Adventures In Homesteading (Day 173)

Hello Everyone!

A fruitless mushroom hike, Looking for a better shelter site, The dodgy tent & Staking down the polyethylene plastic!

Alright, I am more or less on time for what I hope is going to become my new writing routine as far as timing goes. I am still unsure how it will all work out once the cold weather really moves in... because I may wind up having to write during the day when it is warmer... instead of an hour and a half after sunset when it is markedly chillier.

Basically, my hands do not function all that well in the cold weather... and I doubt that using gloves while typing would be all that feasible. Since the temperature is set to plummet tonight... I guess that I will see just how well the six mil polyethylene plastic works to trap the heat inside the tent... and based on that I will know if I need to move my writing time forward to earlier in the day.

Anyways, today was not all that spectacular... but I did manage to get outdoors and hike around the place looking for mushrooms. I was a bit surprised that after all the recent rain there was not a single mushroom to be found (aside from some old turkey tails) but hopefully some will pop up soon... so that I can have something fresh to eat.

While I was out hiking I also looked the terrain over (for what must be the hundredth plus time) to see if there was anywhere that I could relocate to... which would offer me some kind of privacy or even a half ass sense of seclusion. Unfortunately, I have yet to find such a place... and the only place that might possibly work is in the base of a large gulch that not only lacks room for the dog yard... but would probably be all too damp to make for a healthy living scenario.

Late in the day, I went ahead and dug out some of my winter clothes... from where they were stored with the bulk of my other gear... in that camping tent that will probably collapse the first time that it snows here. As a side note, I still have yet to figure out what to do about my storage needs... and cannot quite prioritize it until I get into a better shelter than my threadbare tent... with its many holes... and its door flap that does not zip up.

After doing all that jazz, I went ahead and made a bunch of stakes from some of the branches that I saved when I was harvesting poplar trees... and used them to stake the plastic in place that I have covering the tent. The main reason that I did that is because although I had laid a bunch of logs around the base of the plastic... the wind (that had not even been blowing all that hard) had already pulled the plastic free in several places... and I want to be ready for the bad weather that will be blowing in over the coming days.

Well, on that note... I hope that everyone is doing well. Ta ta for now.