The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 388)
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 388!
Framing The Arched Room, Building Up The Compost Mound Wall & Making Progress On My Pre-Winter To-Do List
I went to bed rather early instead of staying up and writing this so here I am first thing in the morning sipping my espresso and slowly waking up after an evening of peculiar dreams. The dreams were actually rather enjoyable even though there was some weird moments where I found myself at a post-apocalyptic music event and me and someone else were more or less patrolling the outskirts of the party that was happening in a really big building that seemed like it was half hotel and half disused industrial factory. For the most part the patrolling amounted to frightening away thieves before they could steal anything from the party-goers and taking catnaps while the other person stood watch. As is the case with most of my dreams it was pretty surreal and without launching into too much detail about it all it is hard to sum up with only a few words so suffice it to say it was pretty fun, the music was good and I awoke thinking once again where the hell does my brain conjure this stuff up from!
It was yet again a rather chilly morning and although I was tempted to just stay indoors where it was nice and cozy... I went outside and started my day by doing my usual routine chores and looking around at the shelter area and asking myself what I could accomplish to make things better with the resources at my disposal and what I should prioritize doing. Since I have been thinking a lot about my water situation lately (and working on those rain harvesting systems) I got to thinking about what I could do to get the runoff from the shelter (and storage addition) roofs properly captured and the water stored.
The main thing that has been getting in my way of progress with that system has been that the 'arched room' on the side of the building is sort of in the way for me to be able to setup the holding tank(s) for that system. Like I have mentioned before I have been wanting to change how the 'arched room' is setup almost since the day that I installed it on that side of the building. The longer that I have thought about it the more that I have realized just how much heat the black plastic sheeting (that forms the arch itself) collects during the day and how ever since I installed the room it makes the storage addition room's temperature stay rather high during the time that the sun is shining on the black plastic arch. With that in mind I got to thinking about how well that heat absorption might serve me during the winter months to keep a water holding tank from freezing. Putting a large holding tank inside the arched room would undoubtedly use up a lot of its available space but it might be well worth it if it provides me with a freeze-proof water storage solution and the bonus of helping to somewhat regulate the temperature of the addition by putting a vent (or vents) between the two rooms which might be tricky if the humidity in the arched room is too high but that is something that I can only find out by testing it.
I had been picturing building a frame for the 'arched room' with some black locust poles and after lots of measuring I dug a hole, put a short two meter post in it and then attached a long pole from one of the shelter roof's support posts to the newly installed post. Hopefully my calculations are correct and the black plastic sheets can be affixed under the eave of the additions roof and be able to lap over the new angled pole that connects the two posts together. It will be a bit of a bear to get the plastic unattached from where it currently is and installed the way that I am picturing it and I might wind up adding another post on the uphill side and attaching another pole between it and the recently installed post just to have something to attach the plastic to on the long vertical side of the arch itself. For now I am happy that I made some progress on it and am looking forward to seeing how it all comes out.
On a different note, I have been noticing that my compost mound is getting pretty full on its downhill side and in some places it was even with the tops of the vertical logs that ring the mound. I have been thinking about all kinds of solutions for making the downhill side taller but decided to just go with something simple and added more logs horizontally positioned along that side which I then chocked in place with lots of small rocks. Two of the logs that I used are full of some sort of mushroom mycelia and the other two were some rather rotten pieces of pine that were full of bugs that I thought would make a nice treat for the chickens. All in all it came out pretty good but I am thinking that I might hammer in some tall wooden stakes along the downhill edge just to help keep it all in place as I add more refuse to the mound.
Well, I guess that I should just wrap this up and get it edited because the sun is starting to rise and I want to get in another long productive day today and not blow my entire morning doing stuff on the computer. Now that autumn is officially here I need to really maximize my remaining days before the cold weather truly arrives and get as much accomplished as I possibly can beforehand. 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.
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