Freezing Weather Prep, So Many Leaves To Rake, Insulating Water Tanks With Leaves & Some Thoughts On Lifestyle Choices
The weather was a little nicer and it was not even all that chilly outside when I woke up a little before dawn and started my day. I have been enjoying getting up early of late, soaking in the morning silence and more or less brooding over stuff as I do my daily writing routine. I am unsure if the brooding is all that healthy (or truly helpful) but I am at least getting all the over-thinking out of my system early in the day even though by the time that I finish the morning writing I often feel like I should just take a nap. Sometimes I actually do close my eyes and let my mind drift off once all the editing and posting is finished and it was kind of funny that when I did it this time that I wound up jumping out of bed and shaking it off just before I could fully drift off to sleep because I realized that I was going to nap the entire day away again if I did.
Since I was in a sort of weird mood and the writing had not really 'gotten everything out of my system' I decided to just do an audio recording and see if anything meaningful/insightful emerged from it. I have been trying to force myself to make more recordings of late and part of my strategy has been to just leave the phone that I use for that on a charger all the time because several times over the last few months I had felt inspired to make some recordings only to find out that particular phone's battery was dead. There is not even anything all that special about that device or anything but for some reason it has always been my 'go to' device for making recordings with and I kind of view it the way that I would view a favorite writing pen or something like that... basically if I use it I will undoubtedly create something! This time in particular I made a little podcast but did not spend a whole lot of time in the audio editor cleaning it up which I often find to be a barrier to me actually getting recordings uploaded and shared because I can get too over-involved.
A little before noon I got started working on stuff outdoors and for the most part I just stayed in motion after that doing a bunch of things around the shelter area in preparation for the first below freezing temperatures of the season. Mostly that work was doing things like emptying the buckets that collect rain water, emptying all the water from the outdoor bathtub, storing away some bulk drinking water jugs, emptying the three gallon chicken watering device and basically dealing with everything that holds water of any type and might freeze. The biggest task (and the one that really wore me out) was getting the two holding tanks on the greenhouse's rain water harvesting system covered with an old canopy tent's tarp and then burying everything under a thick layer of leaves. The part that took the longest with all that jazz was going and gathering tote after tote of leaves from where I was raking them up in the small grove adjacent to to greenhouse. I have no idea how many totes that it took to get everything sufficiently covered but I wound up raking up the leaves from almost half of the grove and a good portion of the main trail which all needed to be done anyway so it was nice accomplishing two things at once.
After all that jazz, I started raking up the leaves in the dog yard once again and although I had wanted to have a small fire with some of them the wind was gusting intensely so I just raked the majority of leaves downhill and close to an area where I am thinking of building a new compost for the chickens. I am still undecided on the design, construction and placement for that new compost but I sure do have the beginnings of a large leaf pile to get it started. Keeping the majority of the leaves raked up in the dog yard each day has become quite a task in and of itself and with all the high winds throughout the day I literally could not rake fast enough to get them all so I just focused on getting them away from the shelter and the fire-pit area.
Autumn is truly in full tilt at this point and aside from some reflexive seasonal affectiveness (that will hopefully pass soon) I am in full tilt with it wrapping up as many projects as I can whilst the weather remains mildly fair. Thankfully I have not felt all that manic trying to get my goals accomplished and if anything I just keep finding layer after layer of resolve inside myself to keep patiently doing one thing at a time and doing it as well as I can before moving on to the next thing. The bi-product of that sort of methodical activity has been interesting and I have days like this one where I wrote a bunch of words in the early a.m. hours, then made a podcast, then accomplished doing a dozen or more outdoor projects, before sliding into the evening re-working a mixtape that I originally created a few months ago but never shared because the behemoth nine and a half hour track was just too damn big of a file size to upload to its respective places online over that dodgy high latency satellite connection that I was on then.
Anyway, having such a productive (and creative) day was rather damn taxing on me and at one point just after dark I totally zonked out for about forty-five minutes before waking back up feeling more focused than I have in quite a few years. I had some pretty intense dreams during that nap and in them I was playing with some sort of giant technological 'ball' and watching it spin around in my mind's eye and occasionally the 'ball' would stop and I would closely examine layers of inter-connectivity that created the overall structure of the 'ball' in all its intricate detail. Hell, for all I know that ball may have been a visualization of my own mind and me giving it the good ole 'once over' just for 'maintenance' reasons! Whatever was going on I felt pretty clear-headed when I woke up and had somehow along the way embraced a sense of well-being that I have yet to even attempt to shake. As dodgy as the times may be I feel good about my wherewithal, my attitude, my morale, my resolve and that I actually have long practice with maintaining a certain 'fortitude' in the face of stressful/dangerous situations without batting an eye along the way even if I do complain about it all every now and then!
What I am getting at with all of that is that I think that it is pretty awesome to be doing what I am doing in life and how well my decades worth of lifestyle choices have put me in a position to get to share what I can share with folks and be setup rather well as far as my personal living space goes. Even though I have only been here for a brief period of time I think that I have done well and with all the various helping hands along the way... a lot more has gotten done than would be able to be done by me alone in that period of time. That is actually a big game changer as far as setting up a small homestead goes or like I have done with setting up a homesteading area inside a larger homestead. Skilled helping hands are assuredly nice but trainable helping hands can be just as beneficial given some patience and basic teaching skills/tactics. As with all things human-related communication is the key ingredient and so far so good on that front here which is why so much has already been accomplished at the homestead in its entirety over the previous four hundred and twenty-eight days.
At this point in everything I feel like I have done so much due diligence over the years that it has finally not so much 'paid off' but been worthwhile as far as lifestyle choices go. Documenting it along the way is a bit intense at times for a number of reasons and often technologically challenging but somehow I navigate it all and have developed my skills along the way into being routines (as far as preparing and sharing content goes) that are easy to execute in order to edit whatever the content is whether it be text, images, audio or video or some bizarre combination of those forms of media. For me it takes a rather simple familiarity with Linux and a handful of free software tools and if I follow the steps (routines) that I have practiced... it works! Often the most challenging part of my sharing media process is the internet connectivity but I think that I finally got that covered here in such a way that I no longer view it as a barrier and have been able to recently share larger file size media like the video project, more podcasts and mixtape tracks which are always fun for me.
Well, I am going to just wrap this up and see what all that I can accomplish before dawn! Having started writing this a few hours ago sure helped me to get a jump-start on my day and now I have to get all the editing and publishing done which is always a process! I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
The leaf pile insulating the two rain water barrels!
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-428
