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.
[End Introduction]
The Fantastica Chronicles Day 199-205!
Day 199 200. (TFC Resting On A Rainy Day, Adding Ash To My Compost, Working More On That Spring & Going On A Hike Looking For More Springs)
Yesterday the weather turned colder and it rained on and off throughout the day which made for some decidedly nice napping weather. Given that I was pretty worn out and sore all over from all my recent endeavors it was quite enjoyable to just take the day off and get an abundance of rest. I did manage to get up early and do my usual Sunday posting of the Fantastica Chronicles on Steem so it was good to get back on track with that especially since I skipped doing it altogether the week before because I was so caught up in the hostile takeover thing that I failed to write my daily posts.
As far as the hostile takeover situation goes it is still ongoing and although I have largely tuned out to the shitshow that it has become it is worth mentioning that we are still deadlocked in a stalemate and somehow still managing to hold ten of the top twenty Witness spots. The stalemate will not last forever though because each day our adversary keeps dumping about thirty to forty thousand dollars into achieving victory and the community is (and has been) 'all in' for the last few weeks. In short, at this rate we will eventually lose barring that someone with 'deep pockets' does not step in and tip the scales in our favor.
All that jazz aside. Today I got back to working on stuff and spent some time this morning cleaning up the ash and charcoal left over from the two recent fires that I had when I was burning all that brush and used a metal bucket to haul it over to my compost pile and layer it over the top of it. With all the recent rain I did not have many ashes left even though I had buried the remnants of the fires under dirt and clay. I am thinking that I will just have to start routinely having fires in my outdoor fire pit so that I can build up a good supply of ashes to coat my compost with before the flies get active with the warmer weather. The dog poop compost mounds that I make sure do make for some nice earthworms (and dirt) but they sure do require a lot of work to control both the flies being able to use it for laying eggs in and controlling the odor. I still think that it is the best thing that I can do with the dog poop especially considering how much money that I spend on dog food each month!
Anyway, later in the day I headed down to that spring near the creek and started working on doing more excavation on the bank looking for a springhead. I was not down there very long when four other of my fellow homesteaders showed up and all started working on building up the dam that separates it from the creek and clearing the channel that keeps the water from backing up too much in the spring's pool. Eventually me and two other folks got that big rock moved that I mentioned in my previous post and although it was not nearly as difficult to move as that last boulder it sure took a lot of effort to get it first up onto the dam and then down the other side of it to help shore up the dam a bit on the creek side.
I have no idea how long I spent excavating the bank behind where that big rock was but I never found a springhead and am wondering if that by moving around all the stones and doing all that digging if I did not somehow accidentally plug it or cause it to change its route. The springhead might also be coming up from the ground there and with all the clay and silt (and the pressure of the water in the pool) it might just not be flowing like it was before. It is really hard to determine what is going on but I am starting to feel a bit like Captain Ahab because I am so hyper-focused on finding it!
Late in the day me and one of my fellow homesteaders crossed the creek and hiked the extremely steep slope looking for springs on that good neighbor's property. Although we traversed much of the hillside we never found any springs even though I noticed several places that might be wet weather springs. It would be really nice to find a good spring on that hill because the elevation is so great that we could easily gravity-feed water to anywhere on our homestead with it. There is still more of that hill to look at but after about forty minutes of hiking (mountain goating) along its sometimes nearly vertical incline I was worn the heck out and decided that any further scouting would have to be done another day.
Just before dark I helped out some at the homestead proper moving some stuff from one storage space to another and generally just gave some assistance to a project some other folks here were working on. It is pretty nice that we are all coming out of our winter hibernation modes and getting a lot accomplished especially given that the actual springtime is yet to truly arrive. This year we are hoping to grow a lot of food so getting an early start on things will hopefully help us accomplish that.
Well, I am achy and tired and just sort of want to fall asleep at this point but I am going to try to get this edited tonight so that I will not spend my morning tomorrow doing it. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 201. (TFC Making Some Blockchain Art, Doing Some Tech Work, Building A Potato Box, Gathering Soil, Planting Potatoes & Generally Having A Productive Day)
It is early morning here and yesterday I failed to get this post written because I had a very long day and at the end of it I fell asleep a little before dark. It was not until almost ten at night when I woke up, fed the dogs (much later than usual) and ate some dinner myself before falling back asleep again. So here I am first thing in the morning writing things out and thinking about how difficult it is to write in the evening after I am fatigued from the day and how that might be not the most productive strategy on my part for writing these posts. I guess that the important part is that I actually do write them regardless of the when.
It was raining rather steadily yesterday morning so I spent the early part of the day (almost until noon) reading about the announcements of a new blockchain named Hive being launched and then making a bunch of image art for the new blockchain just for my own amusement. All in all I am rather excited about the new blockchain because it solves the problem of the Steem blockchain being at the mercy of the continued assault (and turmoil) caused by the folks trying to take it over in a rather hostile fashion.
To spell it out as simply as I can... a large group of developers/backers have been working tirelessly to create a hard fork that will basically mirror (make a copy) of the current Steem blockchain and also give all the new users the same equivalent of a new cryptocurrency that they currently have as STEEM on the Steem blockchain. This hard fork will also exclude the accounts (and their supporters) of those responsible for the hostile takeover of the Steem blockchain. I look at it as a wonderful chance to make a fresh start and also remove the cancer that exists on the current Steem blockchain. It might seem like an extreme measure on the community's part but alas the situation rightly calls for such an extreme measure if we are to preserve our community and not succumb to centralization and mismanagement.
On a different note, the main desktop at the homestead proper had another hard drive fail in it a few months ago and given that every hard drive we have put in it dies (and the SATA ports themselves seem to be glitching) I decided to stop 'feeding' it hard drives and made the recommendation that we rebuild it with at least a new motherboard and/or power supply and since then the folks have mostly just been using a laptop to do everything. Recently that particular laptop has gotten to where it keeps slowing down and not performing well which is not all that surprising considering that it has been heavily used over the years and would benefit from a clean install of its operating system with an updated version of Linux.
Since there is a lot of stuff on the laptop's hard drive I used one of my spare laptop hard drives in an external USB housing to use as a backup drive to start backing up everything off the laptop so that I can wipe it and do a clean/fresh operating system installation. I started copying one hundred and three gigabytes of data off the laptop at around noon and it did not complete copying it all until nearly six in the evening according to one of my fellow homesteaders that was keeping an eye on it. I was hoping to get further along in the process of backing everything up and doing a fresh Linux installation but I guess that I will have to continue that task today.
After starting the backup process of the laptop I switched gears and used some scrap plywood to build a potato box for the folks at the homestead proper to use in the greenhouse there. It was a pretty simple task and although the pieces of plywood were mismatched in size I opted to not cut them down and maximize the materials at hand to make the box as large as possible. As it turned out the box is roughly three and a half feet square and about sixteen inches tall which should accommodate plenty of potato plants growing in it. I also retrieved a few of those metal containers that have the bottom rusted out (that were pulled from beside the creek last year) and put them near the greenhouse as well for use as potato boxes. Between the metal containers, the wooden potato box and a large plastic tote with cracks in it there will hopefully be plenty of potatoes grown here this year.
Once I was finished constructing the potato box I hiked down to the bank of the creek and spent some time gathering some loamy soil and some black dirt for use on my own gardening project in that big raised bed garden box that I made near my greenhouse last year. Given that it would take an incredible amount of soil to fill that raised bed I opted instead to use one of its edges and a small formation of stones to make a smaller garden bed inside of the larger one. I figure that with the limited sun that area gets the stones/rocks that I used will help keep the soil warm and help stimulate growth.
I had several pots with seeds, vegetation and worms in them from the last place that I lived and the majority of vegetation (and seeds) being of the medicinal and/or edible variety I thought that they would make a good start for my garden and emptied them out into my newly created garden bed. There was even one tiny black lost sapling in one of the pots and although I am unsure if it will come back I planted it in the garden bed as well. I also planted three partial potatoes that I got from the folks at the homestead proper and although the eyes on the potato parts were rather small the potatoes themselves are a variety purchased from a local hardware store that are intended to be 'seed potatoes' so hopefully they will grow well. Once again on St. Patty's day I was able to plant some potatoes which has become a bit of a tradition for me the last few years!
Anyway, the day was overall pretty damn productive and after all the hiking around and doing stuff I was pretty exhausted by late afternoon and like I said before I fell asleep and not even the dogs trying to wake me around their usual feeding time was able to rouse me from my slumber. Waking up after the long nap (almost five hours) I could not quite get it together enough to get this all written but alas here I am and although I did some other stuff throughout the day my brain will not quite conjure it all into simple enough words to spell it all out.
I have been enjoying coming out of my winter downtime and with everything going on in the 'outside world' I have been feeling pretty damn motivated to really get both my own scenario and the overall homestead dialed in to the best of my/our ability to do so. Although I have largely been focusing my efforts on getting a drinking water spring system setup I have yet to find an actual good springhead to utilize. That big spring is awesome for irrigation and non-potable applications but without treating and/or filtering the water it is not a good source of actual drinking water per say. In a pinch I do not doubt that we could 'make it work' especially because the way the dam and surrounding terrain is at the spring site the creek water (that is infiltrating the spring water pool) is getting filtered by a good bit of sand but there is just no comparison between that and a pure vein of spring water without any outside water getting into it. All that I can really do to find such a springhead (or seep) is to keep exploring, keep digging in the wet areas and keep looking until I find one (or more) that are suitable.
Well, I have rambled on enough here and am going to wrap this up and get it edited before the sun comes up and I get to itching to be outside working on stuff. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 202. (TFC Doing Some Computer Repair Work, Fabricating A Long Table The Greenhouse, Building A Natural Water Reservoir & Setting Up A New Gravity-Fed Water System)
Day 202. (TFC Doing Some Computer Repair Work, Fabricating A Long Table The Greenhouse, Building A Natural Water Reservoir & Setting Up A New Gravity-Fed Water System)
I do not know if I should try to squeeze more into that title or not but I did do a wide variety of tasks yesterday that left me feeling pretty exhausted by the time it got late in the day. I was in the midst of doing some computer repair stuff when the tiredness really caught up to me and since I wanted the folks whose computers I was fixing to be able to use at least one of them last night I did what I often do and made more coffee and just kept plugging away at things until late in the evening. I still have to work on the computers more today but that will mostly involve getting the two laptops updated and tweaking the configurations a bit.
That one computer that I mentioned the other day turned out pretty good and now has a 'rescue' Linux setup on it as well as a main Linux for daily use. Like I have detailed in other posts I did the same thing that I have been doing on my own computers and installed a tiny Linux first and then a second more robust Linux second so that in case the main operating system fails the system can be booted into the 'rescue' Linux and either fix the broken system, do file recovery or just be used to do all the stuff that the main system does. It is worth noting that the 'rescue' Linux is also a 32-bit operating system which comes in handy for playing certain games and running software that will not run on a 64-bit system. The way that I look at it is that having options is good and having some redundancy (by having two operating systems) has never been something that I have regretted doing.
The other computer that I worked on had been having all sorts of problems and kept running really sluggish but since it did not have Linux on it I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do to fix it because I had already done everything that I could to optimize it. While I was working on that other computer a little inspiration hit me and I realized that I could perhaps resize the hard drive partition on it where the other operating system was installed and after formatting the free space I could install Linux on it as an alternative to the sluggish system. All of which actually worked out really well and now that computer works smoothly or at least it does when it is booted to Linux! Anyway, I did all that computer stuff on and off throughout the day (and part of the night) and in between the times that the computers were doing long automated actions I did a bunch of stuff outdoors.
One of my fellow homesteaders expressed how they wanted a table (or tables) in the greenhouse at the homestead proper so I used a metal collapsible kennel, some bamboo and some rope to fabricate them a table. I failed to measure exactly how long the table turned out to be but I am guessing that it is somewhere around fifteen feet long, perhaps three and a half feet tall and three feet deep. For being just a bunch of lashed together metal mesh and bamboo it sure turned out rather stout and easily accommodated the weight of lots of flower pots with soil in them.
I should note here that we got an entire truck-bed full of gardening soil brought to us yesterday and whoa is it some rich looking stuff comprised of chicken and goat poop as well as a good bit well broken down compost. Although the soil is primarily for the gardening projects at the homestead proper I got a wheelbarrow load of it brought back to my area to use in my own gardening efforts. I am still thinking that I should gather more soil from near the creek and mix it into the new soil just to help spread it a little further.
Anyway, during the hot afternoon hours I went down to the creek and after inspecting an area on that good neighbor's property on the far side of the creek I decided that it was possible to accentuate (dig out and dam up) a naturally formed pool at the edge of the creek which just happens to be located at the highest point of a long gradual incline along the creek that is more or less a big shelf at the foot of the ridge. Having procured permission to setup water systems from that neighbor last year I am a bit surprised that I had not noticed the pool (and usefulness of the terrain) before recently.
To make the pool work out I had to dam three points of it where it is located between the bank and several large boulders and then dig out a bunch of rocks, muck, sticks and leaves to deepen the the pool and generally remove as many debris from it as possible so as not to clog the intake. I wound up pulling up that orange two inch diameter tubing with the filter on its end (that I built last year) and positioning it in the center of the pool halfway below the water line and then dug a trench to lay the rest of the tubing in where it runs from the pool and onto the aforementioned 'shelf' of land. Since I mainly just want to create an irrigation water system it is no biggie that this particular water system is just creek water.
Once all that was done me and a fellow homesteader pulled up all the black irrigation line that we had installed along the opposite bank last year and hooked up to our spring pool which sits a good four or five feet below where the new intake is. We then ran the irrigation tubing down the 'shelf' and across the creek and was pleasantly surprised that on our side of the creek that I could hold the end of the line almost eight feet in the air and water was still flowing from it steadily! We ran another short piece of irrigation line to get the water uphill (up the steep creek bank) and closer to the yard and although at the top of the hill it is still flowing if it is laying on the ground... if I lift it up it loses the ability to flow. I will undoubtedly try a few different configurations of where the tubing climbs the incline and hopefully I will find a spot where it works well enough that I can fill a holding tank with it.
Well, I better wrap this up and try to get it posted before the site goes down for maintenance. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 203 204. (TFC Expanding On A Gravity-Fed Water System, Configuring The Computers I Have Been Repairing & Being Cooped Up On A Rainy Day)
I am once again writing this in the early morning hours of the following day which has been working out rather well because I am no longer struggling to write these posts late in the day/night when I am tired and/or fatigued. Since I like writing early in the day and this approach seems to be working better I think that I will continue doing it for the most part unless there are days that I have the energy (and wherewithal) to write these posts on the same day.
All that jazz aside. It was another productive day even though I felt like I did not truly accomplish much considering how much energy I expended because in the end my project did not quite pan out the way that I had hoped that it would. Given its 'experimental' nature though... I should just be happy with the results and keep moving forward.
As you probably know I have been working a lot lately on trying to get a gravity-fed water system setup for irrigation purposes here at the homestead and although there is plenty of water available (from the creek) actually getting said water from the creek and up the steep bank (and even further uphill) to a usable point (high enough elevation) that I can then water the gardens with it has been quite the challenge. With the help of two other folks I ran and re-ran various lengths of irrigation tubing (attached to that pool I made two days ago) up the creek bank and as close to the yard as I possibly could and although at several points we were able to accomplish getting the water to flow at ground level via the velocity/siphon effect we never quite accomplished our mission.
It was really a tedious task and required lots of hiking up and down the creek bank, some wading in the creek, trampling through brush, getting the irrigation tubing to lay flat on the ground, moving rocks and logs and basically lots of calories! There are several places where we got the water flowing rather strongly (like the place where I setup the water barrel last year in the boulder area) but none of those places are at a high enough elevation to be able to then gravity-feed the water into the homestead proper.
Plenty of folks would probably have grown discouraged by the end of the day but I just looked at it like I had eliminated lots of options that did not work and perhaps by the process of elimination I can figure out something that will work. Mainly I think that it is going to require going further up the creek and capturing the water at a higher elevation so that I/we can get it to flow uphill enough to then be able to feed it downhill again to the homestead proper. The only real problems with doing that are that there are not many good spots to draw water from along the creek (on that good neighbor's side) and the spots that are good will require about twice as much irrigation tubing as what I currently have available. One way or another I am determined to accomplish it so I will keep trying to figure it out and trying different approaches!
Anyway, I spent the majority of the rest of my day updating and configuring those computers that I have been working on the last few days. I still have a few bugs to iron out but otherwise they are running rather nicely. Hopefully after today I will be finished with them especially since the slow internet here has dragged out a one day task into a three day task!
Well, I was thinking to end this post here but since another day has passed and I do not have much more to write about I am going to just add a bit to the end of this one and call it 'good enough.'
I awoke to it raining and although it was not all that cold outside it was markedly cooler than it has been of late so I postponed working anymore on the gravity-fed water system and focused my efforts on finishing that computer repair project that I had been working on. I was finally able to get both computers fully updated (which only took so long because of the slow internet connection) and I also got them both configured in a way that even the online streaming services (that the other homesteaders use) work well over the dodgy internet connection. It was nice to finally wrap that project up and hopefully I will not have to tinker with those computers for some time to come unless the folks want to add more software or run into problems with functionality that I might have missed during the initial setup and configuration process.
On a different note, that new Hive blockchain launched and I was able to make a post on it and get familiar with some of the new tools developed for it which is always a fun task even if all the tools are still under development and a bit buggy. It is after all a brand new blockchain that was rapidly rolled out in response to the hostile takeover of the previous blockchain so it is not like there was a lot of time for the developers to fine tune everything.
Mostly it was a frustrating day because every time it quit raining and I thought that I would be able to get to working on stuff it would then start raining again which was not all that bad because I probably needed a break after such a long week of physical activity but trying to do anything online was nearly impossible because the internet connection got extremely finicky which pretty much just amounted to me getting so frustrated with it that I gave up and took a late in the day nap with the hope that after I woke up the connectivity would be better... which it was not so sa la ve!
I am going to wrap this up before I ramble on too much more. I will try to get this posted this morning even though the internet connection is still being dodgy and with the rain having settled into the area I doubt that it will improve until the cloudy weather passes. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
Day 205. (TFC Hunkering Down With The Dogs On A Cold And Rainy Day & Marginally Improving My Internet Connectivity)
It is early morning here and although I had plenty of time yesterday to write this I was feeling too damn moody to actually write without getting off on some wild tangent about current world events, my perceptions/intuitions on what is coming 'down the pipe' (so to speak) in the near future, and the ill/greedy behavior of some folks on the new Hive blockchain who spout all sorts of altruistic drivel but whose actions do not quite align with their words. In other words I found it best to just 'keep my own council' and let the moodiness pass and my mind to resume its usual calmness before I found myself mired in a rabbit warren of my own half-formed thoughts.
So here I am after a good night's sleep, sipping my morning espresso and letting the dreams of last night replay in my mind's eye and hoping that something in them will mayhaps illuminate my path ahead or at least shed some light upon the path that I am currently on. Nothing all that marvelous has really bubbled up to the surface yet but at least I am feeling like I am on a bit more of an even keel and have a firmer grip on the moodiness.
Having spent much of my life anticipating the coming of 'dire' times (and preparing for them) all I can really say is that at this point I am both mentally and emotionally in a much better position to cope with the changes than most folks that I know which is no great feat in and of itself because I have mainly just conditioned (or been conditioned by my life experiences) to deal with and endure hardship/deprivation and basically make the best of bad situations and I am largely okay with whatever changes 'life' throws at me because to be blunt I adapt well and want very little from life besides a warm/dry place for me and the dogs, a small amount of food to eat and the freedom to live my life in a low-impact way that is beneficial to the land and does not wrack me with guilt that my lifestyle choices are helping to usher in the destruction of life on good ole planet Earth.
As simple as all that sounds it has been one 'tough row to hoe' to make it to where I am and although I have lived more self-sufficiently than I am currently living, I have equally lived less self-sufficiently than I am. Perhaps I have just reached some mediocre 'middle ground' between the two and the compromises in lifestyle that I am making come down to the economics of my current scenario and not necessarily my 'willingness' to be dependent upon others.
It might sound like I am being vague so I will try to clear things up a bit. At the last place I was living (at That Old Farm) I had achieved independence in regards to water (from cultivating/capturing springs), electricity via solar power, internet via cellular service, financial stability through writing/sharing multimedia and donations, a decent food supply via my income (and some food donations) which may all seem like simple things but it was by no means simple for me to achieve. Moving here though, I lost pretty much all of those things including the cellular service (account) that I had for the better part of fifteen years.
What I gained though was a place to build my own warm shelter in the woods where I am largely left to my own devices with the dogs and things are not stressful nor do I have some flaky land-owner to deal with that changes their mind (as the saying goes) 'every time the wind blows' nor do I have a bunch of nefarious folks to contend with constantly which was extremely problematic at the last place. Having just spent the entire winter staying warmer than I have in over fifteen years I have zero fucking complaints in that regard so please do not get me wrong... my shelter is awesome, the dogs are happy and my fellow homesteaders are good folks and generally life is pretty damn peaceful. Yet the lack of independence and lack of self-sufficiency is perturbing the fuck out of me to put it mildly.
The difficulty is that at the last place it took me nearly three years to truly dial in said 'independence and self-sufficiency' and although I have earnestly worked on achieving those things here the place does not accommodate solar (hence my further exploration of hydro-electric) the water situation is tricky at best because I have yet to find/develop a spring that does not get infiltrated by creek water, there is no hope of cellular service ever working here because of the mountainous/hilly terrain, the existing satellite internet connection does not accommodate me uploading videos or podcasts (believe me I have tried and the uploads continually fail) and there just is not much in the way of sunny areas for me to grow the stuff that I want to grow. The list there goes on but hopefully you get the point that there are a lot of challenges involved and even having all the gear that I need to be more self-sufficient it does not amount to jack-shit without the ability to implement it all.
I am by no means ungrateful for the situation that I am in nor is it a bad situation by any means besides my desires for 'independence and self-sufficiency' and like I have said numerous times in the past the folks here feed me and I of course earn it by doing work around the place and also helping them with any tech support they might need so it is not like there is an imbalance there or anything but I would damn sure feel better if I did not have to rely on other folks in that regard as well as for water, electricity and internet. Given my level of skills and work ethic I undoubtedly put more into the scenario than I actually get out of it and I absolutely have no complaints in that regard because I just look at it as a good way to show my appreciation and gratitude for their hospitality. I also just want to see the little homestead here not just grow but flourish and for that to happen I have to put in the work, be patient and just keep giving it all my best.
Oh yeah. I was able to marginally increase my internet connectivity by moving one of my wireless routers six feet! I was trying to move it further but lacked an extension cord to do so and did not really want to fabricate a cord. Much like that other router that I moved less than two feet the change was/is quite noticeable and perhaps now I will not have to hit refresh/reload quite so often to do whatever it is that I am trying to do online. Any small improvement is after all at least 'an improvement' and will hopefully curb some of the frustration I encounter every time I try to do something online.
Well, I meandered way down the rabbit warren after all and am unsure if I actually conveyed anything useful here but I at least feel better now that I have to some degree worded it all out. Now that the sun is nearly up I better get this all edited and get the hell on with my day! I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night and I will do my best to do the same.
