Adventures In Homesteading (Day 22)

5 months ago

Hello Everyone!

Predawn espresso, A baking hot day,Taking it easy, Building a giant drill bit, Minimal bugs, Treating pests & Underground appeal!

Alright, I am beginning my writing routine much earlier in the day than I have been due to it being baking hot outside... and having some 'free time' to spend in the shade. Keeping with the schedule for the writing has been utterly hit or miss in so many ways... and honestly I am glad that doing it each day has 'stuck' regardless of how the timing works out.

Last night I fell asleep before the sun had fully set over the western horizon... and was wide awake at five thirty this morning brewing espresso... and making an early start to my day. My dreams have still been vivid... and although the 'dispassionate' trend has continued... there has been much less hecticness with the bizarre sequence of events that occur within them.

Having gotten such an early start I should probably be napping at this point... but for the most part... I am not all that tired aside from the bone weary tiredness that has been with me since day one here. After taking a 'light duty day' yesterday... my body felt much less tense... and I decided to follow it up with a second day of piddling around with small easy tasks again!

A few days ago I had given the dogs a good lathering of some of that sulfur lime dip... and then today I followed it up with a sponge bath of strong pyrethrin and water. I never mentioned it before... but thus far at the new place... I have not found any ticks... seen any fleas on the dogs... plus the demodex mites on my one dog seem to be subsiding like I thought that they would.

By and large the bugs have not presented much of a problem aside from my light at night (in the tent) occasionally attracting horseflies... that make quite the racket as they look for the exit. I would not even want to imagine what it would be like trying to deal with the place... if it were super buggy, had a lot of ants, vermin... or if it was super snakey.

Anyways, not long before noon I did my best to fabricate a sort of drill bit from a long piece of PVC pipe... in the hopes that I could attach it to my cordless drill and then drill for water with it. My experiment mostly worked and the 'bit' did a nice job of boring a hole... but where it met the chuck on the drill it kept failing... which means I need to put my thinking cap on and come up with a better solution.

Once again, I found myself hiking around a lot looking things over in an effort to figure out where to set everything up at... but I am still coming up with nothing new... nor finding myself very fond of the few bad options that I do have. In the end it may well take bringing in a bunch of fill dirt, more gravel (crusher run) and heavy machinery... to create the areas that I need and there is just no other way about it.

Since I am 'running on empty' as far as funds go... I will have to get creative going forward, use whatever resources that are here... and perhaps terraform a few areas the hard way. Heck even bushcrafting a place together would make for quite the upgrade... and considering how exposed that I am on the hill here... I need to upgrade my situation tremendously... long before the arrival of winter.

I gotta admit that building some kind of underground house here sure does look appealing... but I am hesitant to start thinking about that idea overly much until I understand how the surface water flows here. There is a good chance that several of the gulches are now dry gulches... and if that is the case... then I want to build a root cellar in one (to see how it does) as soon as I can.

As you can probably tell there is a heck of a lot of stuff bouncing around in my brain... and everything that I am doing (including where the animals are located) is done so... in such a way... that I am having as minimal impact on the watershed as I can. In other words... things are so convoluted (especially with things like the fall zone of big dangerous trees) that I really have to take my time... and think through all the long-term ramifications.

Well, on that note I am going to wrap this entry up... and get on with the editing and posting portion of things. I hope that everyone is doing well. Ta ta for now.