Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 1163)

3 months ago

Hello Everyone!

An almost warm day, Lots of inbound rainy weather, A late day hike & Way less bugs in the dog yard!

Alright, I am right on time with my writing routine tonight... and I even managed to successfully shift my 'start time' to the beginning of the time frame that I have allotted for it. I guess that if I had not put off closing up the chicken coop for the evening then that would not be the case... but I am going to do that later tonight before the temperature starts plunging.

Things finally warmed up a good bit today... but the wind (although not that strong) made it feel like it was much colder outside than it really was. I was hoping for a nice warm day... but that just was not the case even though it was quite sunny and otherwise quite nice.

Although the temperatures will remain above freezing tonight it will only be by a few degrees... so I decided that considering the windchill that I should just leave the water system offline. Having just filled all my water containers the other day doing so is not all that big of a deal... and will most likely hike around and bring it back online tomorrow.

After tonight the real warm weather will be moving in and it will be much warmer... but alas it is also going to rain and thunderstorm for several days in a row! Basically, I will have some nice weather tomorrow to get caught up on my outdoor chores... before I am cooped up indoors again... only this time it will be from the rain and not the cold!

Anyways, last night I got to bed rather early... and even slept without any 'background noise' playing on the computer... which made for quite the deep slumber so that was nice. This morning I awoke around dawn feeling quite rested... but I was way too cozy all snuggled up to the dogs... and wound up falling back asleep for a few hours.

Once I got up and about for the day and got some espresso brewed... I dove into my Hive engagement routine with real gusto... which was nice given that I have been kind of slacking on it the last few days. I think that doing that so early in the day works well... because I have definitely noticed that my willingness to engage (and spell things out in detail) tends to wane the later in the day that it is.

For the most part I spent much of the afternoon zoned out watching a science fiction series... and trying to convince myself to at least go on a hike or something just so that I would get some exercise. Eventually I succeeded at it and went for a hike late in the day... but it was admittedly a short one... and my mind was quite distracted as I trudged around taking in the scenery.

With all that recent cold weather there are assuredly way fewer bugs around... and throughout the day the chickens kept wanting to come inside the cabin to look for dog food either in or near the food bowls. Usually they do not bother with such antics (given how many bugs are around) so I guess that extended cold snap did quite the number on them!

I think that one of the things that I will do tomorrow is churn over some of the soil in the topsoil trap... so that they can get to the earthworms inside of it. I could also let them outside the dog yard to scratch around in all the leaves and find bugs on the rotting logs... but the last time that I did that... they wandered way too far away from the shelter site.

They wander so far that (as I mentioned when it happened) I had to use the dogs to herd them back towards the place... and get them to go back inside the fence. Given that I really do not want to lose any of them to a coyote (or anything else) my best option is really the worms... or perhaps even finding some rotting logs with bugs in them that I can bring inside the dog yard for them to pick over.

Well, I think that is all the words that I have in me for the day. I hope that everyone is doing well and all that jazz. Ta ta for now.