Fat Bunny

  • 1666: The Devil is in the Details…

    After not seeing a usable set of French doors in months I have found 2 sets in week. The first set are aluminum framed which is probably practical for the exposed side of the cabin where they would fit, and they are slightly narrower so they will fit easily in the gap. The gap in this case is exactly 1666mm.

    The second set of doors are wood and will need sanding, painting, and regular maintenance. They are also 1640mm wide without the jambs, so in total I will need 1676mm to install them. I’m leaning towards the wood pair just because I am more comfortable cutting up wood and installing hardware than I am aluminum. I suspect the greenhouse is going to get a nice set of aluminum doors and I am going to be planing 5mm of both edges of each of the wood doors.

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  • Zen and the Art of Dashcam Videos…

    I have found that when I am feeling stressed, which is increasingly often this year, I have been finding it difficult to come up with ways to cope and distract myself. I am also very sensitive about putting my stress out into the world as I really don’t want to be the person who throws a sourdough loaf at somebody in the supermarket for blocking the aisle.

    My possibly unorthodox solution has been watching compilations of dashcam footage on YouTube, and just relaxing and letting the road rage inciting incidents (poor driving not accidents) just play out while I just breathe and remain calm. I am sure I am just reinventing the wheel here, and this is just some sort of immersion therapy (possibly not the right term). There is something amazing about watching stressful situations and not being able to just concentrate on keeping your heart rate just high enough that your Apple watch doesn’t try to alert medical authorities for you.

    I’m noticing that I am also calling people DUMBARSE less when I am driving in actual traffic lately, which has to be a good thing…

  • Midweek Break…

    I’m not actually taking any time off the break is more emotional than physical. Break is also probably a bit dramatic, because I am just a bit tired and it feels like it’s been winter for about a thousand years.

    Did I mention I was feeling a bit dramatic?

    I should be feeling positive because I am making real progress at the farm again finally, my new medication appears to be working and I’m hoping the specialist agrees that I am in remission. Instead I’m just feeling a bit flat from spending so much time alone at the farm. Neither the children nor the cat seem keen to spend wintery wet days working in an unheated cabin with no windows, or digging out drainage canals by hand. I can’t blame them really, I would prefer to be in town taking a nap near a heating vent to.

    I’m really pinning my hopes on spring providing a mood boost and a garden with more than dead leaves and empty pots…

  • Insomnia Paralysis…

    When I went through a serious bout of PSTD induced insomnia a few years ago I was pretty much ready to check out a few times. But with a lot of work and a very strict sleep routine I managed to reset myself and get back to a more or less normal sleep schedule. Which has helped my health both mental and physical.

    However—I have now become so fixated on maintaining the same routine that helped my insomnia that I have been unable to listen to anything other than the same three audiobooks. I no longer read before bed or listen to podcasts for fear of interrupting the all important schedule. It hasn’t helped that the few times I have varied things with a late night or an evening event I have struggled for the next few days.

    I’m hoping that I can break the routine at some point without breaking my sleep again. I don’t think my brain can handle the atrophy much longer that is happening with the lack of stimulation. I’m hanging an awful lot of hope on the farm regulating my sleep while allowing me to return to the creative life that kept my mind occupied.

  • Empty…

    The last few months has involved a lot of work to get the shipping containers to a stage where they could contain things. I had to install a road just to be able to get them onto the property just in time for the coldest and wettest time of the year. I then had to pave a path to allow access to them so I wasn’t standing in a mud bath while I tried to fill them with all the junk from my storage unit in town that had raised its prices 3 times in the last 12 months.

    I also desperately needed to sort and downsize the amount of stuff. It was suffering badly from having a pile of stuff hastily moved into it, which was something I didn’t want to just transfer to the shipping containers at the farm. So after months of selling, sorting, and eventually just dumping I have reduced the amount of stuff to mostly quality items in organized storage tubs. I have also handed back the keys to unit and that felt great.

    There is a sense of purpose and a daily endorphin feed that comes with jobs like this. Which lasts a few days before it all wears off and you remember you have another task ahead even bigger than the last one.

    Next week I better get back to work on the cabin because it has been rather neglected while I have been taking care of other things.

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  • There are Two Paths…

    Except one is a sticky mudslide. Actually both were sticky mudslides because groundwork, constant rain, short days, and subzero temperatures are not great for making ground you can walk on let alone drive on.

    Which would not be an issue if I didn’t need to be able to use the shipping containers until spring. I do however need to move a bunch of stuff from town to the farm in the middle of winter because as usual my timing is awful. So the only practical solution is to make a path. Starting with a ute full of rocks and sand.

    Because the cure for mud is drainage according to some french guy on YouTube. I probably should have watched a few videos in a language I can understand because then I probably wouldn’t have started at the furtherest point and worked backwards. It didn’t make the job easier to be stomping through sticky clay while carrying bags of gravel.

    In my defense the end container was the one with the slipperiest areas, so it felt more important to make it accessible. I should add that the initial plan was just to gravel it, but then I found a pile of pavers my father had collected from somewhere and never used. One of my goals for the farm is to finish the jobs he started and use the materials he stockpiled. Of course once I decided to use the pavers I then needed to compact the gravel. Lay, screed, and compact the sand and then scour internet free sites for more pavers.

    Free pavers seem to show up quite often but disappear just as quickly, and spending money on them seems to go against the spirit of things. However if enough to finish the job show up all at once I might be convinced to part with fifty bucks. By my calculations I need another 400 to get to gate. I did see an offer for 1200 pavers for a $100 but that way madness lies.

    I already considered paving the area between the two shipping containers for no practical reason. So every pallet of free bricks or pavers looks like me spending 5 years putting paths through the woods.

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  • Nah, I’m Good…

    Occasionally I get asked out, no really I do. Sometimes I even go, have a coffee, and a chat but not too often because I know how busy I am at the moment so it’s not really something that seems fair to the other person. The other problem is that I am not just comfortable with my own company, I enjoy it.

    I’m starting to think I could only ever spend time around someone who was equally okay with their solitude. There is attractiveness about people who don’t need to take people’s BS. Someone starts playing games? Explain you don’t need that in your life and walk away. I also like the idea that someone would just cut me dead and never talk to me again if behaved for one second like I did in my 20/30s.

    Maybe it was getting a cat that pushed me over the edge. He’s cool, I’m cool. He does his thing I do mine. I remember to buy food, and occasionally he bites me for no reason. I really can’t imagine a relationship gets better than that, but I wish he liked going for drives.

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  • Ranking My Top 5 Regrets…

    Wouldn’t that be a depressing way to spend your birthday? What I did instead was have a bit of lie in until the cat decided his breakfast was late. Then I had breakfast at the village markets with my ex-wife who gave me a lift out to collect my car from the farm and she kindly paid for my bacon and egg roll and a coffee. She also gave me an annoyingly thoughtful card with a water colour of the farm creek and a Tolkien quote inside. She also signed it “Your Ex-Wife” because she is only slightly less hilarious than I am.

    At least two of my regrets involve her, maybe three…

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  • Like a Bird on a Wire…

    Working at the farm is frosty hands and muddy boots and very solitary this month. Which is understandable because if I had a choice I wouldn’t move from the couch till spring. Maybe next winter that will be an option for me.

    I am in clearing paths mode this month, mainly clearing a path through the pine trees to the shipping containers. The main road to them is a messy clay slip and slide until August however the path through the pine tree is surprisingly solid due to huge quantities of fallen pine needles.

    While clearing out the random tire puncturing bits of metal that are lurking under the leaves I discovered another one of my father’s home made targets. I found one last year around this time as well, and while I don’t really do mystic meg stuff it is hard not to feel the coincidence a bit more at this time of the year. With my stepmother’s birthday yesterday, my birthday tomorrow and my fathers birthday and anniversary of his death in a couple of weeks it definitely makes winter feel harder.

    I have decided to mount the targets in this off cut for now, just to make sure they don’t get lost, and so I can see them while having a coffee break at the farm…

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  • Just wait till spring…

    Everything is either grey or mud at the moment, especially all the bits of ground that have had heavy machinery all over them for weeks. The deciduous trees are basically sticks, the grass that hasn’t been run over or buried is barely hanging in there.

    Today the tiny house was moved to its final location, which is looking very bare and uninviting right now, but once again it’s going to be a wait till spring situation. Decks, planters, sale shades and lighting will make it a magical place to be again.

    It’s going to be a busy winter of making paths and preparation for spring planting and turf being laid. This winter I’m betting a lot of my mental health on spring being spectacular, and on me being in a position to enjoy it.

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