kirabug's idea files

Day 68:

I cut wood all day today. Definitely making gloves next chance I get. You’d think by now I couldn’t get blisters, but it turns out that swinging a pickaxe and swinging an axe are distinctly different movements that blister distinctly different parts of my hands.

Today’s one of those days where I’m grateful that the spring in my cave is ice cold, is what I’m saying.

I’m cooking down some wood into charcoal because I haven’t hit a vein of coal in ages and charcoal’s better for melting iron than straight wood, which is too inconsistent in its temperature.

I’ll admit that I originally started chopping wood so that I could make a bridge, but then it occurred to me that I’d have to haul the support logs all the way to the river, and Stupid would probably have objections. Not sure I can blame the horse for that. So instead, charcoal, and a plan to continue digging toward the mountain so that I don’t have to be worried about being caught outside near the river.

That’s today’s plan, anyway.

Day 67:

Packed some good tools in one of my rock-hauling sacks, rode Stupid until we reached the shadow of the mountain… and discovered there’s a river in front of it.

Turns out the lake that is near the front of my place is fed by a very large river right in front of the mountain. Makes sense, I guess, since the rain that falls on the mountain has to go somewhere.

But Stupid wanted nothing to do with fording the river, so we turned around and rode back, this time following the water so I could see where it goes.

Sure enough, if I keep tunneling in the direction I’m currently going, I’m going to hit the river.

So a bridge maybe? I have to think on this.

Day 66:

I think I have enough iron to make some quality tools and head for the mountain now. Instead of continuing the downward trend my mining has been taking me on (that’s a mining joke), I might pack up some bags on my horse, head out to the mountain to see what I find, then ride back under cover of daylight.

We’ll see how things look in the morning. Not much around here to use to predict the weather and this isn’t an adventure I want to take up in the rain.

Day 65:

Cut down trees. Made new axe handles. Filled my hands with splinters.

I think I’ve figured out how to tan a hide. I remember reading a book a long time ago as a kid, where it said something about every animal having enough brains to tan its own hide. So tanning a hide has something to do with stretching it and spreading brains on it I think.

I have plenty of duckens I could experiment with, but I can’t remember the last time I heard someone say they had chicken-skin gloves, so call it a hunch but I suspect birdlike creatures are a no-go.

Can’t bring myself to kill one of my cows though.

I’m essentially waiting for one of the local monsters to kill a (hopefully wild) cow for me.

Day 64:

The trees here are pretty soft. They split in clean lines, with few knots or curves. They remind me of string cheese more than trees. Then again this place grows mushrooms the size of a small cottage, so maybe they are some odd string cheese. I haven’t been inclined to taste them.

Because splitting the wood is so much more effortless than the oaks on Earth, or the silverwood on Freya, or especially the Iron Root on Ares, I haven’t wanted much for wood. I had more problems doing things like carving than splitting logs, because the wood wants to split.

(This is one of the reasons I haven’t bothered with a wheelbarrow. I’d have to make it out of planks and seal it, instead of carving out the inside of a log, because the log would split almost immediately whether I wanted it to or not.)

The trees grow almost instantaneously, just like the duckens and cows and everything else on this whacked-out world. But just because they grow fast doesn’t mean I want to plant hundreds of them. That would look out of place and get me in trouble with The Company. On the other hand, careful harvesting means I have to regularly go out to get more wood because a tree will only last so long.

All this to say that I’m out of axe handles, and I forgot I was out of axe handles, so now I have to cut down a tree with a shovel (which will probably break it no matter how soft the wood) just so I can make an axe handle so that I can then cut down more trees and make more handles. And a new shovel.

If I could make an indestructible pickaxe, I could probably stay underground for days.