char To My Compost & Fixing A Dysfunctional Sewing Machine)

The weather turned rather fair today and there was even a good bit of blue skies which is always nice to see especially during the often overcast winter. It was in fact so nice that I was able to spend much of my time today outdoors with neither a jacket on or even a warm hat and overall the beautiful weather had me longing for the approaching springtime to hurry up and arrive. Do not get me wrong there because I am definitely enjoying finally getting some much needed downtime and have quite enjoyed the winter thus far staying all warm and cozy in my little shelter.

Early in the day one of my fellow homesteaders took me out to do my monthly supply run and I was able to get my supply of dog food as well as another twenty pound tank of propane filled. Last month when I went on my supply run I got the same size propane tank filled and began using it the same day and I am very happy to say that I made it through an entire month and that tank is still not empty which is a vast improvement opposed to how much propane that I was having to purchase the last few winters. Basically I went from using eighty to one hundred and twenty pounds of propane per month down to less than twenty pounds a month and at roughly thirteen dollars a twenty pound tank that is quite the savings!

During the afternoon I spent some time collecting the low-grade biochar that I made during the first few months that I was here and had stored inside my greenhouse where it stayed mostly dry. I say that I 'stored' it in the greenhouse but what actually happened was that I built the greenhouse over the biochar oven that I had built and just removed the metal parts of the oven and left the rocks and the biochar itself where it was (at the oven site) and then built the greenhouse over it all.

I decided to spend some time outside enjoying the nice weather and used all the biochar that I collected as an additive in my ever-growing compost pile. It being the dog poop compost I do not till it or anything like that and tend to just apply what I think of as a 'layering technique' to it. I start the layering with some rotting sticks/logs on the bottom with dog poop (and more dog poop with each subsequent layer), leaves, dirt, green vegetation, more leaves, more dirt, charcoal and ashes from a fire pit and when I get to this point the layering repeats. Once the compost pile becomes a roughly two to three feet high by six to eight feet wide mound I add an inch or so of biochar, repeat the above layering and then 'cap' (completely cover) the entire pile with a thick layer of ash followed by an even thicker layer of clay to 'encase' the entire mound and keep flies from being able to enter/grow in it.

This type of compost mound has worked really well for me over a number of years (and different locations) and once I get it to the point where it is all encased in clay I just keep adding a lot of dirt to the top layer (as well as more dog poop) and start transplanting (or outright planting) various plants into the mound so that their roots will help hold it all together and stop the rain from washing away any of it or especially the 'encasement' layer. Last year I even planted a bunch of potatoes in a similar kind of compost mound just to provide more food for the earth worms that were thriving inside of it.

On a different note. Late in the day I worked with one of my fellow homesteaders to first do some troubleshooting, then some repair work and routine maintenance (cleaning and oiling) their sewing machine that had been having some difficulty winding the bobbin. The sewing machine being an economy model made it an interesting prospect and even after several exhaustive internet searches we could not find a good repair manual or even any how-to articles or videos that covered that specific model of sewing machine. We wound up having to figure it out on our own and to fully disassemble it mainly just so we could inspect the little 'tire' that spins the bobbin spindle and to oil the spindle itself. It was quite the prospect but in the end we figured it out, applied the fixes we could, reassembled it all and viola it worked and now functions again.

Anyway, I am really looking forward to the coming springtime and have even been considering stopping my winter downtime a bit early just so that I can get back to being physically active again but I know that if I do that I will never get finished with editing the draft for my book. I really need to maximize the coming weeks before spring arrives to finish hammering that whole book project closer to completion so I doubt that I will end my downtime early but hey it is nice to daydream about working outside and improving my scenario.

Well that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

I still need to add more biochar to it but my compost mound is looking good!

Day 160. (TFC Waking To A Rainy Day, Enjoying The Warm Weather, Doing A Bunch More Book Editing & Taking A Long Nap)

I knew that the weather was going to be turning rainy over the next few days but I was still mildly surprised by it raining this morning when I woke up especially since it was such a nice day yesterday. I am glad that I got some stuff done while the weather was fair because it is looking like this rainy weather is going to stick around for the remainder of the week.

It is also going to be getting a good bit chillier at night over the coming days and I am actually looking forward to it because I absolutely love being all toasty warm inside my shelter when it is freezing cold outside. Even going outside into the cold is not all that bad because I always know that getting warm again will only take a few moments of being inside the shelter with the heater on. There is just something fantastic about being capable of getting super warm really fast and also being able to warm the entire shelter in less than five minutes.

I once again put in a lot of time today editing and proofreading my book and am happy to report that I am gradually getting closer to finishing the Daily Post section of it and nearing the end of the text file where I have all the 'future posts' (fictional) entries. Reliving the days of my stay at That Old Farm has been quite grueling to say the least so I am really excited to delve into the fictional story and perhaps even being inspired to expand upon it.

It is not just that the 'editing process' is tedious and slow going, it is also something that frankly I am not all that good at doing. My skills are actually getting a bit better as far as editing goes so perhaps by the second or third proofreading and editing of the book's manuscript I will have grown much better at it and not dread it quite so much.

Working with such a large manuscript is pretty damn interesting in and of itself because I routinely come across the same erroneous wording, vague descriptors and rambling sentence structures and thus it is showing me some of the fallacies of my own writing techniques.

It is also interesting because I am reading/watching my own evolution as a writer and while I have been writing for several decades now I have only been 'taking it seriously' and sharing it publicly for the previous three years.

Do not get me wrong because I actually spend very little time critiquing the words/sentiment of the writing even though I am critiquing the hell out of the actual 'form and style' of it all but I guess that is what the important part of 'editing' is and I am just happy that I am making good progress thus far and not over-thinking the entire process.

All that jazz aside. After working on the book for the majority of last night (until nearly three in the morning) and getting up at nine this morning and immediately diving back into working on it... I was an absolute zombie by late in the afternoon and drifted off into a deep sleep and took one heck of a long nap.

During the nap I dreamed about this springhead here that recently emerged near the creek in a place where myself and some other folks had excavated near that big spring here that we did some preliminary work on last year.

A few days ago me and one of my fellow homesteaders had hiked over to that spring so that they could show me where they had spotted what they thought might be a new springhead. I have to say that upon seeing it I was pretty damn elated because it was not only a very strong flowing springhead but it had also emerged in one of the spots where I thought that one had the potential for emerging. The entire prospect of spring development is always a gamble and from just how strong that spring is flowing I must say that this time the gamble appears to have paid off in full!

Anyway, in the dream that I was having myself and some of the other folks here were doing some more excavation (by hand of course) at that particular spring site and after moving this one large rock (that actually does exist in the waking world) we revealed an old pipe jutting horizontally from the side of the hill and it had an amazingly ice cold column of water flowing from it. All in all it was a rather interesting dream and I think that I am going to make moving that big rock a priority in the next phase of developing that spring and see what we find.

Well, that is about it for now and I better get this all edited. As a side effect of doing all the editing on my book... editing these entries has become much easier. Also I am on my fourth day of typing these entries out on an actual keyboard and computer monitor and whoa I am starting to like it much more than all that damn phone typing!

I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

Just before dark today after I awoke from my nap.

Day 161 162. (TFC Sleeping Odd Hours, Doing More Book Editing & Getting Epic Amounts Of Rain)

I was trying to avoid making anymore of these posts that combine the days but yesterday during the time that I should have been writing a daily post I found myself turning that excerpt (introduction) for my book into an audio version as well as into thirteen different types of ebook (text) formats and then putting it all together in an article for Steemit. All in all it took me much longer to complete than I initially thought that it would and I found myself finally wrapping it up at nearly two in the morning!

As far as introductions go I think it works rather well because the series of daily posts included in it really portrays the 'spirit' of the book but I will most likely need to add some sort of preface to it that makes for a better explanation for the scenario that I found myself in and how I had come to be there. In other words at some point I really need to sit down and write a proper introduction instead of just using an excerpt from the main body of the book.

Anyway, the last two days I have been sleeping rather erratically and spending nearly every waking moment either editing my book or taking a break from editing. Tackling such a large manuscript has been interesting to say the least but at this point I am really looking forward to completing version two of the draft so that I can start again at the beginning to do a third pass of editing and proofreading. The more that I do it though the more that I realize that at some point I should try to enlist an actual editor (someone other than me) to edit and proofread the final draft or more than likely final drafts!

I have to say that this whole 'book editing' thing has really opened my eyes to just how much really goes into creating a book and although I sort of shudder to think about it I know that there is still the publishing aspect that I have yet to even begin to tackle. There are a lot of pros and cons to both self-publishing and publishing through an actual publisher and I am still weighing those options carefully as I continue to move forward because either way I want to just 'do it right' and not wind up with a book that fails to sell because of bad formatting, marketing or availability. To say that the entire process is merely daunting is a vast understatement but hell I am committed one way or another to seeing it through to the end at this point.

All that jazz aside. The rain moved in at some point in the wee hours of the morning yesterday and has not really let up since it began. It is by far the most amount of rain that I have seen occur here to date and given that the ground was already saturated the water it does not have anywhere to really go other than to run across the surface and has left much of the terrain here slippery and mucky.

Overall the dog yard is holding up surprisingly well as far as the muck goes and I am thankful that I used some of my dwindling supply of straw to spread around the more heavily trafficked areas near the entrance to my little shelter because if I had not it would be in far worse shape than it is at this point.

Even with all the straw on the ground I did manage to lose my footing yesterday and there was absolutely nothing graceful about it because I was barely awake and my feet shot out from under me and the next thing that I knew I was laying on my side in the mud and in nearly half inch of water flowing across the top of the mud. I missed hitting my head on either the metal entrance ramp and/or the big boulder near the ramp by less than a foot so I guess that it could have been much worse than it was.

After that occurred I decided that perhaps I should stop wearing my slick bottomed house slippers outside when the ground is wet and that no matter the inconvenience I should wear my boots with good treads instead and minimize my chances of slipping. So far doing that has worked well and I have been able to navigate the mucky terrain with minimal anxiety about falling.

The rain really has been quite the deluge and the big creek bordering the property is now at the highest point that I have ever seen it and makes for quite the 'background noise' of rushing water mixed with the sounds of small and large rocks tumbling downstream. I am dreading going and inspecting what all the water/rocks might have done to the water lines I have setup along the creek (from the various springs) but I am hoping that none of them have gotten washed downstream. I knew there was a risk of it (the lines getting washed away) but I did not see a better option for where to route them when I was setting everything up so I guess it was a gamble one way or another and I am thinking that tomorrow I will go and see just how that gamble panned out.

Another thing that I need to do tomorrow is walk around the entire property and take a look at where all the surface water is flowing and/or pooling and see what I can do to help mitigate it by creating water diversions and/or drainage. Although I have done some water management here I have not done enough of it because while walking the main trail today there were several large puddles that I had to avoid while trekking from the shelter to the homestead proper. The area around the shelter itself that I did do a lot of water management on with berming the uphill side and creating a few swales is doing remarkably well so that is pretty good to see especially given the amount of rain that has occurred.

On a different note. So far my stay here at Fantastica has been pretty damn pleasant and it has assuredly been a good experience to 'hit the ground running' (as I did upon my arrival) develop a site, build a warm shelter and get my dog yard all setup long before the cold weather arrived. I of course did much more than those few things but they are what has accommodated both me and the dogs to have such a pleasant winter full of some much needed downtime to not just relax but to also reflect and sort through my internal landscape in relative peace without any real struggle or strife involved which is something I never quite achieved at the last place I was living.

Reading and editing all of those daily posts from my last adventure has been rather 'sobering' for me because although I am only somewhere near 'Day 820' (with
the editing and proofreading) the entire manuscript is fraught with struggle, strife and hardship and thus has been highly illuminating in regards to how where I am now is quite the polar opposite of all that for which I am am absolutely grateful!

I better wrap this up so that I can get back to editing that book and see just how many hours I can get in before I fall asleep again which is pretty much what I have been doing around the clock lately because I sleep a few hours, wake up and do more editing, then sleep a few hours and do it all over again. At this point every time that I close my eyes I see a big 'blob of text' in my mind and my entire life seems to be revolving around getting the book's draft completed so that I can begin on the next phase of things!

Well, that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

Here is that Steemit article that I wrote: https://steempeak.com/hive-174578/@jacobpeacock/ebook-and-audio-versions-now-available-for-the-introduction-to-my-book-titled-957-days

Not the greatest picture but I took it just before dark today.

Day 163. (TFC A Snowy Chilly Day, Inspecting The Spring Water Lines & Doing More Book Editing)

The snow came down rather steadily today but overall it did not accumulate very much so that is kind of nice because at least things will not become more of a mucky mess outside than it already is from the torrential amounts of rain we got the previous two days. If the snow had actually accumulated it would assuredly be frozen into solid ice by now because it never got much above freezing outside today and near dark the temperature plunged rapidly. Although the wind was a bit gusty it never blew steadily enough to really be much of a factor with keeping the shelter warm as I opened and closed the door throughout the day. The wind did howl a few times but it was always rather short lived and I did not hear any trees (or branches) falling which is a bit surprising with all the rain and snow we have had.

Late in the afternoon I braved the cold and shoveled all the dog poop from the dog yard onto the compost heap and during that time I got really damn cold. With the constant rain yesterday I did not get the opportunity to clean up the dog yard and I have to say that the rain made quite the mess out of the poop and made it rather difficult to see because it had been flattened out (washed down by the rain) and was a bit camouflaged by dirt getting washed onto it. Anyway, it took me a good bit longer than usual to get it all cleaned up and by the time I was finished my hands felt like icicles inside my gloves.

Once I got all that finished I went for a hike down to the creek to inspect the water lines coming from the springs there and I was a bit surprised to find that none of them had gotten washed away by the raging torrent of water, rocks and logs moving down the creek. While I was near the creek I even took a few pictures because like I said yesterday the water level of the creek is the highest I have seen it get since my arrival here.

Since I was already over in that area near the creek I went ahead and drained the spring water holding tank because the water to it quit flowing sometime since the last hard freeze and I did not want it to freeze over the next few days and potentially break the plastic tank. In the last hundred feet of the irrigation tubing leading from the spring to the holding tank there is a clog (from what I think is just a bunch of silt stuck in the line) where it comes uphill from the creek to the flat spot among the boulders where I have the holding tank.

I thought about climbing down the slope and dropping the end of the clogged water line into the creek but decided it was too wet, slippery and cold to be monkeying around on a bunch of algae covered rocks near the flooding creek. That particular clog just formed recently so all total that spring water system operated rather well for the better part of six months which is not too shabby considering that it is just a temporary system connected to a spring that is still under development. I was actually surprised that the water ran unimpeded for that many months given the amount of silt at the springhead and that the intake lacks any sort of screen or filter.

All that stuff aside. I spent a good portion of the day doing more editing on my book and at this point I am at the part in it where I have to find a new place to live and pack everything down and whoa is it illuminating to read my own process of how I coped with all of that upheaval to my life. It is also really slow going because the length of the posts start getting really damn long and the things I am expressing get a bit (for lack of a better word) 'expansive.'

So far it is probably my favorite part of the daily entries to actually edit (and read) but I am unsure if that is just because I am nearing the end of the daily posts or because I really like how I spell things out during that time. The entire manuscript is not all that bad from a reader's perspective but I should really hold off on an opinion until I can read it all without having to do any editing in the process because all the stopping and starting (because I have to fix something) really disrupts the 'reader' experience.

Well, I should probably just wrap this up, get all the editing done and call it a day well spent and even a day that was quite productive. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

As you can see the creek is really high currently!

Day 164. (TFC Getting A Lot More Snow, Staying Warm And Cozy In My Shelter, Helping A Developer With A Blockchain Game & Doing More Book Editing)

The weather took a further plunge today and it snowed pretty good for much of the day and well into the afternoon. The snow even accumulated a good bit this time so I was able to get a few pictures of it before it began melting a bunch, which it did late in the day before the temperature started dropping again as it got closer to dark outside.

Everything outside is pretty 'slushy' at this point but with the low temperatures tonight most of it will probably turn to ice and then everything will be what I like to call 'crunchy' which is not all that bad because at least when everything is frozen solid I tend to slip and slide a heck of a lot less than when it is either snow, muck or a combination of both.

I spent several hours early in the day just working on editing my book and I am starting to get into a pretty good habit of starting the editing as soon as I wake up and then stopping when the sheer drudgery of it starts to get on my nerves which happens after about three to five hours into it. Over the last few weeks I would just push myself through the 'drudgery' part and keep hacking away at it for long hours but with the section of it I am on now (the having to find a new place part) it does a bit of a number on my psyche and I just have to take a break from it not so much because it stresses me out but because it sort of evokes a really mixed bag of emotions in me and I find myself doing too much 'skim' reading and not enough 'critical' reading. I am slowly learning that the latter (critical reading) is really vital for doing the editing well.

Once I was done with all the book stuff I helped a Steem blockchain game developer by doing a little proofreading for them and giving them some of my opinions about how to display some stuff on their gaming website. They have been working on a new game called 'The Blind Rune' and are planning on integrating the new game onto their website that already has their other game called 'Goblin Prince' on it. I have been playing Goblin Prince for the last several weeks even though I generally steer clear of luck based games. For whatever reason I have had a lot of fun playing it and along the way I started giving a lot of feedback to the developer and even done a few 'jobs' for them that they rewarded me for so that is pretty neat in and of itself. As a side note: If anyone is interested in those kinds of games I recommend checking out @taverngames.

Mostly today I just stayed hunkered down inside my shelter and kept the place toasty warm which was quite the contrast to how it was outside to say the least. The internet got pretty dodgy today but after looking at the web-based admin panel for the satellite modem I saw that the gain (DB) was really low (around thirty instead of it's usual one hundred and twenty) and after hiking down to the homestead proper and sweeping the snow off the dish the connection improved dramatically which made doing stuff online much easier!

Anyway, I do not really have much else to report so I am going to wrap this up and get it all edited. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

We got a lot more snow here than we did yesterday!

Thanks for reading!

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That Is All For Now!