Day 64:
The trees here are pretty soft. They split in clean lines, with few knots or curves. They remind me of string cheese more than trees. Then again this place grows mushrooms the size of a small cottage, so maybe they are some odd string cheese. I haven’t been inclined to taste them.
Because splitting the wood is so much more effortless than the oaks on Earth, or the silverwood on Freya, or especially the Iron Root on Ares, I haven’t wanted much for wood. I had more problems doing things like carving than splitting logs, because the wood wants to split.
(This is one of the reasons I haven’t bothered with a wheelbarrow. I’d have to make it out of planks and seal it, instead of carving out the inside of a log, because the log would split almost immediately whether I wanted it to or not.)
The trees grow almost instantaneously, just like the duckens and cows and everything else on this whacked-out world. But just because they grow fast doesn’t mean I want to plant hundreds of them. That would look out of place and get me in trouble with The Company. On the other hand, careful harvesting means I have to regularly go out to get more wood because a tree will only last so long.
All this to say that I’m out of axe handles, and I forgot I was out of axe handles, so now I have to cut down a tree with a shovel (which will probably break it no matter how soft the wood) just so I can make an axe handle so that I can then cut down more trees and make more handles. And a new shovel.
If I could make an indestructible pickaxe, I could probably stay underground for days.
