Hello Everyone!
A brief introduction: 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.
TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.
The Fantastica Chronicles Day 234-240!
Day 234. (TFC Re-Enforcing The New Dam At Cold Water Spring And Installing an Overflow Pipe, Repairing My Dog Yard Gate, Planting Some Beans & Making More Bio-Char)
The chilly weather stayed well into the afternoon which is how it has more or less been for the entire last week but at least the wind was not gusting and cold like it has been doing. As long as I stayed in the sun or just stayed busy the early part of the day was not all that bad. I never quite put away my winter clothes and of late I have been having to wear them more often than not and then shedding them as the day wears on before slowly putting them on again as the night approaches. It is always such a diverse mix of weather this time of year in the mountains here and I have assuredly learned that it is best to just be prepared and not to put away the gloves, chapstick and warm clothes until the first few weeks of May or else be caught unprepared when the weather goes from icy cold to pleasantly hot throughout the day and sometimes multiple times throughout the day.
Rather early in the day I bundled up in my warm jumpsuit that recently got massively repaired by one of my fellow homesteaders, my heavy coat and a warm hat before going down to the creek to work on the Cold Water spring site. I have to start using names for these springs because it is driving me crazy having to explain which one I am working on! Anyway, with all the changes that have occurred at the spring site since that recent flooding (and my dam building efforts) I have been pleasantly surprised to see that the spring's main pool is still holding several feet of water. The secondary pool (that I made after the flooding) is also holding a lot of water which is awesome because it will hopefully help keep the initial pool full. The main reason that the pools are holding water so well is that there is a lot of creek water now flowing into both pools because the big dam got breached by the flooding and the creek is also running rather high at the moment.
That spring being in close proximity to the creek has always been problematic which is part of why I have been excavating the bank so that I can 'distance' the two water sources from each other a bit and also to help ensure that the spring site itself does not eventually just become part of the creek. To say that it is a tricky prospect doing the above would be an understatement and although the flooding has helped (and also hindered) with developing the site... I know that eventually nature will run its course and the site will be compromised without a lot of careful planning (and work) and even then it is a gamble because the forces of nature which in this case are rushing water pushing logs, trees, large and small rocks along with it... is well... pretty damn hard to contend with.
Recently with the loss and destruction of that intake tubing and filter at the reservoir on the other side of the creek I got the lesson of 'battling nature' rammed home for me and now I am a bit more shrewd about the entire scenario of utilizing any water near the creek. All that said I have not given up or anything but moving forward with the water projects near the creek I think that I am going to always keep in mind the changing nature of the creek and the importance of securing all the plumbing materials against being washed away.
Back to what I was getting at with Cold Water spring. With my warm clothes on (because it is always much colder near the creek) I retrieved a piece of one and a half inch pipe that is about twelve feet long and headed down to the site to see if I could perhaps 'tap' the pool at a higher elevation now that the water level is much higher and create an overflow. I was not exactly sure how I was going to accomplish doing it but it had been nagging at me to try it for the better part of a week.
I wound up embedding the pipe in the dam between the main pool and the secondary pool almost directly above where the now completely buried two inch orange tubing runs out of the bottom of the pool. I packed the dam around the new pipe with a bunch of root mass that I removed from the top of a nearby rock and then packed a bunch of soil and clay in on top of that as well as a bunch of rocks to seal the dam better and to ensure that the pipe would remain in place. The dam came out pretty good but I will need to somehow secure the pipe against being washed away the next time it floods. I am thinking to possibly keep building that particular dam higher with more rocks and dirt and getting a bunch of vegetation growing on it to help hold it in place and just tying the pipe itself off to some large roots with some strips of inner-tube rubber.
It is worth noting that the two inch orange intake tubing that I initially installed at the spring site not only survived the flooding but most of the tubing located beyond the first pool (whose bottom it is situated in) is now mostly buried beneath about six inches of small rocks and silt so I doubt that any flood at this point will ever disrupt or dislodge it because it is now effectively part of the creek bed itself.
I have been referring to that piece of tubing as 'the drain' for the spring pool because I have mainly been using it when doing excavation work to drain the pool or fill it by plugging the 'drain' which has worked really well. What I have been thinking of lately though is perhaps putting a ninety degree elbow on the end of the tubing in the pool and adding a section of pipe vertically to the elbow to act as the intake at a higher point in the pool. As much as I like the idea of utilizing that tubing for an intake I am unsure if giving up such a convenient 'drain' would be worth it in the long run. For now I am just going to focus my efforts on the newly installed one and a half inch pipe as the main intake and see how things progress but I might eventually utilize both as intakes for a gravity-fed water system.
On a different note, my dog yard gate has been a pain in the butt ever since I re-hung it and it was especially problematic when I could not use my right hand for the better part of a week. I really like having good ingresses and egresses and to say it has been annoying me does not quite convey just how much it has been driving me fucking crazy especially since I could not do anything to fix it! So with my hand that is not really healed enough for such work, I spent some time fixing the latch and also putting a sort of arch over the gate that braces the post that the gate is hinged on to stop it from sagging. It worked pretty good but I noticed after doing it that the frame of the gate itself is sagging every time that it swings so I will have to devote some time to fixing it soon as well once my hand is a bit more healed. I would have fixed it then but I should not have been using power tools quite yet and the only reason that I fixed what I did was that I just could not stand struggling with the gate anymore!
Anyway, late in the afternoon I had another fire in my dog yard fire pit so that I could make more ashes and bio-char for my compost pile. Since I have been making several garden beds I have been collecting lots of sticks (from cleaning up the garden areas) and burning them each day along with some of that split pine wood that I have stacked by the fire pit. The pine is probably not all that great for bio-char but it sure burns hot and makes good ashes. Having those fires routinely is slowly becoming a part of my weekly chores and although a few times it was nice to sit by the fire(s) for the most part I just load the fire pit up with wood, set it alight, go back to whatever else I was doing around the shelter site, letting it burn down and then later making sure it is put out before I go to bed.
On a few occasions it was really nice to escape the chill of the wind by getting by the fire for a few minutes and it has lead me more and more to thinking about having a fire as a constant 'feature' either as a bread oven or in an outdoor firebox of some sort that heats an oven. I even looked up several outdoor oven designs and built a small scale model with some flat rocks just to have a visual aid. I am rather excited about the prospect of having a good outdoor oven and although I have other projects that have a higher priority... I think that I want to start getting the materials together for building one and pick a location to start piling said materials at.
Well, I have rambled on enough for one morning and although I am absolutely stoked to be able to type again I better get this wrapped up and get the heck on with my day and see what I can make of it now that it has stopped raining and the sun is struggling to come out from behind the storm clouds. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 235. (TFC Working At Cold Water Spring, Roughing Out An Area And Gathering Materials For An Outdoor Oven, Making More Biochar & Feeling Good Seeing All The Tiny Corn Plants Growing)
It was quite the rainy morning and pretty damn chilly to boot but it eventually got warmer as the day wore on and per usual of late it started getting chilly again as the night approached. The wind gusted a good bit throughout the day as well but eventually let up enough late in the day that I could 'safely' have a fire in my outdoor fire pit to make more ashes and biochar. I say 'safely' because with all the recent rain everything is pretty saturated in the woods here but given how much leaf mass there is I do not like to take any risks in that regard.
Early in the day I once again bundled up in some warm clothes and headed to the Cold Water spring site with a piece of one of those sections of ABS pool heater as a possible intake filter (or the makings for one) to see if I could somehow attach it to that blue-green overflow pipe that I installed in the dam the day before. Although I was able to attach the unit to the pipe without too much difficulty it did not fit all that well into the pool nor allow for quite enough water to be drawn into the pipe as I would like it to. Since it was only a single four foot section I had my doubts about that last bit but connecting three or four of them together (like I did at the last place I lived to draw water from the creek) was not really an option because of the spring pool's size but I thought it worth trying nonetheless.
Since the flooding has mostly receded I removed that barrel that I had in the spring's pool (protecting the intake area for the orange tubing from silt buildup) and after digging around in the silt that had accumulated there I pulled up the end of the orange tubing and was able to pull it over a few feet and position it under the rock where the blue-green pipe terminates. I know that I said yesterday that I just wanted to keep that tubing as a 'drain' for the pool but once I moved it and unclogged the downhill end of it I was so impressed by the flow rate (volume of water) and albeit water pressure that I am seriously reconsidering what purpose the tubing will serve. Before, when the pool was much more shallow and the water was being drawn from the bottom of the pool there was not much volume nor water pressure produced by it and it is pretty amazing to see how much difference moving the end of the tubing to the top of the now deeper pool made. How things turn out at that spring site depends a lot on whether the water in the pool drops in depth again or if it remains at its current depth so for now I think that keeping my options open on what to do there is the best approach.
As a side note, that other piece of orange tubing (with the intake filter attached to it) apparently washed up (during the flash flooding) into a neighbor's yard so hopefully it is not lost after all! Given the quarantine and all it might be a bit tricky contacting them so that we can retrieve it but at least it has been located! It is kind of funny because one of my fellow homesteaders spotted it from the road right after I mentioned to a different fellow homesteader that if they happened to be driving along the creek in that direction to please look along the creek for the tubing and although they failed to find it themselves a person that I did not ask to do it found it. I knew the tubing was somewhere downstream but I had no idea it was so close!
During the afternoon I scouted around more for a good place to build that outdoor oven/stove that I mentioned yesterday and although I had a general area in mind picking a specific location meant I would be more inclined to get started on the project. There is a big rock pile near where I have that glass tree stump table and after moving a bunch of smaller rocks I was delighted to find that there is a long and rather straight boulder protruding from the ground there that might make an excellent 'rear' of the oven's firebox. The only real difficulty with the boulder is that it does not have a whole lot of height to it so I would have to build upon it to form the rear of the oven itself but I do not think that will be all that big of a deal.
Since the boulder is basically 'long and low' I am considering just making the firebox much larger than I first imagined it to be and perhaps being able to create two ovens and a stove-top above it. I even retrieved (from the boulder area at the homestead proper) some nice stainless steel parts from an old stove that might aid in the construction. There are some more non-stainless parts as well as a glass oven door that I still need to retrieve which would make for a pretty neat outdoor oven door. I think that I might be getting over-ambitious with that entire project but there are plenty of rocks for the project already located there and the big clay deposit (that I want to use to seal between the rocks) is located only about seven meters away... so who knows how that will all work out!
On a different note, I went around and looked at all the stuff that I am growing in the greenhouse at the shelter site as well as all the stuff that I planted in the gardens and wow it is pretty awesome how far along the potatoes are coming, how healthy the blueberry bush looks and just how many tiny corn plants are starting to pop up. The potatoes in the greenhouse are doing really well and have grown so fast I am rethinking having planted them in small containers and thinking that when I add some more soil on top of them that I might transplant some of them into either more small containers or build a large outdoor one for them.
As far as the greenhouse goes I need to prioritize running a water line into it just to make watering everything in it more convenient. Lately what I have been doing is letting a small tote get filled with water that drips through a hole in the plastic of the greenhouse roof which has worked really well given all the recent rain but it is not a good long-term solution because I will eventually need to patch the plastic so that it is not dripping water onto the wooden frame of the greenhouse and potentially cause it to rot faster than it normally would. What I keep picturing doing in the greenhouse for water is setting up a small sink that I have and putting a bucket under it to catch the water. The water would not be gray-water and the sinks primary function would be just to have a place to rinse dirt off my hands and wash the tools off so using a bucket for the drain should not be all that big of a deal.
Anyway, all that jazz aside my life has continued to remain largely the same (except for losing two-thirds on my meager income) and it has been rather interesting watching how not just my fellow homesteaders but everyone I know has coped with the changes that have occurred for them. Honestly I think that the 'isolation' and introspection time has made folks begin to realize some stark truths about not just themselves but also their priorities, their wants, needs and ambitions... or lack thereof and the world around them. Mostly what I have noticed is that lots of folks are gardening and working on sustainability projects and although there is a good bit of whining about 'how things used to be' for the most part folks seem to be adjusting well to the changing landscape and perhaps even growing in ways that will prove beneficial to themselves, their loved ones and the world around them.
The entire scenario currently playing out has definitely driven home just how appreciative I am of my own simplistic lifestyle and that any 'adjustments' to my psyche that help me to cope were ones that I made years ago. Having spent much of my adult life alone you would think that I would have a bunch of advice on the subject but really all I can come up with is: Be kind to yourself and all living creatures, do not breathe anxiety into the world and if you cannot be your own best friend then you cannot reasonably expect others to be your friend.
Well, I have rambled on enough for one rainy morning and am going to wrap this up before I get over-involved dissecting the current zeitgeist and feeling entirely too damn smug about my life choices and priorities. I failed to take any pictures yesterday so as soon as this rain slacks up I am going to go hike around and get a few while the sun is still at a low enough angle on the horizon that it does not make taking pictures all that difficult. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 236. (TFC Waking Up With Too Much Pain From My Fractured Sternum, Working On The Secondary Pool's Dam At The Cold Water Spring Site, Trying To Recall The Last Day I Did Not Work & Taking A long Nap Full Of Bizarre Dreams)
It was chilly and raining this morning when I woke up to a throbbing pain in my chest which was made a little worse when I sat up and something in my sternum once again 'popped' in such a way that it left me feeling a bit queasy. I have had plenty of bruised, broken and fractured ribs in my lifetime but this sternum injury is a whole different ball of wax even if it is a good bit easier to deal with than the aforementioned sort of injuries.
I am sure that my continuing to work every day since the injury has not helped things at all and although I occasionally get some assistance from some of my fellow homesteaders there is still a lot of stuff that requires my own skills (and effort) to accomplish. So I just keep trudging along, pacing myself and doing my best not to exacerbate my own pain and discomfort whilst still being productive. It might all amount to a recipe for disaster but hell 'doing nothing' could prove to be equally disastrous.
Anyway, after getting up before the sun and doing all my morning writing stuff I headed down to the Cold Water spring site and spent some time building up the dam on the downhill side of the secondary pool. There was not anything all that glamorous about it because all I did was use a bunch of rocks to build up and better seal the existing dam that I built last week after the flash flooding occurred. The more I work on those dams the more I wonder if the next flood will wash them away before I can build them strong enough to withstand the rushing water and especially the big dam that protects both the pools.
While I was working in the area I also retrieved a piece of one and a half inch irrigation tubing that was a part of that spring's gravity-fed water system (pre-flood) and sleeved one end of it up into the orange tubing that runs to the spring's main pool. I positioned the other end of the tubing about twenty feet downstream at a place in the bank where I later want to run a water line through the bank so that I can avoid a big boulder that has previously forced me to run a short portion of irrigation tubing in the creek and around said boulder. Hopefully after a few days of 'jetting' the water into the bank at that spot it will bore a hole through it large enough to accommodate the tubing. I will of course have to keep feeding the tubing into the hole each day to continue 'jetting' it out but considering that the bank I am trying to pierce is only a few feet thick it will perhaps only take a few days to make it through to the other side given that I do do not hit any rocks in the way.
At one point when I was close to finishing up working on the water systems for the day I made a misstep on a big rock near the creek and had to make the choice to either fall or step into the creek with my shoe and dry foot. Well it was not much of a choice as much as it was a reaction and needless to say I did not fall but came away with a thoroughly drenched foot and shoe. Given my proneness to calamity of late I took it all as a sign to go take a nap and perhaps in the process get my chest to quit hurting so damn much that it can distract me from doing something so simple as walking from one large rock to the next.
During my hike back to the shelter for a nap I got to wondering exactly when the last time was that I actually took a day off from doing physical work and although I clearly recall taking my birthday off late last month... I have absolutely no idea of any 'days off' before or after that since the end of my winter downtime. One way or another I am going to need to break the 'over-working' cycle before I waste all the warmer months grinding away on projects and not taking the time to enjoy any of the fruits of my labors. I must be feeling rather stressed to let this 'no days off' thing to get this far along so I better start keeping track of my days a little better and appropriately schedule some leisure time in as well.
Well, I am writing this post late at night because I want to have my morning free so that I can (you guessed it) work on some stuff early in the day. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 237. (TFC Axing Out Stumps, Grooming The Dog Yard, Creating Another Terraced Garden Bed Across The Creek & Planting More Corn)
The day was rainy and chilly to begin with but eventually it warmed up rather nicely. Not wanting to waste my morning just because of some foul weather I spent some time remastering a few entries from my 'A Story' book that are audio only entries.
What I mean by 'audio only' is that the entries themselves are not in the original text of the book and I only made audio versions of them when I was initially writing the book. Like most things that I create the actual content of the recordings were a bit of a mystery to me but after listening to the first audio file (there are only four of them currently but I think there may actually be more of them somewhere) I was a bit surprised that I actually mention the year 2020 and after reflecting on things I think that it is the only time throughout the entirety of the book that I mention an actual year and given the current scenario of the 'world' I felt inspired to remaster them and turn the mono wav file audio clips into stereo mp3 files so that I could share them. If you are interested in listening to them you can find them as both wav and mp3 files here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=16O2Xd61EVR-BYHpqYbsMKNFz82A0YKRV
After finishing the audio editing and chatting with some of my fellow homesteaders I decided to finally get some more of those small tree stumps around the shelter area removed by axing them out. The stumps are ones that were per-existing before I moved here and as stated in many of my earlier entries they have been a pain in the butt the entire time that I have been here. I have never actually stopped removing them nor gotten them all removed as of yet so go figure! The stumps around the shelter itself I had mostly grown accustomed to walking around but I reached a point where they just 'had to go' and since most of the roots were dead they were pretty easy to axe out without disturbing the ground overly much which is good because part of why I had avoided doing it was because I did not want to make a bunch of mud holes around the shelter site whilst trying to remove them. Even though there are plenty more stumps around the woods here that need removing at least now I do not have to navigate around the ones at the shelter site each day and night.
Once I was done with all of that I decided to 'groom' the dog yard by raking up all the small stones (that continually pop up from the ground because of the rain and high foot traffic) as well as all the small sticks. Since I am trying to get grass to grow throughout the dog yard I look at it like everywhere that there is a rock is a place where no vegetation will grow. I actually raked the entire dog yard (even where there were no rocks or sticks) to help loosen up the soil a bit and perhaps stimulate the grass to spread into the bare areas. Over the coming days I should probably use a hard rake on those areas as well to really break up the soil and spread more grass seed into them while the ground is still saturated from all the recent heavy rain events that we have had here.
During the afternoon I went across the creek and scratched out another terraced garden bed directly above the last one that I created over there. Although the new one is only about three feet tall and about fifteen feet wide it will assuredly accommodate a good amount of corn plants. The creation of the garden bed wore me out (because I am still doing most stuff one-handed) so after taking a break from it for awhile I later returned to it, shoveled the loamy layer of it to the downhill side (which helped to 'level' the terrace) and got two of the three rows of corn planted in it.
In the other garden beds in that area across the creek I noticed that perhaps only one out of every four corn kernels that we planted over a week ago are popping up and I am unsure if it is the soil there, the not-so-great sunlight or the wildlife that is responsible for it but I went ahead and over-seeded the new garden bed just to see what happens. It is probably a combination of all those things that has resulted in only a quarter of the corn kernels/seeds turning into plants but it is also a bit early to judge if the plants I am seeing are the only ones that are growing or if some of them have yet to break the surface of the soil.
As a side note, there is a place along the creek where I have been crossing back and forth which is a series of boulders that are positioned in such a way that I can hop from one to another of them to cross and re-cross the creek. The boulder in the center of the creek has had a lot of algae starting to grow on the top of it recently and although I have thus far avoided slipping on it... I did not want to keep risking a fall! So before I crossed (to plant the corn) I used a large wire brush to remove as much of the algae as I could and then splashed a bunch of water onto the boulder to remove all the remaining residue which worked out pretty well and now that particular boulder is nowhere near as slick as it was before. I will undoubtedly have to repeat that de-sliming of the boulder and I think that next time I might bring some sand (or silt) with me to thoroughly scrub the surface with as well because the wire brush alone took a lot of effort to remove the algae.
All that jazz aside, I (like most folks currently) have been stressing a good bit over my financial scenario. Mostly having lost half of my monthly Patreon funds (because of the economic conditions going on) I no longer have the peace of mind that each month I can at least afford a month's supply of dog food. At first I was not super concerned because I have some odd jobs that I can get paid to do at the homestead proper but given my recent injuries I have not been able to continue on those projects even though all the materials to do so are here. It is all a bit frustrating to say the least but one way or another I am sure that I will make it through and somehow make ends meet.
On the bright side of things though, a few months back (before the economy got super dodgy) I had bought two months of dog food during my monthly supply run and although at this point I no longer have a full month of 'extra' dog food on hand I do have an 'extra' two weeks worth which means I will not actually run out of the stuff until the middle of the month. The way things were before I would buy a month's worth at the beginning of each month (after my Patreon funds were processed) and then would run out right when the next month started so running out in the middle of the month gives me an extra few weeks to come up with the necessary funds each month which is nice.
Considering that I have been scraping by on about a hundred dollars a month ever since my arrival here the current scenario of making a little less than forty dollars a month just will not do and unlike most folks I do not actually qualify for any of the money being doled out by the state or the federal government at the moment. There is nothing new to me in 'being part of the minority' that falls through the cracks and having been clutching the edge of my own personal 'crevice' for most of my life... my grip is rather unwavering so I doubt that even all of this current upheaval will see me tumbling down into oblivion.
At this point I sometimes wonder if I actually enjoy not having a financial 'safety net' or I just enjoy enduring hardship but hell as long as I do not fall and the dogs are fed, have a cozy shelter and a healthy life... I will abstain from overly complaining about my own circumstances. Since the folks here feed me it is not like I am going to starve or anything but damn it I miss the independence that I had attained at the last place that I lived and hopefully I can somehow re-gain it here eventually.
Well, I guess that is enough early morning rambling and I better wrap things up and get on with my day. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 238. (TFC Staying Indoors On A Very Windy Day, Replacing The Igniter In A Gas Oven, Fixing A Door & Taking A Day Off From Physically Demanding Work)
The day began as a rather rainy one and as the morning progressed the winds picked up and by early afternoon they were gusting like crazy. I am a bit surprised that the winds did not blow over any nearby trees because there are a few standing dead ones that could topple at any time. The winds were also the strongest we have gotten here since I finished enclosing the greenhouse and I was very happy to see that although it 'billowed' a lot it did not tear any of the plastic lose. I will have to inspect it for tearing (where the plastic is anchored down with screws and pieces of wood) but any such tearing will be easy enough to repair so no biggie there.
With all the high winds, the rain, my current injuries and lack of taking any days off over the last many weeks I decided that perhaps it would be best to just rest and let my aching sternum heal a bit. The cut on my hand is mostly healed up at this point which is pretty fantastic even though it still is not back to one hundred percent its former usability. There is still the possibility that I could accidentally tear it back open because although the layers below the skin have healed the 'top' layer has yet to form a scar and there is a 'hardness' to the tissue surrounding the wound that makes tightly gripping things with that hand uncomfortable and albeit awkward.
Early in the afternoon I went down to the homestead proper and did some repair work on the gas oven there because the new igniter for it came in the mail a few days ago. When I originally looked for a replacement part for the oven I could not find an igniter for less than fifty dollars but after doing some intensive online searching I found one for sixteen dollars which seems like a much more reasonable price for such a simple part. The only difference that I could tell between the cheaper part and the other more expensive one is that the wires on the end of the igniter (that connect to the AC electric wiring of the stove) lacked a plug on the end of them. So I used the fire-resistant wire-nuts that came with the new unit and harvested the plug from the old unit to make it work. I am never really fond of working on gas devices (especially gas devices with electrical components) but thankfully replacing the igniter was very straightforward and actually pretty damn easy.
While I was at the homestead proper I noticed that one of the exterior doors was not closing properly nor was the 'catch' actually landing properly on the strike plate. So while I was there with the tools in hand (from working on the oven) I loosened the screws holding the door knob and with the aid of a fellow homesteader we lifted the handle a bit to force the 'catch' downwards and I then re-tightened the screws which fixed that problem rather well. Normally I would just move the striker plate but since the door is hung in a metal frame that just is not an option. The other thing on the door that I fixed was actually a part of the frame along the top which I can only describe as a 'lip' and since the frame has sagged the 'lip' was stopping the top of the door from closing completely. Said 'lip' is intended to keep rain from penetrating into the doorway but since there is a porch over that door I just bent the 'lip' out of the way which accommodated the door to both shut completely and actually maintain a better seal when it is shut.
Since there was a thunderstorm supposedly on its way I decided to just hang out with the dogs in the shelter until it blew over and although it did rain some (as well as the winds continuing to gust) the thunderstorm itself never materialized and I eventually just dozed off and took a really long nap until a few hours before dark. By the time I woke up the rain had let up, the sun was out and the wind had died down and although I probably could have been productive I instead opted to read stuff online and get my new phone setup. Thanks to a contribution that I got I was able to finally afford a phone card for the phone and complete the activation process. The service here is total crap (even with the cellular repeater) but I can at least get text messages now and hopefully unlock everything that I have been locked out of for many months because I did not have a number to receive text at for everything that requires two-factor authentication. Basically it cost me somewhere around eighty dollars to get the phone and pay the first months service just so that I can unlock my bank account, get a new debit card and also unlock my cryptocurrency exchange account as well. I still have a bunch of hoops to jump through to change the phone numbers for the accounts themselves but at least now I have a new number to change them to. Hopefully once I get it all sorted out I can get things setup to sell my ebooks but that is so many steps away still (even after the aforementioned stuff) that I am not even going to think about it for now.
Well, I guess that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 239. (TFC Another Rainy Morning, Seriously Looking At Cryptocurrencies To Save My Ass In This Time Of Economic Ruin, Sorting Out Stuff With My New Phone, Working On A Studio Space & Helping Troubleshoot A Laptop Power Supply)
The rainy and chilly morning did not quite foster in me a desire to get up early but I did it anyway so that I could do my usual early morning writing. My recent nap taking has assuredly skewed my desire to get to bed early of late but with the weather being like it has been I have not been pushing myself too hard to get up before the proverbial 'crack of dawn' and be 'raring to go' by the time the sun makes it over the horizon. Considering that I make my own schedule I think that I do exceptionally well at staying 'on point' with my sleep/work cycle and if anything I probably just push myself too damn hard to make the most that I can out of each day and yet some days are just more productive than others. This day was one of the less productive ones which is no big surprise given all the rain.
Very early in the day I hiked down to the homestead proper so that I could use the 'landline' (satellite internet phone) there so that I could start the long process of getting all my banking stuff sorted out which ultimately amounted to spending much of my morning talking on the phone with a rather chipper support technician, changing my phone number for the two-step verification, getting my new address on file and learning what steps that I needed to take to accomplish that last bit as well as how to get my new debit card in the mail to me as rapidly as possible. Mostly though I just had to 'jump through all the hoops' so that I could later get a text message (on my new phone) so that I could access my account. Considering that I paid somewhere around eighty dollars to get that text message... it felt pretty damn good after I wandered around the homestead and found enough cellular signal to receive the message!
Mostly I just need to get all my 'ducks in a row' so that I can once again be able to swap my hard-earned cryptocurrency into fiat money because at this point I need to offset the loss of two-thirds of my income however the hell I can. Since I have been using cryptocurrency the last few years I mostly just hoard it and hope that eventually it all does two things: add up to a useful amount and that the damn price goes up so that I can liquidate some of it at a decent amount. Considering that both of those things have happened I feel pretty good about investing so much of my time in it creating content and reaping the rewards or lack thereof. Some content performs better than others and although I have never quite reached a decent dollar per hour wage creating content it is absolutely better than generating zero earnings for my time.
Most folks 'buy' their way into cryptocurrency so there is something to be said for earning it through hard work via my writing, art and sharing of original content. It definitely lends a different perspective to the 'crypto world' by not simply being an investor and/or trader of cryptocurrency and the only way I can even sort of describe how I feel is that 'it feels personal' in such a way that the 'units of value' (the cryptocurrencies themselves) are directly tied to my 'hours of input' as a content creator. There is some irony to my own situation because currently I am looking at utilizing something that has been historically 'volatile' to create some much needed stability for my current financial situation.
Once I got done with all the banking stuff I set about organizing more of my storage and consolidating things in such a way that I am finally starting to have some room in the cramped space. Something that I realize every time that I work on my storage scenario is that I really need to just go through everything and let go of anything that I do not absolutely need or that I have doubles of because all things considered I just acquired too much damn stuff for my liking over the last several years. The problem with having useful stuff is that it is frigging useful but given that I do not really have the space to use much of it there really is no point in just keeping it all boxed away.
I have been working towards having some 'studio space' because all in all I just do not have a good indoor space to work on things at nor a good place to have all my gear setup to work on things. Hopefully I can keep shuffling things around in my storage enough to create said space and be able to do crafts, repair computers and pretty much just have a place to tinker with things. One of the things about having a studio space that I am pretty excited about is that I will eventually be getting a sewing machine to put in it and be able to work on a few of the garment projects that I have had some ideas for and made prototypes of in the past.
Late in the afternoon I assisted one of my fellow homesteaders in troubleshooting a power supply problem with their laptop and after lots of testing with a multi-meter I think that we narrowed it down to the power cord and adapter. We still have some further testing to do on it because we could not find the proper screwdriver to dismantle the power 'brick' and test it internally but so far we have at least narrowed things down a bit and once we get the 'brick' taken apart (and test it) we will have a better idea of what is going on. I love how much technology has advanced with portable computing and all but damn I miss the good old days when power supplies were not 'smart' devices that just complicate the troubleshooting process! I will refrain from overly sharing my thoughts on the lithium battery model but ugh it always makes me want to scream when I see eight power connection points on a fucking laptop battery!
Well, if I keep writing this morning I am going to get way off on a tangent so I am just going to wrap this up and get on with my day which may not amount to much because more storms are rolling into the area and I will probably find myself spending much of the afternoon soothing the dogs while the thunder rumbles in the distance. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 240. (TFC Waking To Another Stormy Day, Tinkering More With That Laptop, Getting A Homemade Face Mask & Pretty Much Taking Another Day Off To Heal My Fractured Sternum)
These rainy and stormy days of late have been putting a damper on my days but given that I need to be keeping my physical activity to a minimum (so that my fractured sternum heals faster) I guess that it is working out in my favor. The clouds were a bloated black and gray in the sky and although it was only raining lightly when I first woke up it eventually rained much harder throughout the day and by the evening it started really pouring down as well as doing a good bit of thundering which frightened the dogs but it thankfully did not last all that long. It rained so hard during the night that I should probably check the creek to see if there was any flash flooding from it but so far this morning I cannot hear the 'roar' of rushing water so if it did flood it has at least settled back down by now.
During the afternoon I helped that fellow homesteader further troubleshoot their laptop and we even managed to get the power 'brick' taken a part and tested.
One of the four screws holding the 'brick' together was a 'safety screw' and lacking the appropriate bit (or screwdriver) to remove it we wound up heating the end of a piece of hard plastic and cramming it onto the screw head (while it was still soft) and then holding it there until it cooled and thus created our own crude 'bit' to unscrew the screw with. Surprisingly we just had to loosen the screw a little with the plastic bit and once we did that the regular star bit was able to grab enough to back the screw out the rest of the way. The safety screw's head was the same size star bit as the other screws but on it there was a metal stud at the center of the star which I could have maybe just drilled out but I did not want to risk damaging the rest of the screw head in the process.
It took us much longer to get the power 'brick' open than it did to test it with the multi-meter. It passed the test that we gave it with the multi-meter so we at least eliminated it being the source of the problem. We also removed the three RAM modules in the laptop and re-inserted them to make sure they were properly seated and also eliminate that as the possible problem. We failed to actually try turning the laptop on with the RAM removed so that is something that will still need to be tested. After doing a bunch of research on that particular laptop model I discovered that it is rather common for the motherboard in them and/or the video card in them to burn out and given how old it is it might not be worth the price of replacing those components to fully repair it.
On a different note. One of my other fellow homesteaders made me a homemade face mask (per my request) so that when I go out to do my monthly shopping sometime this week I will at least have a little peace of mind during the process. I do not know what exactly it is that thrills me at the idea of wearing a mask in public but I am actually looking forward to it more for the 'thrill' than for any protection that it might offer. It did come out pretty cool looking but I totally failed to get a picture of me wearing it. Suffice it to say that it is very 'utilitarian' which is fine by me because I often prefer function over form.
Anyway, I do not really have much to write about because I spent the majority of my day either writing or taking long naps but at least my sternum is feeling a heck of a lot better since I have refrained from doing physically demanding work the last few days so I have no complaints about my level of productivity or anything like that.
Well, that is about it for now and I am going to wrap this up and get on with my day because hopefully today we might get a good bit of sun which would be nice because everything outside is mucky and slippery and thus treacherous for walking on not to mention all the muck that the dogs have been tracking into the shelter because of it! I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
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