Morning Stillness, A Sunny Day, Fence Post Installation & Making Progress The Easy Way
It is another one of those mornings where I woke up a bit early and am now confronted with either trying to fall back asleep or to just 'embrace the new day' and get an incredibly early start to said day. I guess that since I am now writing that I have chosen the latter but I might still do the former sometime over the next five to six hours before the sun makes its way up over the horizon. I am still pretty sleepy feeling but that may pass soon enough once my espresso finishes brewing on the outdoor stove and I manage to get it poured into my over-sized coffee cup and inevitably begin drinking it.
These early morning moments are actually pretty nice and it is difficult to sum up just how pleasant that I find them to be without getting overly poetic (or even philosophical) about them. Like I have said so many times before there is just something wonderful about the 'stillness' in the wee hours of the morning that does not occur at any other point of the day or night and even the overhead air traffic seems to lull during these hours and aside from the occasional yowls and yips of coyotes (or coydogs) in the distance there just is not much of anything 'going on' besides the blessed silence of the woods and the low hum of my computer's internal fans and the small fans mounted on my propane heater that are blowing warm air around inside the tent. I guess that one of the things that I like most about these early morning hours is that the 'potential' for anything 'going on' is incredibly low also which is nice because I can just zone out on my internal landscape and not have to give all that much attention to the external world. As much as I try not to romanticize things I sure as hell romanticize the 'stillness' that I find in the wee hours of the morning and I think that it comes from a deep appreciation (and fondness) for them because to be blunt the world is a noisy damned place and its human inhabitants would probably do well to embrace more quietude.
As far as the day went it was another chilly morning and I did pretty much the same thing that I did the last few days before by getting in some early morning gaming and letting things warm up a bit outdoors before starting the physically demanding work part of my day. I did get a bit too zoned out though because instead of turning the water system back on after the temperature outside got above freezing I did not do it until nearly one in the afternoon. How exactly that happened was mostly because I had a bit of a 'brain fart' where I kept thinking that I had turned the water back on but those memories were actually from when I had done it the day before and my confusion was probably a direct result of the weird sleep cycle that I have been on and how I had taken that inadvertent nap the day before late in the day and my internal clock thus getting scrambled in the process. Of course the water getting turned back on later than usual had zero effect upon anything around here but I had committed myself to turning it back on once the temperature was above freezing (and no earlier nor later than that) which I think is more just a quirk of how my mind works when I commit to something than anything else and basically translates as setting a cue (like the temperature) to remind me to do what I said that I would do... when I said that I would do it!
Once I got the water system turned back on and all the air purged from the system I got bundled up in some warm clothes and headed over to the new shelter site so that I could continue working on the dog yard project there. I am unsure of how many more post holes that I dug and how many more posts that I got installed but I pretty much finished the western fence line except for one of the gate posts and the horizontal braces for the both the gate and the corners. Once I finish that stuff on the western fence line I still have another gate post to put in on the southern fence line as well as its corresponding bracing and some braces for the gate and corners on the northern fence line to do. Basically I am almost done with the entire posts installation phase of that project and nearly ready to begin the next phase of things. Thankfully all the digging on that western fence line went rather smoothly and I was able to dig the post holes a good bit deeper than what I could dig the other ones before hitting that hard packed clay layer (that I have mentioned numerous times before) which is really good because that section of the fence will probably get the most 'abuse' from the dogs because it faces the side where the most activity will occur (that they will alert to) because it borders that access road to the new shelter site.
On a different note, things here are progressing well enough and although I am seriously missing taking my usual winter downtime I think that doing so (missing it) in order to get my living scenario sorted out is a worthy cause to say the least. I mean the base camp setup (especially the living quarters tent) is rather damn nice even given that it is wintertime but I know better than to let myself get too cozy and thus settle for it being 'okay' for the pseudo-long-term. It is also still early in the winter here and I have just enough of a window (time wise) to get the new dog yard completed and get the new cabin built before the weather starts turning more severe. I think that it will all work out wonderfully as long as I keep plugging away at things each day and continue to pace myself in such a way that I do not induce a bunch of anxiety and stress upon myself along the way which is much trickier to do than I actually make it sound!
Well, I guess that is enough writing for one morning. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
I love how my totem cow skull looks at the entrance to the new site!
Thanks for reading!
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That Is All For Now!
This post was originally posted to the Hive Blockchain here:
https://peakd.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/apocalyptic-homesteading-day-22
