Adventures In Homesteading (Day 36)

4 months ago

Hello Everyone!

The drainage fixes worked, Trimming some mimosa branches, Learning the property boundaries, Mushroom hunting & I really miss the woods!

Alright, I am running about twenty minutes behind schedule with my 'hit or miss' writing routine... because I kept dicking around on a social media site looking for responses to a post that I made in search of someone wanting to come stay here. I will not get too caught up in explaining all that here in detail at the moment... even though I may do so in a future post... but suffice it to say that: I need one good human!

Last night I was up a bit later than I wanted to be (ironically crafting the previously mentioned post) but still wound up waking at four-thirty in the morning. Unlike many other days here (almost all of them) I decided that instead of drifting back off to 'lightly sleeping' I would get up, brew some espresso... and start my day.

In hindsight I am unsure about the wisdom of all that... because I was feeling super irritable (mostly due to my entire body having so many aches and pains) and an hour or two later when I took a brief nap (to reset my mind) I still could not shake the irritability. Aside from the physical 'aches and pains' I have also been under way too much mental stress... given that I have been out of the woods for so long now!

What I mean by that last bit is that... this place (or at least where I am camped at) is much more like 'being on the side of the road' than 'being in the woods' and to make it even more tiresome... there are two very busy roads! Between that and having to constantly wave at passersby and/or meet new people... I have had more social interactions over the last month than I am comfortable having over the course of several years!

In other words the 'zero seclusion' factor is wearing on me heavily... and it would be a bold faced lie if I said that I was not starting to 'crack up at the seams' from it all. Having started from scratch numerous times before... I really do know how much of an endurance test it is (even in an ideal situation) but ugh all the exposure... and having to interact with strangers... is really testing my limits.

Anyways, early in the day I headed out to the road to see how my fixes on that neighbor's drainage system held up... and also try to get any debris (from further up the road) raked up... so that what happened yesterday will not happen again. Everything that I did seemed to have helped a lot... and although I was yet again tempted to get over-involved with the project... I successfully avoided doing so.

During all that I wound up finally meeting the previous owner of this place... and the care that was taken of the place over the years/decades made a heck of a lot of sense to me haven met the fella. In short, I was quite impressed by the fellas thoughtfulness, friendliness... and especially kindness... which yeah is not all that common these days.

We did not chat for super long because the dogs heard us talking... and escaped the temporary dog yard (because they are after all work dogs and want to see what is going on) and I had to shoo them back to the camp... and get them secured again. As a side note, I later saw where my boy dog gashed himself open on a piece of the fence... and it was so bad that I had to glue it shut... which yup means that he will be getting started on the last of my antibiotics this evening to keep any infection at bay.

Not long after all that I headed back out to the road... and trimmed up a bunch of mimosa tree branches that were sagging into the road... and forcing folks to drive around them. Right after that I saw that fella again... and he made sure to tell me exactly where I could find the two iron stakes that mark the southern boundary of the property.

Having had no idea those stakes existed... I had simply paced the place off to figure out that boundary... but whoa I had stopped way shy of where the boundary actually is. Basically, I have about a ten meter wide by one hundred meter long strip of land that I did not know that I had... which might seem small but it is huge considering that there is a nice flat spot at both the furthest uphill and downhill points of it.

While I was hiking around exploring the new boundary I was also looking for mushrooms since we got so much rain... but I did not find anything edible to fluff out my meager diet with. Maybe in the fall there will be some good mushrooms to pick... but this early in the year I was hoping to find some chanterelles... or maybe even some ceasars but no luck yet.

Another thing that I learned from that fella is that some of the gunfire that I have been hearing is from a nearby shooting range where people learn firearm safety... and of course do a lot of shooting at. Although it sounds like it is super close to me... it is actually on the other side of a hill/ridge... but the way the sound travels (echoes) it seems much closer... and my only thought was: At least there is a hill between me and the noobs learning to shoot!

Well, I had a bunch more that I wanted to spell out... like how I intentionally kicked a hornets nest the other day just to do it and did not get stung... but my old dog is yelping for me to come help her go outside... and I have used up all the words that I have in me for the day. I hope that everyone is doing well. Ta ta for now.

P.S. Sorry about all my recent typos! The stress is playing hell on me!