Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 686-743)

almost 2 years ago

Hello Everyone!

A rainy autumn, Freezing the pesky fleas, When projects need a full restart & Not enough hiking!

A lot of time has passed since last I wrote anything and I doubt that the worming dread that I have been feeling over 'diving back in' is going to decrease over the coming days. I have been willfully ignoring the writing urge the last many days now so I guess that sort of tells me everything that I need to know in that regard... which is basically that I best stop hemming and hawing over beginning said activity!

The last few months have been full of hunkering down, indulging in inner-reflection, gaming online, exploring my new coding hobby and basically spending a bunch of time in a text editor and clacking away at a keyboard! It was undoubtedly a nice change of pace and one that eventually lead me to polishing up a few game mods and making a handful of gaming videos. I even wound up expanding upon some of my earlier ideas with that software project that I began this previous spring.

In other words my time has been far from idle. That said though... I am really unsure how much of that I should really be spending time on... considering that it does fall squarely in the 'I am doing this for my own sanity' category! I am after all passionate about that aspect of my life and thoroughly enjoy tuning into it from time to time... but such is the way of hobbies!

Much akin to these entries (and their coinciding gradient of consistency) pretty much everything amounts to a hobby for me in one way or another and mayhaps I will eventually see the folly in such sentiments. I guess that in that regard it just comes down to how 'seriously' I take my hobbies... and well from the looks of things at this point... I find myself taking them 'seriously enough' and giving them my best effort.

Anyway, during the beginning of taking my little break from writing a very 'early in the year freeze' happened here and although I doubt the wildlife and flora appreciated it I sure did. As I have remarked upon a few times the pests around here have always been problematic and even though the chickens have done well with controlling the ticks... the fleas have been an ongoing battle.

The little buggers have yet to get to the point where they are super problematic (aside from once or twice a year) but as far as really wiping them out goes I have not had a heck of a lot of success. All that said... when that freeze happened I took all the bedding, the mattress, dog beds, carpets, pillows... and everything of that nature and put it outside overnight to freeze!

It really did quite the number on the flea population and although there have been numerous other freezing nights I have yet to do it again because I have only started seeing them again over the last few days. My big plan is that during the next freeze I am going to repeat the process but include my own clothes in the pile and cover every nook and cranny that I can inside the cabin with a light coat of diatomaceous earth.

Having done that a few times with the diatomaceous earth I gotta say it works awesome at what it does but whoa it sure dries my sinuses out breathing its dust! Now that I think of it I may as well also dust the chickens, the laying boxes, the coop (especially beneath it) once again as a preventative measure.

All in all it is probably not a bad idea to always treat the coop and the cabin at the same time when dealing with the pests. In this instance they are located kind of close together though, so I best keep that in mind lest I wind up chasing the little buggers from one locale to the next in an endless cycle.

On a different note. Thankfully there has been plenty of rain over the last few months and although a few times it was a heck of a lot of rain (from passing hurricanes) overall it has kept the woods from becoming dry, dusty and fire-prone. Given all the high wind events, tornado conditions and thunderstorms that have passed by... that extra rain was a welcome relief in regards to my anxiety over wildfires.

For the most part the autumn has been much more like winter and in the back of my mind I keep wondering what the real winter is actually going to look like. Geographically I do not have a whole lot to concern myself over (aside from some grid-related inconveniences) but whoa I have to ask myself what would I do if for instance the abnormal occurred and I found myself waking to a knee-deep snow drift!

Not that I spend a heck of a lot of time thinking about such a scenario but basically I keep having the inclination to anticipate the bizarre, the abnormal, the strange in regards to the weather and perhaps everything else while I am at it. I mean seriously the peculiar nature of events spanning the last many years has eventually got to reach a crescendo of some sort... or the bar for what constitutes 'abnormal' is going to require some heavy adjustment.

Back to what I was getting at. My overall attitude has been one of 'keep an open mind' and not get too focused on thinking that I can gauge the present and/or the future by the past. Although I am specifically referring to the weather it has become my overall demeanor about damn near everything... and although I have yet to really test its merits... having that attitude has worked out well enough on the food supply front.

What I am getting at there is that by and large I am gaining some kind of toehold on utilizing a 'measured approach' as my go-to method of accomplishing my goals each day. Which yeah was mostly the result of spending the better part of the previous month up to my proverbial 'eyeballs' in computer code... and me realizing that not only was I out of my depth but that if I was to obtain said depth it would have to be in incremental steps.

Honestly, I cannot stop thinking about it all and I guess that is what having such hobbies are good for because they tend to 'push out' all the other mental noise and allow me to focus fully upon whatever I am feeling passionate about. Perhaps binging out on them is not such a great tactic (habit) but I guess that really depends upon the results. So far it is a mixed bag on that front (because whoa have I binged out) but I do feel good about the projects that I worked on.

Okay, I trailed off there yesterday and never finished working on this long overdue entry. Thankfully one of the 'difficulties' of letting so much time pass between them is that there is too much to write about and not too little. With that said... I do want to keep this one as short as possible if I can manage to do so.

There is a good bit of bad weather moving in over the next day or so and I have yet to make any real preparations for it which is not all that big of a deal considering that I have kept things in storm-prep mode for several months now. The only thing that did not really survive the storms (and I have yet to deal with) is the frame for the little greenhouse for the outdoor tub.

As far as that greenhouse goes it is still salvageable and I have been procrastinating working on it because it is one of those projects that has had so many 'quick fixes' applied to it... that at this point it is just a mess. In other words the best thing that I can do for that setup is take it all apart and start over! Including the giant spiderweb of twine (that at one point) held it all together and has kept it from blowing away.

Perhaps I will just forgo making repairs to the plastic parts of the metal frame this time and come up with a better solution like making some hoops for it from irrigation tubing. I was originally considering fabricating a wooden frame for it but the more I have thought about that the less I actually like the idea unless I could do it with cedar or a similar wood.

Anyway, I was looking at that project the other day and kept thinking how it is an excellent example of my own internal landscape at the moment. It is hard to convey it in words but more or less amounts to: Oh look at how all this stuff that is good... and how it is strung together... anchored to the ground... collecting water... growing algae and so forth... and not performing anything even close to the functions it is all supposed to be doing!

As shoddy of a picture as that may well paint it sure has made me think about how easy it is for one project or another (including my own life) to continually get 'quick fixes' instead of actual lasting repairs. On some level sure there are things that quick and easy solutions work well for and others that just require more effort and attention.

Of course none of that is all that new of a perspective for me but mayhaps one that I should begin applying much more often than I do now or have in the past. The most challenging aspect of that is getting it worked into my routines. At this point though my routines are in shambles aside from working on those gaming related projects and doing my day to day duties.

In other words it is a really good time to make way for better (or just more interesting) routines than those which involve a text editor in one shape, form or another... regardless of how much I enjoy it! Getting in more exercise sure will be nice as well considering that I have only gone hiking infrequently of late and not been getting much in the way of physical activity.

Well, that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.