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 227-233!
Day 227-233. (TFC Fracturing My Sternum, Almost Cutting Off A Perfectly Good Thumb, Creating More Garden Beds, Hauling Rocks, Doing More Spring Development & Generally Still Overworking Myself Even Though I Am Crippled Up)
Yay! I can finally type with both hands again... somewhat... which is more than I have been able to do for almost an entire week. That is the longest break in writing each day that I have had in nearly four years now and made for an interesting week of introspection and just sort of brooding about what I should write when I regained enough use of of my hand to do so. I considered doing some audio recordings but rejected that notion after thinking about how taking a short break altogether would be good for me even if it was not an intentional break.
My troubles really started on Day 227 which was last Sunday. There was a big storm system coming this way and I spent much of the day at the shelter site securing things against high winds and setting up a hand wash station inside the dog yard. Since moving my stove onto the porch I kept wondering how to utilize my 'coffee cart' now that it is no longer my kitchen. I wound up moving the cart a little downhill and setting up the canopy tent over it. It sounds like an easy task but 'walking' the tent through the woods from where it was previously located to inside the dog yard by myself was quite the feat but as always my patient methodicalness got it done without too much difficulty. Mostly I just wanted to get the canopy tent somewhere that I could tether it down against high winds and decided that a good place was over the cart because I could also use the cart itself to help brace the tent's sagging metal frame which actually worked pretty well and when the storm finally arrived the tent's canopy did not catch and hold nearly as much water as it has in the past.
Back to my troubles and where they began. After doing all that stuff (and a good bit more) the winds had picked up some and although the sky was pretty dark it had not done more than sprinkle on and off throughout the day. I had it in my mind for several days to make another garden bed across the creek, get more corn planted and get the gravity-fed irrigation system on that side of the creek fully operational again. After doing lots of re-configuring of where the irrigation tubing traversed the terrain I finally went along each section of the tubing and purged the air from the line before hooking it to the next downhill section. By the end I had the water flowing all the way to the boulder site (near the yard of the homestead proper) and with more volume and water pressure than I had achieved in the past which was awesome because my changes worked!
Once I was finished with that the sky grew even darker but I was determined to create another garden bed across the creek so I made some espresso (gulped it down) grabbed some tools and headed across the creek again. It has been too many days to recall the exact sequence of events but what happened was that I got the garden bed created and was ready to start cutting small rows in the soil to plant corn in when it started raining hard. It had been sprinkling pretty heavily by the time that I got to working on creating the garden bed and by the time it started raining heavily I just kept plugging away at it so that I could get more corn planted.
Well what happened was I grabbed the 'D-handle' shovel and while walking towards the garden bed with it the shovel's head got stuck in the ground while I was in mid-stride and the handle got lodged under my sternum and I was moving so fast that I 'hung' on the shovel for a moment before I could get off the tips of my toes and off the shovel's dense plastic handle. I was carrying the short handled shovel in front of me and the elevation changed along the trail and once the shovel's head went into the dirt my momentum carried me up onto the shovel's handle in such a way that it lifted me off the ground.
It was some crazy shit and something that I wrote off as a freak accident and just went back to working even though my sternum (breastbone, chest and ribs) were hurting. It was not until I actually finished digging the small rows for planting corn in that I realized the extent of the damage done by the shovel handle and it was not until later that evening that I realized that I had heavily fractured my sternum. Nearly a week later now and it still hurts when I breathe deeply, laugh, cough, stretch, pick anything up or basically do anything that does not involve laying down on my back.
The storm broke that night and I was like 'If a tornado or something hits here I am screwed because I am too severely injured to be of any help.' Thankfully there was just a bunch of high winds and lots of rain which caused some minor flash-flooding. The flooding swept away that orange two inch tubing, intake filter, about a hundred feet of one inch irrigation tubing and somewhere between sixty to eighty dollars worth of fittings, adapters and hose clamps. The flooding totally destroyed the reservoir where the intake was located and just washed everything away.
That setup had survived several other heavy rain events but I had made some changes to the reservoir's dams and in doing so it was no longer as well protected against flooding and a log seems to have torpedoed into the reservoir and unseated the intake tubing and broke the dam where the tubing exited the reservoir. I learned a few things from that failure and although I have looked all over the creek I have yet to find the orange tubing, the filter or any part of the other one hundred feet of tubing that got washed away. Mostly I am just bummed out that I have to fabricate a new intake filter and fabricate a bunch of adapters for a new system and of course having to rebuild the reservoir itself.
The spring site on the homestead's side of the creek fared much better and although it got flooded with nearly two feet of water the main dam held up rather well and a big log (the one that I first had to move from the reservoir on the other side of the creek) got jammed perfectly against the big pine log that lays over the top of the dam. Some other smaller sticks and logs got jammed up against it as well and that entire side of the spring area has the makings of becoming a really well fortified wall that will protect the spring site from debris that are washing downstream. I will write more about that spring site in this post but for now suffice it to say that it is looking good and the flooding was actually beneficial.
With all the rain the first thing that I noticed the following morning (Day 228) was that all the holes at the wet weather spring site near me on the hill were full of water and the two main ones (uphill of the boulder) had water flowing out of them and running downhill across the trail. I dug some quick trenches for them so that they would flow into the holes located downhill and decided that I had finally reached the saturation point in the ground that I had been working towards for months now at that site and should explore for water by digging new holes downhill. I was pretty excited about doing that and also not wasting the prime time to explore for water while everything was fully saturated. Later in the day one of my fellow homesteaders did a bunch of digging at that spring site and we actually found a small vein of water!
On the morning of Day 228 (the day after the big storm) I was showing off my cane knife to a few of my fellow homesteaders and while flipping it in the air I missed catching it by the handle and got cut by the blade at the base of my thumb where it meets the web of my hand. It was a rather severe cut and one that probably would have required a visit to a doctor if I could afford such a thing which I cannot so I did what I always do with deep cuts and quickly glued it shut. As far as the cane knife goes I should mention that I have owned that particular knife for nearly twenty-four years now and have flipped it in the air and successfully caught it by its handle perhaps thousands of times over the years knowing full well that someday I might fuck up and get cut by it. Shit happens and all but that was a truly avoidable accident and after spending a week without being able to use that hand, keeping it covered and generally struggling to do everything one handed... I do not see me doing anymore knife juggling tricks anytime soon.
Somehow with only one hand and a fractured sternum I still managed to get a bunch of stuff accomplished throughout the remainder of the week even though it seemed like I had to work twice as hard and be extra careful not to injure myself further. Not being able to write during that time added its own level of stress and by the end of the week I realized just how much 'steam' that I vent via writing each day and how much it helps me keep what I am doing project-wise in focus.
By Tuesday I was pretty fed up with not getting enough accomplished so I went down to the big spring site on our side of the creek and set to work building two small dams on the downhill side of the main pool there. The pool being flooded had changed things there a bit and I decided that if I could build a second pool that the first pool drains into that I could perhaps retain more water in the first pool and maybe even achieve getting the depth of the water to change so that it will have more head for the gravity-fed water system. It is difficult to fully describe it all in words but the way that the pool got flooded (and the rocks shifted) actually made the pool itself much larger and the bank that I have been excavating has now been submerged in water for the better part of the last week so hopefully it will be easier to excavate in the future and if I am really lucky a few more springheads might start flowing out of it.
Throughout the week I made a few more small garden beds in some of the 'sunny' spots around the shelter area and got more corn planted in them. I lost track of how much corn that I now have planted among all the garden beds but it must be somewhere around two thousand seeds or more. I know that it is going to be really hit or miss on how well the corn grows because as the trees continue to regain their leaves the sunny spots I now have gardens in will undoubtedly change but I am hoping that at least some of them continue to get good sun and produce healthy crops.
One thing that I figured out that I am pretty good at even with one hand is gathering and hauling small rocks to border my garden beds with. At some point I even went back to those places that I planted black cherry and apple seeds at and made small rock borders around them so that I would not forget about them and possibly mow (or weed-eat) them once I start cutting back the vegetation over the coming months. Since I am trying to rehab the forest floor here I have yet to cut anything back for the year and am waiting on stuff to got to seed before doing so. There are a few spots where I might need to cut back the poison ivy (just to keep it from spreading) but overall the vegetation now growing in is looking pretty awesome and aside from the grass that I planted it is predominantly a bunch of native plants. I am rather excited to see what sort of 'yard' that it becomes over the coming months and what sort of wildlife the plants attract.
Anyway, it has been a pretty wacky week for me and although my hand is healed enough to type with again it still has a tremendous amount of healing to do before I can use it for much else. My sternum is still pretty fucked but it is slowly healing also which probably means I am in for another week of not getting a whole lot accomplished at least in regards to anything that requires heavy lifting or using upper body strength. Honestly I would be quite happy at this point just to have full use of both hands again because whoa even making coffee in my stove-top espresso makers has been way too damn challenging. I got a little lucky with the coffee making a few times during the week because one of my fellow homesteaders made it for me but mostly I just struggle with doing anything that requires two hands.
Well, I should wrap this up and call it good enough. My apologies on breaking my posting routine but barring any further calamities I should be able to get back on track this week and continue my daily writing and the documenting of the projects that I am doing. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.
