Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 1116)

5 months ago

Hello Everyone!

A long productive night, Some sleepy sandwiches, A prospector mindset, Enjoying new hobbies & A memory trick!

Alright, I am slowly getting it in gear here to begin doing the evening writing and since I am already off track with my routines... I should probably take my time spelling things out and not be in a hurry to do so. I am unsure if it ever caught on as a saying but the term 'there is no point in hurrying if you are already late' comes to mind.

I would have been on time tonight If I had not been sleeping when the sun set... and then had to scramble around (once I woke up just after sunset) to get all the critters fed and get the water system taken offline. Basically, I wound up doing exactly what I said that I wanted to avoid doing in my last entry... which was sleeping in... and having to fiddle with the water system after dark.

Per usual the system itself was not all that difficult to get drained but I was reminded (yet again) why I try to do that stuff when the sun is out! It was not quite as bad as the last time that I took the water system offline 'late in the day' because I only had one water hose to deal with... but whoa it had already grown so stiff (from the cold) that it did not want to lay flat on the ground so it could drain properly.

Honestly, when I woke up I was in such a daze that I skipped making espresso and immediately dove into getting everything done that I usually do near sunset... and of course draining the water system. In hindsight I think that I should have done all my other chores first because I wound up having to fill one of the chicken's water bottles from my own drinking water due to doing things out of order.

Obviously my sleep cycle got skewed even further by being up super late (yet again) last night. Although I attempted to stay up all day, in an effort to 'reset' my cycle by falling asleep early tonight... I only made it to around noon before falling fast asleep. It is kind of fuzzy at this point but I think that I made the mistake of eating too many peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches for lunch... which made me feel just sleepy enough afterwards that I 'crashed and burned' (fell asleep) in short order.

I gotta admit that by that time of the day (after being up for around eighteen hours) I was feeling a bit scatter brained... and even without eating too large of a lunch I probably would have fallen asleep anyway. One thing that I do recall about the afternoon is that at one point I almost convinced myself to start doing stuff outdoors... before promptly realizing that was probably a recipe for disaster considering my sleepless fatigued state.

To be clear here, I do not have any real 'turmoil' (or anything like that) over my skewed sleep cycle and those 'late night' hours that I have been staying up for... have been extremely productive. It is hard to describe the kind of passion that drives me with my coding projects... but I am beginning to think that it is very similar to the passion that I felt while gaming for all those decades.

The big difference is that I just do not feel 'guilty' (or bad) when I spend incredibly long hours devoted to exploring my newfound hobby. As a side note I should probably quit calling it my 'new hobby' since I have been doing it for well over a year now... but being 'stuck in my ways' has me calling it that! When I first started shifting away from spending time gaming... to spending time coding... I did not quite think that the coding habit would 'stick' but as it turns out I was quite wrong in that regard.

It sure has been quite the journey both mentally and albeit emotionally but I feel so much better working (and sometimes bingeing out) on the technology projects than I ever felt with the gaming. Sure there are plenty of 'golden moments' that occurred during my decades of gaming that I will never forget... and always remember fondly... but they primarily had a social aspect to them... whereas with the technology projects it is primarily a solo endeavor... which is an entirely 'different animal' so to speak.

Another thing that I have noticed is that doing that hobby tends to heavily impact my writing... and I have to restrain myself from rambling on overly much (in a technical manner) about the things that I am working on. Thankfully, I am learning to put that kind of stuff in its own post (or documentation) and not overly saturate these entries with all that jazz... which is tricky given that I tend to write about the 'goings on' of my day to day life.

To sort of tie everything together here, I should say that yeah I have plenty of 'secret agendas' (goals) when it comes to the technology projects... but given my exploratory mindset with it all... I am much more akin to being a 'prospector' than anything else. First I had to see if I could really 'get into' the coding hobby, then I had to see if it would stick, then I had to see if I could actually produce useful software, then I had to build the habit of sharing the projects and now (perhaps belatedly) I am trying to marriage it all with my writing habit.

So in short... if it seems like all that stuff has 'intruded' into these entries... and steered me away from my usual topic of homesteading... it has... which is fine because it is all 'part of my life' which is what these entries are all about. There is a heck of a lot of crossover though in the way of how I am trying to build my coding skills so that I can manage to someday earn from their usage... so that I can afford to do all the things that I want to do... like procuring my own land, being able to afford materials for my homesteading projects, afford my farming endeavors and what not.

When it comes to earning a living (meaning incoming and/or finances) I gotta admit that I am barely getting by as it is... and the only way that I can see myself getting out of that scenario is by applying myself to opening up new avenues of revenue for myself. Hopefully, I can do that (one way or another) with my coding hobby or one of my technology related projects... because whoa at around seven years into the writing thing... I am still not earning anything truly substantial.

That is an observation not a 'complaint' but all total I think that I make somewhere in the ballpark of between thirty to sixty dollars a month at it... which yeah is peanuts... but it sure beats zero dollars a month. Which... to be utterly clear... is what I was making when I first began this phase of my life and is awesome progress when viewed through that particular lens!

What I was getting at, is that I have to try new things and find new ways to make a better life for myself... and preferably ones that will not tax my body physically. Also ones that offer my mind new challenges in such a way that I remain interested (basically, have the morale) to continue plodding forward without my 'life' feeling like it is just so much dead-weight that I am dragging along behind me instead of actually living said life.

In other words if it seems like I am hellbent on all my technological pursuits... it is because I absolutely am! As with most things that I have tried in life I know that it will take time, effort and doing lots of tedious steps with little in the way of an immediate return... but in time... and over time... I will see what becomes of it without the fixation upon a destination (or monetary return) mucking up the journey that I have (thus far) been enjoying so much.

A few weeks ago I had this rather strong epiphany that most of my daily 'thought experiments' are so freaking bleeding edge (meaning they are in an unexplored field) that I really should be doing whatever I can each day to hammer them into code... or at a bare minimum make more notes on the structure of the ideas. Believe me when I say that I am no coder... and still thank the advent of LLM technology for helping me achieve what I have done... and much of that is not so much 'how' the code does what it does... but 'what' it is actually doing.

My thinking on all that jazz is to simply take the idea of something... and use it to hammer out a 'proof of concept' that can be built upon... without getting hung up on the 'how it is done' part along the way. Once I can get a project to that point... I generally share it publicly and hope that folks who are actual coders (or just developers) can use the idea and hopefully build off of it from there.

Oddly enough I have about the same mindset about that stuff as I do about all my ideas... which is to toss them out there and see what happens! As long as the ideas do not stop coming to me... I will never have anything to complain about... and obviously I have way too many of them to start with... so it seems wise to not get overly attached to them... and freely share them as much as humanly possible.

Well, the hour has grown late and it seems like the cold weather has firmly moved in because I had to get a sweater... and turn the recirculating oil heater on to warm things up. Here in a bit I actually need to go hike out into the cold... and double check that I opened all the water faucets for the water system to fully drain before it freezes outside later.

When I took the system offline earlier tonight I was in a daze after having just woken up... and although I have a trick for remembering whether or not I did (or did not do) a routine chore (or just something that I have done countless times) I was so sleepy that I think that I failed to do it... and now have to bundle up in warm clothes and venture out into the night because of it.

If you are wondering what my trick is it is rather simple. All that I do is say... when I am opening a water faucet (that I have opened dozens or even hundreds) of times... I look around and find something to focus on like a tree branch or a stick on the ground (or anything) and make a memory of it right before I open (or close) the faucet. Occasionally I also say something to myself, or make a mental joke and laugh, or any number of other things... to help reinforce the memory in a way that it is 'fresh' and easy to recall later when (like now) I wonder if I really did something that I think/thought that I did!

On that note I am going to wrap this entry up and get on with the editing and posting portion of my evening. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice time!

P.S. The main coding project that I have been working on lately is being able to store files directly on the Hive blockchain. Of course simply 'doing that' at the base layer was not 'good enough' for me so I began exploring ways to store entire small operating systems directly on the blockchain. While most of my work has been 'conceptual' I finally had a massive breakthrough over the last several days (and last night in particular) where I was not only able to achieve my goal but also produce a bootable operating system in the browser. I actually got several operating systems to work in the same manner so if anyone is interested the project is called hive-fc-linux.