The Fantastica Chronicles Day 420!
The Outdoor Kitchen Blues, Sorting Out The Greenhouse, Washing Laundry In A Barrel & Working On Some Music For The Apocalypse
The morning was rather overcast and although it sprinkled a little it never quite rained hard and even the sprinkling did not last that long. With the rainy weather came some warmer temperatures so it was nice not needing to bundle up in warm clothes nor have to run the heater to dispel the cold after I let the dogs outside and brewed some espresso on the outdoor stove. I know that those kinds of warm mornings are going to grow fewer and further between over the coming weeks so I have been savoring them when they occur of late and mentally preparing myself for the rapidly oncoming winter. It is kind of funny that the only part of the colder months that I really dread at this point in my life is having to go outside to brew my espresso!
I am of course still hoping to figure out a way to use the limited materials at my disposal to partially enclose the porch so that I can at least brew my espresso out of the rain but as of yet no good solutions have presented themselves and I still feel uninclined to hack something together with the materials that I do have. Some of the difficulty with enclosing and/or putting a roof over the area of the porch where the stove is that the top of the 'cube' that makes up the shelter and the roof that covers the shelter are at two different heights and the top of the shelter door is in the way of just extending a roof off of the cube that has a sufficient enough slope/pitch to shed the water away from the porch. The other option is to extend the existing pitched roof that covers the shelter to also cover the porch but since the edge of the existing roof (that already partially covers the porch) is basically created by a 'fly rafter' that is not sufficient by itself to support another four feet of roof so I would have to add more posts, headers and rafters to accomplish it which is where the material shortage enters into the equation and stymies the entire affair.
When I was originally setting up the shelter I was thinking of attaching the porch in a different way than how I wound up later doing it and that change (although a good one) has made putting a roof over the porch rather challenging. Originally the porch was going to be about a foot lower than where it is now and thus I would have been able to easily extend a roof off of the cube of the shelter itself without it interfering with the door and I would still have had sufficient headroom for a pitched roof which is not the case the way things are now. The main reason that I raised the porch to its current height is because I wanted it to run the length of the shelter so that I could eliminate having a mucky pathway from the dog yard gate to the shelter door and have the gate open onto the porch itself. The only way that I could have set the porch lower was by digging out a massive amount of dirt and then installing a french drain and some drainage piping so the drain could evacuate the water somewhere else further downhill. In short I chose not to open up a massive can of worms for myself by digging into the side of the hill and compromised by raising the height of the porch. There are some other factors to all of that but hopefully you get the general idea of how it affected my plans for enclosing the porch.
On a different note, after doing my usual morning chores I set to working on getting more stuff moved from the greenhouse to the arched room but soon realized that the only way that I am going to successfully accommodate everything into the arched room from the greenhouse is to add some more shelving below the shelves that I have already made in there and even then there is just some stuff that either will not fit or that I do not want to store in there at all like solvents, paint and other potentially flammable stuff. I have probably never really mentioned it but I do not mess around when it comes to flammable stuff or stuff that is just noxious or toxic and never store them in places that they will be around the animals or my actual living space. The only real exception that I make with that stuff is propane and that is because I need it for cooking, heating and occasionally hot water and it is rather 'safe' as far as that sort of thing goes.
Once I got done moving more stuff into the arched room I shuffled the stuff in the greenhouse around a good bit to make it easier to work in. I then emptied all the mold riddled fabric items from the fifty gallon barrel that I use exclusively for washing clothes in or when the need arises a holding tank for shower water that I pump with a sump pump. After washing the barrel out I added water to it and then added about a quarter of a cup of bleach which is about as strong of a mix as I would want to use when washing clothes and even then I only add the black colored clothes to it once there is sufficient enough water to dilute the bleach enough without discoloring the clothes. Anyway, I used a broken shovel handle to poke the fabric items that I wanted to wash down below the water level in the barrel and as the barrel filled with water I kept adding more fabric stuff into it, poking it all down and stirring it all around until the barrel was full of both water and fabric items and I could not stir it anymore. My goal with this initial 'wash' is to just kill the living mold, sanitize the fabric and remove the bulk of the dirt. I will let all of it sit overnight and then pull it out afterwards and give the remaining fabric items (mostly blankets) the same treatment.
The next phase of washing all that fabric stuff will be to use the water in the barrel to wash off some outdoor items and then let the remaining water sit until the bleach evaporates before pouring it out into one of the garden beds. It is worth noting that if the bleach water in the barrel is clean enough after I remove the first 'load' of laundry then I will undoubtedly use it to do the second load but going off past experience the water will probably be way too damn filthy and a fresh batch of bleach water will be required to wash the next load. Once both loads are finished with their first wash I will then re-wash all of it in much smaller sized loads (with more bleach water) that are small enough that I can stir and basically agitate them with the wooden shovel handle. Ideally I would then wash everything in Borax (sodium tetraborate) to kill off any remaining mold spores and impregnate the fabric against mold but I have not seen a single box of it for sale in the stores for many months now and keep failing to remember to look online for ordering it.
Anyway, doing the laundry wore me out a good bit so I wrapped up the day doing work outdoors a bit earlier than I usually do and wound up working on a new mixtape track for several hours and was still working on it by the time the sun set and well into the evening. It was actually a continuation of working on a mixtape that I had started the day before and I basically just made an 'extended' version of the previous track which is something that I occasionally enjoy doing just because I envision some sort of segue from one genre into another that makes the track much more 'hardcore' than it originally was. As with most of my mixtape tracks I want them to more or less tell a story and those 'extended' version tracks are often the 'full story' whereas the shorter tracks are the 'condensed story' and sometimes I want to hear one or the other so it is nice having different versions to choose from depending on what kind of mood I am in.
Well, I should probably just wrap this all up and get on with doing whatever I am going to do with the day. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Evidence of me doing my laundry!
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.
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That Is All For Now!
This post was originally posted to the Hive Blockchain here: https://peakd.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-420
