Day 770. The last few days have been so overcast that I have produced an extremely marginal amount of electricity from my solar panels. I keep hoping that the sun will peek out for at least an hour or two but I have had no such luck in that regard. It is looking like I will not get any sun until next Monday so I am in for roughly four more days of basically just having enough electricity to charge my phone, charge an led flashlight and run the small fans on my propane heater. This entire winter has been a bit of a struggle on the electricity generation front but it sure has been an improvement over the last two winters. It is not like having much more electricity really makes a difference but being able to use my netbook is highly enjoyable and makes doing online research a heck of a lot easier to boot. Doing so much reading (and writing) on the smartphone screen is pretty tiresome and a heavy strain on my eyes but I guess it is better than not being able to do those things at all. I keep contemplating whether to start making handwritten journal entries (and fiction) again but as I have stated numerous times before I never do anything with the things that I write in that fashion. Being faced with transcribing things I have already written by hand into a digital form or just writing something new...I always choose to write something new and that my friends is the never ending loop that has lead me to write eight (or ten) books worth of fiction, a few books worth of prose and poems and sixty journals over the last two decades that do naught but take up a big chunk of my limited storage space in a few densely packed totes. So I resist the urge because I know my habit/pattern in that regard and choose to just laboriously hammer out the words that I can in my tedious method of typing. Doing this greatlty improves the odds that I will actually share said 'words' which is pretty damn important to me as I detailed in yesterday's post. Back to what I was originally talking about with the electricity thing. When I do have enough electricity to use the netbook I always feel this sort of pressure to do something that falls within one of the following brackets...educate myself through research, write, make music, or entertain myself one way or another either through watching videos or playing video games. I generally do some combination of those things during the winter and personally find it a very healthy balance as opposed to the rest of the year when I pretty much just overwork myself ad infinitum and do not do much else except for on the occasional rainy days when working outside is not plausible. All that said during times like this when I won't have much electricity for a four, or five, or six day period I tend to avoid going stir crazy by just reading books which is fine and dandy but whoa I can burn through the available books that I have to read rather rapidly during those periods. Long story short I just tell myself some version of 'this too shall pass' and count each passing day as one more day closer to when the sun will be out again and I will once again be producing a more substantial (and albeit useful) amount of electricity. Anyway I am just going to keep plodding along and I hope everyone is doing well.
Note: As some of you know I have been making these 'Daily Post' on another platform ever since I began my stay at this old farm seven hundred and seventy days ago. Ever since I began using Steemit I have considered posting them here as well but have been hesitant to do so because the content of them varies and thus it is difficult to tag as 'one thing or another' and they do not always directly relate to homesteading, off grid living or whatever. I also type them out in a notepad App on an Android phone and post them as a 'wall of text' instead of breaking them into paragraphs because the platform that I copy and paste them to formats them into a 'wall of text' even if I break them into paragraphs. I am not going to correctly format them and have grown to enjoy their rambling nature. So this is sort of a test and I appreciate any feedback that folks may have.