kirabug's idea files

Day 292:

Since I’ve been doing a lot of digging down, I’ve got a lot of scaffolding and piles of rock formed just so I can put in a level floor. It’s, well, it’s boring mostly, and hard work because a lot of it takes place either under your ankles or above your head. My back is particularly angry today and I think I’ll be heating some water back at the cave to soak in for a while tonight.

I dropped one of my potatoes out of my pocket earlier and it fell for a very very very long time. So I’m also rigging ropes and makeshift pinions all over the place to keep myself from falling into the pit.

I could really use a radio today.

Day 291:

Lest I seem like I don’t appreciate the lowly potato with my complaints about the lack of leafy greens here, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about potatoes and mines.

Cook used to tell us that way back during the Alaskan Gold Rush, before we’d left Earth, people would trade gold for potatoes because potatoes had vitamin C and prevented scurvy, and gold did not. I don’t know that vitamin C is an issue for me necessarily, but I’m glad to have potatoes just in case. I mean, I’ve been here long enough that I’m sure something I’m not eating anymore is causing a problem.

But there’s a better reason to eat potatoes than just to prevent all your bits from falling off (which I think is what scurvy did?). See, mines are cold, and dank, and damp, and if you don’t do something to keep warm, soon you’re cold and dank and damp too. Even if you are working constantly, because if you’re working constantly, you’re sweating, and sweating in a cold humid environment just makes you cold and humid.

But baking potatoes is easy: start fire, throw in potato, remove before scorched. And back at my cave where I have actual furnaces and tongs, baked potatoes are really easy to make. Baked potatoes are like hot rocks. They’re relatively large, they’re solid, and they hold heat a really really long time. When they start to cool down, you eat them.

When I get up in the morning I toss a couple of potatoes into the furnace before I leave. Then i store them in my pockets.. Throughout the day I eat the potatoes (and some meat) and by the end of the day I’m tired and out of potatoes, but still warm.

So although most of my meals consist of ducken prepared in various ways, the food that keeps me warm and nourished while I’m out mining is potatoes.

Day 290:

Spent the day making paper because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my handwriting is pretty big and it takes up most of the page on these little sheets I make.

I’d make bigger sheets but that means trying to make bigger frames, and honestly the paper rips most of the time when I make it on the little frames. It’s not easy to get a pulpy substance to congeal into a papery substance without things like, say,  wire mesh.

Huh, I wonder if I could use those weird wings those killer night birds have to do it.

That would require being outside with the killer night birds, though, and honestly I think I’d rather take on the horror squid.

Speaking of which, they’ve been pretty prevalent in the caverns I’ve been mining lately, It is not coincidental that I’m taking a day or so topside to do some housekeeping kinds of tasks. Horror squids are nasty nasty creatures.

I’m still trying to figure out if I can boil down the liquid from the cane and turn it into sugar. Maybe that’ll be the other half of my work tomorrow. Some candied carrots would be a nice change.

 

Day 289:

There’s no salad makings here.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not the “gallon of iceberg lettuce with CO₂-ripened tomatoes and ranch dressing” type. No, I’m definitely more the “bring me your finest platter of meats and potatoes” type.

I kind of have to be. Even before landing on this forsaken rock, I was burning thousands and thousands of calories a day mining and hauling back supplies. The inertia dampeners and power suits can only do so much, and even when they’re running at their best I still have to bend or lift or swing a pickaxe a few hundred times a day to get anything done.

But, well. I have bamboo. I have potatoes. I have carrots. I have a wheat-like grass. And I have some pumpkin-like gourds that I could swear look like someone carved into jack o’lanterns while they were still on the vine.

And those are all heavy-carb heavy-starch kinds of veggies.

There are no lettuces, no cabbages, no tomatoes. No grapes, no pomegranates, no oranges, no peppers. Heck, I don’t even have the semi-starchy vegetables like broccoli or cauliflower. It’s either all-starch or go home hungry.

And I could do with a good glass of OJ or maybe a mixed greens salad, is what I’m saying.

I never thought I’d miss it.

Dug holes. Climbed out of holes. Occasionally got lost. Tired, don’t feel like writing. Almost out of ink. Guess I need to go kill another squid.