Day 789 (Daily Post)

Day 789. Recently I have been easing myself back into being more physically productive now that the winter is nearly over. It is not that I ever really get to the point where I do zero physical activity but compared to what I do during the warmer months it amounts to the same thing. What I have been doing is just setting some small goals each day that are labor intensive and after accomplishing them (which works out to about half the day) transItion to doing other stuff that does not require much physical exertion. In this way I can gradually build back up muscle mass without feeling like a train hit me.

Yesterday I worked on installing that new (new to me at least) water barrel at the spring where my drinking water comes from. At first I was planning on hooking it into my existing drinking water system but once I was up there and looking at things I decided to just leave that system as it is and use the new water barrel as a holding tank for my utility water system that is fed via the overflow from my drinking water holding tank. Before the winter I had unhooked and drained the utility water system so that it would not get frozen and also because I do not really need it during the winter for irrigation or any other purpose but once I was up at the spring looking at it all yesterday I decided to hook it all back up and upgrade it with more water storage capacity and if I really want/need to I can use it for drinking water also.

The way that I had the utility water system setup before was with a metal holding tank that tended to put some rust in the water which is fine for irrigation (and for washing off my dirty boots) but not so great for much else. It was also a much smaller holding tank and the new barrel holds five times more water than it did. I have been letting it trickle fill ever since yesterday and am excited to check on it today and (if it worked) see just how much water pressure I have in the 'yard' where I have a garden hose hooked to it with a shutoff valve at the end. The total 'run' (length of pipe/tubing/hose) from the holding tank to the end point is nearly four hundred feet and consist of roughly two hundred feet of three-quarter inch irrigation tubing and two-hundred odd feet of really stout water hose. I may still have to disconnect and drain the system a few times because the freezing temperatures are not quite gone yet but it is much better than fiddling with the system during the time of year that I actually need to be using it reliably. As with every new (and albeit experimental) system I am sure there will be some things to adjust and/or troubleshoot so by hooking it all up now it gives me plenty of time to do just that.

On a different note I managed to get a decent amount of sun yesterday and utilized most of the afternoon to backup all my media onto an external hard drive and basically prep my netbook for a much needed operating system upgrade. Just getting everything archived onto the external drive took several hours and I was reminded just how much 'media management' that making my videos, recording audio, writing articles, taking pictures and doing research really entails. All that sort of stuff really adds up not just in 'subject matter' but also in actual hard drive space but it was a good feeling getting it all sorted out by the end of the day. I even got my operating system upgraded to a newer one and although the process itself is rather easy all the system updates and user interface tweaks took me nearly another six hours to complete. Downloading just about anything over an intermittent cellular connection is dodgy at best but downloading five hundred megabytes of 'critical' system updates over said dodgy connection is put simply a tedious process and put bluntly a total pain in the butt...but by nearly eleven o'clock last night I finally finished that phase of things and at some point today I am going to finish installing all the software that I use and finish off any necessary configurations of the new system. During the entire process of doing all the technology stuff yesterday I got to thinking about how nice it would be if both software and hardware would just quit evolving and be whatever the hell it is without needing updates, upgrades or replacement. I know that this is totally a fantasy idea on my part but damn it sure would be nice if stuff just worked and didn't constantly change or need to be made 'secure'.

Anyway it is rather overcast today and it is looking like it might rain at any moment so I am going to 'get it together' finish off my coffee and see just how productive I can be today now that I am feeling about ninety-three percent recovered from whatever ailment it is that I have yet to fully shake off. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.