Adjusting My Sleep Cycle, A Day Of Rest, Stacking Fence Posts, Packing In Calories & Making Base Camp More Functional

I finally slept in a bit this morning and did not fully wake up until four thirty-six which is pretty nice because I stayed up late (until almost eight in the evening) in the hopes that I could get my sleep schedule nudged towards waking up around four instead of the two o'clock that I have been waking up at over the last few weeks. Starting my day so early has been nice and all but falling asleep (or feeling so tired that I should fall asleep) before the sun goes down each day was getting rather bothersome because I need to be using those daylight hours to be productive during instead of snoozing them away even if I have put in long hours beforehand. I am probably just pushing myself too hard in regards to working outdoors but given that it is winter and I am currently in a tent and will be in a tent until I get a cabin built... I better be pushing myself hard to accomplish my goals and get to living in something more cozy. The way that I see it is that as long as I can keep my pace steady and not push my body too hard then I can assuredly pull it all off and get stuff done without inducing a bunch of injuries upon my body along the way by being constantly fatigued.

All that sleep cycle stuff is just as important as eating routinely and drinking plenty of fluids and given that all my routines have been disrupted and I am creating new routines I think that I have been doing okay at it all and the aches and pains that occurred during the moving process are finally beginning to fade. I could have just rested the first three days after moving and accomplished the same sort of physical 'recovery' (from moving) but I wanted to 'hit the ground running' here and utilize the momentum that I had to set a good pace and get the proverbial 'ball' rolling with projects at the new place which all worked out rather wonderfully so I have zero complaints in that regard especially considering how high my morale has stayed and how positive/pragmatic that my attitude about it all has been.

It was another windy and chilly morning so I mainly just focused on rearranging things more in the living quarters tent and trying to get things a bit more 'tidy' not just inside the tent but around the base camp in general which seemed like a good use of my time. Honestly the high winds around here frighten me because of how many widow makers (dead branches stuck in trees) and standing dead trees that there are around the site. Mostly there are a lot of tall standing dead pine trees that probably met an early demise due to a pine beetle infestation or perhaps some other sort of blight but no matter what the cause there are a lot of trees that make working outdoors during the high winds dodgy at best and kind of reckless at worst if I was to actually get out and work near them. I have my work cut out for me over the coming months to get the widow makers and standing dead trees dealt with but currently all my focus has been on other more pressing tasks.

Since the wind never truly died down and the temperatures did not get above eight point eight degrees Celsius (forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit) I decided early on in the day to just take it easy and basically just take the day off to rest and recover a bit from all my recent physical exertions. I did wind up picking up some more sticks in the new shelter site, removing some fallen branches from the roads (the ones that I walked on but not all of them) and then later I unloaded sixteen more of those fence posts for the new dog yard. Something that I noticed with the fence posts is that their diameter varies a good bit so this time when I unloaded and stacked them I laid down more dunnage beside the original stack of fence posts and made a new pile just for all the larger posts so that when I am building the fence I do not have to rifle through one large pile of various sized material to find the size post that I want.

There are now thirty-two of the fence posts staged at the top (uphill portion) of the new shelter site which should be enough to get a post installed every two point four meters (eight feet) along the fence-line. The only posts that I will need after that are the ones that create the horizontal braces for the corners and the posts that create the gates themselves. I am planning on having three gates with this particular dog yard and one of them I think will be a sally port gate that can act as either a small kennel (inside the larger dog yard) or as an actual sally port so that I can enter and exit the dog yard without the dogs bum rushing me at the open gate which seems like a wise move on a property that has other dogs on it. The other reason that I want three gates is because the new fence is rather large and I learned the hard way that even in a small fenced area that having just a single gate makes working around a site a tedious affair especially if I have to constantly walk outside (and around) the fence to get to the other side of it. Basically more gates means easier access, more efficiency and less wasted time and calories.

As a side note, this whole new endeavor has been taxing in the calorie department and I have been eating food like crazy to make up for the change in my dietary needs. I have yet to eat all the groceries that I got nearly two weeks ago but I sure have eaten about as much as I would normally eat in a month in just under a two week period which is really saying something! I keep calling it 'packing the calories in' and that is exactly what I have been doing by eating at least two big meals a day and snacking on something nearly every hour or at the very least every other hour throughout the day. Thankfully I was in excellent physical condition when I began here a few weeks back and am glad that I have not just stayed in good shape but gotten into 'even better' shape along the way since my arrival here. Admittedly the lack of being in a stressful environment has been nice and having positive social interactions with other folks here has been refreshing and pretty much all my fears about 'who I am around during the apocalypse' have evaporated. In other words not having a bunch of damned worry and anxiety in my life about other two-legged critters has really bolstered my morale and overall mental attitude in such a way that I am actually enjoying my daily toils.

Anyway, throughout the day I napped a few times and somehow managed to stick to taking a 'day off' even though that by the end of the day I had successfully rearranged the camping tent in such a way that I could fit another dog crate inside of it and finally have both a headboard (and a foot-board) for the bed so that my pillows and/or blankets will no longer fall off the bed while I am sleeping or when the dogs are moving around on the bed. Those little inconveniences like that can really stack up and play hell on my psyche so I pretty much did everything that I could do to make the base camp in general more functional and have less things about it to overall annoy me or cause me frustration. When I am in these transitional periods it is easy to get bogged down with the day to day activities of what it takes to live like this and I try to remind myself to just invest small amounts of time each day to maintain the 'bare minimum' of comfort, maximize the convenience of things (like setting up the stove in the storage tent or filling three gallons of water jugs at a time instead of two) and basically not getting too caught up in the day to day stuff so that I can focus on the larger projects at hand that will bring this transitional period to a close.

Well, I have to keep this entry short and sweet because the sun is already peaking up over the horizon and I still have all the editing ad posting to do before I can get on with my day and hopefully get some more fence posts installed on the new dog yard. It was another chilly night and it is super cold outside today but at least the wind has died down and perhaps I can have a fire at the new site to help keep me warm while I am working over there today. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

The fence posts for the new dog yard!

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That Is All For Now!

This post was originally posted to the Hive Blockchain here:

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