The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 262-272)
Hello Everyone!
A brief introduction: 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.
A little over three 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 the Fantastica Chronicles came about is that I was living at another place when I started chronicling and sharing my days but eventually I wound up moving to a new place. The new place is a homestead named 'Fantastica' so I started with 'Day 1' upon my arrival here and just kept documenting my days much like I had done for the previous nine hundred and fifty-seven days at the last place that I lived.
I have mostly done that 'documenting' at Fantastica exclusively with words (and pictures) opting not to do the videos because as I learned at the last place, sharing videos over an intermittent and slow internet connection is horribly time consuming and what I often think of as an 'ulcer inducing' experience. All that said, I opted for simplicity with the documentation and have no real regrets for doing so.
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.
TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.
The Fantastica Chronicles Day 262-272!
Day 262. (TFC Getting More Rain, Working On My Chicken Coop & Having A Rather Subdued Day)
It was raining when I woke up and having forgotten to close the lid on my outdoor propane stove I had to dry one of the burners out before being able to brew my morning espresso. It is always tricky drying out the burners once they get wet because if I turn the gas flow adjustment knob up too high the pressure of the gas 'blows' the fire out and if it is too low then the gas has trouble getting through the water filling the tiny holes in the burner. Having had this happen all too many times I have figured out that the best approach (aside from closing the stove lid and keeping the burners dry) is to just keep one hand on the gas knob and to keep making incremental adjustments to it as the burner dries itself out. Although it only takes a few minutes to get the burner dried out it is not exactly an enjoyable experience standing in the rain in the wee hours of the morning when all I want is some espresso but until I get a real kitchen built some mornings are just going to be that way and there is not much that I can do about it.
Once again I spent a large portion of my day doing stuff related to that video game and also working on the latest version of my Hive Survival Guide. As far as that last bit goes it is becoming more and more difficult to keep up with all the rapid developments on Hive that I want to feature in the guide so I have found myself weeding through and subsequently 'picking and choosing' to include the stuff that really stands out for me as something that will help new users. In the latest version (that I just published) I tried to focus more on including some 'frequently asked question' items and the links to articles that answer those questions which I think is something that was sort of necessary because it is difficult to find consolidated information on multiple topics in one place which is really what the guide is all about: Consolidated and concise information that is easy to digest!
It was late in the afternoon by the time that I wrapped all that stuff up and got to working outside and thankfully by then things had dried up a bit and the dog yard was not too slippery or mucky to walk around in. I wound up using a big piece of plastic to fully cover one side of the chicken coop framing and halfway down on the other side and then stretching it taut and stapling it all in place. I then put a tarp over the peak of the roof and hung it equal distances down each side of the framing. I added the tarp to help keep the peak from leaking in the long-term because the plastic will eventually get small 'wear holes' in it from the combination of the edges from the wood and the wind gusting into the tiny building making the plastic billow. I probably could have just used a few extra layers of plastic on the peak and it would have been sufficient but since I am thinking to put a WiFi router just below the building's peak I thought it best to make it as waterproof and as durable as I possibly could.
After getting all the plastic and tarp securely fastened in place I dug through my rusty roofing metal pile and found three pieces that were not in too bad of shape and were sufficiently long enough to reach from the ground to the building's peak so that I would not have to 'piecemeal' a bunch of smaller pieces together to cover it. The roof is pitched at such a drastic angle that it could almost be called a wall and since it is in the dog yard near the fire pit I wanted to created as few sharp edges as possible and 'piecemealing' it together would have made a heck of a lot of sharp edges to contend with. When I was building the framing I had it in my head that the roofing metal was twenty-four inches wide but it turned out that they were actually twenty-seven inches wide which left one seam (where two pieces of roofing metal join vertically) without anything to screw to. For now I just screwed the two pieces of roofing metal together but I will need to add something to screw to the framing before we get any high winds here that could peal the two pieces of roofing metal apart.
The more I think about having chickens the more I am considering just making them their own 'yard' inside the dog yard because although the dogs will probably just ignore them I do not want them shitting all over everything especially my deck, outdoor kitchen area or in my outdoor bathtub. I may wind up having to sacrifice a portion of the dog yard to be a chicken yard and that might include the area that my fire pit is located in as well. I could just enclose between the coop and the existing dog yard fence on the downhill side of the coop but it stays so shaded throughout the day in that area that I do not think that the chickens would do all that well there (nor be happy) because they would not get hardly any sunlight. Another factor is that I just do not have a lot of chicken wire (or any fencing really) to work with so I have to find a solution that will fit the materials that I have on hand.
Anyway, hopefully all this work to create an area for the chickens will be worth it because although having eggs will be nice what I really want is to just have some fowl around to help control the tick population especially since I am not cutting down the vegetation much because it is all newly established and I am waiting for it to go to seed before cutting it. Some of that grass that got planted from the seeds in the straw bales has already started to produce some seeds so I will probably start on the mowing down of things once those seeds reach maturity because although that Kentucky-31 (tall fescue) grows fast and all I like the idea of growing a grain and spreading the seeds around early in the year will help ensure that it spreads and grows in thicker than it currently is by the time that winter arrives again.
Well, that is about it for now. Although last night I was planning to write (instead of in the morning like I am now) I wound up falling asleep a little after the sun went down and did not fully wake up again until four this morning. I will try again this evening but it is likely that the same thing will occur if the weather clears up and I get to work on stuff outside again today. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 263-271. (TFC So Many Days Without Writing These Daily Posts & Trying To Get Back On Track)
Well hell I have not written anything for many days now and although it nags at me I just have not made time for it. More accurately I should say that I have not written any of my Daily Post (I even did not do my weekly Fantastica Chronicle's post) but alas I have been writing a heck of a lot. All total I have more than likely churned out thousands of more words a day than I usually do (or consistently have each day for around three years) but all of it is in either private messages or in public chat channels while working (roughly eighteen hour days) as a volunteer (community member/fan) for that eXode Hive blockchain game. All of which has been pretty fun and all but whoa between doing that and running my digital asset 'store' it sure does not leave me with much time to do any of my own writing.
As much as blaming my involvement in the game development would be an easy thing to place my lack of writing on... really I have also neglected to do it and a heck of a bunch of other stuff as I hyper-focused all my attention the last few weeks on the project at hand concerning eXode which has all been working out rather well so there are absolutely no regrets in that regard especially given what a wonderful community it has and my endeavors have been 'fruitful' to say the least.
All that aside though, I have started to write many times and I get to the point where I spell out the Day and the (TFC) part of the title and then I just stop and sometimes the text editor for it stays open all day and no words get written and I am like 'Hell I can write a bunch later and just sum everything up" and yet each day the 'summing things up' gets more daunting and I dislike the notion of just 'summing things up' even less. So I am like "Okay. Just write something" and some far-in-the-back part of my mind whispers: 'But then you will have to proof-read and edit it' and the daunting feelings grow a little stronger.
Doing the same thing each day (like writing daily for three years) is not all that hard once it becomes a habit but once I fall out of the habit it sure is difficult to overcome whatever internal resistance is going on and re-initiate it as a daily routine. The big problem is that patterns emerge in the writing as well as summations, repetition etcetera and as a writer I begin to loathe those patterns because I fear the silent insinuation that my lens of perspective has been scuffed by the 'way' that I write and the form that takes on.
As an example here if I start each post with talking about the weather that particular pattern grates on me over time and all that I do is remind myself that I am (A.) Chronicling the weather and (B.) I just like how when it posts a preview of the post's link all that folks see is some blurb about the weather. Nonetheless patterns get 'stale' over time and although I have the ability to induce great stress upon myself to write each day I have come to the realization that each day I only have 'X' amount of 'words' and it is a matter of where I choose to put them that is the most relevant factor and the 'how' is always a side note. Lately my words have gone elsewhere but at least I am still using them.
So what has been going on for me is that my chicken coop (shower house) now seems like a bad combination especially because that area just does not get enough sunlight and the chickens will be miserable. I also kind of like the idea of an outdoor shower house that is fully enclosed and that I can utilize even during the colder weather months. The way that I have the little building built so far is pretty ideal for what I am picturing so I am pretty stoked to see how it all comes out. As for the chicken coop I am thinking to perhaps build it between the shelter and the greenhouse and perhaps by doing so I can also expand the dog yard a little bit by using one edge of the coop as a fence. The chicks are getting big though so I better get something built for them over the coming week.
I never really planned on getting chickens when I was laying out the shelter site and doing my initial planning because I always pictured myself getting ducks which tend to do pretty well in shaded areas. Now with the prospect of placing a chicken coop somewhere I have to account for the sunlight, where the runoff from the interior and roof of the coop will go as well as the inevitable smell. I also do not want to block any of the precious sunlight that I get each day especially on my 'yard' that is just now starting to gain some traction with the grass growing in. Basically the 'impact' of a chicken coop is something that I need to consider heavily as well as where I am going to be shoveling all the chicken poop to from cleaning the coop out! I keep going outside and walking around looking at various spots but the more that I look the more that I realize that I may have to think outside the box on this one to come up with a suitable solution.
The weather has been crap here of late and most days it either looks like it is about to rain or has already rained. Things outside are not exactly mucky but everything is thoroughly saturated at this point and after a recent rain a few days ago I even saw water standing in the main spring hole in that wet weather spring near the shelter site. I still think that if the big pine tree at the springhead were removed that the main hole there would stay at least partially full at all times regardless of whether it had rained or not.
At some point a while back I did some weed-eating and removed a bunch of poison ivy that was encroaching on the main trail, around the shelter site and even inside the dog yard and during the process I avoided getting any of the plant oils on me but two weeks later I was handling the rubber boots that I was wearing during the process and of all the places to get some poison ivy I now have it between my pinkie and ring finger of my right hand. The itch is just annoying enough that it reminds me to be thankful that is the only spot that I have it!
In other news my change of diet has been doing me pretty well and I am optimistically hoping that it will help speed along the healing of those damned hemorrhoids that have been such a consistent pain in the ass for the better part of a year now. Mostly I have just been eating rice and those 'protein cakes' that I make by mixing coconut oil, peanut butter, flour, water and whey protein powder together before 'baking' it in a covered frying pan on the stovetop on a low flame for about thirty minutes. They sure are tasty and are super easy on my digestive system overall so I am thinking that it is probably something that I should have done many months ago instead of when I am at my wits end over it all! I have also been making a point of drinking more water even though most of the time I just find myself heavily watering down my espresso instead of drinking the water by itself.
Well it has taken me too many days to write too little but I have to get back on track somehow and I guess that this is just going to have to suffice. Soon I should be getting a new phone (yeah another one from a different provider) and will solve my slow internet problem and be able to start uploading videos and podcasts again which sure will be nice especially since the writing seems to be coming in 'fits and spurts' as of late.
Anyway, I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night and all that jazzy feel good stuff that keeps us all felling like life is good and our interactions are meaningful.
Day 272. (TFC Getting Some Sunshine At Last, Doing Some Much Needed Weed-Eating & Generally Just Feeling Better)
After a brief spat of rain in the wee hours of the morning the day stayed rain-free which is really saying something around here because it seems like it has rained nearly every day this month. It did turn out to be a really nice and alas a very sunny day once the clouds dispelled. Although things outside are still far from drying up they are at least not quite as damp as they have been.
I once again spent much of my day doing stuff related to that eXode game on Hive and got in a bunch of practice at making some emojis for the game's chat channel. I have no idea just how many memes, gifs (and now) emojis that I have made for that game over the last several weeks but my graphics arts skills have definitely been expanded upon at this point which is pretty cool because it is something that I have never been 'super good' at doing. Like most things though, a little reading, patience, following directions and practice/repetition has made the learning curve a heck of a lot less daunting than I thought it would be as far as graphic arts go.
On a different note, with all the rain that we have been getting everything is growing like crazy at this point. Everything except my gardens which are just too damn shaded now that all the leaves of the trees have grown back. It is a bit discouraging to say the least and I will probably need to look at just growing stuff in the greenhouse if I am ever going to be even mildly successful at gardening in the woods here. Considering that I am still using most of the greenhouse for dry storage who knows when I will really get the greenhouse setup for food production.
Since the ticks have been getting steadily worse with the warmer weather I went around with the weed-eater and cut back the vegetation along the main trail as well as everywhere that I tend to walk at around (and leading to) the shelter site. There was surprisingly not a whole lot of poison ivy to contend with but in a few spots I did notice that it was growing rather densely. For now I am just going to keep cutting it back as it grows in but I am thinking that in the places around the shelter site itself I might be better off to just start pulling it up by the roots to help hasten its eradication.
Well, it has taken me most of the day to get this far with writing this post so I should probably just wrap it up and get it posted. I am sure that this 'weird writing thing' that I have been going through of late will pass soon enough. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
https://peakd.com/c/hive-114308/created
https://peakd.com/hive/@jacobpeacock/hive-survival-guide-sixth-edition
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