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.
Day Unknown - A Story!
There is not a lot of time left to the day and I am unsure of what daily log entry this actually is but here goes. It might be a longish one so keep your knickers on and take the time to absorb some of the words along the way.
Yesterday was pretty intense because the twins from the future (yeah we have still been caring for their babies) came to visit and were looking for information on some fellow named Lopez that had apparently crashed a craft that he was piloting near all of us back in the days when the original Train Depot was just getting started. Since I cannot take all the twins (both present and future ones) being in the same room for a prolonged period of time I arranged our meet on a grassy knoll that would receive good sunlight even though the temperatures were going to be brisk. Secretly I keep thinking that a third set of the twins might always appear at any moment and things would quickly get truly complicated from there!
Thankfully, the visit seemed to only involve a bunch of quiet whispering between the four of them as they sat upon the largest stone in the sunshine whilst occasionally all four darting glances at me where I sat just out of earshot, built a smoke, lit it with my trusty lighter and watched them through the small clouds of smoke that I breathed out. They were all so different from each other and albeit beautiful in their own ways not to mention their presence as a group. Honestly I felt very much like one way or another when under their collective gaze I was totally powerless to negate whatever their decisions would dictate of my life.
Mostly, I think that from the sort of 'surmising and weighing looks' that I received during the twins interactions today that something is brewing but as of yet they have not let on to me about what it might be. During the return trip to the Leaning Lodge (where we have been staying at for the summer) the twins barely spoke and when they did it was to each other and all I could catch in the windy conditions was something about 'showing them whose timeline this is' or something like that. I did not ask about it and although the twins are never frigid with me they are often very serious so I just 'let it go' and kept trudging along the path and scanning the horizon like a good woodsman even though I am not one. I always figure that if something is important or they need my input they will ask and they often do so no complaints there. I really enjoyed the brisk pace that they set riding Curly and the rhythm of his clumping hooves was a pleasantly familiar sound to have at my back as I hiked along.
Well, I have some time here so mayhaps I should really delve into this thing and see what all that I can sort of recap in the process. Life has actually been quite prosperous ever since we started shipping all that black locust lumber south for dock and bridge building purposes and we are just now enjoying our seventh year of fresh seafood from the coast on our return train cars after making lumber deliveries. Of course we ship much more than just lumber these days with the various hardware stores that we are supplying and heck the coffee trade alone has been booming for nigh on almost ten years so it is a large portion of our shipping capacity on those return trips. I do not keep up with all of that stuff enough these days and mostly I just focus on the goals, the plans, the strategies and albeit a good bit of the tactics, logistics and communications.
The cellular network that Eva and Evy created all those years ago is still operational and even now it is the largest service provider in this hemisphere with somewhere around one hundred thousand users doing voice calls and over five hundred thousand people using the free data network that the girls affectionately call 'The Network' and refuse to call it anything different. I still have no idea how they pulled it off but a heck of a lot of folks have been able to benefit from it and in this day and age communication is key! They even incorporated data over HAM (shortwave) radio into operating as a component of the cellular service which although can do raw transparent data it can also handle IP address creation for the entire meshed network. It is slick and I use it all the time even when in remote locations because the weather prediction models are slowly becoming more reliable (yeah a real weather forecast instead of watching my dogs for the signs they exhibit when foul weather is approaching) which is awesome for planning routes and moving large amounts of cargo around the northern and southern continents here.
I have to say that I never saw myself settling in the Smoky Mountains but alas it is where the girls wanted to have their dreams be fulfilled so we made the trek north over the mountain range from where we were and the area in which we had all met. Hell, I think that the the twins are twenty-two now but I have been calling them girls for so long that I doubt that I will change that. It has been an interesting journey and especially so since the kids came along which happened right around the time we were pulling up stakes in the Blue Ridge mountains and heading north.
It was actually roughly four months prior to the 'big move over the mountains' that the future twins showed up with the kids and yeah you guessed it... both the girls had twins so we tend to four wee ones (well not so wee these days) and it has worked out well that way even though the kids only know Eva and Evy as their parents they also know the future twins as their mother-aunts! The kids all know what is gong on of course and nothing is weird or anything in that regard and for the most part we all trudge along doing whatever it is that we want to explore in the moment and whoa we have been some explorers over the years and learned a lot in the process. Mostly we all have some sort of hobby that keeps us busy but some of the group projects have really fucking nailed it as far as technology goes and if there is anything that we all want it is technology so that we can conveniently communicate with each other over the vast distances.
There is something of the old world in what is going on today and I am proud to be a part of it no matter how difficult that the journey has been. The folks that I have met along the way have helped me to navigate my own way in it all and no matter what else I feel entirely grateful for the meaningful relationship that we all share on a day to day basis. There is something almost poetic about how everything has worked out and when I look at where it all began I am still absolutely flabbergasted that I (and we) have made it this far. The struggles have become less with our daily lives but there is an immense amount of work to be done in just rebuilding infrastructure. The kids seem focused on that aspect of things so mayhaps they will handle it in the long run even though for now I have to keep bank rolling there being new roads, bridges, inlets, ports and a slew of other things that help myself and others to ship goods without breaking a bunch of equipment to make it happen. I have had three train derailments this year and in the end had to lay another two miles of track to fix the problem which was no easy feat considering that all the workers were already clocking overtime from a previous emergency job. Busy times and all that jazz but the little problems that no one thought of a few decades ago are really challenging these days in regards to building materials and such. I had to get a frigging batch of bolts made recently by a machine shop because none of the hardware suppliers had them available in stainless steel. Those folks out west sure make some nice steel these days and even their aluminum has come a long way in the last few years.
Anyway, I am in the office car tonight on the passenger train that runs west and east through these parts and I have to say that it is quite cozy. There is even a hot shower to be had if I want it but I seldom do on these kinds of short trips. The fact is I do not do much to get dirty these days aside from monkeying around on job sites doing architectural work that primarily amounts to me letting the architects know what the general idea is and what I am picturing in my mind. In other words I fool myself into thinking that I still work but largely my time is spent delegating instructions to the folks that I communicate with to keep the crazy apparatus of my life going from year to year so that yeah I can get served a late night espresso on my own train traveling to a town that is a vital trading post in the area where they also actually like that rotgut moonshine that my four distilleries produce and sell under the name of New Vodka. Which by the way we also freely distribute in all the ports for the cost of shipping just because hell folks gotta drink when times are hard and although they are getting better they have been quite hard.
So I think that is enough for now because the train is slowing down and I have to wrap up this last small piece of business before I can ride the train back to the girls and the kids at the Leaning Lounge where we will convene for a short meeting about trans-Atlantic shipping with what was once Australia and perhaps even the new prospect of trading medical supplies with former South Africa. Things are always dodgy in that regard though because we get a wicked delay when talking with anyone 'over the horizon' so to speak. Supposedly a new buoy repeater has been activated and the delay has been reduced but we will see about that tonight.
Well, that is about that until next time. I hope that everyone is doing well and the times that you are in are prosperous and not preposterous!
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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