kirabug's idea files

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.

Day 286:

I dug up and out of my current mining area. (Yes, I was chasing a vein of ore at the time. Yes I do remember what I said yesterday. No I don’t regret it.)

Anyway, it was nice to be out in the sun. And I knew exactly where I was when I came up.

I was about 100 yards from my front door.

I’ve been digging for days and I’ve made it less of a distance than my pigs wander when they’re hungry.

Perhaps I really do need to focus a bit.

Day 285:

I’m making great progress getting this ore out of this hole I’m working in.

Of course, the goal was to move east, not down, so I could find some sheep and make some wool clothes and then climb on top of that giant mountain to the west.

So I’m working on addressing my actual needs, which are to stop digging and move east.

I sometimes think I might be addicted to ore.

And I wonder how that happens exactly. I mean, yes, in a sense, mining is a bit like gambling. You’re reading the walls and the things around you, and making decisions on what to do next… and there’s no guarantee that anything will pan out, literally.

But on the other hand, it’s long hard work.

Well, I mean, I guess gambling isn’t all that different.

I remember my Uncle Sy telling me about how he’d go out gambling every Sunday, while Aunt Sylvia was in church. He’d spend hours trying to judge every other player, the dealer, the security staff, the cards… it sounded like a lot of the kind of work I don’t like doing: working with people.

I suppose if I was the type of person who needed to be around other people I would have gone mad here by now.

Not to say that I haven’t, but, I’m not really a people person.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll start digging east again, if for no other reason than because I haven’t had warm socks in I don’t know how long.