Hello Everyone!
A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.
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 414!
Making Plans For The Bus Project, A Shocked Well Is A Clean Well & Flushing The Rainwater System
It was another chilly morning and I wound up running the heater a good bit just so that the shelter was more comfortable after I opened the door several times to make espresso and let the dogs in and out. The shelter stays plenty warm enough without the heater being used throughout the night this time of year and if I did not air it out in the mornings then it would probably retain that heat well into the day. The exhaust fan that I have in the shelter does not quite evacuate the air from the room like it used to because over the last many months it has collected a heck of a lot of dust in it and I keep failing to take the time to clean it out. So I have been using the door to air it out each morning and like I learned last fall/winter if there is even the slightest breeze outside all the warm air (or any air really) gets sucked right out the door which is kind of nice when I want to rapidly air the place out after me and the dogs have been cooped up inside all night stinking the place up.
It stayed rather chilly until almost noon so I just sort of vegged out doing some stuff on the computer and tried to catch up on the news that I have not paid much attention to over the last few days. I did not last long getting the latest updates about what has been going on in the world and wound up playing a video game for the last hour before noon when the sun was up enough to knock the chill off outside. Even at noon it was still pretty chilly in the shade of the woods and will continue to be that way until the rest of the leaves fall and the sun can penetrate the canopy better from its low angle on the horizon. Aside from there being too much shade in the woods to grow stuff during the warmer months I do not have much in the way of complaints because the way it works out is that the woods are nice and shaded during the hot times of the year and quite sunny during the colder months which is rather ideal for me as far as shelter setups go.
Anyway, around noon I hiked down to the homestead proper to take some measurements on the bus to see if I could scavenge up enough material to insulate the floor on either side of the bus's rear door because the more that I thought about it the more that it seemed like a good idea to insulate as much of the floor as possible. There is basically a two foot by two foot square on either side of the door and I think that I have just enough material to frame it in and put more OSB plywood over them. I considered just using more paneling but decided against it because there will be a refrigerator on one side and a vanity cabinet on the other side and if even a little water (or other liquid) gets on the paneling it will start de-laminating and become a mess. I actually decided to only add flooring to within two inches of the entryway so as not to confine it any smaller than it already is.
Since I wanted to take a break from the bus project for a day I just took the measurements for the floor, organized the job site by tidying it up and made a better step for entering the bus instead of the 'tippy' cinder block that I had been using. I also gathered up all my cordless tool batteries and got them on the charger for the next time that I work on the bus project. I also spent some time trying to figure out the best approach for running some electricity via an extension cord into the new room in the bus but failed to come up with anything that did not require drilling a hole through the bottom of the bus. My original plan was to either run the extension cord through the front door of the bus or create a port in one of the windows that I replaced with those aluminum panels. There are pros and cons to each of those approaches but neither seem as good as coming up through the floor with the cord. I am still 'working the problem' but will undoubtedly come up with a good/safe solution eventually.
On a different note, with having the well pump and ABS tubing pulled out of the well recently and laid across the yard I had advised the folks at the homestead proper to look into shocking the well and flushing out all the pipes and fixtures at the homestead. I am not going to detail the entire process here but I basically found a good document detailing the shock process and sent it to my fellow homesteaders. Thankfully they saw the reasoning behind shocking the well system and did the process themselves the day before which left me to flush everything the following day because they were not going to be at the homestead when the process completed twenty-four hours later. When I flushed everything I was a bit surprised at how little debris came out of the water lines but whoa it took almost an hour of the water running for the chlorine odor to completely vanish. If you are interested in well shocking here is the document that we used: http://aesl.ces.uga.edu/publications/watercirc/ShockChlorination.pdf
The one thing that I did not want to do was waste all that good chlorinated water being flushed from the well system so after I ran the water enough that the debris were gone but the chlorine odor was still there... I hooked up my heavy duty outdoor water hose and used all the remaining chlorinated water to wash off my greenhouse roof, clean out my gutter on the greenhouse rainwater harvesting system, flush out the downspout pipe, flush all the output pipes coming off the downspout (including the drain) and flushed out that green barrel that was full of silt from when I had it installed on that gravity-fed system near the creek. All in all everything worked rather well and I wound up scrubbing the inside of the gutter out with the leaves that had accumulated in it before I tossed them into the garden bed. The green barrel took quite some time to get all the silt out of it and I may not have actually gotten all of it because the barrel got shot at some point (while it was near the creek) and I could not fill it completely without repairing the holes in it. I will probably wind up just drilling the bullet holes out so that they are uniform and screwing in a few stainless steel bolts with a rubber gasket under their head and then tape over them with some 'ZIP System' tape. I could probably patch the tank with the tape alone but it does not hold up all that well in the long run under direct UV from the sun.
Once I got all that jazz finished I was pretty wiped out for the day even though I had not actually done a whole lot and decided to just take a nap and give myself some more time to recover after too many days of working long hours on one thing or another. I did not wake back up again until it was nearly time to feed the animals and call it a day. I briefly considered diving into working on the next video for the video project but decided to not start the process because I would wind up working on it all night and stay up much later than I wanted to. Sometimes I think that trying to squeeze every once of productivity that I can out of each day is a bit counter-productive but hell that does not stop me from trying to do it more often than not!
Well, I have rambled on enough for one morning and daylight is burning so I better get on with my day. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
More about me: 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.
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