kirabug's idea files

Day 799:

Remember yesterday when I said I didn’t like digging into the side of a mountain and finding a spring because I don’t particularly love being soaked in water?

Yeah, about that.

Up by the northern river thing, I dug into the side of a cliff and a pond broke out. An underground pond that I obviously didn’t know was there, but whose water table was definitely higher than the river’s.

So now there’s a seemingly-unlimited waterfall of pond water pouring down my beautifully manicured hill into the river.

And that means I’ll be doing a lot of sandbagging and patching and wading through water the next few days.

I wish I could find a wetsuit tree growing wetsuits out here somewhere so I could keep warm in the water.

Day 798:

One of the crazy parts of this Swiss-cheese planetesimal is that any given time I can dig into what seems like a perfectly solid chunk of wall and discover that there’s a sinkhole or ravine or cave on the other side. Today I dug into the side of a mountain and discovered an open pit with hot-and-cold running liquids. (In this case, a water spring on one side and a lava spring on the other.)

The spring will be annoying because I don’t like being soaked in cold water.

The lava spring will kill me if I don’t do something about it.

So add those to the to-do list I would keep if I didn’t value my handmade paper too much.

Day 797:

Still doing a lot of work outside during the day, and a lot of work in the caves at night. I should probably sleep more, but

1. even after two plus years I haven’t figured out how to adjust my sleep schedule to meet this planet’s extremely fast days and
2. I’m pretty sure i have some kind of anxiety problem because there are a lot of times I try to lay down to sleep and it just doesn’t happen.

Now, that could be because I’m sleeping on a bed I made myself out of ducken feathers and ducken skin leather. It could be because the temperature’s always too hot or too cold or too dry or too damp when you sleep in a cave that’s heated with a coal stove. Or it could be because I don’t have any open windows ever because of the monsters, so the air can get pretty stale.

Fortunately it’s still beautiful outside, not much rain lately, so even when I feel exhausted, being outside doing things is beautiful and relaxing. Well, when nothing’s trying to kill you, anyway, which admittedly only really happens from sunset to sunrise as long as I stay out of the woods.

Here’s a fun picture I took today. I think one of the land squid that carry around blocks of sod  — for fun? because they eat it? because they like redecorating? — stuck one on top of a tree.

Day 796:

Went back out to work on taking down the mountains today. I feel like I’m really making progress, although it makes the environment look really wonky right now. The cliffs were steep before, but now they’re sheer, until you reach the base where they slope gently to the river. Which, I mean, I’m trying to slope them gently to the river, but in the meantime it can be pretty nerve-wracking being at the top of those cliffs.

Speaking of nerve-wracking, that horse I spotted yesterday is going to give me a heart attack. It’s too skittish to go near me, but has zero fear about climbing right to the edge of the tallest cliffs. I’m sure any minute I’m going to hear a horrible noise and find splattered horse all over the base of the mountains.

Day 795:

I spent the day mining the mountain. Most of the time I climb to a high point and dig down until I’ve cleared enough of the hill that it’s sloping gently down instead of deadly sheep-dropping cliff face.

I lost track of time at the end of the day and happened to find myself at the peak of the mountain just in time to take a picture of moonrise when I was photobombed by a non-skeletal horse.

It’s been a long time since I saw an actual horse here, so it was both surprising and a bit pleasing.

This one was definitely not tame and stayed far away from me.

A small part of me wonders if when skeleton horses die they come back as normal horses, and this was my horse coming back to say goodbye.

…

Not my lizard brain though; it says OH GOOD SKELETON HORSE GONE.