I'm trying to do with this frugal passage of a bear market.
It feels good knowing that you can defend your nest egg or your long term holdings of whatever asset.
It's an amazing feeling to be able to create a financial buffer protecting my future security.
People say, I figure I would need to have a nest egg of about a million dollars, assuming eventually an individual would end up having to go into hospice care.
You're gonna have medical bills as you age as a given, and then just to live relatively comfortably, let alone have any kind of fun with your golden years.
With inflation and the devaluation of the dollar, erosion of the value of the dollars that were saved over time, that million dollars, you'd be lucky to to stretch that for the rest of your life.
This retiring generation is facing longer life expectancy and a shrinking nest egg.
Which could be investments falling apart in the stock market, or just the value of the money, value of a dollar saved being eroded, purchasing power eroded.
So that's why, in context of me having this little moment, why I'm in a great mood, because I look at what I need to do with that cash flow, that liquidity that I can apply that to bolstering my strategy to survive another stretch of months.
Or even years of recession or bear market, applying the principles of permaculture and modern survivalism on land where, once the basic mainframe, permaculture design is done, which it essentially it's just a matter of scaling into those zones and plugging in the plant stock, the livestock, the infrastructure as you can afford it. Doing all the sweat equity in the meantime, doing everything I possibly can that costs no money, other than the $6 shovel that I've been using to dig epic swales and ponds and staying in good shape and feeling great physically. At least when it's not so blazing hot that I would perish for even lifting a finger half the day.
It’s been said, you feel insecure and you die many deaths of anxiety living in the city and working for the man. And once you start building your own ecosystem, you start to feel very secure, and you get a warrior energy and a charge to move forward, because you only have one death to fear.
That is your ultimate, one final biological death, but you're not dying a million times every day, living in those insecure circumstances.
I have really yearned for that.
Now I'm finally starting to realize it. Although I'm still a ways off.
But it's getting closer. And at least the symbolic representations of that, there are some important, successes to celebrate, like shedding vitamins and store bought vegetables for many months coming on, coming up on a year of feeling great and having not having my teeth fall out, or scurvy or rickets, or other indicators of malnutrition or vitamin deficiency, and having that come from the most humble, most tooth and nail existence here in a blazing, winding storming desert, sandstorming desert, desiccating winds.
To be able to harvest even micro greens before they're destroyed by the extreme conditions.
To be able to save them and harvest them, cycle them through ferments, and basically be nursing myself through this leafy green, micro green, herbal, ferment, that I'm cycling through. That is a dimension of freedom and liberation and security, which is not even that extravagant.
I've even had way more extravagant gardens in fairer climates, where I had giant bowls of totally diverse species of plants and herbs, everyday harvesting just an absurd amount of very diverse crops every day, and having these giant bowls and making green smoothies once or twice a day on top of a salad on top of a saute.
Now I realize that was great but I was probably was actually just consuming more than I even needed because now I realize how well I can function on even the smallest, most minimal supply.
I would be excited to treat myself to some blood work at some point to really see how well I'm pulling it off with no supplements, no fortified anything, and nothing store bought anymore.
I've just got the staple foods of the seeds and nuts. And I've transitioned away another dimension of liberation into a very resilient and permanent future of homesteading, shifting from the reliance on the coffee grinder, albeit with solar power.
It was using a coffee grinder for years now to grind my sesame seeds, so that they would be palatable for basically a homemade sort of tahini.
That's been my staple food. Ground tahini is what rice is to so many of the peoples of Asia, so that ground sesame, and then whole almonds and whole papitas and raisins.
Essentially my diet is totally consistent with these staples of whole almonds, whole papitas, ground sesame seed and raisins.
In addition to that, every other day, a can of sardines.
And every other day, alternating with the sardines a sort of a half bowl of very dense fermented greens and herbs that are homegrown.
At some point I want to get some blood work done to see whether or not it's all placebo that I feel so good.
Feel better than ever, whether it's all just being high on life, it could all be delusional, though.
I could just be completely falling apart, but I'm pretty well attuned to how my body feels.
I'd felt a lot worse living and eating store bought food, a lot more side effects from all of the toxins and all of the pesticides and, and just all of the additives and whatnot from previous eras of life.
So that's something to feel great about. And then liberating myself from that grinder. I have now a rustic homestead table mount hand crank grinder.
A nut flower grinder, you can adjust the granularity of it for different sizes.
So because the sesame seeds are so fine, I have to tighten it a lot, so there's a lot of tension on it.
So I'm getting a hell of a workout cranking this grinder and, and I just love it because now I don't have, it's one less piece of electronics and plastic that I have to worry about failing.
I purchased that grinder for redundancy. But I soon realized it's a quality of life upgrade.
I just keep thinking more and more about the beautiful journey of like having the modern appliances the modern cheats of getting anything you want cheap from imported, dollar store whatever, and driving and get it's like all of those conveniences that create this artificial glut of free time that ends up getting consumed by drama or bickering or trolling online or rage posting or video gaming, all this frivolous activity that in a more rustic world, a more homestead sort of lifestyle...
The artisanship and the crafts of living life and working tools and preparing food and harvesting food and separating seeds and gardening, like everything is such a beautiful ritual.
Everything is such a delicate art and act, and it keeps you fit and emotionally sane and enriched.
And I just feel that this transition is happening that I've always dreamed of, which is every time I shed a prosthetic, modern, industrial, toxic plastic, electric whatever device or appliance, and I take a step back in time and I'm using A rustic technology in order to fulfill that function I feel so much more fulfilled. I realized this my soul sings with resonance with this activity because it's a meditative trance to get into grinding that tahini mix.
It's such a beautiful transition. I feel that continuum, or that sort of ratio flipping to where, eventually, like just my own survival, let alone caring for livestock, let alone caring for family or children or tribe, if all I do is just do me, and I homestead me.
All of my activity and time gets consumed by these sometimes gentle, sometimes more rough activities.
But they're all meaningful, and they all interlock together into this ultimate product that is a very healthy handmade organic life and it's so beautiful and it's so cheap and so attainable with just a bit of desire to study and to practice.
So another thing to celebrate that I feel was a sacred upgrade, is that recently I used a mortar and pestle to grind my own homegrown rosemary dried and, clipped it straight off the plant it was just part of it that was kind of overhanging and blocking out other plants so it was perfect to prune that out.
Then dry it in the heat and strip the leaves, put them in the mortar and pestle and grind into this beautiful fluorescent green powder.
It's such a potent flavor, being able to mix that in with my tahini at times.
What a rewarding practice the mortar and pestle such a lost art.
Then today, I was using it, and was actually holding it in place with my feet, almost in lotus position, but my bare feet on either side stabilizing it. Then really focusing on a practice that I was informed about recently, a Japanese martial art tradition, generally speaking, which was about, honoring everything and respecting the physical objects in your life, so that you're more attuned to respecting yourself and nature and others and all beings.
But really having this, like ritualized, meditative approach to every task, giving every task full attention and taking your time with everything, with each act, like not rushing any one task that's integral, which everything, kind of is, unless it's doom scrolling or something.
You could bring consciousness to anything. But what was striking about that sentiment was beyond the philosophy of that, which is beautiful, was the notion that was extremely striking to me.
Imagine that you have this the center line, your body is separated into your left side and your right side. And then the center, a line down the center. This notion that you would be cheating or defrauding, or violating and abusing one or the other side of your body if you always crossed over that line to say, open a door handle that was on the left side of your body when you were facing it at the time, or vice versa.
So this idea that you're disrespecting the harmony and the balance of your body by having a dominant hand to do a bunch of dominant things, and just leaving your non dominant half of your body always, neglected and always left out.
That just felt really sad really heartbreaking to me when I thought of it that way.
So now, every chance I can, when I remember it, I think, try to be conscious of that center line.
So when I'm using that mortar and pestle, I would normally just use my dominant hand, which feels stronger and more accurate, more efficient because of how much more training it has had.
The left hand is so lame relative to the right hand, it's just too inefficient to even try to train it to get it up to speed, which is just a sort of a lame or a very lazy attitude and posture that I think can affect all areas of life.
So now that I have this time, I'm doing me, I have the opportunity if I was working for the man on a job, and they said, hey, I notice you're starting to use your left hand.
What do you thinking? No, I'll fire you if I see you using your left hand again. I'm like, no, I'm trying to be balanced and use my left hand so that it can also be fast and strong and efficient.
But it's gonna take time, I'll work harder and faster when I'm using my left hand, and I'll do a normal pace with my right hand, so you won't notice a difference.
You can't have that conversation in the rat race. But in my reality, now, I can sit there with my bare feet, stabilizing, when my right hand gets tired and it needs a rest, I can alternate and try to equally alternate to give the left hand a chance.
And then realize, wow, how atrophied this is. But I'm it's catching up.
So that's a beautiful practice. Sitting there thinking, this is so awesome.
It's me and the elements. This is ancient.
And I think about all those people who are crafts people, closer to nature, industries closer to nature, cultures in the world where they actually have the joy and privilege, being in a trade craft that's within their family, handed down generations.
Something where they don't just use their bare feet for walking and transportation, but actually as part of the craft, like holding something with their feet or moving something with their feet.
I see footage of that, and I think about, wow, this is probably the first time I'm really able to join them in that joy of doing a very sacred and ancient craft.
If I grow a lot of herbs, and I stick with this, then I could be singing and hanging out and being social and doing this practice and balancing my hemispheres and regulating my nervous system and giving my feet something useful and redeeming and and prideful to do.
There are so few opportunities for that in the modern world.
I just was sitting there thinking about, wow, think about all the feet idle in shoes, just tapping the floor and having no purpose and just being totally neglected.
It's those details that put me in a good mood and I feel like, make more permanent these this infrastructure of survival, and this permaculture infrastructure, this stone mortal mortar and pestle the iron seed grinder.
Ultimately replacing plastic water storage tanks with, at least galvanized which eventually could be cement and ultimately better, the bentonite sealed ponds.
Some stuff is gonna cost a lot of money to to install. But from where I'm at now, this sort of plateau of a little going a long way, it is very satisfying.
With that said, with that gratitude spoken, I wanna get into this topic, I'm feeling re energized and amped up more than I have in the last few weeks, which have been pretty rough in terms of morale, getting through the heat.
But, but right now I'm on a high morale moment.
So I'm going to apply that to some interesting explorations of the intrigue and the mystique of the tactician mind.
So, of course, you have the beautiful, sustainable life that you're building and then, the balance of forces, not even necessarily good and evil, but the force, to some extent, good and evil, but another extent, just destruction and creation, or fortune and misfortune.
Just the fact that nothing is in a vacuum and nothing's really static.
Spiritual and ecological and biological forces that are intent on your destruction, if not just to eat you alive, as fungus and bacteria and critters and pests that they'll eat your corpse.
The forces of the state and rogue nations and hackers and whatnot.
So I have my little peaceful artisan reality that I that I'm creating that's so satisfying.
And then there's ever looming, and sometimes actively encroaching enemies of that peace and enemies of that stability.
So I'm gonna talk about this interesting metaphor, this synchronicity of these two disruptive forces that are affecting me and that are tormenting my peace.
That's beyond just the heat of the sun, which is a given, and something that is a constant that you just have to adapt around.
But what is not necessarily a constant is these other factors. One of them is a factor I would consider a threat to my ecological security.
The other factor is a sort of cluster of threats to my cyber security and whereas the threat to my ecological security is very idiosyncratic and probably not something that you might necessarily share or commiserate with by analogy, and by extension, it's a teaching tool for me to really understand and evaluate this posture towards what is a threat to everyone.
Which is the cyber security threat landscape.
I'm somewhat dismayed, and someone embarrassed to to confess that I have fallen victim to a harvester ant invasion of my sleeping quarters to an extent that I had not foreseen.
That is unprecedented in the over a year and a half that I have been on this site.
Just as of yesterday, or as of this morning, rather crossed a line where I had to take an evasive action, that makes me think a lot about guerrilla warfare and guerrilla tactics.
So I'm very spoiled in life to have really the worst encroaching invasive threat to my ecological security at the moment, being these harvester ants.
While I know people throughout the world are being shelled and displaced and forced into refugee camps and all forms of torture and trafficking.
So I say this with all due respect and care and concern for them.
I feel this is the smallest scale to be training for geopolitical disruptions, but what's interesting is part of the permaculture promise is that when we stabilize regions with permaculture, we will have relatively better and better problems to have.
We will be more more concerned about natural pest control methods and having a balance of power between ourselves and wildlife, and allowing them to live in their power, allowing pests to play their role in a balanced ecosystem, because you can't have beneficial predators unless they have some pests to feed on. That's how it works.
You have to yield to get a yield in a way.
So it makes me think about guerrilla warfare, where in asymmetrical battle, you can't just expend infinite infantry people and infinite funds and infinite authority to just reign terror upon an enemy with superior everything and decimate them and roll over them.
If rape and pillage in the old world paradigm, now they would use the financial institutions of the world to enslave financially? So it becomes the exploitation of a nation's financial sovereignty, to where the black market of brothels, sex trafficking, that trafficking that occurs, and the selling out, the forcing of marginalized villagers to have to sell their children into the sex trade in the cities.
That's all part of globalization and the neoliberal conquest and colonization. The new imperialism is this sort of financial pimping.
The promise of permaculture is that by stabilizing regions ecologically, there will be enough hyper localized abundance that people will not have to fight over water, they will not have to fight over food, they will not be starving.
They will not be rioting and taking over the governments, in fact, they will probably shrink governments because they will not be dependent upon air dropped handouts from aid organizations or from loan shark financial institutions.
They won't be pimpable through ecological abundance and security provided by the good life.
I'm in a relationship with population density, with legality, with land rights and with my own human ecology. So long as American democracy and national security and rule of law, despite the partisanship...If basic national security and basic rule of law and democracy continue, then all of the people who wanna go and prove themselves by being in the Armed Forces and serving the country.
I will salute them. I will thank them for their service. I don't trust that system to wanna sacrifice myself but I respect that they're willing to do that and for those who wanna be litigious and be in those branches fighting over the colors of the States and all that, and the morality of religions. I don't wanna say more power to you, but I will say I'm glad that it's all happening far away from my little peaceful homestead, off grid, off road and eventually offline, probably.
But my world, my battles, my fight, my security, is mostly matter of ecological security, which comes down to my relationship with a very ancient, primordial threat landscape of wild animals and the elements, not warring tribes, not Samurai drone strikes dropping bladed attack drones onto me from above, hopefully not chemical agents or biological agents, not suicide bombers or any kind of special forces attack, ambush raid, whatever.
I'm gonna try to stay out of those kind of conflicts and those kind of controversies so that I'm under the radar I'm nobody's prerogative to want to take out.
I'm just a peaceful permaculture homesteader, and I wanna pick my battles.
I don't wanna fight people. Most of the things people are fighting for, what they're fighting for is over delusions of material wealth so that they can have more than they need.
I just keep thinking more and more and more about how, like God, the last thing I wanna do is be caught up in any kind of…
Putting myself my sacred body temple in harms way so that I can prop up the agenda of anyone, any dynasty, any party, any institution or agency or individuals agenda. To prop up the system of people trying always to take more than what they need.
I'm living a way where, I just wanna only have what I what I need. I wanna get rid of things. I wanna deccumulate objects that are not living.
I wanna create life and extend a forest ecosystem and build out an oasis that will live for thousands of years beyond me.
And I wanna do that with natural elements.
Only importing biology and bentonite, only importing that mineral element and those living elements and compost and mulch to kick start a desert oasis.
Maybe with a little bit of heavy machinery, maybe with a little bit of fossil fuels, appropriately used for a brief period of putting in bigger earthworks and ponds.
Once that is done, I will be able to just import only life and minerals and complete the mission of nontoxic abundance, where I will have more than I need.
A process of enriching an ecosystem. It will not be a process of killing and maiming and poisoning to strip mine rare earth minerals, for technology systems, or for gold and that delusion, or for territory, or for all the things like what's going on in Sri Lanka, which just is probably the most epic tale of corruption and excess and collusion among the colonizers.
Some of the most beautiful, living, indigenous, ancient permacultural wisdom is alive in those people.
It breaks my heart. But back to me. Before I get too political, I will say my issue a hand.
The battle that I've chosen to fight is a battle of balance.
And that balance now happens to be a little bit out of whack in that the happy life of the harvester ants, coming out from the winter underground bunkers that they have and coming up to the surface and working like clockwork, he most organized system of biological machinery that I've ever witnessed, to hack and pen test and crack and infiltrate everything that I have here.
Going back to homesteading, a lot of what happens is that, healthy things consume your time. Healthy projects, sensible living in the wild, tending to the wild and balancing with that.
So I've found them breaching my long term food storage and seeing them lay waste to tens of pounds of food that I'm gonna subsist on.
There was one time where I sifted out thousands of ants, with a sifter, from a 25lb pepitas.
They were stinging me, from a dime to a quarter size inflamed, irritated, itching red area around a center point.
It kind of looks like a spider bite, but basically it feels like that. They got me a lot Last year.
I spent more time than I should have, closer to the ground and started to learn my lesson.
So, this year, they come back around and it's a daily patrol monitoring their movements on my property. What is their strategy now of breaching my food supply and getting into my water, getting into my everything and just being at peace with that, because they're just doing their thing.
From their perspective this is the coolest, most generous guy in the world. He's just offering everything to us. He seems to to have no limit to his generosity.
So I obviously do not hate them. I'm not xenophobic towards them. I'm not nationalistic about them. I respect them. I just try my best to have very sustainable strategies.
So I've never gone on a campaign to try to eradicate them with any kind of toxin or poison or or even natural substances.
I have just had to be vigilant, and just had to be more mindful and upgrade certain strategies.
I get more and more and more validation of just like, wow, glass jars with metal lids.
I just wish I would have bought more. And it's another thing to just shed, because mylar bags and buckets that, that's the mantra of prepper survivalism. But out here, I'm realizing that, no, rats and squirrels have chewed into five gallon buckets, so I've had to elevate and secure them and all with alternate methods. I've witnessed ants chewing through mylar bags if they're able to breach and get near them.
Then I look at my jars, some of them are gallon jars, the quart jars, wow, I can't be more in love with glass.
This technology of jars, so optimal and so ideal and so effective relative to anything plastic.
I just love this transition from all things plastic containers to all things glass and in some instances, metal cans and whatnot.
I'm okay with some casualties of food stuffs, and I'm okay with an occasional ant ending up in my drinking water.
There was a time when a ton of them got into one of my coconut oil jars.
I have become one with them, so to speak, in a dietary sense. And I think there will be a lot more of that.
I will be exacting a bit of a commission from all of the abundance if I'm gonna feed them, I better damn sure be eating them and trading some carbs for some protein.
And I'm okay with that because I'm not, I'm not vegan in that sense.
But an event horizon was crossed in which, after all this time, with them getting into everything, because I have been very mindful and diligent, and I don't leave any crumbs of anything of any kind ever in my sleeping quarters.
I felt relatively buffered from them, infiltrating this environment.
However, all of that changed a week or so ago.
I took immediate, swift action, watching them intently as they're coming in and out going like what are they going after I don't see them carrying anything.
I didn't spill. They're not getting into any of my, my seed storage.
I got seeds in an ammo can, I checked all of that.
When they get into something, you'll see them carrying it. I've foolishly scattered a ton of amaranth seed and two seconds after I got done with that I said, oh my God, what the I can't believe how stupid that was.
I should only be raising these seeds in an enclosed nursery setting because I'm surrounded by what are they called? They're not red ants, they’re harvester ants, and more accurately, seed harvester ants.
So I watch this parade of the ants, taking every single one of hundreds of amaranth seeds that I just buried in these containers.
They really just scoured and took them all. And I was like, that is such a funny lesson, and good for them.
Actually, that's beautiful too, because they're gonna scatter those seeds. I’ll see volunteer amaranth indigenizing itself in awesome random places.
I will always be able to wink and nudge at that moment to those ants for doing that. So another reason to make this peaceful balance with wildlife is that they will scatter your seeds for you as much as they will eat them and drive you crazy.
But no, I wasn't witnessing them taking out anything. There wasn’t any major spill of anything that they had discovered.
So I didn't know what it is that was attracting them. In a controlled frenzy I pulled out everything, and went crazy sweeping and dusting out, it was a good spring cleaning or summer cleaning that was overdue anyway so I was kind of thankful that they were the impetus for that.
There wasn't anything I was aware of that they were attracted to. So unfortunately, I didn't solve the problem. They still were returning in a more focused way. Under the cushions that I sleep on were stragglers, but there was enough en masse that those stragglers were very noticeable.
I could probably have spent a lot of money to mitigate this to a degree.
But every time it rains there's always an amount of rain that works its way underneath the plastic shell of the bed liner.
So there's basically this aquifer underneath where I sleep, where water gets into it, and even the hottest temperatures, will very slowly, if ever evaporate, and it may never evaporate fully, it may always stay sort of dank down there.
All the mulch and compost that this truck has hauled, there's gotta be like a fungal rainforest down there so I'm realizing that when there is a rain event this hadn't happened before but it only takes one curious one of these ants to leave a chemical trail marking the spot. There is now a famous historical legend of an ant who found out that there was this cave system, this aquifer cave that is under my bed, under the lining of this trunk.
So there has been this unending now for days and days and days, just parade march of ants going back and forth.
I watched the stream going in and the stream going out, they all sort of fist bump their antenna as they go along.
Even just from a couple of small rains recently and whereas that wasn't a problem last year, it was a potential problem and one that I did not foresee.
That's why there's some legend now in their culture of the one who found the aquifer.
I don't think it's feasible to think that they're gonna leave, the only thing I could possibly do, what is sensible to do? I've seen it done in Southeast Asia, where they build homes on stilts, where at the bottom of the stilts, they have these bowls of liquid, which I assume is just water.
I don't know if they sort of put any kind of poison in there. But basically, because the insects are so much more voracious in that ecosystem in order for them to even barely survive and protect their food and themselves. It's life and death to have these moats around the bottom of the stilts that they build their houses on their little huts.
I always thought that was so interesting and so cool.
So, I'm on a truck, doing something of the moat, around the base of this truck, I'm gonna surrender, and I'm gonna say, you know what, it's just something I gotta live with in the warmer months.
And that means that they're gonna have their way with those stragglers.
It's nice to know that, it's kind of enduring, that I'm watching this parade happen along the edge, and most 99.9 % of them don't even bother to come up to where I am and climb up on a cushion and wanna sting me and bite me.
But I realize an attraction point, which is the fact that I'm sweating, and then I have to wrap myself in moist fabric, to not overheat and die.
So, lo and behold, while most of them seem to be content seeking their watering hole underneath me, a few stragglers will find their way up.
And then, of course, throughout these last several nights, I wanted to be in denial as long as I could, but now they're tearing me up, and I've got welts all over head to toe.
I'm not covered in them, but there are enough of them, and it only takes like one.
I have probably 20 at any given time. There's not a moment where I'm not slapping and rubbing each of them as they call for my attention.
I've learned my lesson about scratching, so I cut my nails and I do not scratch the surface of my skin.
I've had horrible, near death experiences with staff earlier in life, where a real staff infection, where I then learned, clip your nails and do not break the surface of your skin.
No matter what, whether it's heat rash or these bites or these stings, all I do is rub them gently with a very soft finger or palm, and being certain not to rub off, to break the skin whatsoever, which would lead to just absesses and staff infection.
It's been hard enough to sleep. And now these compounding bites and stings, and what they do is that they will bite down to secure themselves, and then pivot around where they're biting, and sting with their rear mount stinger in a circle.
Until they decide to stop, they can basically just sting repeatedly, it's not pleasant.
I fought with myself I'm like I don't wanna have to think about relocating because of this invasion and I'm not going to do anything aggressive to try to like eradicate them because of the futility of that I'm gonna learn to live with it.
I'm gonna adapt. But, I held out. So there were a few days where, I don't like to kill any of them, but I do sense them crawling on me, or I feel the bite and I will reach down and and squeeze them and kill them and flick them away, that's futility as well and I don't wanna be woken up and I'm not gonna wake up enough.
I will only have noticed or stopped a few of them.
Then, lo and behold, they got closer and closer to where the sun don't shine. So my adaptive strategy was that it actually opened up a very positive, very like magical new dimension of freedom and empowerment, which was that it pushed me to be on my event horizon to say, you know what, maybe this isn't the best place to sleep.
Maybe what I should do is use this not as a place to sleep and as my office. I'm on acreage that I own, shouldn't I maybe branch out a little bit and and not be so conditioned to what I'm used to and be this creature of habit?
I was trucksteading on skid row I didn't have the option to scout out, my acreage and where I could pitch a tent or hang a hammock.
So that was my life for a number of years, as I hoddled in from a bear market to a bull market.
Then that bull market gave me the means to buy land. Now that I'm on land, old habits die hard.
It took this invasion of the ants, almost like a sort of cosmic nudge, almost like they're telling me something in the voice of God, saying, if you don't get out, move out of here at night, we're gonna sting you.
You will realize that you bought acreage and you bought a hammock for 20 bucks, and you should go hang that hammock and be swinging out under the stars and situate yourself with other options that are gonna keep you high and dry, above where we're gonna be setting up shop.
It actually is a bit of a diplomatic compromise, because they disappear either into the aquifer cave or back underground. But I've studied their cycles, and like it's when the sun goes down, it's cool enough at night, that's when they make their move, and that's when they're crawling, all over beneath me.
A few of them come up and bite and sting me.
But when the sun is up and the heat of the day starts coming on, that's when they disappear, and they're not a threat to me.
When I have full solar power, that's when I can put in a few hours of work, have office work and computing.
So, so there you have it. The guerrilla tactical nature of I can't win this war with them, they are superior in numbers. They are superior in tactics and ingenuity.
There's really nothing I can do to stop them, other than for myself to be adaptive enough to escape and evade and live to fight another day and just sort of surrender some territory to them.
But then maybe that opens up new horizons and actually gives me a better positioning in life, which it does.
So I'm celebrating now what will be my first night of actually using the hammock I bought and actually being in a better position in a lot of ways, and I just wouldn't have pushed myself out of the nest if it wasn't for this invasion.
So that has a very, sort of story book, happy ending.