Hello Everyone!
A world gone wacky, Floundering along, Battery heat slows sawing, So long tree debris pile, A rootball wall & Lots of wooden poles!
Alright, I have been awake for the better part of the previous five and half odd hours now... and seem to have gotten my sleep cycle worked back around to where it was before the moon got full. Waking up at or before midnight, truly is the sweet comb of the bees' work... and more often than not the silence is like 'honey for the soul' when it comes to actually enjoying the place.
Overall, it has been a slog of a morning already... just wading through all the online jibber-jabber and doing some jibber-jabbering of my own... in a very non-jabberwocky sort of way... as I 'take in' the zeitgeist of the moment. Which, whoa... is akin to a 'dull hollow crumbling' of straight forward (obvious) dystopian madness on all fronts... as far as my eyes can see.
Somehow, through it all I have to keep looking at it both clearly... and with sober recognition that there are solutions to many things... but not many solutions to human strife. Not to get any further down into that rabbit warren or anything... but being of good conscience and having any amount of decency it is hard to not see what is happening as disaster spreads.
I really have so many challenges in my day to day life that require an incredible amount of focus (and determination) to overcome... that watching the rest of the shitshow unfold in realtime is mind boggling to try to keep up with. Given that I am already floundering with basics like food and water... I have to be pragmatic and realize that although I am frugal... and being so has mostly worked for a decade... it simply will not work now.
Between the electric bill, the trash pickup bill, the increased prices of goods, the delivery fees and whatnot... I can never seem to stretch any funds that I have far enough. Bleeding my Hive account dry, simply to keep a mere fraction of my expenses paid with the bulk of my earnings is not just a less than sufficient solution... it is also not the direction that I want things going in.
My main point there being that doing anything 'extra' to prepare at this point in things... is beyond impossible for me in regards to stockpiling food and other essentials. Heck, I have even been eating some freeze dried goods lately... that for some reason never quite seem to be 'cooked' no matter how long that I 'cook' them for... simply because it is my best option without having to actually cook... and make the tent overly hot in the summery heat.
Anyways, yesterday I made an early start on things and continued my efforts of clearing out that big tree debris pile near the driveway with the battery operated chainsaw. I dunno what it was but for some reason the battery did not seem to stay charged for as long (and I had to pause work while it charged) but that could have been due to cutting so many larger tree trunks as I worked to free all the remaining root balls.
The sun was brutal on me also... and although I kept placing the chainsaw in the shade to help keep the battery from absorbing more heat... some of the battery's performance could have been from it slightly overheating. That sixty volt battery is touchy when it comes to heat... and the saw will stop working altogether if it gets too hot... which it is prone to do when cutting larger logs and/or denser tree types like the dogwood that I was cutting.
I am unsure how much time that I spent working on that area in the late afternoon... but I got the whole area cleaned up, all the root balls lined up next to each other along the driveway (almost like a fence) and all the rest of the various sized tree debris stacked into their respective piles. Of course by that last day of working on that big pile (when I finished it) I had finally gotten it all down to a science with 'when to work where' according to where the sun is in the sky... so that I did not get melted beneath my straw hat by it!
It has been a while since I 'poured that much sweat' for that long each day (regardless of working in the shade or not) and I burned through four days worth of drinking water in two days' time. My clothing has not been super optimal either and more than a fair amount of that sweat has been due to that... besides my straw hat of course!
Once again, I did not work on the terraces other than to add to the piles of materials (for stakes and poles) that I have been working on for them... which now are as good as they are going to get. It is a pretty decent mix of soft woods like poplar, sweet gum and devil's walking stick... mixed with some oak, dogwood, beech and pignut hickory... along with a separate pile of pine poles cut to various lengths.
That whole terrace project might have to wait for a few days, because late in the day a big storm blew in... and it rained so much that it is going to take it a few days to dry up enough to work in the area again. That clumping clay is really problematic, not just with how it sticks to my boots... but also to the shovel not to frigging mention trying to shovel the stuff itself... which is something that I need to do a lot of.
Much like how I built the earth bridge across the gulch, I am going to be layering in tree debris and vegetative matter along with soil... but this time inside the terraces as a hugel mound. I was hesitant to fully commit to the idea before (and I still have reservations over it around termites) but after finishing clearing the big pile of tree debris near the driveway... I wound up with just the right amount of material to make at least one hugel mound.
Well, I best get to wrapping this entry up because the sun is crawling up over the horizon... and too much is afoot (and needs done) to dally here any longer. I hope that folks are doing well. Ciao for now. Stare contra malum. Nulli reges. Nulli dii. Nulli domini. Semper Vigilantes.
