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 415!

Expanding The Compost Mound, Raking Leaves, Finishing The Bus Flooring & Doing More Video Editing

The morning was rather chilly and I yet again opted to stay indoors until things warmed up a bit before venturing out and doing stuff. This fall season seems to be going by rather quickly so I should probably be bundling up with extra clothes and working on things regardless of the outdoor temperatures but no matter how much espresso that I drink I just do not really like starting my day by being cold or especially working in the cold. There is also something deeply satisfying about being warm in the shelter and enjoying my mornings even if it means that I get a little less accomplished during the first part of the day.

With all the leaves accumulating in the dog yard it has made finding and shoveling up the dog poop rather difficult so I finally decided to take some time and get all the leaves raked up. Since I did not really have a good place to store the leaves, or make another compost for them (and I did not want to burn them) I gathered up some chicken wire and strung it along the downhill side of my dog poop compost mound so that I can pile the leaves in it and not have the chickens knock them out of (or off) the mound later which is something that they have continually done since I started adding leaves to it a few weeks ago. I did not spend a whole lot of time on installing the wire and wound up just staking it in place with a few well placed black locust stakes pounded into the ground and a few nails driven through some small pieces of plywood to anchor the wire against the vertical logs that create the mound's border.

After getting the chicken wire installed I started the time consuming task of raking up all the leaves and then using a garden rake and a leaf rake to pick up the piles and layer them onto the compost. I did my best to stuff the leaves up against the newly installed wire to help prevent it from sagging and/or having the chickens knock it down while they are scratching through the compost looking for stuff to eat which is something that they vigorously do every day. At this point I am in the experimental phase of feeding the chickens with the compost and although it seems to be working well enough for now I still keep thinking that I should build a second compost just for feeding them and basically make them their own worm/insect farm.

Since my dog yard is already kind of cramped I will probably just keep using the compost that I have until I can afford some more dog kennel fencing and slightly expand the dog yard itself which is something that it needs anyway because I only have about two thirds of the 'yard' around the shelter fenced in. I keep considering expanding the current fencing with some chicken wire that I have but every time that I have used chicken wire for a dog yard I have wound up regretting it for one reason or another even when it is four foot tall chicken wire instead of the three foot tall wire that I currently have. I have also been considering making the chickens their own yard but have yet to come up with a good design for it as far as squeezing it into my limited space goes without making the dog yard even smaller. If the terrain was more suited for it I would probably be using a 'chicken tractor' to move them around each day but for now just letting them roam inside the dog yard seems to be working well enough.

Once I got all the leaves raked up from the dog yard I scavenged up some building materials and hiked to the homestead proper to finish working on the bus project. I sort of hacked the two remaining pieces of insulated floor into place with a bunch of scraps and wound up using that paneling as a floor covering where the vanity will sit and a piece of OSB plywood for where the refrigerator will sit. I initially wanted to use OSB on both of those places but I just did not have enough material to do so and decided that the paneling would be fine under the vanity as long as it stays dry and even if it eventually starts de-laminating it will not be a big deal because the bottom of the vanity will be covering it. There are just a few places where I will need to add some expanding foam because I failed to perfectly match the curvature of the bus's shell but all in all the floor is now done and should work rather well at helping to insulate the bus.

Anyway, in the early evening hours I started working on that next video in my video project and by late in the evening I finally got it all rendered and compressed but I failed to do the uploading because I was feeling too fatigued to go through the tedious process of uploading the video, adding the description, tags and title to it so I instead spent a bunch of time reviewing the footage and trying to commit to memory what all topics the video covers so that I can use the appropriate keywords when I share it. On the bright side I really have my workflow for the video project down to a science at this point and as with most things... the more that I do it the better that I get at it!

Well, that is enough writing for one morning and I better get on with the editing and get everything posted. 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.