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.
