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 380!
Fabricating A Gutter, Researching Low Tech Water Filters & Rambling On About Preparedness
I got off to a pretty slow start this morning after finishing the writing that I should have done the night before which is not that big of a deal or anything because although I still have a lot to do before the cold weather arrives... for the moment I do not have any super pressing projects that require my immediate attention. Well maybe my laundry requires attention but that is just one of those things that I will undoubtedly get to eventually. The laundry I am talking about is all that fabric stuff that got moldy in the camper and has been stored in the greenhouse the last few weeks while I continually procrastinate filling a barrel with bleach water and laboriously washing all that stuff by hand and then stringing up more clothes lines in the greenhouse to dry it all on.
Today I finally fabricated a gutter for the roof of the new addition and even managed to get it installed before it started raining this afternoon. Since I already had a two meter section of actual metal gutter I used it as a template to make another section of gutter with a piece of coated aluminum that I think was previously used as skirting on a building or mobile home. It was a bit tricky to do all the bends for the aluminum so that it had the appropriate contours to mate with the other pre-fabricated piece of gutter but with a little patience, some blocks of wood and the edge of my work table the bends came out rather uniform. I think that it actually took me longer to get the gutter installed than it did to fabricate the extra section that I needed but in the end I like how it all came out and now directs the water away from the building and more importantly away from the big tree directly downhill of the addition.
That particular tree is a 'split base' poplar tree with three trunks which basically means that at some point the center will rot and it will shed one or more of its trunks and I did not want to hurry that process along by potentially shedding water onto it or even around its base where it would eventually cause the roots to become exposed by erosion. One way or another that tree will eventually be problematic much like the big cherry tree that leans over the shelter. Fortunately I am rather confident that if either was to topple onto the buildings that they could withstand it without being fully crushed even if it still did significant damage.
Anyway, aside from burning more stuff for ashes I did not really do much else today besides all my normal chores. I did spend some time trying to figure out how to create a downspout from my new gutter and how (if at all possible) to fit my large water holding tank below the downspout. I also did some research on building a low tech high volume water filter and it seems that although it is not all that difficult to do either on a large or small scale the larger scale (fifty-five gallon) filters are way better especially if there is a series of them. I am not feeling all that ambitious though so I will probably just look at constructing a single fifty-five gallon filter or opting for filtering the water downhill of the holding tank at the end of the gravity-fed system that I want to build.
Like I said a few days ago the 'water thing' has really been on my mind a lot lately and now with the two gutter systems that I have setup I am in much better shape as far as having grid-independent water goes. Considering that I can always manually filter the debris out of the water and treat it with some bleach (like I did for many months at the last place that I lived) I at least feel that I now have 'water security' and can sort of mark it off my mental checklist. If I was to use the system like it is currently I would undoubtedly want to cover my holding tanks (a plastic tote and a plastic bucket) with screen to keep the mosquitoes out and also to prevent wildlife from drinking from them but aside from that it is already a hundred percent better setup than the one that I used previously.
On a different note, everything that has been going on in this country has been weighing on me rather heavily and although I am doing well at not letting it stress me out or even depress me or anything like that... nonetheless I find it all extremely worrisome for a number of reasons and keep finding myself taking stock of my own situation. I cannot really (and will not) speak for other folks at all but as far as I go I think that I am holding up well and have my head on my shoulders instead of stuck up my ass which seems to be where most folks' heads in this country are located currently. As much as I like being a home body and love the idea of weathering the coming storm where I am... a good thirty percent of my planning and prep work has been going into the possibility that I might find myself displaced for one reason or another. Even though the likelihood is low for that eventuality I damn sure do not want to be caught by surprise by it and thus find myself scrambling at the last moment to get my shit together and bug out with the dogs.
As far as bugging out goes the thing that I always try to remind folks is that there will undoubtedly be other folks doing the same and the woods are never quite as big as you think that they are especially if there are multiple people foraging and/or hunting in said woods. As a side note there is also always going to be someone around that either knows the woods better than you (or I) do or someone that is better at procuring food in the wilderness. If there is some sort of societal breakdown or hell even a supply chain breakdown folks will flood into the woods looking for food and the amount of acres per person that it takes to support that sort of foraging just does not exist in the region where I currently am. To put things in perspective one person needs around five acres (2.02343 hectares) or more to sustain them and that is with gardening included which will not be the case if folks bug out to the woods or just try to procure food from the wilderness. It is a nice thought/fantasy that someone with a backpack and a few well selected items could do well 'in the bush' but having put that to the test a few times in my life I damn sure do not want to count on it.
Well, I have rambled on enough for one evening and think that it is time to just wrap this up and do the editing. 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.
https://peakd.com/c/hive-114308/created
https://peakd.com/hive/@jacobpeacock/hive-survival-guide-sixth-edition