Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 1136)

5 months ago

Hello Everyone!

A sleepy morning, Some downright muggy weather, Bandwidth choices or the lack thereof & A late day hike!

Alright, it is that time of the day again to dive into the writing and see what emerges. Currently I am running about forty minutes behind schedule but all things being equal... that seems to be on par with how my timing tends to fluctuate... so mayhaps I am not truly 'behind' at all.

Last night it was a bit of a slog to get my daily entry wrapped up (given the late hour after my phone call was over) but I think that it was well worth it... because I at least finished it... instead of putting it off until today. For once I was actually kind of happy with feeling fatigued since it curbed me from overthinking too much... and not being too anal about the editing and proofreading portion of things.

You would think that after all that I would fall fast asleep... but for some reason I found myself 'tossing and turning' a good bit and it was super late before I finally fell soundly asleep. I tossed and turned so much that I even shut the 'background noise' of the television series I was watching off... because for once it was not helping me to fall asleep at all!

Anyways, I wound up sleeping in to sometime in the afternoon and per usual I let the dogs in and out a few times without it actually disrupting my sleep. I think that they have me well trained in that department... because it never bothers me to do so no matter how zonked out that I am.

Once I was up and about for the day, I more or less decided to 'couch everything' and try to catch up on reading some Hive posts... and essentially take a break from everything. I also wanted to take a mental step back from the coding projects that I have been bingeing out on... and let some of the suggestions/ideas that I have received/had 'sink in' so that my subconscious could play with them.

Admittedly the degree of pressure that I put on myself in regards to those projects is a bit much at times... but it is still much better than spending my time gaming. Like I have said before the mental and emotional 'return' on my time invested in my new hobby... is just so much more uplifting than the older hobby it has replaced.

That said, I do miss the social aspect of gaming online and if I had a better internet connection... I probably would have buckled by now and joined a few online developer groups. To be clear here, I tried everything back when I was gaming to be able to do voice chat consistently... but it only worked well occasionally and often lead to more stress (in the group) than it alleviated so I stopped trying altogether.

I know that most folks have no real clue what it is like to have to 'pick and choose' what they spend their bandwidth on... or the depth of the struggle for those with poor connectivity... but whoa it can be maddening. What often makes it worse is other folks failing to understand (or even attempting to understand) the complications or trying to grasp that sometimes 'better options' simply do not exist.

Lately I have been borrowing the internet device that belongs to the landowners here... and without it I would not have been able to achieve even one percent of what I have over the previous month or so. For the most part my tethered phone does the trick of 'keeping me connected' but its barely useful when it comes to doing large downloads... and is horrendous at uploading anything larger than one megabyte due to how often it will fail.

Heck, for the last several days my phone (even with the cellular repeater) is getting zero bars due to how much cloud cover there has been... and although I have not tested the data connection... I doubt that it would be much better. I dunno why it just popped into my head but every time that I have looked into doing some kind of remote work I get incredibly discouraged because even if I landed a solid gig... my connectivity is not good enough to make 'doing the job' feasible.

On a different note, most of the rainy weather blew over sometime late last night... and today it just sprinkled on and of a bunch without really coming down steadily at any given point. All in all, it was kind of nice outside even though it is super muggy... and even inside the cabin the air has a 'damp' feeling to it that I am more accustomed to experiencing during other times of the year than the winter.

Since I have been spending entirely too much time cooped up indoors lately... I used a break in the weather (late in the day) to go for a hike. I once again did not quite do it long enough to truly 'clear my mind' but just getting outside and moving around sure felt good and the walk was quite relaxing.

During the hike I was kind of surprised at how few branches there were that needed to be removed from the roads... but I guess most of them had fallen during all those other storms that blew through the area over the last month. I also saw that there is now a lot of standing water in the meadow so I think that I missed my window for doing any mowing in it.

On the bright side, that new little berm (that I have been slowly adding to) held up super well during all the rain. It looks like all my recent additions to it have made it start becoming more a 'part of the yard' than something 'sitting atop the yard' which is really good... because now I can move on to making that other berm that I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Over the coming days I am going to try to adjust my routines a good bit (before the new year arrives) so that I am once again waking up before dawn... instead of falling asleep shortly before dawn. The trickiest part to that comes down to curbing those late night coding sessions in such a way... that I do not undermine the inspiration (usually found in the silence of the evening) that drives me to work on them for long hours.

Given that no matter what I do, I only tend to sleep for six hours at a time... I need to figure out the 'perfect' time to do it. If my memory serves me, the last time that I did that... I wound up settling on going to sleep not that long after sunset and waking up again at three or four in the morning.

The only real downside to that is it confines my 'daily writing' time to a very small window at the end of the day (and again if memory serves) I wound up abandoning writing the entries on the days they occur... and opting to write them the following day. Although I really disliked doing that (for all kinds of reasons) I may wind up having to do it regardless... because the way I am doing things... has not been accommodating a consistent enough sleep cycle for me.

Well, I think that is about it for this entry. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice time.