Day 19: This whole farming thing

Day 19:

I was sent down here to mine, but I seem to spend more time on the surface than deep into the ground.

Sometimes it’s defensive; a spider climbed over the fence and attacked, so I had to kill it. The good news is I succeeded. The bad news is that I killed one of my chickens accidentally in the process.

Sometimes, it’s things like feeding the chickens (so that I now have a bunch of chicks) or gathering their eggs, or feeding the cows (so now I have more cows).

Sometimes, it’s chopping down trees so I can make fences so I have more space for the chickens and the cows.

None of this seems to involve digging up rock.

It’s making me think a lot about my ancestors, way back while we were still on the first Earth. The story goes that this is how they had to live before people invented robots and machines to do all the farming. It’s a lot of work, and it’s kind of crazy.

But I’m alive. I haven’t been killed by the spiders or the giraffe-corgis or the green zombie hominids or the skeletal archer thingamajigs. (I’m still not convinced they’re not robots of some sort.) I haven’t starved to death or broken any bones falling in a cave. So if I’m getting subpar digging done, well, there are worse things.

One other note: I saw a human today, a woman I think, dressed all in purple, a few hundred yards out from my house. I would have called out to her, but there was a pony spider between us and I didn’t want to alert the spider to either myself or her. Turning wild beasts onto the neighbors isn’t generally considered polite. By the time I got rid of the spider problem, the  woman was gone.

She had a hell of an eerie laugh though. Almost a cackle.

black and white sketch of a bowl of eggs, with the words "bowl of eggs" over it.
Eggs!