The Fantastica Chronicles Day 421!

Diversifying My Crypto Holdings, Setting Up A Cardano Node, Harvesting Ashes & Patching A Rain Barrel

  It was an overcast and rainy morning and it kept raining on and off until the early afternoon. So, I spent the majority of the early part of the day hanging out with the dogs in the shelter and reading about various cryptocurrency projects online. I also decided to give the Publish0x platform a try and after the sign-up and writer application process was complete I was able to publish my first article posted rather easily. For now I am just going to share these posts on there each day to help boost my lagging finances but since I can have multiple 'blogs' and each with their own title (subject matter) on the platform I might eventually write some other stuff just for it so I am looking forward to seeing how all of that works out. Honestly I like the platform so far but am not all that excited at the prospect of managing another account that will require me to monitor it for comments and so forth but I really have to do everything that I can at this point to have more revenue coming in each month especially since I had to upgrade my cellular plan so that I could have unlimited hotspot data for my online endeavors.

  The other thing that I spent the morning doing was to diversify a few of my cryptocurrency holdings so that I did not have all my eggs in one basket by just holding HIVE, HBD and eXode cards which are all reliant on the Hive blockchain. I have still been mining on the Pi Network but since it still has no value I do not really count that as anything other than an ongoing experiment. There is also the NIM that I have been CPU mining for the last few months but its price is really low and I have yet to acquire enough of it to make trading and/or selling it worthwhile. After reviewing my meager 'holdings' I decided to look into ADA (Cardano) and after a bit of tinkering I got a node for it up and running but did not have enough in other cryptocurrencies to buy ADA off an exchange so that I could stake some of it and start getting returns off the staked tokens. The ADA node works well enough though and aside from it taking forever to download and verify the blockchain I think that it was the easiest node setup that I have encountered thus far. What I am hoping to do with the ADA is to use the Ethererum (ETH) and Loopring (LRC) that I earn from Publish0x to buy the ADA that I need for staking purposes which is the only way to earn more of them!

  All that jazz aside, it eventually stopped raining and got sunny outside so I got my work clothes on and got to doing stuff outdoors. After doing my usual daily chores I drained the water from the barrel that I am using to wash all that laundry in because it was incredibly filthy and there was no way that I could use it to wash more laundry with. It was in fact so filthy that I had to leave the laundry in the barrel and fill it with water again so that I could give everything a good rinsing before wringing it all out and hanging it up to dry which I opted not to do until after the laundry sits in the barrel for a bit longer. I also still need to make more room in the greenhouse so that I can install more clotheslines in it to accommodate hanging up all the laundry that I am washing so that it can dry out. I did shuffle a little of the stuff stored in the greenhouse around but started to get frustrated so I just stopped working on it altogether and decided that it was a project for another day.

  Once I was done fooling around with the laundry I spent some time digging out all the ashes from my fire-pit and spreading them over some of the compost mound more as a way to utilize the ashes than to seal the mound against flies. There was also a lot of partially burnt paper and cardboard in the fire-pit and instead of separating it from the ashes I added it to the compost also. The main reason that I wanted to empty the fire-pit out was because I think that I am going to install at least one of my solar panels on the chicken coop and like I said a few days ago the fire-pit is way to close to it and I do not want to risk damaging the panel. Moving the fire-pit is not as straightforward as it might seem because of how the terrain and the trees are in the shelter area but hopefully over the coming days I will figure out a good place to relocate it to. I am considering just converting the current fire-pit into another compost mound so that the chickens will have another mound to forage in but I am as of yet undecided on whether I want a compost mound on the uphill side of the coop or if I should build one on the downhill side of the coop where the drainage is better.

  Anyway, with all the rain and overcast skies the past few days I have yet to be able to apply another coat of polyurethane to the broken glass of that big solar panel and I noticed that where the polyurethane was applied too thickly the other day that it has turned milky. I may wind up having to clear out some room in the greenhouse and move that project into it because it looks like it will be raining on and off for most of the week here and by Thursday a tropical storm is going to roll into the area which means there will be a heck of a lot more rain! I really just want to wrap that project up, get the panel installed on the chicken coop and move onto getting its micro-grid setup so that I can perhaps start powering all my communication devices from it so that they will not go down if the grid fails. I am still at a loss as to where to setup all the batteries and charge controls but I have been entertaining the idea of moving the solar shack closer to the shelter and just using it to house everything. I will of course need to look at insulating the shack for the winter but considering how small it is that should not be all that difficult especially if I just insulate the around the batteries themselves.

  Late in the day I tinkered with my rainwater harvesting system some more and finally patched that barrel that someone shot a hole through that was keeping it from being able to be completely filled. All that I did to repair the holes was cut off the protruding plastic (from the bullet's exit hole), clean around both holes with bleach water, dry the cleaned areas and then apply a few layers of black 'Zip-System' tape. The reason that I added it in layers is because over time the UV from the sun will degrade the tape and I did not want that to happen before I can find something else to cover the tape with and thus protect it from the UV. I am thinking that I might just put some duct tape over the Zip tape for now but even duct tape eventually breaks down in UV so in the long run I am thinking of either applying some paint over the tape or perhaps even some kind sealer that contains a UV blocker. For now the barrel is holding water and it does not appear to be leaking so that is good and I can move forward with adding more holding tanks to the system.

  Well, all in all it was a pretty good day but whoa by late afternoon I was pretty wiped out and wound up taking such a long nap that it was well after dark by the time that I woke up and I was feeling entirely to rested to fall back asleep and found myself up rather late into the evening because of it but hell it was a very refreshing nap to say the least so no complaints there! I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

One of the patches that I applied to that rain barrel!

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-421