Dear Diary…

18-19 May 2026

A little bit of a different post today. I wanted to take some time to write down a couple nerd / computer things, as well as outline where we are looking to go in the future while I wait for the kids to have their swim practice, before we run off to Scouts after.

2026 so far…

It has been challenging to keep up with all of the irons in the fire, but still we persist. Spring came this year and we were not quite fully prepared with what that entailed on a homestead. We should have been starting seeds and the garden in November / December, but we were starting them in February this year.

We got some more baby chicks and baby ducks, as well as hatched some geese, but we were also behind on the infrastructure we needed to support them.

Combine that with (attempting) to maintain a full press on homeschooling, with sports and Scouts ramping up with fundraisers, Meagan and I got overwhelmed. It’s amazing when you spend your weekends doing fundraising how much you miss them for other things to do around the house.

Amongst all of that, I continue to manage my server, which this site, among others runs on. I even have a few paying clients for email and web hosting! I need to add these offerings to my consulting page – https://www.lonewolftech.services. I thought I had done so, but I see that I did not.

I have been tuning the server and it is performing better now as I learn how to administer it better.

This blog and Patreon.

On our 2024 RV Trip, I started using Patreon to manage users and share things. At the time, it was too much for me to unscrew the spammers and such on wordpress. I think it’s gotten better, and/or I’ve gotten better. One of the significant reasons to using Patreon is that it would cross-publish from there to here. The problem, however, is that it doesn’t push all the images. I wish to have a copy of what I do, and not have to go back and recreate it if something untoward should happen or if Patreon takes exception to something. So, I have shifted back to posting here primarily, and cross posting a link to Patreon. If I can figure out how to push all the images so that they are not solely hosted on Patreon, then I will try to simplify it more.

For now, though, I will be posting here on this blog as primary, and backing up to Patreon. I do appreciate my paid suscriber!

I do know who you are, and thank you very much! It has inspired me to continue to post our adventures.

Lines of effort

What are we working on? Well, we have a few irons in the fire right now.

The house

Bathroom remodel is underway, and was put on pause for tax season and spring.

I have another infrastructure project to run power to the shop and water lines around the yard as well, but that’s going to wait until the bathroom remodel is finished.

Lone Wolf Tech Services, LLC

This is the main self employed LLC for running the business side of things.

Allaboard Acres Farm

This is a DBA of LWTS, for the cottage sourdough bread that I’m making, as well as our animals and raw milk.

I have gotten good reviews for the bread, so that is very encouraging. Now, we just need to build a market for it!

Allaboard Bouncers

Another DBA, but for doing a bounce house rentals in the area. We have the bounce houses, but I need to get the contracts and back end done to my satisfaction, as well as do some trailer maintenance before I’m ready to make deliveries.

And in all of this, home school continues amongst all the other activities. The RV has a bunch of maintenance that it needs as well, so yay!

The Future

What does the future hold? Well, I don’t know exactly, but I do have a vision of where we want to go.

When we moved back here, I said that I figured we had 3-5 years before we would have to move. That would be 2 – 4 years as of this writing. There are two parts of the waiting – getting through some of the teen years and various doctor things – braces and such. The other is waiting for prices to correct, as anything resembling what we would like to do is presently out of reach, perhaps I should have gambled on bitcoin or Gamestop stock shenanigans earlier. Oh well.

So, if I could write our story, what would it be?

In the next few years, we find a suitable property / farm that we can move to. The property will be mostly flat and have a good source of water on it, ideally a stream with some elevation drop. It may have caves on it, and support a basement and/or root cellar. The land will be mostly flat with some terrain. We will have a nice homestead and be able to run livestock and have a market garden. We would use draft horses in addition to tractors and other mechanical means. There of course, would be a shop with a large parking bay suitable for a fifth wheel size trailer, a pole barn, and perhaps a couple auxiliary dwelling units or spaces for them. We think that it is reasonable that the kids may have to continue to live on the farm, or may opt to. We would like to have the option to offer the kids and other family. There will also be space to offer RV spots and/or Air BNB style places.

On or adjacent to the property we would have a general store with a restaurant. One of my current futures is running a tavern type place, where I can make and serve the various smoked meats, bread, brew mead and beer, and other quality food with real ingredients. The farm / homestead would feed the store / restaurant with farm-to-table. The farm store / tavern would be a community center where folks could gather and socialize, building those connections which hold people together and make them stronger. It would also make meals easier for us – we’ve joked that we need a commercial kitchen just to make dinner for the family.

The farm and store will be on the edge of a metro area, far enough away to be ‘country’ and close enough for people and for access to activities for kids and other benefits of concentrated humanity. Meagan and I have spent a lot of time discussing the balance between country and the desire to have activities and things for kids, but we may have to choose one or the other.

For now, though, we work on the projects at hand, and are slowly moving through the things that the kids have finally outgrown. The event horizon of the ‘youngest child’ has finally moved on and a large amount of things are now ‘too small’ or no longer needed. We just have to get past the emotions of letting go.

More to come, as we work to refine things, but I have a toilet to fix (leaking seal). Losing a toilet with a large family is no bueno. I’ll have a separate post on that, but right now waiting for it to dry before I re-seat later tonight. We have Swim team followed by Cub Scouts also tonight. Never a dull moment!

Thanks for reading! If you would like to support our adventure, please sign up over at Patreon! I’m going to work on adding more direct methods here, on the blog directly!

Old Jennings backpacking trip

A couple of weekends ago, I took Jarek and Arya on a trip through the Old Jennings State Forest. This was a fairly aggressive trip planned, it had a 9 mile leg in it. I wanted to see if we were ready to take on a more aggressive longer multi-day trip that would have us doing ~10 miles a day or so. Spoiler – we were not!

Ready the story here – https://www.wolfandraven.blog/2026/05/old-jennings-backpacking-trip/

#hiking #backpacking #adventure #outdoors #forest #camping #outdoors

Daily chicken

Just another day in the life here on the homestead. It was a cloudy rainy day, which is much appreciated as it has been very dry lately. I went out this evening to tend to the chickens and collect eggs and discovered a lost chicken in our yard.

To answer the question of why the chicken crossed the road, the answer is snacks. I managed to lure her back about half way to where the chickens are set up, then I was able to pressure her the rest of the way.

I had some goat pellets from Meagan that had gotten wet. They had a lot of grubs in them, which the girls appreciated. Check out the video below – the girls wasted no time.

Not a bad haul today.

I had some help putting the eggs away when I got back.

Then it was off to the back yard to check on the geese and little birds. I cleaned out the wading pool for the geese and the goose was all about a fresh bath!

#chickens #goose #geese #helper #eggs #homestead #homeschool #video

If you liked this, you can follow my blog at https://www.wolfandraven.blog

We appreciate any and all support through our Patreon here – https://www.patreon.com/WolfandRavenBlog

Chicken Tractor #2 progress

Presently working on building chicken tractor # 2 with my little helpers.

A few stops and starts and a couple extra trips to the store, but progress has been made. Another trip to the store tomorrow. The hinges I ordered haven’t come in yet, so off to get some off the shelf. I made the initial parts order via online for pick up, but apparently I picked something that wasn’t available.

Randal helps me by holding the roosting bars up so I can secure the brace for the nesting boxes.

Another day or two, and it will be ready for prime time! Which will be great as the little chicks are growing up fast!

#2026 #homestead #chickens #building #ducks #goose #geese

Hawk attack!

Hawk attack

Our geese defenders did a good job today, scaring off a hawk that tried to grab a chicken! Fortunately, the hawk was not successful and our guard goose was on duty to scare him off.

You can see the hawk drop the chicken on the way out (dark shape). The kids said that the goose hit the hawk when it came into the pen.

#homestead #chickens #goose

Hawk attack

Our geese defenders did a good job today, scaring off a hawk that tried to grab a chicken! Fortunately, the hawk was not successful and our guard goose was on duty to scare him off.

You can see the hawk drop the chicken on the way out (dark shape). The kids said that the goose hit the hawk when it came into the pen.

#homestead #chickens #goose

Fun with water and fixing things!

Recently, we have had two water projects to do. One was the pressure tank in the well house. The other was the dishwasher.

Last week I came home from Scouts, and Meagan told me that there was no water in the house. I went out to the well house and found a scene that looked a lot like this (after we shut off the pumps):

The exit fitting from the pump was blown out of the pump housing. Easy enough to fix. it was about 9 pm, so I had enough time to run down to Lowe’s and get parts to fix it, and I did that night. We had water again, so that was cool.

The next day things were good, until later that night, when sitting at my desk I heard a bang. Shortly after, Jarek told me that there was no water in the bathroom. I went back out to the pump house and found this:

It had failed again, the same way. Further diagnosis indicated that the pressure tank was failed, as it was not having any pressure. The pressure gauge on top of the pump had also failed. Since it never built pressure, the pump never shut off, causing heat to build up and eventually deform the PVC pipe to the point where it could blow out of the fitting.

Off to the store again to get parts, I set to work on installing a new pressure tank and hoping that the pump was still ok, as it was rather expensive to replace the pump as well.

Evan is helping me chamfer some pipes prior to gluing them up.

The system is coming along nicely, but I ran out of parts to fully get the water filtration system connected. I was able to get the bypass loop complete and restore water to the house. Off to Lowe’s once more for the rest of the parts.

Garrett went with Jarek and I. Jarek wanted to get some seeds for a gardening project of his own. Garrett got to help the checkout lady, Susan, with scanning them. He thought that was the best!

Back at the house with everything hooked up! We had a noticeable increase in water quality after putting the filter system in use.

About a week later, the dishwasher threw an error code. As you might imagine, this ranks right up there with having no water in a large family. The seven of us make just a few dishes every meal, and that becomes a problem if the dishwasher is down.

I had lots of helpers on the first day (more on that later) of diagnosis. I showed the kids the guts of the dishwasher and how to diagnose it.

I ordered a new valve, which was the most likely cause of this (IE – inlet error) failure and put it on. However, the problem still persisted. I ordered another two valves, and the next day I put the one on that came today – one is still in transit as of this writing.

However, the problem still persisted. I took the system apart again and found water in the black tube (visible above), which meant that some water was getting through, but not enough apparently.

I ended up taking the dishwasher out, turning it around, and hooking it back up so I could test. The slow trickle above was with the ‘new’ valve on. I ended up taking that valve off and putting the old valve back on, and got a much better flow rate.

I cleaned out the plastic manifold, and put everything back together, and it worked! I’m not sure what the actual problem was, but there was some obstruction somewhere that was preventing the water from filling up like it was supposed to.

Jarek helps out by reinstalling the kickplate on the dishwasher after I put it back in the cabinets.

Garrett and Randal loved playing with my sockets – they were entertained for the whole time I was working on the dishwasher today.

“Look at me mama. I tightening someting with a tool mama.”