The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 422)

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 422!

Some Humans Make Me Smile, Troubleshooting A Clothes Drier, Laundry Lines In The Greenhouse & My Solar Dilemma

The weather turned much nicer even though it remained overcast and there was just enough of a breeze that if I was in the shade without a shirt on that I got a bit of a chill but otherwise it was rather warm and pleasant outside. The morning seemed to fly by which was probably because I spent nearly all of it with my eyes glued to either a text editor or an online editor working on a couple of posts and then late in the morning chatting with a few folks who by the way always seem to bring a smile to my face and whose conversations I always find uplifting for one reason or another. I should probably do more of that last bit just so that I have more to smile about and to thwart the occasional feelings of loneliness that seem to unexpectedly creep up on me of late.

As far as that sort of 'loneliness' (and my mental well-being in general) goes I guess that I am doing alright because for the most part my days go by without much in the way of 'disturbances to my peace of mind' occurring which is more out of sheer willpower to not have a bunch of mental/emotional turmoil over the state of affairs in this country goes. To be blunt there is a hell of a lot of downright disturbing shit going on here which makes for a tense present moment in history and the possibility of a future fraught with upheaval. I do my best to acknowledge what I see (or at least think that I see) happening, try to judge its potential impact upon my own life (and of course the lives of others) and from there I endeavor to plan accordingly, develop contingencies for said plans and deeply dive into critically assessing the status of my mental and physical preparations to try and accurately gauge 'where I am at' with everything. Mostly I just do my best to keep my morale up, not get overly-stressed about it all and practice my recent motto of 'not breathing anxiety into the world' which is of course a hell of a lot more difficult than it sounds but I have grown increasingly successful at it over the last many months!

Early in the afternoon I sort of got caught up in someone else's project of troubleshooting a used clothes drier that was not working. A bunch of work had gone into remodeling a laundry room and knowing what had gone into getting the drier installed I was like 'well that sucks' when a fellow homesteader informed me that the drier was dysfunctional. By the time that I arrived on the scene they had already removed the drier and started dismantling it and since I know a few things about washing machines and driers I volunteered myself to help troubleshoot it and if possible get it fixed. Long story short here, once we got it dismantled enough that we could get to the drum inside I was able to grab hold of the drum from the outside while the other person pushed on it from the inside and we were able to get the drum to rotate even though there was a good bit of resistance at first. I think that between all the dust and debris in the drier, it sitting for a long time and the unit getting exposed to humidity that rust (and who knows what else) had seized up the drum's ability to rotate on its track. Once we got the unit put back together, I helped to get it installed back into the laundry room and it was pretty cool to see that once it was plugged in that it actually worked. It is worth mentioning that we turned it on and left it running for a while just to help work loose all the stuff that was creating resistance between the track and the drum and although there was a bit of a rubbing sound it seemed to diminish over time.

On a different note, I finally got enough stuff in the greenhouse shuffled around so that I could install more clothes lines inside of it to hang stuff on for drying and although the setup is not ideal (because there is still just too damn much stuff in there) it works well enough for my purposes. Wringing out all of my laundry in the barrel that I have been soaking it in was no easy feat but I eventually got the entire barrel of the stuff wrung out and hung up on the clothes lines in the greenhouse where it then dripped like crazy because I did not bother with trying to get as much water as possible out of them during the wringing process and just wrung them out enough that they would not create too much weight on the clothes lines nor be a sopping mess as I carried them to be hung up. I thought about starting the next load of laundry soaking in the barrel to get rid of the mold but decided against starting it until all of the stuff currently hung up in the greenhouse has dried out which might take a few days if the weather stays as overcast as it has been or gets super rainy/humid later in the week when that tropical storm rolls into the area.

Anyway, I wound up spending a lot of the late afternoon raking up leaves from the dog yard and adding them to the compost mound as well as gathering up a bunch of sticks for firewood from the woods around the shelter area. I also scavenged around the shelter site looking for materials to mount that big solar panel on the chicken coop. I took a bunch of measurements for different configurations of the panel and honestly I was not happy with the results because if I mount the panel vertically the bottom edge of it is a bit too close to the ground and if I mount it horizontally then part of the panel will always be shaded to one degree or another. There is literally only one small area on the coop that gets a decent amount of sun for a few hours a day so my options for the panel's position is rather limited.

It all lead me to re-considering installing that big panel on the chicken coop altogether and perhaps installing my smallest panel there instead which would work fine but I would lose a good bit of the power it generates because of the length of the wire it would require to get said power from the chicken coop to the shelter. Those big panels that I have do pretty well over long runs of wire but they also have a heck of a lot higher voltage (and amperage) than that little panel has and I have in the past used those long runs of wire (from the big panels) to drop the voltage a bit so that my cheap PWM charge controllers do not struggle with the higher voltages that they are not really designed for in the first place. All that jazz aside, I am still 'working the problem' of where to put that big panel and although I dislike the notion of doing so I am currently considering putting them on the roof above the shelter just to maximize the amount of sunlight that they can get even though how the hell I am going to mount them up there (and get them angled correctly) is going to be tricky to say the least!

Well, that is enough rambling for one morning and I have yet to drink a second cup of espresso and wrap my head around the projects I am thinking to do today. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

IMG_20201026_161438.jpg

The new laundry lines in the greenhouse!

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.

woodbanner.png

Please check out the Homesteading Community:
https://peakd.com/c/hive-114308/created

Hive Survival Guide Sixth Edition can be found here:
https://peakd.com/hive/@jacobpeacock/hive-survival-guide-sixth-edition

A playlist of my Jacob Goes Off Grid Videos can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CsWYxlqp36dEFkg5mnlzgY41bE761oK

Please consider becoming a patron on my Patreon page!!!
https://www.patreon.com/jacobpeacock

Contribute via Paypal:
https://PayPal.me/jacobpeacock

woodbanner.png

That Is All For Now!

Cheers! & Hive On!



0
0
0.000
2 comments