Day 37:
I said I was going to dig all day and I did. Wore out a number of my tools, too, so I know what I’m doing tomorrow.
I hit a huge vein of ore (I think I mentioned that the other day), but I didn’t realize how huge. It’s big enough I’ve been digging for 14 hours and it’s still going. For a while it was swerving off my chosen course of “toward the mountain” but then the entire vein swerved back toward the mountain, so I’m good there.
I’m sore. I’m tired. I’m running out of tools and seriously missing my mining laser. But I feel a lot more accomplished today than I did when I was repairing things other creatures broke.
It takes a special kind of person to fix things that other people break, especially when it happens over and over and over again. I was always kind of impressed that the ship’s mechanic, Marvin, didn’t just beat me over the head with my laser mining pistol after the third or fourth time I held it too close to the wall and half-melted its firing mechanism.
Marvin was pretty awesome.
Marvin was actually his last name – his first name was like Hinkley or Reginald or something horrible that had been passed through the generations, so we all called him Marvin.
He was about two meters tall, sandy hair that was thinning at the edges and showing a bit of grey at the ears, stormy grey eyes but a smile that lit up the room. He spent most of his time laughing. He loved a challenge, loved to see what horrible ways we’d broken the equipment this time, and almost always could fab something out of the fabricator to repair whatever we’d done.
One time when I was snooping around his workshop waiting for him to finish a job for me, I looked him up on the versnet. Turned out he was the top contributor to the MakerBotVers network for repair and upgrade instructions in like the whole universe. Or at least the part of the universe that uses versnet.
He was like everything my dad wasn’t when it came to life: handy, friendly, laughing, willing to share what he knew with others…
Anyway.
Dug a lot of holes. Need some sleep. Will probably do the same tomorrow.
