22 May 2024

Yesterday I had to rest, usually I rest Monday’s as the weekends are usually a lot of work. The car maintenance had been put off for so long, I wanted to do it last week and needed to postpone it again that this week I needed to get the car into the shop first thing. That way nothing can come up to take priority, that left me with less rest and here I am with a cold again. I am sick of being sick every other week, maybe it’s because I’m not resting enough, but I’m going to see what healthy changes I can make in my lifestyle to help. Because of that not much has gotten done in my life, I’ve been doing some reading to prepare for this week’s podcast. The awkwardness I felt in last week’s episode has guided me to make the most controversial episode yet. We talked about some people being bad and my opinion was to not judge, so I will be going down an extensive list of bad things humans have done so we can rank them. My point is that we don’t judge anyone because this is what it devolves into and even saying some bad deeds hard for the self, so we don’t want to go down this path. We’ll see how the Bois respond and what that leads me to do next. Hopefully this will be a short distraction since I wanted to talk about war tactics and have even been studying the old infantry field manual. The military FMs are full of valuable information that I seldom saw people reading, most of the knowledge was passed down verbally. Once I encountered the verbal rules not being what the book rules were, when I tried to make the correction I got in trouble. That is one reason I got out, leadership that valued their ego over the rules. 

20 May 2024

The car’s oil has finally been changed! I’m bad with car maintenance and waited so long the car would give an alert every time it turns on, then I still drove it like that for another three thousand miles. There will be cars in the wild that have trash bags over a window or a bungie cord holding the bumper up and I feel better about myself. As life improves it’s hard for the standard of living to not improve with it, I worry as much about overdue oil now as I worried about my bumper flapping in the wind then. Another example is how I used to eat and drink anything, now I think how rotten food might get me sick. It’s over now and I’ll regain a lot of space in my head where that worry was waiting. I can look up again and figure out what I need to focus on next. The trail blazing in the forest is going well, lately I’ve been working to cut feeder paths allowing everything to be connected to everything. With the new tree I revealed last week, I cleaned up some paths around it to create a new area or I think of them as rooms since they it feels like they have walls and a roof. This week I’m hoping to take the mower to the farthest corner of the property, that will be a happy day. The corner that’s equally far back but on the opposite side is close to where the neighbors house is, that makes it not so entrenched in woods and I’m less inclined to clear it out. My favorite neighbors are the ones I never see. My chainsaw still needs to be tightened, it came loose while working last week and is only a single bolt to fix. When I was done with the work I didn’t have the energy and now it sits in the shed.

17 May 2024

The transition away from bottles for the baby this week has gone well. There was some struggling the first couple days, but after that she’s done great and I don’t think there’s been any resistance yesterday or today. She’s a great kid and we love her more everyday. We recorded the Wrecking and Rapping podcast last night and there were some sensitive subjects mentioned, not sensitive to me, there more subjects I have to be careful what I say. A lot of what I say is to break down people’s preconceived notions and that requires a sensitive touch as well since it’s ill advised to damage a persons world view, especially if you haven’t given them anything to replace it with. To provide people with a world view is why I preach the Bible though I know the resistance to that people have. My work has to be done slowly, but other people might push it along since they think they know where I’m headed, that can leave them with whiplash when I do twist around. I hope things are going well and that I’ll help more than I hurt, this is the path I must travel so only dwell on it as long as it’s helpful. Outside of that life is pretty standard, we went to the grocery store and the baby got upset because we were going to buy apples but she wasn’t allowed to eat them then and there. While the baby was crying a stranger said to me, “You better stop beating that kid.” It’s always astonishing the things people think is okay to say when I’m out with the baby. Maybe they lose their minds if they’re not around kids usually. Another time someone pointed out to me that she was upset, like I couldn’t tell from the ear piercing scream. 

16 May 2024

The days are starting to heat up again and there’s nothing like working in a forest where the humidity has no where to go. I was out in the forest this morning with my chainsaw and hedge trimmer combo, there were a couple different path I wanted to extend. The paths weren’t suitable for guests to walk through with so many low hanging branches and random thorny sticks coming from the ground. The work today cleared up space for my mower to drive by and create a nice bed of grass. There was one big tree that had fallen before I moved in that I cut into pieces and cleared out, there were also a couple different trees that had bent into the paths I wanted, so those got taken out too. I’m really excited to see what it looks like after my next pass with the mower, though after breaking my belt a couple weeks ago I’m hesitant to go galavanting in the woods. Act without fear. I made an Instagram story of one of the paths I cleared because my Facebook page has challenges to level up and it wants me to create five stories. The levels don’t mean anything, I’m just always working on making number go up. After that the only thing I have to do for the next level is get 1,000 followers, so I’ll share the link if anyone would like to help out. These blog posts and podcast content are also shared there. Who knows maybe I’ll keep making stories. 

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100085102509430

15 May 2024

When I laid down to rest yesterday I fell asleep for longer than I expected and at night I had a neck pain that I associate with the tick bite. This morning I was worried that the meat allergy was beginning, it’s been almost two weeks and three weeks is how long it took last time. There’s been no reaction so far today, so I’m probably just dealing with another cold. On Monday when I picked up the baby from daycare I noticed some green snot from her nose. I’ll take a cold everyday of the week over alpha gal, still it will be a couple more weeks before I can sleep comfortably. The reason I got bit in the first place was complacency, I took the dog for a walk around the property in slippers instead of my tall boots. That mistake will not happen again and I’m regularly spraying those boots with bug spray. That’s left me mostly resting these two days, we’ve been doing a lot of smaller unpacking tasks, there’s still several boxes of stuff laying around the house. The boxes don’t have things we use regularly so it’s been fine to let them sit, they still take up space and keep us from fully appreciating our house. With having guests coming in the Summer we’d like to get the house as far along as possible, plus having a clean and unpacked house feels good, we can enjoy our stuff better. We have an A frame jungle gym that I put together yesterday that was taking up a lot of space, now it’s outside. There was also a lot of rain the last couple days and I’ve been able to get some good photos of mushrooms growing.

13 May 2024

We’ve had a successful day of work already, the big item on the to-do list was installing a bidet for my wife. The job kept getting post poned due to one thing or another, I was sick for about two weeks, and like I’ve said the longer something sits on a list the scarier it becomes. Plumbing work is always scary, there’s the fear that once I take the system apart that I won’t succeed in putting it together and water will keep flowing until my house is sunk. Thankfully there doesn’t appear to be any leaks, I’ve gotten meticulous with plumbers tape and owning a basin wrench is a big help. It’s been said that if a job is hard it’s because you don’t have the right tool, the basin wrench makes all the tight quartered bolts easy to turn. There’s also a good deal of physics at work, that being the creation of torque in a small space and even how the wrench head grabs the bolt while twisting. The weekend went well, my sister in law was visiting and having guests is always tiring, but we stayed around the house. We began planning a trip for some of my family to visit and that will be a lot of fun to have a full house, very tiring too. Today is the beginning of no more bottles for my baby, it’s been a long time coming, with the move and sicknesses that also kept getting delayed. The switch has already happened though and there will be no going back. Apparently staying on bottles too long causes problems to the kid’s teeth, my wife said she started to notice it, so I’m move driven to commit. I cut some flowers from around the house for Mother’s day, feel free to enjoy.

10 May 2024

Another satisfying week, for the first time since I’ve moved here over two months ago I’ve finally mowed all of the grass on my property. The grass on the West side gets covered in shade by the tree line leaving it to grow slower. The bees are also on the West side making it the first time I mowed around the bees. Since I didn’t want to get attacked while mowing I did my wellness check on the bees immediately before mowing in hopes they would still be pacified by the smoke. There were no bee attacked and they’re doing great, this was the first time I was able to see they’re making honey. I still can’t really find the queen since they built their own combs instead of building on the frames I can remove and I have zero experience spotting the queen. As long as everything looks fine, I’m happy. With mowing, I continued clearing areas in the woods. It had also been awhile since I mowed the previous paths and gave them a cut. A process the forest floor is going through is my first mow clears out brush and layers of dead leaves, this allows grass to begin growing. My second pass of freshly revealed forest puts the grass at a nice height creating a comfortable forest floor. There are still parts of the forest I’m revealing and I’m almost to the back edge, I was mapping out the path I will attempt to cut next time to do so. Then I will work on the Eastern edge of the forest which has trees growing over the neighbors fence, that’ll be a lot of chainsaw work before I can mow. 

9 May 2024

Yesterday’s post was about a memorial stone placed under an oak tree, here is a picture of the oak tree. The stone is being overtaken by the roots of the tree, when it was placed over 100 years ago wouldn’t have been nearly as big and now it dwarfs the house next to it. This tree is also a sign for me to be here and for new beginnings since the tree is dead. This might not be obvious since the tree itself doesn’t know it’s dead, there are leaves growing on the branches. When a tree gets cut down it will still grow new branches and leaves, it’s using the energy stored with in. Upon closer inspection of the tree, all of the big limbs have broken in the past, that’s how to know it’s secretly dead. Those broken limbs will continue to sprout new branches and leaves, then the weight will be too much for the unhealthy limb and break again, this process will continue until only the trunk stands or the whole thing falls. Thankfully it doesn’t look like the tree will and if it did it wouldn’t be towards the house. The falling branches are likely to knock out the power line connected to the house, looking at where the line connects it seems this has happened in the past and ripped off some exterior wood. We’ll deal with that as it happens. My neighbor shared some videos she had taken interviewing previous owners of our house where they had shown pictures of what it used to look like. Through my wife’s friend who is related to the woman on the memorial stone we were able to get a photo of her. It’s hard to believe there’s so much history here, that we could access it, and are stewards to it.

8 May 2024

When we were visiting our neighbor for eggs, they told us about a tombstone that was under a big oak tree. Yesterday, I found the stone and as it’s over 100 years old the tree has grown so large the roots are overtaking it. We were then able to find out who the person referenced is and also found that she had a daughter. That daughter ended up dying in the exact town we just moved from and when my wife posted about it online a friend from high school messaged saying that daughter was the friends great grandmother. How is it possible that we would have a direct connection to the person that lived in the same house as us over 100 years ago unless it was all part of a plan. I’ve said before that I stopped making plans and this is what that looks like, falling into the place I’m meant to be. If we didn’t live in the house before this one, I wouldn’t have the experience or desire to live where we are now. That doesn’t mean I know what’s going to happen next, I will keep doing the work I believe to be right and I do that work knowing it matters. Same as it mattered when that daughter moved from this town to that and we brought it full circle. 2024 is shaping up to be a significant year, in my podcast I’m always preaching the importance for people to stay sharp. When events begin to unfold we have to be ready and able to move with them. We don’t want to slip through the cracks. In my audiobook while mowing C. S. Lewis said, “if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.”

7 May 2024

Today was still mostly spent resting, I had some coughing fits last night that kept my wife awake and I’d like to knock this thing out completely. Yesterday I got some smaller tasks done that had been waiting awhile and the longer a task sits undone the harder it becomes to start. Our bathroom didn’t have a toilet paper roll holder, it was only two screws to hang it, but day after day of seeing it sitting on the floor turns it into a monster of a project. There’s also the little difficulty of all my tools are still semi packed, that means I have to go on a search before I can even start the project. The lawnmower belt has been replaced and afterwards I wanted to check that it worked so I hadn’t put the floor of the mower on, that allowed me to see the belt move. There is a spring that keeps tension on one of the pulleys and I could see the belt was touching the spring. I’ve never seen the belt moving before, so I don’t know if it has touched the spring in the past, but now I know that it’s happening it’s something I’ll continue to worry about. At night our neighbor texted me that they have extra eggs for me, they have chickens and I eat three eggs a day for breakfast, so I had let them know I can eat any extras they have. My wife and I went over to their farm as they had never met her and we got to see more of their set up. They have been here for 14 years and a lot of what they have is what I’d like to build someday. We came home with three dozen eggs and picked a large cup full of fresh strawberries.