The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 361)

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.

[End Introduction]

The Fantastica Chronicles Day 361!

Bathing The Dogs, Adding Another Support Post & Doing Demo In The Camper

I got off to a slow start this morning even though I got up a little after sunrise. I nearly got sucked into doing a bunch of research online but after reading about a half a dozen pages of stuff (mostly about node.js) I thankfully realized that what I thought had only been a few minutes of reading was actually a few hours of it. It is kind of funny how time can slip by so quickly like that when I hyper-focus on something that I am interested in but it could just be that I was avoiding tackling the storage snafu in this particular instance.

On a different note, one of my dogs got into poison ivy pretty bad a while back and she got it all over her belly. At least I think that it was poison ivy but it could have been an allergy to something also. Either way it never seemed to really go away and recently I noticed that she has some spots (not on her belly where the poison ivy was) where her fur was/is thinning out or gone altogether. After doing lots of research I deduced that it was either mites, allergies or a fungal growth which is pretty damn broad I know but I did not want to rule anything out because after all I am not a veterinarian. Anyway, I have some broad spectrum anti-fungal and anti-microbial pharmaceutical grade animal shampoo so today I gave her a really good bath with it and her skin is already looking a lot better.

I also washed the other dogs and once I got them all wet I noticed the same pattern of fur loss on the three other dogs as well which is much harder to spot on them because of the color of their fur and in the case of my big dog because of how dense her fur is. Seeing it (even though to a much smaller degree) on the other dogs has me inclined to believe that it was/is some sort of fungus which would not be all that surprising given how damp it stays in the woods here and how little sun actually penetrates the trees here this time of year. Hopefully I am on the right track with a treatment and am going to be giving them a bath every few days with that shampoo until whatever it is is gone and failing that I will have to somehow scrape up the money to get them to a vet as soon as possible.

Anyway, I added another support post to the new addition this morning because the other day I noticed that after putting all my books and journals in it that the floor joist below where I put them were not so much sagging but definitely had a pronounced downward bend to them. I already knew that I would probably need a post there but seeing that 'bend' was highly motivating to say the least. Digging the hole for the post was a pain in the butt because I kept hitting the shovel handle on the wall and there was a bunch of small rocks where I was digging at. Thankfully the post itself was easy because I had an old black locust fence post that was almost the perfect size for what I needed so I removed the fencing nails from it, chiseled away the green algae and dirt that were on it, cut it down to size and got it installed in short order.

The other reason that I wanted to put the post in is because I have been thinking of making some large shelves (or just on large shelf) under the new addition to store some of my stuff on and the post will aid me in doing so. Since I do not really have the materials for building the shelving I decided to do some demolition work in the camper per the owner's request. There is a bed frame and some drawers in the front of the camper and a few closets that they want removed so I figured that I can use the materials from that to make my shelving.

What a frigging mess all that demolition turned into today and I was very disappointed that what I thought was a few nice pieces of plywood making up the top of the bed frame are actually several thin pieces of plywood (interior paneling really) nailed together with way too many frigging finish nails. Whoever the hell built that bed frame initially put about twenty nails in where just one nail would have done the job just fine. Anyway, I got part of the bed dismantled before realizing that I could not get the plywood sheets out of the front of the camper without also removing at lest one of the closets so I switched gears and got the majority of the closet demolished before calling it quits for the day. Needless to say the closet also had a gazillion fucking finish nails in it also!

Well, I am a bit tired and irritable so I am just going to wrap this up and call it good enough. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

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The new post that I added!

Thanks for reading!

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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That Is All For Now!

Cheers! & Hive On!



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Awe unfortunately my puppy passed away last week. I am really working hard on getting my fundraiser going.

Definitely sucks when you lose an amazing friend.

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