Day 44: Back entrance finally sealed

Day 44:

Oh cod I am covered in mud. So much mud.

The rain has been off and on. If I had any idea what the climate of this tiny planet was normally, I could say something pithy like “Ah, spring!” or “The rainy season needs to make up its mind!”

Instead I’m just covered in mud.

I finally mostly sealed the back cave that I found…what…weeks ago now? Yeah, back almost 20 days ago. It took a lot of my diorite to do it. (I don’t trust the normal bedrock in this place. The exploding giraffe corgis have been shown to turn it into rubble too quickly. So I’ve been stacking and chipping and polishing and using the pitch and tar that seeps into the bottom of my forge to seal the stone I’ve mined into a wall between me and the outside world.

Fortunately, the back cave is on the way to the mountain.

Unfortunately, the back cave’s entrance is, like, two yards maybe from a pretty sizable lake. And it’s raining. Not just like a spring rain on the vid channels where the couple falls in love and talk about their favorite perfumes, but a torrential downpour of giant drops and heavy wind. Which means waves. Which means lake water is just sloshing all over the place, over the banks of the lake, down the embankment into the cave entrance, and all over my nice shiny stone.

Everything is wet. Everything is muddy. Everything is slippery. I can’t even climb out that entrance because it’s a mudslide, and I don’t mean the alcoholic bit with the coffee flavoring.

I’m probably covered in cuts and bruises from all the falling down I did today but fortunately/unfortunately I can’t see any of it through the mud.

I’m afraid to sleep on my bed because I still only have one stinky sheep skin and I don’t much look forward to washing it to get the mud off. But I’m so tired…

Sketch of a wall made of roughly 1 meter high blocks, with a set of double doors in the middle. Black and white except for some brown watercolors indicating the wide path of mud leaking under the door.
Mud mud mud

Day 43: Jangle of bones

Day 43:

Dug all day today, managed to not get covered in mud or lake or anything else gross.

Shoulder’s still sore. Writing hurts, sorry about the length of the entries.

I’m also trying to be extra quiet because, well, remember me saying the other day that the skeleton-like creatures seem to have disappeared?

There’s one outside my door right now, circling. Watching. Waiting. I don’t think it can see through the windows since i have the light extinguished and the starlight doesn’t penetrate to the bed here very well. But that also makes it a bit hard for me to write. Mercy knows if my handwriting will prove illegible, or the page crooked.

It doesn’t seem to be able to get into my fenced-in pen, which is good. And it doesn’t seem to be interested in the duckens or the cows or the horses, which is even better. But it certainly doesn’t like me.

I’m going to lay here and try to sleep and not freak out.

Black and white sketch of a skeleton from about the 3rd rib up. It has very large black eye sockets and is glaring downward at the viewer. This one is actually a bit creepy.
How is this even possible?

Day 42: Flooding

Day 42:

Sometimes you move one rock and everything comes tumbling down.

It’s probably a pretty good metaphor for my life since I landed on this dump, but at the same time it’s not a metaphor at all.

Since I’m mining without a compass or a map or for that matter anything else, I  managed to follow a vein in under the river.

You can see where this is going.

Anyway, I managed to get the holes sealed back up, but I’m soaked to the skin. I’m going to spend the night in front of a hot fire.

Really bad sketch (author is not exaggerating) in black and white of a hole at the top of a cave with water pouring down and the author standing in it waist-deep.
This is a really bad sketch but you get the idea. I am too wet and cold to spend my time drawing a flooded cavern.

Day 41: Damp and squeaky

Day 41:

The top of my cave house is pretty well sealed against the wet. It’s taken me a while to accomplish that – stuffing pitch from the wood I’ve been burning into every crack I could find to seal the place up.

Below the main level, though, when it rains, things still get pretty wet.  The water seeps through the ground and turns the dust to mud and the stone into a slippery surface that even the best of boots struggle to maintain a grip on.

It rained all day today. I did my best to mine, but the risks are much higher than even The Company, with all their equipment, was generally willing to take on. We almost never dropped into a site if there was rain in the local forecast.

I remember the Captain complaining one time about the delay in starting a drop because of the rain, and Marvin just looked her and said, “How many bones do you want the doc to set?” and that was the end of that.

Tomorrow hopefully there will be less rain and more time to work my way closer to the mountain.

Watercolor sketch. All colors are muted as if seen through the rain. Blue-grey sky, some trees way in the background, yellowish-green fields in the distance, brighter green, then darker green fields in the foreground.
The view from my front door. Plenty of water for watercolors, but I’m running out of blue flowers.

Day 40: Peace, and boots

Day 40:

When I finished yesterday’s post, I took a nap, but it wasn’t a very long nap because now that I’ve got windows in my cave house, sleeping is harder because the sun actually makes it into the room.

Funny that. Biorhythms are difficult to defeat on any world.

I gathered eggs, wheat, carrots, and seeds from my “farm” and fed the animals. Since feeding the animals results in more animals, I’ve got a sizable number of chicken ducks now and enough cows that fresh milk is definitely not a problem around here. (These weird cow creatures give milk all the time even though their young are only “young” for about three days. Maybe they’re always producing milk in case they accidentally eat and mate that day?)

I discovered one of my horses had escaped, but he wasn’t very good at it. He stood on the other side of the fence and looked at me like “Yo, what am I doing out here?”

I still haven’t figured out how he escaped. Sometimes I swear animals can just like slide through the fence. I know the physics folks swear that’s impossible — something about the fact that even though there’s more space in our atoms than material the atomic forces don’t actually let us slide though things — but I’m pretty sure those physicists haven’t met the vwooping land squid of death either.

Anyhow, Stupid Horse (his new name, he didn’t really have one before) went right back into my fenced-in yard once I caught him.

Near the end of the day I did some fishing. I caught:

  • One bone. Looks like a femur off a skeleton. (I haven’t seen any of the skeletons lately. Maybe I killed them all off. That would be both an ecological disaster and good for my health.)
  • One wooden bowl. Looks like a soup bowl. Reminds me of those songs Gran used to sing about “Here’s good luck to the pint pot, half a pint, gill pot, half a gill, quarter gill, nippikin and the brown bowl /  here’s good luck to the pint pot, good luck to the barley mow” from way way before any of us were born.
  • One pair of boots. If I didn’t think the archaeologists at The Company would flay me alive and use my corpse as a figurehead on the prow of the ship, I’d set up a boot shop at the end of all this.
  • One fish.

Kind of glad for the fish, I was getting nervous they’d all died or something and the water’d gone toxic. But nope, still fish in there.

Also, chicken ducks takes too long to write. I think I’m going to call them “duckens” from here out.

Going to try to get a good night’s sleep tonight and then get back down into the mines tomorrow. My arm’s still sore — one day of rest isn’t enough to save it — but it’s either that or sit around watching Stupid Horse to see if I can figure out how he got out the first time, and that’s, well, boring. I’m a miner, I like to dig.

Black and white sketch from above: one femur, one wooden bowl (badly drawn), one pair of boots
Bowls are really hard to draw from above.