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 389!
Rambling About Winter, Upgrading The Arched Room, Building A Step & Having A Productive Day!!!
It was much warmer this morning than it has been of late and it was quite nice being able to get an early start on working outside without having to bundle up in clothes that would just make me sweat within the first thirty minutes of doing stuff. Perhaps it is my Floridan roots but I always picture that the seasons are just going to abruptly go from warm and pleasant to cold and dreary and if I do not watch closely then I will miss the transition time altogether. Of course after all these years living in the mountains I am well accustomed to the seasonal changes by now but still when I picture winter I often gloss right over autumn and picture the weather being brutally cold and since I am not all that fond of cold temperatures I think that my mind just gravitates towards that dislike and ignores all else!
Anyway, I got the 'arched room' all sorted out by redoing how I had the sheets of plastic so that they now lap over the long diagonal pole that I installed yesterday. I actually had to lower the pole by one inch on the high side of it to get the edge of the plastic to bend so that I could screw it to the storage addition's wall under the eave. Getting the walls of the arched room constructed and anchored in place was a bit of a hassle especially since I had so much stuff stored in the room and just did not feel like moving all of it out of the way. The main thing that I wanted to accomplish with the walls was that they are not truly parallel to the other building's walls and are situated in a way that will make any water shed away from the arched room and ultimately towards my fire-pit and the chicken coop so that both can act as water breaks to spread the water out as it travels downhill. On both the walls of the arched room I added greenhouse plastic to the exterior and lapped several inches of it over the ground at the base of the walls and then covered that plastic with lots of small stones.
All in all the arched room project came out rather well. Although I created a good bit more storage space with the way that I have the room setup now... I have serious doubts as to whether or not I can squeeze a three hundred and thirty gallon IBC tote inside of it and still be able to use the room for storage. I can definitely fit a fifty gallon barrel (or two) inside the room so that is what I am considering doing instead of sacrificing so much of my precious storage space. For now I am considering adding a bunch of shelving inside of the room and getting some of my stuff from the greenhouse stored away so that the greenhouse is no longer a complete cluster-cuss.
Late in the day I finally added another step below the step that I added to the porch a few weeks ago. I wound up installing the step an equal distance from the previous step to the porch itself. I thought about setting it lower but decided that I should just add another step below the new one soon and also install a nice black locust rail and basically make myself a proper set of steps there so that I am taking no chances of falling or at least minimizing the chances. I am rather spry and all but damn I have lost count of just how many times that I have slipped and/or fallen when there is muck, ice, snow or all three in the dog yard. My current setup is absolutely better than that dodgy ramp that I used last winter (which accounted for many of my slips/falls) so I am super thankful for that but really I need to just do the steps and rail properly and be done with it!
Well, that is about it for now. 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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