kirabug's idea files

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.

Day 287:

Not much going on today. Digging.

Looking back through my notes it doesn’t look like I’ve talked about the duckens’ hatching problems.

Or rather the weirdness of them.

See, all the animals here — except me, obviously — mate as soon as you feed them. What they eat seems to vary by species. The cows prefer hay, the duckens prefer wheat seed, and the pigs seem fond of potatoes or carrots.

And as I’ve mentioned there’s some kind of weird time compression. Or weird biology. Because within seconds of eating and then mating, they give birth to one and exactly one baby, alive, small, but fully formed. None of this eyes-closed-for-the-first-two-weeks nonsense for them!

So, that’s a thing, and it applies even to the duckens.

Except, well, the duckens lay a lot of eggs. So many that I trip on them regularly. (I mean, there are some places in my compound now that probably have a few hundred duckens in a room. Being frustrated at them, I threw one the other day… and out popped a baby ducken. Fully formed, and just as healthy as if they had been “born” the “natural” way.

So I’ve made it a habit to throw extra eggs. If they hatch, more duckens. If they don’t hatch, they don’t even leave a mess on the walls, which puzzles the heck out of me. Because if I crack one on the side of a bowl, I definitely get egg.

Honestly, I need an engineer, a biologist, and a physicist on this compulsory trip so badly.