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.

The Fantastica Chronicles Day 384!

Cleaning The Chicken Coop, Laying Pavers & Cleaning The Propane Tanks

I woke up rather early today and did my best to wrap up my morning routine before too much of the day passed me by which was not all that hard to do because after it rained all day yesterday I was itching to get to working on stuff. My latest trick to get me working outside as early as possible is to just put on some music, grab the dog poop shovel and get the dog yard cleaned up before I let the chickens out of their coop. The reason that I wait to let the chickens out is because they will go around and find every pile of dog poop and peck and scratch at it until it is spread all over which makes it a pain in the butt for me to clean up. Unless it is raining the roosters have also taken to crowing once they see me outside and will not stop until I let them and the hens out of the coop. In other words they now have me trained just about as well as the dogs have me trained!

While I was letting the chickens out I noticed that it was time to once again give their coop a good cleaning and also that yet again they had not eaten the corn in their feed mix and there was a good bit of it piling up inside the coop. I tossed all their droppings onto the compost mound again and did the same with all the uneaten corn. I dunno why it is that they will eat the corn once I throw it onto the compost mound but sure enough they flocked to it and started eating some of it. I have also noticed that there is a small round seed (that I do not know the name of) in the feed mix that they will not eat either until I throw it on the compost mound and today I noticed that it has sprouted and started growing into small plants where I dumped it last time. I am hoping that the chickens will eat those little plants that are popping up and that those seeds will not be wasted after all. Perhaps the same thing will happen with the corn but so far I have yet to see any of the corn start sprouting.

On a different note, I have mentioned before how treacherous the places that I step off my porch can be and yesterday evening I stepped down in one of those spots and almost completely busted my butt (I actually caught myself on the fence) and I was like damn it I better fix that soon. I like having an outdoor throw rug in that spot where I step down off the porch (or up onto the porch depending on my direction of travel) because I often pour some bleach water on it and slide my shoes (or boots) across the rug to disinfect them before stepping onto the porch. This is a pretty old habit of mine by now to help keep things a bit more sanitary while living in the rough and it works really well but over time the rug gets a lot of dirt in it and when it rains that dirt turns to mud... and unfortunately I tend to forget how slippery the rug becomes after a hard rain which has resulted in several actual falls and many more times of me almost falling.

After that slip last night I decided to finally start working on a project that I have been considering for many months now which was to start laying flat stones around the porch in that area where the rug is and perhaps continue from there outwards to fill in the majority of the dog yard with flat stones or what I like to call pavers. The more I thought about the project the more daunting that it seemed because that is a lot of damn pavers to have to go out and gather. Aside from that slip yesterday the only other thing that made me feel like I just had to start the project was that ever since my arrival here I have been collecting flat stones (pavers) and making little piles of them all over the place and well I needed to start using them up!

So I went and got a really big flat rock with a nice concave shape on one side, moved the rug, leveled the area with a shovel (I had it gently sloped before to help shed the water away from the porch) and fit that big stone into place nice and snug where I would be stepping on and off the porch. The slight concave shape in it is just enough to hold some water (it will perhaps be problematic once there is ice) and I can clean my shoes (or boots) off in that pool of water. Once that stone was in place I basically fanned out from it and kept adding more stones. I do not know how many times I went and scavenged up flat stones but altogether I spent the better part of three hours either gathering stone or laying stone today and even managed to make a small pile in the dog yard so that I can continue the project tomorrow. I love the way that those kinds of pavers look when they are embedded in the ground but if I do it to the extent that I am thinking to do it then it means that I have given up on trying to get grass established inside the dog yard and I will have to gather a heck of a lot more pavers.

The other thing that I accomplished today was getting all my propane tanks out of storage and washing them off so that they would be nice and clean for when I go to get them filled at a local hardware store. I was a little disappointed in myself for letting them get so dirty and having stored them so poorly since I used them last winter. They all had dirt on the bottom of them from sitting under one of my outdoor tables and when I saw it I was like 'doh I should have at least put them atop some pieces of lumber or something' and resolved myself to making a good storage place for them and never repeating that mistake again. On the plus side to all of that at least I had the good sense to keep them mostly out of the rain. Admittedly my overall storage places here have been rather limited so I can see how all that happened but still I know better especially about something like that which helps me stay warm, cook and make hot water!

Anyway, I have had a lot on my mind of late and it is always quite the challenge not to launch into a bunch of things in these writings and just meander on and on in some rambling fashion that is more or less an attempt for me to convey all the stuff that is (or has been) on my mind. Do not worry I will not launch into any of them now so just sigh and breathe a bit but I want to point out that for me personally I am probably the closest to going 'holy fuck maybe I should truly panic' for the first time in a very long time about what is going on in the world. Then I find myself using my old trick of looking around me and actually seeing that everything is fine around me and telling myself everything is fine... and that it is my own feelings of being ill-prepared for what I see coming down the proverbial pipe so to speak. I mean really I have prepared for this stuff pretty much my whole life and do not feel ready and ultimately I just have to acknowledge that it is not humanly possible to be ready for every eventuality in every situation and that each moment is a new moment full of infinite possibilities... which does not exactly calm me down as much as lend me a shred of humble perspective that hey I have made it this far and given it all my best and who the hell knows what will happen... then I look around and 'everything is fine' and that is good enough for me.

Well, this will probably be a mess to edit but I better wrap this up and get to it. 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.

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.