Hello Everyone!

A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.

TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.

Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 33!

Peculiar Dreams, A Rainy Day, More Fencing Work & Why Cannot The Good Times Be Now

I do not know why but this morning I woke up every hour on the hour since five o'clock but could not muster the motivation to get up and start my day until almost nine. Part of it was that I was having a rather interesting dream which oddly enough was about me moving to a super remote place in the woods and all the stuff involved in doing so and getting myself setup to live there. Yeah it sounds a lot like my reality at the moment but in the dream I was also exploring all these weird routes to get to the place via land, water and through a system of ancient caves whose walls were covered in some strange language that gave directions to various locations but whose script I was absolutely unable to translate but somehow I intuitively understood.

In the end I actually made it to where I was going but I then had to backtrack to get the dogs and all my gear and make the journey again. It was one of those over-involving dreams that could have gone on forever had I not finally reached some point in it where I was like 'whoa I made it' and 'okay it is time to wake up and drag back as much of these memories as possible into my waking life' and even now while I am writing this my mind is sort of swimming in those memories not so much to see if I can glean any understanding but just to preserve them by letting them play on repeat in my mind. I could probably write all too much about those dreams but as always trying to word that stuff out would influence the memories in such a way that they would get skewed in the process and hell I have barely even had enough time this morning to sort of 'absorb' it all so I am just going to gloss over all the details and say that I actually enjoyed them and that somehow I awoke with more peace of mind than I have had in quite some time now.

As far as the day went... it rained on and off for much of the morning and early afternoon but by late in the afternoon it let up some so I kenneled all the dogs, got my gear on and headed over to the new shelter site to see what all I could get done before it started raining again. I wound up rolling out that remaining section of fencing from that roll that I have been using and was happy to find out that there was just enough of it remaining to finish the eastern fence line with. Given the state of the weather I decided against trying to actually get it installed and instead just focused on prepping the fencing by stripping those horizontal wires that will secure it to the corner post before I stretch it taut.

I also racked my brain a good bit trying to figure out how exactly I was going to stretch the fencing taut and get it connected to the post where the other section of fencing terminates which is going to be tricky because I need to pull that existing piece of fencing in one direction and the new piece in the opposite direction. As far as the existing fencing goes I think that I can just use ratchet straps connected to the 'H' brace of the corner to pull it taut with but as far as the other piece goes I will either have to use a lot of static rope to reach the other 'H' brace some twenty odd meters away... or utilize some of the tree stumps (to pinion to) that are much closer. Since the stumps are all at ground level they would will not work by themselves (because the fence would be getting pulled at the wrong angle) so I am thinking to attach some oak logs/poles to them with some of those six inch landscape screws and more or less try to form a tripod (or whatever shaped structure that I can create) to pull from. If that all sounds vague and confusing... well it is and although it is hard to word down I think that it will work just fine even though it will undoubtedly require a good bit of extra work to make it so.

Anyway, I got the horizontal wires all stripped and put the fencing in place at the corner to make sure that the wires would reach all the way around the post and still have enough remaining to wrap back onto the fencing which they did at the top of the post but since the post is tapered they did not reach all the way around the bottom of the post. So, I took the fencing back down and began the process of stripping more of the horizontal wires to fix the problem. The wire stripping aspect of the project is by far the most time consuming and the most tedious but at this point I am just resigned to it all and given up on finding a faster way to do it. I do not so much mind the tedious nature of that step but my frigging hand is so cramped from opening and closing the fencing pliers that each day that I do it the process grows a little more difficult because my hand gets more and more uncooperative. My advice to anyone doing that sort of thing (especially if they have arthritic hands) is to at the very least have a pair of spring-loaded pliers which will alleviate half of the motions involved.

The weather wound up holding off for an hour or so but eventually it started drizzling rain on me and of course it was right when I began to pull more tools out and had more or less decided to get that section of fencing attached and prep everything for pulling it taut the following day. So, I just heaved a big sigh as the sky grew darker and put all the tools back away and called it quits for the day. With all the recent rain and the cold temperatures the working conditions have not been all that awesome to start with but I just did not have it in me to work in the rain, deal with the muck and cope with the tedious nature of the work itself so I headed back the warmth of the base camp tent and was thankful that I was able to get at least some work done for the day.

On a different note. I really need to get myself moved into the new area as rapidly as possible because currently it is just this place that I have to hike back and forth to each day and although I have been making okay progress
I think that I would be making more of it if I was waking up and falling asleep there. I do not know if I can adequately describe it but as of now the site is just some 'area that I am working in' the base camp is 'some area that I am temporarily staying in' and between those two things there is not much of me feeling like I am really 'at' either one of them and in the process I am somehow missing out on settling in, relaxing or even enjoying the achievements that I have accomplished thus far. There is assuredly a bunch of fucked up psychology (and pathology) going on there but basically I am slowly getting fed up with camping and rapidly growing anxious to get on to the next phase of things here. I keep telling myself 'all in good time' and 'it is frigging winter and there is only so much that can be done in a day' but honestly I do not give a damn that it is winter and I want the 'good time' to be now!

Well, the morning is dragging on here it is actually looking a bit sunnier outside than it has been of late so I should just wrap this up and see what I can make of the day. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

More about me: I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.

Nearly four years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!

The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.