The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 338)
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 338!
Getting Exercise Via My Lifestyle, Working In The Rain & Prepping For The Storage Project!
This morning I woke up at eight and for the most part I was nowhere near as sore as I thought that I would be after such a day of heavy exertion as I had the day before. It is really a wonder sometimes how well my body seems to 'stay in shape' even if I do not get a whole lot of exercise over an extended period of time. A big part of that is 'long conditioning' over many years but mostly I think that it has to do with how much 'effort' (physical activity) that my day to day life entails even when I am not working on outdoor projects. Whether it is hauling water, shoveling up all the dog poop from the dog yard, picking up fallen sticks or walking up and down the little slope between the shelter and the chicken coop it all adds up to a good amount of physical activity over the course of a day. Perhaps doing those (and other) various tasks each day is my way of making sure that I get some sort of exercise and things never get 'too convenient' or that I get overly complacent in my chosen lifestyle.
Most folks would probably view much of my day to day life as a series of inconveniences but hell I have done those things for so long now that how a 'normal' household operates seems pretty damn alien to me and also rather damn wasteful in so many ways that are hard to explain to folks that have never spent extended periods of time 'roughing it' with little or no accommodations. The perks of living simply far outweigh the stresses, impact and waste created by how most folks live. Even my electricity consumption is rather small at a whopping one kilowatt hour per day on average. Basically I use as much electricity in a month as most households use in a single day. Between me, the dogs and the chickens we consume about three and a half gallons of water per day and about a half a gallon of that I 'waste' washing out the dog bowls which I then in turn pour out on some plants.
Today was pretty hit or miss on working outdoors because it started raining on and off during the afternoon but I was able to finish that odd job that I started yesterday even though I got rained on a good bit (soaked actually) for my efforts. The posts went in really easy atop those two concrete piers that I created yesterday and thankfully I was able to get them both rather plumb which was something that I was concerned about due to where I had to install the piers. I was even able to raise the second roof by the way that I drove the post into place with a hammer and a block of wood. It sure needed it because the second roof had been bearing down quite hard on the first roof for who knows how long and had caused parts of it to marginally collapse and/or be crumpled down under all the weight. All in all both the piers and posts came out looking pretty good and I even manged to get the soffit cut out around the new post in such a way that I did not have much in the way of gaps around the posts where the soffit meets them.
Something that I noticed the last two days while pulling the big wagon loaded with tools back and forth to the homestead proper from the shelter site is that I really need to make the path that I have been using a lot better if I am going to keep using it with the wagon. Not only do I have a pile of black locust logs in the way along it but there are also several small stumps that I need to take an axe to and get rid of altogether. I am thinking of using some of the black locust material on the addition I am building onto the shelter so perhaps over the next few days I will move the pile to a better location for curing and go ahead and de-bark it all now that the poison ivy vines growing on it are all dried out. I actually have a bunch of stuff that I need to do to prep for constructing the new addition and one of them is that I need to somehow create space in the greenhouse to store all the building materials that should be arriving this weekend which is going to be quite the challenge given how much stuff I have stored in there already!
Anyway, I have such a running list in my head at this point of what it will take over the next three weeks to get everything out of the camper that my head spins a little bit but as long as I just keep plugging away at things each day I will get it all done without too much stress. One thing that I am really dreading is having to carry all my gear uphill and storing it in the new addition once it is built. It is going to be an especially treacherous task because it keeps raining and everything is mucky. Hopefully the rain lets up and things dry up before then but I think that I am going to be in for a rough three weeks ahead as I sort everything out.
Well, I better wrap this up because it is already getting late and I am fading fast. 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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