Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 36)

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.

[End Introduction]

Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 36!

Changes Of Weather, A Storm Approaches, More Fencing Tasks Accomplished & A Secret Agenda

It is a little after three in the morning here and it sure is quiet outside which is partly because of the time of day but is also due to there being a large storm system approaching. It is like every critter (except humans) can sense when bad weather is coming and that really makes me wonder just how out of sync humans have become with the world around us that something as fundamental as the approach of bad weather does not even register in our mind unless we aim our man-made satellites, radars and various sensors at it and then interpret that data or better yet have others interpret said data for us to tell us what the heck is going on. Perhaps all of that is something worth doing some in-depth thinking about because a species that cannot recognize changes in its environment probably has some larger issues going on and it makes me wonder what occupies our attention so much that we miss all the clues (data) that is right in front of (or around) us which would indicate that things in our environment are changing.

I guess that for many folks the path of domestication has 'walled' them off from even noticing that there is an environment around them and of course in some places the environment itself has been fully supplanted via artificial means such as climate controlled spaces. I guess there is also all the man-made racket (sounds and even visual stimuli) that obstructs the clues of the shifting environment in more urban and densely populated areas but when it comes down to it I think that even in those kinds of places that it has more to do with where (and on what) we put our attention than mere distractions of sight and sound can account for. As far as all that jazz goes I guess that the old saying about 'not having enough sense to know which way the wind is blowing' can be broadly applied.

Today it is looking like I will not be getting any work done outdoors and in this instance I am absolutely okay with that because a break from doing physically demanding stuff will give me a much needed respite and mayhaps give my aching body (especially my hands) an overdue opportunity to heal a bit. Working with the fencing material has been pretty hard on my hands and although that is mostly due to wrapping the wires and using the pliers I also have dozens of tiny abrasions and small cuts from instances where I failed to have my gloves on or could not have them on because I needed more dexterity to do a task than what I could achieve with them on. I really do my best to not just avoid things that can injure me but to also take every precautionary step that I can along the way and just make those steps a part of my routine. Which basically amounts to keeping my safety glasses at the ready atop my head and either carrying a pair of gloves on me or having various pairs staged in the places where I either have hand/garden tools or will be working on stuff.

It is kind of funny but I have gloves for digging in the dirt, gloves for working with the fencing, gloves to handle felled brush with and even gloves to handle sappy pine wood with all staged within a ten meter radius of each other and on top of that I try to have a 'clean' all purpose pair of gloves that just live in one of my pockets or travel with me wherever I go! It took me a long time in life to figure it out but buying gloves in bulk is absolutely the way to go if I am going to be prepared in an affordable way because buying individual pairs of gloves is always expensive. There are of course inexpensive single pairs of work gloves but whoa can I burn through those ones rather quickly and I cannot even always count on them to properly protect my hands.

Anyway, I hiked over to the new shelter site a good bit earlier than I have been able to of late and a big part of that was that it got quite warm (and even sunny) very early in the morning and actually stayed that way for much of the day. As a side note it got so warm by a little after noon that I had to shed my layers of clothes and worked shirtless. Just feeling the sun on me felt frigging awesome and I think that I even got enough to mildly sunburn me which is not easy to do in the winter. The day was made even nicer by me lugging my netbook along with me and then immediately downloading the manual for that stereo amp that I mentioned yesterday. Honestly without the manual I would have been totally at a loss with grasping most of the amps functionality but after maybe fifteen minutes of reading and pushing buttons I got it figured out at least to the point where it would meet my needs. At some point I will have to sit down with it (preferably in the shade where I can easily read the display) and fine tune a bunch of its settings before I play it super loud on new years. For now it sounds good enough to meet my needs of working around the shelter site and it sure makes a big difference in my productivity when I can just zone out to it and do whatever task is before me as the music caresses my mind.

The main thing that I worked on at the new shelter site was to finish attaching the fencing on the northern fence line to the gate post that it terminates at which was not all that hard but I buggered the process up somewhat because during it I changed my mind about which side of the gate that I was going to hinge the gate to. Basically there is a section partway up the post that the fencing does not wrap fully around the post and the rest of the post is fully wrapped in fencing. I think that when I build the gate itself I am just going to cover the entirety of the mesh fencing (that is facing the opening between the gate posts) with a piece of lumber which would help anyway because otherwise the gate would have to close (and smoothly abut) to a round post. It is worth mentioning that particular gate post was a little lose after I got done with the fencing attachment so I drove a really big fat lighter stake into the ground beside it and that firmed it up splendidly. Aside from all of that the final wrap up of that section of northern fence line came out rather well but I am thinking that I am going to add a second strainer to the gate post so that the two strainers will make a big 'X' under the H-brace that is already there.

Once all that section of fencing was done I moved onto the opposite gate post further downhill which comprises the corner where the northern and eastern fence lines meet. On that side of the gate there is only an H-brace and while I was installing the eastern fencing to the corner post I leaned on the strainer for the northern H-brace and it tugged nearly free of its crimped coupler. It was probably a poorly crimped coupler because it was one of the first ones that I did and I was still figuring out not just the tools that I was using but also the materials but hey any excuse will do. So I wound up disconnecting the strainer on that side completely from the bottom of the corner post and adding a new coupler. I put it a little further down than the old one (that I gave up on trying to remove altogether) and shoved the end of the wire into it so it at least looks like it was possibly intentional.

With the strainer issue addressed I moved on to getting the piece of fencing for that section prepared by stripping the horizontal wires, cutting it to size and attaching the stretcher boards so that I could attach it to the corner post and stretch it taut with the come-along. All of which went rather smoothly now that I think about it but given the steep change of the terrain's incline over that nearly three meter span (which is the size of the H-brace) it was pretty tricky to get the very bottom of the fencing to fit firmly in the bottom of the trench. I wound up having to dig a hole under the stretcher boards and a small trench to drop the boards and the fencing wire into so that it would go down all the way below the H-brace. Hopefully I can repair the damage that the digging did to the middle of the gate's walkway because it is the gate (and walkway) that I will be using a lot to access the compost mound. I may wind up having to re-shape a good bit of that walkway anyway so I did not fret over it too much while I was doing it (the digging) but I am really not looking forward to the problems just that one little disturbance will already cause unless I can re-insert the plugs of loamy soil and it all holds together because otherwise I will have a bunch of slippery red clay to deal with in the walkway.

Anyway, I got in another nice long productive day working on the fence and I was super happy for the opportunity to put in the time especially with the nice weather and actual sunshine to boot. The next several days are going to be quite chilly with temperatures well below freezing each night so I may wind up just hunkering down and taking a few days off in a row which might not be all that bad of an idea to do anyway regardless of the adverse weather conditions. Unfortunately I have a secret agenda which has been in motion the last few weeks now and that is to get the dog yard finished by new years so that I can have a camp there, make a fire and chill with the dogs and listen to music to both ring in a new year and ring out an old year. It was a lofty goal when I first set it a while back but now that I am in the final stretch of things I think that it is actually doable. My fuzzy idea here is that once all the sections of fencing are in place all that I have left is the gates and there is plenty of extra mesh fencing that I can temporarily fence over two of the gates and fabricate a simple gate for the third gate which would of course also be the main entrance that I will use to haul in materials to build the cabin with so I need it to be accessible whereas the other two do not serve an immediate purpose.

Well, I am leaning towards wrapping this up because I have already given it three hours of my day and although daylight is not yet burning it will be soon. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

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There are now a dozen eggs in the hidden nest!

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The 'tripod' that I constructed to attach the come-along to to pull the remaining section of northern fencing taut.

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The last section of the northern fencing installed!

Thanks for reading!

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.

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That Is All For Now!

Cheers! & Hive On!



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