The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 336)
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 336!
An Early Morning Storm, Getting Approved For Food Assistance, Gathering Mushrooms & Ranting About Covidiots.
Whoa! As I mentioned in my previous post (that I belatedly posted this morning because I fell asleep while writing it last night) I sure did wake up early this morning. Going from waking up around seven o'clock to around three o'clock was quite the improvement and I hope that tomorrow I can wake up early again even if it is not quite that early. It was super nice to have all those peaceful hours before the sun came up to just brood and enjoy the stillness. It did get a little hectic though because around four in the morning it started to thunder and the dogs of course grew upset over the ruckus. I wound up putting on some music just to calm them down a bit but the storm and rain continued intermittently until almost noon. Between the time the sun came up and the storm ended I dozed off several times and took several brief naps which was rather pleasant because the dogs kept snuggling up against me.
Shorty after waking from my last nap I got a phone call from my case worker for the food assistance program that I signed up for last week and wonder of wonders my phone worked awesomely for the entire phone call! I had been concerned that it would not work when they called me and my application process would somehow get delayed but like many of the micro-anxieties that often plague my mind it was a futile one to have. The conversation went really well and I got approved for one year of assistance and all I have to do is receive another phone call in about six months which I guess is a 'check in' call to see if my financial scenario has changed. Part of me wonders why I did not (as the saying goes) 'swallow my pride' years ago and file for assistance but another part of me is proud that I never did it until truly desperate times demanded a truly desperate solution. No matter how good I am at keeping any and all sense of desperation at bay... going hungry fucking sucks and the fear of actually running out of food is quite distressing and downright detrimental to my mental well-being!
After learning that I got approved I did a bunch of research of what I can actually buy with the food assistance card that is being mailed to me and surprisingly I can even buy plants and seeds so I am thinking that I might try to get my greenhouse producing a good bit of food over the coming months and maybe even do a few winter crops in there as well. I also researched if I could use the same card online and was pleasantly surprised that there are two retailers that support it in the state that I live in. One of the retailers only does 'store pickup' but the other one has free shipping for all orders over thirty-five dollars. I think that for this month's supplies I will just go to the store but for the following month I am going to start ordering everything online and getting it shipped to me.
Going to the stores in person has been rather stressful the last many months because there is always a mix of people that wear masks and do not wear masks and people that observe social distancing and those who do not and I have to say that the ones that do neither of those things often look like they want to attack those that do. As if the virus was not enough to worry about there are all these folks that just make the entire scenario more fucked than it already is and like the old saying goes 'if looks could kill' my mask wearing self would be dead many times over by now. The hostility is so strong in those scenarios that I took to wearing my scalpel of a hatchet on my hip every time I go out ever since sometime in February. Oddly enough wearing a tool like that on my hip seems like just enough persuasion for folks to stay at a safe distance away from me. By ordering my food online I will be so happy to forgo being in those damn scenarios because I am to the point where I want to scream at people 'What the fuck is wrong with you!' every damn time I see people without a mask and/or not observing the appropriate distances from other folks.
I get it though 'freedom blah blah blah' but damn it if other folks have the freedom to basically murder folks through their negligence then I should have the freedom to put my little hatchet square in the back of their fucking neck to prevent them from not just killing me but from killing untold numbers of other folks with their fucking wanton disregard for human lives. Not that I would do that unprovoked or anything but that is how I feel about it and have felt about it the entire time that this has been playing out over the last many months. It is like folks are hellbent on keeping this virus spreading and every excuse they offer to act accordingly (responsibly) is just that... a fucking excuse. I got off on a tangent there I know and although I did not quite see that one coming I think that I will not be editing out.
Anyway, late in the afternoon I went on a little hike not so much looking for mushrooms but going to where I knew the mushrooms were and on my way there I wondered if I would see that little box turtle that I saw last time and was pleasantly surprised that I did see it. The little feller was even in roughly the same place along the trail and I was able to get some more pictures of it with slightly better lighting than during the previous time so hopefully they came out okay. I wound up harvesting a nice little meal of those red chanterelles and later I cooked them up with a few of my last remaining potatoes and wow it was the best meal that I have had in quite some time to say the least.
Well, I have rambled on enough for now and better wrap this up so that I can unwind for the evening and get up and do it all again tomorrow. 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.
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Thanks @qurator team and @blacklux! 🤠
Sounds like a good day. I honestly can't blame you re not wanting to go to the shops - that was never a pleasant experience, now it's just surreally unpleasant!
RE the food assistance, I'm always amazed at how effective basic socialism can still be in America, given that there is so much resistance to it!
It is effective. I do not understand why there is such resistance to it in the first place. It works!
People call it 'socialism' but I think that it is just being 'humane' and not idly watching as massive amounts of folks suffer and only a small select few folks do not even have an understanding of what 'suffering' (the lack of fulfilling basic human needs) even entails.
It is one of the few things that gives the state legirimacy - the universal safery net - being from Europe it's not such an evil word !
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Yeah it is a shame that it has such a different meaning here!
It might be because the FED take a similar cut of GDP to most European governments, but we spend a much larger chunk of ours on health and education, the FED spends more on weapons and debt servicing. Especially weapons, I mean US military expenditure is insane.
Yeah. I always keep those things in mind actually. I agree also the military and law enforcement budgets are insane especially compared to more practical things.