The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 439)
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 439!
Raking The Main Trail, Re-Positioning A Water Line, Fixing A Drip & Making The Best Of Weird Times
I totally slept in this morning and did not even wake up until a little after eight which meant that the sun was already up and I had accomplished nothing in the early morning hours so I spent a little time doing stuff online and burned up more of my limited daylight hours in the process. Considering that I was up pretty late (almost midnight) and that I have been going rather full tilt of late and been incredibly stressed... I guess that sleeping in a few hours is not really all that big of a deal but whoa I sure can give myself a hard time about it!
Once I felt like perhaps some of the other folks at the homestead were awake I hiked down to do what has become my routine 'check in' with them to see how things are going and to more or less 'check the temperature' of the group. It was actually a rather underwhelming time with the other folks aside from me telling a short story from my youth in order to answer a question that I had been asked. Do not worry I will not recount the story here but it amounted to a story about the first time that I ran away from home (as a teenager) and all the 'ins and outs' of how it happened and what the result was. Which (you guessed it) was me getting into trouble and then having to face the proverbial 'music' of my actions.
While I was visiting the homestead proper one of my fellow homesteaders volunteered to help me rake all the leaves from the main trail so we gathered some rakes and set to working on it. We wound up working at a rather steady yet brisk pace and got all of the leaves cleared from the trail and just added them to the various berms that border the trail and help divert the water from making the trail a mucky mess. The fellow even knew which berms to add the leaves to as we mosied along working which was pretty cool because it means the things that I had taught him in the past had stuck and furthermore he knew why the berms were important for preserving the trail. After all the leaf raking of the trail was finished we even raked up all the leaves in the small camping area and wound up mounding them atop an old tent so that they could be hauled off later to be used at the homestead proper. Honestly I was thinking that I would be raking leaves for much of the morning but since I had some help the entire task got finished in way less time which freed me up to work on other stuff.
Like I said a few days ago I had moved the water line to the inside of the dog yard and was not all that happy with where I had placed it so after lots of head scratching I decided to cut the water line shorter and position it at the corner of one of my garden beds where it is both convenient to get to and mostly out of the way of where the dogs tend to walk a lot. In order to get as much of the line out of the way as possible I wound up pulling the line up out of a portion of the original trench and digging an entirely new section of trench to lay it in. I guess all my recent trench digging has honed my skills because I dug it super fast but the speed was probably more a result of not running into any large rocks or roots!
When I was getting the water line re-positioned I noticed that three of the fittings were dripping so I hiked down to the homestead proper, shut the water valve off and after hiking back to the shelter site I dismantled two of the fittings and added some teflon tape to them which stopped the dripping from those two. The third fitting is that one that the glue let loose on last winter and I had used screws to secure it in place (because I lacked PVC cleaner and glue) and although it has held together just fine it has begun dripping so I will need to effect a proper repair on it soon but I have no idea when the next time I will be near a hardware store will be. For now I just set my big chicken watering device under it so that the water will at least be getting put to good use. Thankfully it is not a super bad drip or anything but I do not want it to go on un-repaired indefinitely.
Per usual my day was filled with lots of other activities like removing a few small sapling stumps from the dog yard, raking up a bunch of leaves from around the shelter site and spreading grass seed along all of the trail (and camping area) that we had removed the leaves from at the beginning of the day. It is kind of funny because I always think that when I write these posts that I can somehow fit into them everything that I do in a day but I never actually do and especially so when I do the writing in the evening when I am fatigued instead of in the morning when I am clear-headed and full of energy.
Well, I guess that I am just going to wrap this up, do the editing and call it a productive day. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night or something like that.
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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