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 437!

The Trench Project Gets Its Final Touches, Sodding A Trail-Head & A Few Personal Thoughts That Will Probably Be Used Against Me

I did the same thing this morning as I did the day before by waking up at four, then five and eventually rousing myself when I awoke at six and making some espresso after letting the dogs outside. Since I was super stiff from all my recent exertions I decided against doing my morning hiking routine but later noticed that in failing to do it I felt a bit less clear-headed than I have on the previous few days when I did do it and I also felt not quite as motivated to get to working on things outdoors. Given the level of physical activity that my lifestyle involves I would think that a little extra hiking in the morning would not make much of a difference but it sure has. I have yet to actually get into a full routine with the hiking thing so we will see how it all works out once I rake all the leaves from the rest of the trails and start making some real laps around the woods.

Early in the day I gathered up some tools and got the remaining section of trench filled in where it leads into the dog yard and wound up just running my water line to the inside of the dog yard as well. Having the water line that close to the shelter is not really my ideal scenario because water always makes a mess and I dislike the notion of the chickens and the dogs being able to piss or shit near where I fill my water jugs at. For now I just rested the end of the water line (where the shutoff valve is) atop a big log and called it good enough but I think that I will perhaps either move the line later to outside the dog yard (on the opposite side of where I had it before) or figure out a way to fence off where it currently terminates to keep the critters out.

Right when I was finished with all that jazz it started pouring rain so I retreated to the shelter where I then wrote a short note to one of my fellow homesteaders in the hopes of clarifying a few things that had come up in conversation a few hours before. Communicating with other humans is always tricky but in writing that note I am hoping to establish a clearer line of communication and also remove the need to converse with them with a bunch of other damn humans around interrupting the process. Written communication is also nice because it removes the 'human interaction' aspect of things. It also documents what someone says and removes all the relying on memory about what was said and how they said it. Basically I just wanted to create a better avenue of communication but ultimately it will probably just turn into a communication channel used to express complex sentiments and nothing more.

Once I was done with all of that the rain abruptly stopped so I did not take the nap that I was hoping to get and instead I walked back over the entire trench several times to compact the soil better. I then did a bunch of raking to get all the loose dirt (that we missed last night in the failing daylight) into the trench's depression and got the entire thing looking much better than it was. There was a bunch of rocks that we had raked onto the top of the trench yesterday so I also got all of them removed so that they would not block the vegetation from growing back in.

There was a lot of small stumps, vines and unwanted vegetation growing along the trail so once all the raking was done and I was satisfied with the results I went along the entirety of the trail from beginning to end removing all that stuff and grooming it into a trail that was not riddled with obstacles. When I originally created that particular trail I basically roughed it into shape, made a nice trail-head transition where the elevation changes between the homestead proper and the woods and since then have barely used it because I had the water line running along it and I wanted to avoid damaging it. I even left the stumps and thorny vegetation along it to discourage myself and others from using it as well to minimize any potential damage to the water line.

With all that jazz accomplished I then focused on fixing the trail-head itself because although it was smooth and easy to traverse before... once I dug the trench through it and filled it back in it was really bumpy, had several small depressions along it and was very uneven. The dynamics of how that played out was a result of there being a lot of rocks in the ground there and I had to disturb a lot of earth outside the confines of the trench in order to remove them and since there are still several big rocks in the trail-head at and just below the surface (that did not interfere in the trench digging) and are too big to move without either heavy equipment or a few weeks of work that really is not worth the effort. Basically it was all a mess of 'terrain' factors but after lots of raking I got it to where it was much less treacherous to traverse and then filled in the majority of the remaining small depressions with sod that I cut from an area where some of my fellow homesteaders are building a garden bed. All in all it came out okay but once it gets some more foot traffic on it I will more than likely need to add more sod to it and try to smooth it out and restore it to its former awesome condition.

Anyway, it was a rather long day and of course I did several other things along the way. Somehow the heavy rain held off until just before dark and I had just enough time to feed the dogs and chickens and brew an espresso to aid me in getting all of this spelled out. I am still not all that fond of writing these posts at night when I am fatigued but they sure have aided in me lowering my stress level before falling asleep for the night. Nothing has really changed in the scenario here that would make me want to continue my efforts here and all I can really say (in a joking/not-joking manner) is: "Fucking hippies!" Seriously though I am at this crossroads in life because I will not tolerate abusers and I am dealing with folks that will tolerate them all too much which is more a fundamental difference in 'character' than anything else and not like I have some personal problem with someone. With abusers I do not make room for them on a personal level because I do not tolerate them in my personal sphere and as with anyone who has had to deal with such folks knows... I am making that choice for damn good reasons and not out of some petty 'like or dislike' schoolyard (childish/immature) reasoning because ultimately they just 'are not tall enough to ride my ride' which translates roughly into: if folks lack common decency, a moral compass, integrity and a willfulness not to harm themselves or others I do not have a damn thing for them and never fucking will.

Fuck, I detest how that crap has bled its way into my writing of late and I guess that it is more out of frustration than for any other reason besides the need to get it off my chest somehow so my head does not explode with it. Hopefully folks will be understanding about all that and be assured that it damn sure will not become a habit because I will remove myself from the scenario before I allow other folks' choices to taint my daily exercise of chronicling my life in a productive fashion. The real shit part of it all is that I have spent four hundred and thirty seven days now pouring myself into the place in general (and my own setup) and I am having to consider halting all progress, bagging everything up and moving nearly three hundred miles away where I will not have to deal with this sort of stuff, start all over again and chock this entire affair up as a 'learning experience' that I could have done without because I have already learned all the lessons of why just one fucking shitheel can monkey wrench what is otherwise a good thing. Of course someone has to also allow said shitheel to ruin things to start with but it damn sure is not me allowing it so go figure! That is always the big problem with caretaking other folks' land and why someday I really need to find an avenue to financial security so that I can just inhabit a place where I can permanently remove that particular problem from life altogether.

Well, I should just wrap this up before I really get off further on a tangent and start intentionally kicking the proverbial hornets nest. It is bad enough that some of my fellow homesteaders might read my personal (yet public) journaling and somehow use it against me but hell that is their choice to read it or not so I refuse to take any responsibility for it beyond the responsibility I have to myself (and my readers) to speak my truth and let the frigging chips fall as they may. 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.