Hello Everyone!
A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.
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 340!
Repairing The Dog Yard Fence Again, Hauling Concrete, Storage Snafus Everywhere & Taking A Very Long Nap.
I missed my window for writing this and getting it posted because I fell asleep late in the afternoon and did not wake up until nearly midnight. I considered trying to write it then but decided not to fight my sleepiness and instead just succumb to it and get more rest so that is exactly what I did. All of which lead me to writing it now in the early morning of the following day while I sip my espresso and stare bleary eyed at the screen hoping to dispel the fog of sleep so that I can hammer out some words before the delivery truck with the building supplies for my latest construction project arrives.
I got up rather early in the morning yesterday and made a rapid start to my day by doing some repair work on a section of my dog yard fence where my boy dog had once again crumpled the fence down by climbing over it. Several days back it had begun to thunder while I was down at the homestead proper and he had done his usual panic thing (over the thunder) and just had to come find me. Honestly that fencing material is kind of shit because the welds on it break really easily and it lacks the rigidity that more expensive/quality fencing has. It has worked so far (because I keep repairing it) but damn it I wish that I had never bought it in the first place and been able to afford the better fencing material that makes up the rest of my dog yard.
There was about a three meter length of the fence that had crumpled downward and the more that I tried to straighten it out the more welds that broke on it so I wound up installing another fence post where the majority of the broken welds are and once again sandwiching the fencing between the fence post and some pieces of lumber that I screwed to the post. I also added two long sticks horizontally across the top of the fence and connected the new post to the posts to the left and right of it and tied the top of the fencing material to them with some rope. Once again it is not the prettiest solution but it works and hopefully now my boy dog will at least not be able to pull the fence downward to get over it and instead leap over it like he is fully capable of doing which at least does not damage the fence.
Anyway, after all that I hiked down to the homestead proper and checked the mail to see if my food assistance card had come yet but it had not so I wound up helping one of my fellow homesteaders move a bunch of bags of concrete from where they were stacked and covered with a tarp on a pallet into one of the outbuildings. We took turns pushing a wheelbarrow that we loaded the bags of concrete into but whoa it was still a few thousand pounds of concrete and the task burned through the little calories that I had for the day rather quickly. There was not room in the building before for the concrete because the posts (for that odd job I have been doing at the homestead proper) were in the way but since that project is nearly finished there is now some room to store the concrete out of the elements.
Admittedly after moving the concrete I was feeling a bit worn down but I wound up working in the greenhouse some to reorganize things and make some room in there to store more stuff. Since where I am going to build the addition currently has that 'arched room' (constructed mainly with two plastic panels) and there is stuff stored in it I will need to move the stuff out of it and into the greenhouse before I disconnect the 'arched room' from the rear of the shelter where I will be constructing the new addition. If it all sounds like a bit of a cluster fuck... well it is and basically I have to shuffle a bunch of stuff around before I can even begin the construction phase of things.
The more I have looked at storing the new building materials in the greenhouse the less likely it looks like I can actually squeeze them all in there so I think that what I am going to do is screw some pieces of lumber to that work bench that I built upon that tree stump last year and put all the building materials atop it and cover them with a tarp. All of which will leave me without a work bench (cut table) to use when building the new addition but I am thinking to either use my front porch or my coffee cart for doing the cutting on instead. I will probably use the coffee cart because with all the rain the porch has been staying rather mucky with all the foot traffic it gets. Using the coffee cart will require cleaning it off though and finding somewhere to store all the stuff currently stored on it as well. At this point I am perpetually running into one storage snafu after another and ugh am I getting tired of shuffling stuff around!
Well, I am going to keep this one short and sweet and try to get it all edited and posted before the sun gets up much higher in the sky because I have an incredible amount of stuff to do today and daylight is burning. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
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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