Hello Everyone!
The original timeline, What it will take, Daydreaming of roofing metal, So many wee poplars, Plenty of rain & Missing the music!
Days go by and I cannot always recall what the number of the actual day is... but I always keep up with it by recalculating it with an online date calculator... and at this juncture... I think that I am twenty-seven hundred odd days in... and counting. As peculiar as it may be... the original timeline of when I began making 'daily entries' (for my now fourth series of adventures) is the only one that ever truly stuck... and whose date I can still recall with absolute clarity.
Over the course of all those many days... I have continued to do my best to simply 'share my life' and let the chips fall as they may from there... as I try to eek out a living in one remote area or another. This time around though the circumstances around my location have changed dramatically... and somehow in all the craziness of it all... I wound up owning my own land... or being owned by it as the case may be.
I gotta say outright that the terrain of said land is some of the most challenging that I have had to work with... and sans having the conveniences of postal service... electricity... and the ability to get deliveries... dealing with the challenges would be insurmountable. Basically, without a heck of a lot of funding to pay for fill dirt, gravel and a bunch of heavy machinery work... the place is not all that usable... aside from the driveway that happens to get showered in limestone road dust from the constant vehicle traffic.
To be clear here... what I mean by 'usable' is the ability to use the land to camp, build or be used for storage 'as is' without either some heavy alterations... or building decks, platforms and such to create useful areas. Either way... it amounts to the same thing... that without investing a lot into this place... it is hard to make it useful (as a functional space) even for my simple needs of farming some trees... and creating some fenced safe places for the dogs and birds to roam.
None of that is to say that 'it cannot be done' or anything without some kind of budget for it... but I would rather the place stay mostly 'as is' than junk it up with stuff built with whatever I can scrap together 'on a shoestring budget' so to speak. I would much rather do everything that I want to do here 'right' the very first time that I do it... rather than it all being done halfass and will-nilly along the way.
It is not like the place does not have plenty of material to build with... if I can get some of it from where it is standing, onto the ground, bucked... and set to drying out. That is all a process though... and while sure I could currently be harvesting small poplars for rafter and header material... I have nowhere to store it nor a place to debark it at.
Most of the time I yearn for just two good pieces of very long roofing metal... just so that I could be felling trees, stacking them somewhere off the ground... where I can protect them from the rain with the metal as they cure. It is worth noting that during this time of year those small poplars are rather easy to debark... which is a big part of my recent yearning to have somewhere to store them.
On a different note, there was quite the rain last night... and thankfully I had set out numerous containers to catch it as it ran off the big tarp that covers the camping tent. The rain catchment system (at the top of the hill) did okay as well... but still does not seem to be collecting as much water as it should be... which is probably because it has a half dozen trees growing directly above it blocking the rainfall.
I am almost tempted to use the five or six gallons of water from the catchment system to take a much needed shower... but if the forecast is correct then there is more rain on the way... which means I might wind up with enough to take a bath. Since the gravity fed system has a black holding tank that gets a fair amount of sunlight... and I have close to three hundred feet of black irrigation line rolled out down the hill... I will hopefully have warm or even hot water for my bath if I do it on a sunny day.
Early this morning I hiked around and looked at all my exploratory digging sites for water... and had underwhelming results at all of them... including the one that was holding water during previous rains. Regardless of how dry that it has been... I was hoping to see at least some change in all of the places that I have dug... but I guess that I will need to double down on my efforts... and perhaps build larger pools to create more surface area for water to collect in... plus to help keep the ground damp.
All of those sites have their own unique challenges (and various soil compositions) but the most common theme is 'too many trees sucking up the water' which is easily remedied by felling the trees... but then the site is left un-shaded... which is worse than the trees soaking all the water up. In a few places now I have chosen to leave the trees altogether... just because of how exposed the area would be to the sun without them... but in the long run building some sort of enclosure around each site would be a better approach.
In other news, I have yet to decide on where to build my bar... and if it is even worth it to play any music here during the upcoming holiday... when the fireworks and such are going to alarm the dogs like crazy. Honestly, I want to play some music one way or another... but setting up my full rig requires that I also be able to keep it dry... and I do not have a tent that I can easily set it all up in.
Heck, I even considered trying to cram it into the writing tent... which barely has enough room for the stuff that is in it already... and for me to have just enough room to sit at while I clack away at the keyboard. I still have a few days to figure something out... and one of the big hitches to setting up the music is the terrain here, how the sound is going to carry... and just how many neighbors windows will it be blaring into!
Once again the idea of an underground dwelling comes to mind as a solution... but given that I would rather have the music elsewhere... perhaps I should put 'building an underground studio' on my itinerary. Although I am being humorous there... it is not a half bad idea... considering that I am simply trying to keep the rain off stuff (much like with the root cellar) and do not necessarily need an entire building dedicated to it.
We will see how all of that works out in the long run... because although it would be awesome to hear some music... I have made it this far without it! Well, on that note I am going to wrap this entry up and get back to doing stuff outdoors while the rain holds off.
I hope that everyone is doing well. Ta ta for now.
