Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 1238)
Hello Everyone!
Stress sucks, My food assistance got cut short, Painting lumber, Cleaning the IBC tote & Musings on the water scenario!
Alright, I am way behind schedule with my writing routine this evening because I zoned out watching a bunch of videos online... and kept telling myself that I will start writing 'soon' which never quite happened until now. I was not exactly procrastinating (even though it amounts to the same thing) because I was trying to get myself into a better headspace before diving in here.
Last night I once again had a hard time falling asleep... but thankfully I was not up super late like I was the night before. I even managed to get up at a reasonable hour this morning and do my usual Hive engagement routine even though my engagement did not actually amount to much besides some reading and voting.
To be blunt I have been feeling incredibly stressed and more than a little worn out by all the packing (and related activities) that I have been doing these last many weeks. The combination of those things (along with a bunch of other stuff that does not make it into these entries) has been playing pure hell on my mind... and every time that I find something else that has been ruined by the rodents here... or another expense for the new place... I get even more aggravated over everything.
For the most part I am in a 'cut my losses and move on' frame of mind... but gods damned I am so tired of 'cutting my losses' in life that I really do not know what words to use to adequately portray my displeasure with it all. I mean it is not like I was trying to move, build a homestead and tear it all down again just to start over again all these times in the first place... and doing it now (again) is 'rough' to say the least.
Anyways, just before I went to get outdoors this morning, I noticed that I had a 'notice' about a notice (in my email) from the food assistance program... so after lots of jumping through hoops online... I was finally able to see what the notice actually was. Long story short, my food assistance will not be continued and since I filed for it close to the end of the month (back in February) they counted that as one of the months of receiving it... which means I got one month of twenty-nine dollars, one month of two hundred and ninety one dollars (for March)... then nada which makes no sense because I was supposed to get it for three months.
So getting that news combined with how poorly my fundraising endeavors have been going... I was feeling pretty bummed out by the time that I got outdoors and started working on stuff. On my way out the door I kept thinking something along the lines of: At least the damned wind has died down today and I can get some painting done!
A while back I had mentioned how I had a five gallon bucket of green outdoor paint... and I swear this whole time I have been picturing how awesome all the lumber would look being painted green... but when I finally opened it today I found out it is actually what looks like a deep aquamarine blue! I guess that the sample color on the lid was the wrong color... and given that it was a premixed paint (that I bought at a discount) I can see how that could have happened.
At least the paint itself was in good shape (even after sitting through three winters of freezing and thawing in the shop tent) and mixing it with a stick was nowhere near as arduous as that last can of white paint that I had used. It also rolled onto the unpainted lumber rather nicely... but when it came time to paint over the white paint on the other lumber... it did not stick all that well and I had to apply several coats to make it look uniform.
During the times that I was letting each coat dry I would switch gears and clean out the IBC (intermediate bulk container) water tote more (after draining it) and wound up getting it much cleaner than I thought that I would. I mean it is far from 'perfectly' clean because at one point in its 'life' it had cooking oil in it... but it is much cleaner than it was when I drug it out of the woods yesterday.
I really do not know what it would take to get it clean enough for drinking water purposes besides maybe using a pressure washer on it (which might break it) but for utility water purposes it should work fine. Since there is that public spring near the new land... I am thinking of getting a small utility trailer and another IBC tote (or a water tank) and mounting it on the trailer so that I can fill it every so often... and eliminate needing to constantly fill smaller containers.
Just how feasible that is I will not know until I look at how the spring is setup... because it might not be possible to fill a tank that is that high off the ground (if it were on a trailer) and might require filling a smaller tote/container and somehow pumping it (while at the spring) into the larger container on the trailer. What I am picturing is perhaps using a small generator to power my sump pump... and have it running in the smaller tote to pump water into the larger tote while I am at the spring.
Obviously water is going to be an issue at the site... but hey it is just one more 'issue' amongst a slew of other issues that I will just have to figure out if I am going to make it work. I still do not regret getting a place that will not pass a traditional 'perc' test for septic... but whoa there are a ton of things that are not possible to do (as far as regulations and codes go) without either having a septic permit or a septic system in place.
I still think that I can do that (LLP) low pressure pipe septic system there... but without being on site to see where I would want it, or being able to afford getting the first step in the process done (the high intensity soil test) there is not anything that I can do on that front at the moment. I will also probably need to get a new land survey done on the place... because the last one looks like it is from the seventies (or maybe earlier) and I have no way of telling exactly where all the property lines are... which is important because I am going to need to know them for the soil test given that it might take every inch of available land to meet the requirements for the alternative septic system.
I swear every aspect of this entire endeavor is fucking expensive... and even after shelling out a bunch of money there is no guarantee that I can even do the kind of septic system that I am picturing utilizing. There are of course some other options (as far as septic systems go) but they are even more expensive (and have other requirements) than the system I am currently considering which seems like the simplest of all the options.
Sure there are always things like composting toilets and incinerating toilets... both of which have to be NSF (National Sanitation Foundation) certified... but for one... those both require extra costs each month like special cover material for the compost toilets... or fuel and electric for the incinerators... and for two... they both only deal with solids and do not handle wastewater. As I have said before in that state they only have 'wastewater' and do not break it down into the traditional 'gray water' and 'black water' designations like many other places do... which is problematic (for my scenario) to say the least.
Having a long history of managing my own waste for all these years... I really do not have any concerns in that regard. Nor do I have them when it comes to dealing with 'wastewater' since I mainly use bleach as a cleaning agent (that I let evaporate) but in order to get a well or even county/city water... I have to comply with the codes and/or regulations whether I like doing so or not.
Well, that is all the words that I have in me for this entry. I hope that everyone is doing well. Ciao for now.
Yeah man I know about restarting and having to redo things over and over. Very frustrating.
Hoping one day to find a place to go. Guessing after my lawsuit maybe things will sort themselves out. Until then it's trying to figure out being a spring and summer nomad.
Yeah at least this time I own the land but that sure does not change the sour taste all the other endeavors have left in my mouth. So much wasted time, effort and resources over the years... plus all the damned stress to boot.
Fucking congrats on getting your own land!
Yeah that's the plan for us. But southern Oregon is now out as they destroyed the water tables. Although there might be super cheap land coming because of it.
Had a plan to do evaporator water collection. Fucking desert. Sigh.
Although if the entire lawsuit goes well. I can pick when and where I'm going to have land.
Thanks.
So many places have that happen with the water table. It is really sad.
Do you mean like this https://warkawater.org/warkatower/ for water collection or are you referring to the 'dehumidifier' units that produce water?
Honestly?
I'd love anything that works. But yeah I definitely would like a combination of systems for redundancy. And there's a lot of these different units that use different types of collection systems.
I'm not sure that these towers would work very well in a place that gets very little fog and dew.
Definitely going to have to have a lot of solar power to be able to power water production. Oh well.
If I was rich, I'd get land with a steam and just do a water powered electric generator.
I do not understand why you do not qualify for food assistance, that is crazy.