Day 498:<\/p>\n
Remember when I said the other day that I might try burning the red rock to see what happens?<\/p>\n
Ok, so my thinking was that the rock has a texture a lot like the coal I dig up – kind of porous and shiny, easily capturing oxygen and the like from the air.<\/p>\n
And all my torches are pretty much giant matches – sticks with ground coal dust that i mixed with a very tiny amount of clay so they’d stick to the sticks, thus making torch like thingies.<\/p>\n
(This also qualifies under my “this shouldn’t work like this, why won’t I just wake up already?” clause from the other day.)<\/p>\n
So I thought “what the heck, let’s make torches out of the red rock too.”<\/p>\n
(The fact that I’d accidentally gotten some of them mixed up together — the coal dust and the red rock dust i mean — might have something to do with this decision.)<\/p>\n
Turns out the red rock\u00a0does<\/strong> burn, and when it does, it shoots little sparks of electricity in all directions like one of those horrible science experiments from physics class where everyone’s hair stood on end even more than usual. (My physics class was in a low-g classroom.)<\/p>\n So that was painful.<\/p>\n But also revealing, because if I can make some wire I can probably capture the sparks and run them to the gold rails.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Day 498: Remember when I said the other day that I might try burning the red rock to see what happens? Ok, so my thinking was that the rock has a texture a lot like the coal I dig up – kind of porous and shiny, easily capturing oxygen and the like from the air. … <\/p>\n