Day 59: Carrots

Day 59:

The thing about carrots is that supermarket carrots are short and bright orange and sweet, and the rest aren’t.

Not all carrots are orange. Not all carrots are sweet. Not all orange carrots are sweet. Not all carrots are tiny things. My grandmother told me the carrots we call carrots today were called “baby carrots” in her childhood, and they were the smallest sweetest ones, or in some places, the sweetest part of the carrot carved out of the middle of a bigger not-as-sweet carrot.

Since I’m not a botanist, I’m not even sure that the things I’m eating and calling carrots are carrots. Scratch that — I’m on a foreign world that to my knowledge, while populated by humanoids, didn’t necessarily get populated by Earth humans, so these are almost definitely exactly not biologically like carrots.

On the other hand, they’re orange (or white or red or yellow, I’ve found a bunch of varieties) and can grow as long as half my forearm, and pack a pretty good calorie punch when you’re really hungry. They don’t go moldy in the cave, in fact they sort of like the humid muddiness in here. And they haven’t killed me yet, though if I eat too many in one day they do strange things to the color of my… output.

Still, they’re not sweet. They’re ruddy or dirty or russety and I have to cook the hell out of them to get rid of the bitterness They make a decent bread, but not a decent cake.

I miss sugar.

Watercolor of six stacked carrots, two orange, two reddish orange, one purplish red and one yellow. Labelled "carrots".
These are waiting to be thrown in the pot.m

Day 58: More on ranching

Day 58:

I fed the cows… I think i’m up to about 16 of them. Bessie is still my favorite to hug.

I fed the duckens too, and I’ve lost track of how many there are. There’s enough that they die of old age and natural causes and I occasionally get a ducken dinner out of the affair. Feels a little odd to eat something that I’ve lived with, but it beats another carrot salad by A LOT.

What I’d give for a handful of mixed nuts right now.

Other than that, digging toward  the mountain.

Bad line drawing of a horse that frankly looks like it's had half its head caved in by a brick. The author needs practice. Labelled "my horse, Stupid."
I need to practice drawing Stupid.

Day 57: Zombie Hunting

Day 57:

I dug all day. Nothing really exciting there.

When I came up to eat dinner and get some sleep, all I could hear were the groans of the undead (or whatever they are). Groaning and moaning and carrying on… it was clear I wasn’t going to get any sleep if they were going to keep that up.

(Sometimes they rattle against the door, but I  bar it at night, so that hasn’t been an issue.)

After a stressful mean of roast fish and zombie groans, I lost my patience. I slammed my water cup down, threw the fish bones in the corner where the mice could get them, and stormed out the back door.

The zombies were all at the front door, since the back door leads into the stockyard (for lack of a better term).

I slipped through the gate, snuck around the house and started picking the zombies off with my bow. It was awesome! I’m actually starting to aim relatively not-horribly, and only really had one arrow miss the target (though two hit the target in the feet which wasn’t overly helpful).

And if I hadn’t run out of arrows, I would’ve been fine.

I almost got jumped by two of the survivors, but I slipped between two trees where they had to come at me single file (because zombies are dumb and don’t go around) and I was able to stab them each to death.

It was hard work, exhausting, a bit painful, but ah the sweet bliss of no zombie groans when I go to bed tonight will be worth it.

Black and white line drawing of the front door of the cave house. A large beam is slid through two brackets on the wall on either side of the door, resulting in an almost medieval barring of the door. The head of a zombie stares in with no expression.
They could probably bust through the windows, but they don’t.

Day 56: mud and dirt

Day 56:

With all the dirt I’ve been hauling out of the lower chambers, I had enough to surround my cave entrance a bit more cleanly, so it’s harder to see from above or the side.  Now I just have to hope that it doesn’t prevent The Company from finding me.

Tired. Fought skeletons in the lower chambers today. No idea how they got there, unless they fell in from the lake and magically sealed the hole they fell through.

Black and white line sketch of the author's cave entrance. It has terraces of dirt proceeding up the face of the hill the door and windows are embedded in. End result is that it looks quite a bit like an old bald head with many wrinkles wrapped in a scarf or two.
Looks a bit like an old bald guy’s head

Day 55: Glass and sand

Day 55:

Now I’ve got a lake over my head when I’m mining, and it’s raining, so I’m not mining today.

Instead I’m drawing designs for a bathtub because I want a bathtub so badly.

I think I’ve figured out a way to put a fire underneath the tub, which theoretically should be safe because the tub will be carved out of stone? I’m not dumb enough to boil myself in a metal pot but a rock one might work.

I just have to figure out which chamber to put it in. Maybe one of the ones near water so I don’t have to haul it.

Colored line sketch of the crossection between two floors. On the upper floor a glass box resembling a bathtub is filled with water. The floor is thick stone between it and the lower floor. In the lower floor, a panel of some sort is hung by chains from the ceiling directly under the tub, and it has 3 small fires lit under it. Theoretically this would heat the water evenly and not too hot. Labeled "Bathtub plans".
Chain could be a problem since i don’t have the iron to spare.