Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 445)

Hello Everyone!

Wacky dreams, Breaking a news loop, Mindfulness overtly matters, The therapy dilemma & Cutting straw in a high wind!

This morning it is much warmer than it has been lately and I did not even get blasted with cold air when the dogs got let out to roam around the dog yard! After falling asleep relatively early last night I awoke once at around eleven from some bizarre dream and after finally dozing back off I slept until a few minutes after five.

Honestly, the whole time that I was asleep I had some rather wacky dreams but oddly enough (as I sit here still waking up all the way) recalling anything about what was going on in them totally eludes me which may not be an entirely bad thing given that they were stressful in nature.

Anyway, after thinking about stuff a lot yesterday I might have come up with a plan to help me get unhooked from the news cycle. What I am thinking of doing is limiting my news time to once at (or around) noon and then once at (or around) sunset unless of course there is some dire need to do otherwise. At first I was thinking to maybe just look at the news on the weekends but tossed that idea almost immediately because I would probably just wind up binging out on it with that approach and find myself craving it the rest of the week.

Of course I will still stay abreast of the weather and probably inadvertently see a bunch of news just surfing the internet or reading posts on Hive but overall it would be marginal compared to my current intake of the stuff. I know it is perhaps not the best point in history to be tuning out to what is going on in the world... but for the sake of my own well-being I need to either stop it altogether or drastically limit my intake in an effort to mitigate its impact upon me.

Truthfully, I do not know if its the news itself or having to sift through the propaganda and like I said yesterday, 'doing mental gymnastics around the various obstacles presented by forceful narratives, algorithms and advertisers' which is not an enjoyable experience and I am well aware of the toll it has been taking on me to do so. Heck, I have grown so weary of it all that sometimes I do not even care if stuff gets around my mental firewall just so I do not have to expel more attention and focus to repel and/or sidestep it.

What I need to be doing is tuning into the 'localized news' of the weather, the growth cycle of plants, critters and pests and basically just fill my thinking with what is 'going on' in my immediate surroundings. Not that I have wholly neglected that or anything but it does often compete against the other kind of 'news' for my attention. In other words I have found that when I divide my attention between the two the wrong frigging one keeps taking precedence and that little factoid is starting to really get on my nerves to say the least.

There is no simple way to explain all that jazz and why it seems so vital for me to get a grip on it but nonetheless I have to get a grip on it and wiggle myself loose from the habit of doing it one way or another. Thankfully, I have been making a conscious effort on that front for a while now and much like getting my sleep cycle back on track it will just take adjusting my routines and being patient with myself. Being 'mindful' of it all sure helps but that mindfulness is pretty useless without some kind of action on my part to consistently effect change.

Anyway, I guess that it could be said that the road to my own version of 'happiness' is littered with the empty husks of bad ideas, poorly conceived notions, fragmented thoughts, impatience, anger, sorrow and a host of other things that at some point I realized were not exactly helping me. There are also the things like depression, romantic relationships, attending festivals/parties and generally having a social life that equally litter said road due to conscious decisions that I made in an effort to improve not just my sense of well-being but also my life.

Has it worked would be the question and I think like the saying goes 'the proof is in the pudding' and while yeah I do not exist in some 'zen' state at all moments (not that I would ever frigging want to) overall my strategy has been working thus far. It probably would have gone a lot smoother with a therapist or other professional involved but if anyone is going to be rooting around in my mind in an effort to modify my behavior I would rather it is me no matter how perilous doing so might be.

Recently I have had many soul searching moments where I considered getting a remote therapist but I always come up against the wall of trusting the technology being used to share my most private thoughts, hopes, fears, memories and whatnot. It kind of says a lot given that I would also have to blindly trust a total stranger (that I will in the course of things learn nothing about nor become friends with) with all that stuff and that is the part that I do not even blink at in my considerations.

In short I can put my good faith in a stranger operating in a professional capacity but not in the technology used to converse with said stranger. When it comes to that sort of stuff 'trust' after all is the name of the game and it often takes a lot of time for folks to build that trust let alone explore where it leads them. I guess that I can group my overall response into the 'being cagey' category and call it good enough of a reason to not go down that route.

Mainly what I am getting at with all that stuff, is while I can see the benefits of some professional assistance... at this point I have already put in (and continue to put in) the hard work and have arrived at a place both mentally and emotionally where I am actually 'okay' and introducing some random outside influence might not be the best move on my part. It could also potentially undermine some of the progress that I have made for more than just the previously mentioned reasons.

There is no way I can reasonably expect another human to wrap their brain around not just my life but also my lifestyle and the choices that I made to be who, what, where and why I am the way that I am today. What a mess of frustration and misunderstanding that would potentially be and I would not be all that surprised to learn that in short order my therapist was in need of some therapy of their own afterwards!

To wrap that thread up, I want to clarify that it is something that I heavily considered and (up until this point) have firmly rejected but first I am not in all that bad of shape to necessitate such drastic action, secondly its not financially feasible and thirdly I am not omitting it as an option if the first two scenarios change. Basically if I think my mental health has deteriorated to the point of needing a professional (and I can afford it) then I am going to hop to it and 'trust in the technology' and 'consequences' be damned.

Well, that was a heck of a lot to spell out but it is a topic that has been nagging at me for a while now and I feel better having done so even though I do have a small inclination to just delete all those paragraphs. That would of course go against the grain of these entries and ultimately I would know that I had deleted them out of some sense of insecurity, uncertainty and doubt which would only re-enforce those troublesome things. Which yeah is absolutely counter-productive and non-conducive to keeping me moving forward and generally growing as a person.

All that jazz aside. With the warmer weather yesterday I got a bunch of minor stuff done and at some point late in the day I hiked around the outside of the shelter site looking it over and sort of eyeing its potential for a few garden plots on the downhill side... like the idea I detailed in my last entry. There may well be just enough room between the trails and the grape arbors to do a small garden plot but I could not quite determine how much sun the area might get later in the day.

Since there are a bunch of trees that I need to remove I also wanted to get a better look at how many of them have nests in them and if they were active or not. A bunch of the trees do have nests but only a few of the trees that need to be removed have them and I think only one or two of them have nests that are active. It will undoubtedly require more observation to see what is going on but I think that I can time things in such a way that even if I disturb something it will be at the very end of winter when disturbing them will not endanger their survival as much.

As a side note, I also came across a section of irrigation tubing (that leads to that pool downhill) that was totally chewed up by some critter. Once again maybe I had some kind of food or beverage stuff on my hands when installing it or else something was super hungry! Earlier in the day I had been hiking around the meadow and noticed some raccoon scat so it might just be that one or more have moved into the area and I should keep a close eye out for signs of them even though the tooth marks in the tubing look a lot like those of an opossum.

I never thought that I would say this but hopefully those coon hunters let their dogs run in this area again soon and I will not have to deal with whatever it is before it gets into the chicken coop. On that note I may as well start shutting the door on the coop also because I have gotten way out of the habit of doing that this winter. With the door shut and the way they all roost on those tree branches I have in there for them... it would take one heck of a long armed raccoon (or other critter) to reach them let alone get a grip with any purchase!

The sun is up and it is quite warm outside so I might not write the morning away like I have been doing of late. It would be kind of nice to make an early start to the day outdoors instead of staying cooped up in the cabin until the weather cooperates with my comfort. I have so far enjoyed the long writing sessions as a way to kick off my day but it may well be time to start reigning it in some and keeping things more concise in an effort to save time.

Lets meander a bit here and see what emerges. During the course of sharing my life I have encountered many obstacles both internally and externally. The external ones are usually stuff like electricity availability, hardware, software and various facets of technology in general which by and large solutions exist for in most cases but the internal ones... well that is where things grow complicated.

Basically those internal obstacles are a frigging minefield that I somehow manage to weave through by just focusing on spelling out one word at a time and seeing what word it leads me to next. More accurately it is one sentence (or train of thought) at a time but even that seems like too much so I like thinking of it as one word at a time just for simplicity's sake. Determination is (I guess) the key ingredient no matter how many other factors are involved and yeah without it I probably would have crumpled beneath the weight of discouragement long ago.

Alright, it is just after sunset and I broke my 'no coffee at night' rule so that I would not put off finishing this entry until tomorrow. I am still feeling a bit foggy from my afternoon nap but perhaps between the coffee and working on this it will snap me out of it. At least I am not feeling all that moody so that is good and I wonder if limiting my news intake for the day has anything to do with that or if it is just the result of staying on the same sleep cycle, getting at least one nap a day and being productive outdoors.

Unlike most days of late, it was long before noon when I headed outside and started doing my routine chores and I have to say that once I got in motion I had a hard time slowing down again. For some reason I decided to blast some music and of course I got pretty sucked into the rhythm of things so that was assuredly a big factor but also the weather was just frigging awesome... aside from a really strong wind that gusted steadily throughout the day and eventually shredded the rain-fly on the canvas tent!

After knocking out the daily duty of cleaning up the dog yard I hiked over to the meadow with the swing-blade and cut some straw. Mainly I had some idle curiosity about how well the swing-blade would work for the task but I also wanted to get in some exercise and see how much the wind blew stuff around before attempting any mowing with the lawnmower. I am so glad that I did not just fire up the mower and head over there because I would have undoubtedly gotten covered in grit, muck, plant matter and who knows what else! The swing-blade cut things well enough but whoa that frigging wind was blowing so hard that it was blowing even those large sheaves of straw all over the place.

It is worth noting that, I could have cut a lot more straw that way than I did but once I got into the thicker areas I saw that there was still a good bit of muck that had not dried up entirely and since I would need to rake up the wind strewn straw... I decided against getting over-involved with it and called my experiment good enough before heading back to the shelter site with a bundle of straw.

Lately I have mentioned needing to deal with some of the vermin around here and one of the things that I figured out is that I think some of them are living inside the cinder-blocks that make the pillars for the deck. It was really the dogs that brought it to my attention because they almost always sniff at both the tops of the pillars (that are stacked about a meter high) as well as digging around the bases of the pillars.

So, after lots of consideration on what to do about it I re-routed one of the water-hoses and ran water into the two main pillars (from their top) in an effort to drive any hiding critters out. I even had the dogs surround the pillars when I did it but no vermin emerged from them which makes me wonder if they are nesting in there or just occasionally hiding in there from the dogs and/or chickens.

Unfortunately, I could not reach all the pillars with that hose and procrastinated getting a second hose and hooking it to it because by then I just wanted to take a nap. What I am thinking of doing the next time there is fair weather is to jet water into all those pillars as well as the ones on the solar shack. When I did it today I just let the low-pressure water flow into them from the hose but next time I want to use that high pressure nozzle so that I can potentially destroy any nests located within the pillars.

Okay, the evening is dragging on and I have yet to begin editing this entry. Much earlier in the day I did give most if it a mediocre proof-reading so that should make the editing slightly easier. I totally failed to get any pictures today because the phone that I use to take them with was being utilized to play music so I guess that I will have to be creative and dig through the last few days of pictures and see if I can find a usable one. At some point I really should invest in an actual camera but I have yet to justify its expense so I will just have to continue dealing with the images created with my low-grade smart phone and not overthink it too much.

I hope that everyone is doing well (or as well as they can be) and has a nice day/night.