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 318!
Day 318 (TFC Why Kick The Hornets Nest When You Can Stomp It & Other Insights)
Even small improvements are appreciated when I have been feeling really down for an extended period of time and especially when I just cannot seem to find a way to 'shake it all off' and do the things (chores and other projects) each day that I need to be doing. It is like it all mounts up as a weight upon my motivation that grows a little heavier each day until I find myself avoiding the mounting dread that I have over whatever I am basically putting off doing for some 'other time'. For the two minutes it takes to do some things I marvel at the self-induced dread that I will heap upon myself over a period of hours or even days! Perhaps some day I will untangle that particular behavioral pattern and somehow unhinge it but today I at least made a start on several things that I had been putting off.
One of the things that I did was finally dismantle the canopy tent that I have been using for one purpose or another since my arrival here and at this point I had to just admit that it had served its usefulness and was beyond redemption. I salvaged the canvas from it and the four square metal tubing telescoping corner poles and crumpled the rest of it into a bundle that I stored with my building material pile in what I think of as the 'front yard' where it will probably sit until I break the individual metal parts down into fencing stakes.
The project went rather well once I forced myself to put my boots on and set to working on in the hot and dusty dog yard where I was pouring sweat even though most of the dog yard is in the shade. It was a 'squelcher' of a day and I wanted to free the canopy tent from over the coffee cart where it had been resting in a crumpled heap for the last several weeks ever since a severe bout of rain crushed it by pooling in its sagging canvas. Anyway, the frame was rather mangled and I was struggling with it a good bit and at the moment that I made real progress on freeing it a white face hornet bit me on my left thumb and just kept biting and/or stinging me repeatedly. Having been stung by that type of hornet before several times let me just say that it is not a mild sting and is extremely painful for the first several minutes afterwards.
Well, I backed away from the project altogether and once I stepped back I saw the massive swarm of them that I had been working in the middle of and was a bit surprised that more of the little buggers had not stung me. Generally I deal well enough with stings from all sorts of winged critters but this time I quickly found myself using wet tobacco to draw some of the poison out and get the pain to reduce to a more manageable level. Through it all I kept telling myself that I knew I should have inspected the tent for nests before moving it but no amount of hindsight would make the swelling or the pain to recede.
A big thunder storm rolled in just as I was finishing up the tent project and lets just say that by the end I only saw one white faced hornet left in the area where the tent had been and it was persistently patrolling the area and attempting to land on me and sting me. This happened at least a dozen times after I destroyed their paper nest and I realized that I want to be like that one remaining hornet still angrily buzzing around and persisting even after the devastation of its home and kin and an impending storm looming.
Well, I am going to try to ease back into writing each day and going to try not to stress myself out about it too much in regards to content, length or even so much its overall form but I have to start somewhere and make progress to any degree that I can in an effort to get myself feeling more 'on track' and less 'off the rails'. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Thanks for reading!
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