Day 332:
In the process of trying to confirm that I can safely fill in some of these dangerous crevasses of course I found more ore.
And even more ore below that.
And I don’t know how deep it goes, but during the day I’m working on topside and at night I’m cleaning it out.
It’s still pretty risky – I mean, scary things are quite good at falling into these crevasses, which you would think is almost too coincidental to be coincidental, but my friends from high school that were good at math assure me that that’s what coincidental means.
I prefer thinking that someone’s in control of this plot —or at least I did until i landed on this crap rock in the middle of nowhere with no signs of civilization.
When I was a kid, my dad used to insist on taking me to this folk festival every year. It covered ancient history —everything from the middle ages through about the 1800s off the old clock—and eventually when I was a teenager he found me a volunteer job there.
I made apple butter.
Ok so if you don’t know what apple butter is, it’s sort of like if you cooked applesauce about ten times longer than you think you should, but very carefully so that instead of burning it just got darker and sweeter and darker and sweeter, sort of like molasses.
Apparently the Pennsylvania Germans, which my father’s roughly descended from like ten generations back, used to eat this stuff on everything. Toast. Sandwiches. They just put bowls of it out with cottage cheese and ate it from a plate. It was their idea of a sweet and savory snack to stretch the meal, kind of like sugared vegemite cubes are today.
I kind of miss those. They’re delicious deep-fried.
Anyway, when I wasn’t making apple butter (ask me some time, I can still rattle off most of the recipe), I was wandering the faire grounds checking out the other sights. I know how to roast a turkey from pluck to plate. I know how to braid my own rope, and then from there how to twist it into actual ten-millimeter cable. I know how to make my own ice cream.
Oh, ice cream. I hadn’t even thought of milking the cows to make ice cream. Next day off I’m totally making ice cream.
Assuming I can figure out how to make ice.
Dammit.
But also the faire was where I got my interest in smelting. We had a blacksmith on site and he taught the basics of temperature and smelting and ore… and the rest I learned over the years in classes. The Company was in the middle of training me to use the smelters on board – the computerized ones – when all this other stuff broke loose.
Anyway, I didn’t want to necessarily do all this stuff when I was just a highschooler, but there was no way to know then that those skills would probably save my life now, so there you go. Learn what you can, kids, you never know when you’ll be abandoned on a terraformed asteroid full of murderous beasts.