The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 409)
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 409!
Local Networking, Shrimp Of The Woods, Getting Spring Water & Well Water Technicians Really Know Their Stuff
I woke up rather early once again and got to spend the hours before the sun came up just writing which is pretty much always a nice way for me to start the day. It may be worth noting that for some reason (maybe because I am not fatigued) the editing part of my writing routine is way less painful of a process if I find myself doing it in the early part of the day opposed to doing it either late in the afternoon or at night. If I can ever get myself to love doing the editing like I love doing the writing I will have achieved something wonderful but that just has not happened yet. I can only compare the editing to the task of shoveling up the dog shit from the dog yard each day... I do it because it has to be done and not because I like doing it!
Early in the day I hiked to the homestead proper to check in with the folks there and see what the status was on getting a licensed well water service technician scheduled and was delighted to find that one was scheduled for late in the day and they were even a neighbor that lives not all that far down the road from the homestead who came highly recommended by a different neighbor. Sometimes small rural communities are filled with a good variety of skilled individuals which is pretty damned nice especially since most folks (at least around this area) tend to prioritize helping their neighbors even if it is just to 'stop by after work and see what is broken' sort of visit after they have already worked their day job. Which was not exactly the case this time because the plan was to get a new pressure tank, switch and if need be a new well pump installed so the technician was prepared to redo the entire system on the first visit.
During the afternoon I wound up getting in a store run to the local feed store and got stocked up on a bit more dog food which is always a good feeling. I do not think that I mentioned it before but when I ordered some food recently from an online retailer the payment processor used my debit card instead of my food assistance card and messed up my budget for the dog food so I sold some Hive cryptocurrency to offset the error and have had to make two trips to the feed store instead of my usual single trip per month. My big takeaway over all that is that I need to double check my grocery orders before I confirm payment and be careful that it never happens again especially since I am often on a very narrow budget and such errors have severe consequences as far as resource allocation goes.
While I was out getting dog food we visited a neighbors property and filled up six five gallon blue carbois (water jugs) from a spring there that has some really nice water. Only ten of the gallons were for me and I did not really so much 'need' the water... but saw an opportunity to get some delicious spring water which in all honesty I prefer over any other kind of water including water from deep wells. There is just something 'alive' and refreshing that I find about spring water and have missed having it since I have lived here. While we were getting the water we were given the chance to pick a bunch of 'shrimp of the woods' (possibly Aborted Entoloma) mushrooms which was pretty cool because I can now use a bunch of the discarded ones to plant them around the homestead here. There is already a patch of them growing here so spreading them should not be all that difficult. From what I saw when I was picking them they can grow rather densely and seem to have no difficulty propagating themselves en masse.
Anyway, late in the afternoon I pretty much just helped out around the homestead proper moving a bunch of stuff around and cleaning up around the well head with some of my fellow homesteaders in preparation of the plumber coming later in the day. At one point a neighbor stopped by and picked me up so that I could go help them fix some stuff on their truck which was more or less just the simple task of installing a truck bed, reconnecting the fuel filler tube, installing all the rear lights, installing the tailgate and then testing all the lights. Having never worked with that neighbor before and us barely knowing each other I gotta say things went rather smoothly and the fellow was competent and even had a sense of humor which always makes for a pleasant work environment. As a side note I have been thinking a lot of late about meeting more folks and working with more folks in the area so it is nice to see that has actually begun happening and am looking forward to perhaps doing more of it.
Even later in the afternoon the well service folks showed up and they rapidly determined to pull the pump. Before that they determined that the one of the pump's wires had gotten disconnected from the breaker at some point. That last bit was probably me and that fellow homesteaders fault because I had tested for voltage multiple times at the switch and gotten 243 AC volts so what more than likely happened there was that we bumped the wires while shuffling around in the cramped space and accidently tugged it loose from the breaker. If you know anything about electric wire installation you know that all wires should be secure enough that bumping into it should not cause it to disconnect from any any termination point, fixture, or breaker panel. It is worth noting that only one leg of the AC wires was disconnected and the other one was still hot which is always dodgy especially since it is hard to get a voltage reading off the remaining connected leg and erroneously believe that the electricity system is safe to work with which is already dodgy and in this case we are adding running water to the scenario by troubleshooting and/or repairing the water system.
Once they fixed the electricity source issue they found that the pump itself was not receiving electricity so they pulled the pump which was thankfully easy (because it was just flexible ABS tubing) and they found several breaks in the wires that lead down the well shaft and to the pump. The main technician doing the work seemed quite impressed with the type and quality of the submersible pump that was in the well and determined that once the wires were fixed that the pump would work fine and had plenty of life left to it and most likely it would not need replaced for quite some time. While the tubing from the well was laid out in the yard I gave it a quick measurement and determined it to be forty-six meters long which would make for the well being the same in its depth.
The folks got a new pressure tank system installed and wrapped things up rather quickly and we began the long process of flushing all the lines until the water ran perfectly clear again before filling the entire homestead's water line plumbing with a bunch of gunk. It was pretty damn nice that there was water again for everyone because after living a few days without running water they were all ecstatic to have it again. For me it is nice as well because now I can go back to conveniently filling my three gallons a day from the well and not have to use either my new spring water cache or treat more rainwater. It was pretty cool just how little the well system being out of order affected my day to day routine and only inconvenienced me by adding the water treatment step to the three gallons a day that I need for me, the dogs and the chickens.
Well, I better just wrap this up and get on with my day. I did do a good bit of other stuff along the way and felt that it was mayhaps one of the most productive days around the homestead in general that there has been in quite some time. 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.
https://peakd.com/c/hive-114308/created
https://peakd.com/hive/@jacobpeacock/hive-survival-guide-sixth-edition