First, thank you to Breathe Easy. I did send my response
last week, as I promised, and they agreed to send the first load of supplies.
We’ve been feeding the octopuses as much as possible so that they will grow
quickly. It’s been a month and a half and they’re basically physically grown,
though still juveniles. They’re a little too playful – they have taken to
tossing the barrel toys to each other, instead of just bringing them to the
surface, and they also like to grab human arms with their tentacles and pull. I
think we’ll be a little safer once we get them completely outside. We’ve moved
on to training them to respond to flashing lights or patterns of beeps – the
sound waves are less annoying to them, I think – so we can tell them what to do
from inside the ship. Once they understand that, we’ll release them into the
cold oceans of Europa.
Vivien had some concern that they might be too exposed to radiation from outer space, because of where Rabbah is positioned. With the Conamara Chaos melt area above us, the ice crust does not fully protect against radiation. I think they’ll be fine, though. They won’t be near the surface more than a couple of times a month, which is not deadly exposure in most creatures on Earth.
We’ve had a bit of bad news in the last week, as well. Although we all worked hard to make sure all of our filtration systems were running efficiently, we focused more on the air filtration system than waste or water, and we did not have as many filters as we needed when we got to those systems. Our water has been a little briny, and it does not sit well when we drink it. We’ve all had dehydration headaches, too, because we can’t drink as much as we truly need. We will have to focus on making more filters for the water when we get our first supply shipment.
We also had a breakdown in the waste system, because about half of us were down with a mild case of e. Coli from waste contamination. The antibacterial drugs worked wonders, but it took about two days to figure out what had happened. We all took a round of drugs just in case.
Samira, of course, took the breakdowns harder than the rest of us. For an Ikin, she is incredibly delicate. She did not swoon, however, but instead spent most of her time elbows-deep in both the filtration systems, weaving the meshes back together. Her mental constitution is amazing, but her physical constitution is nowhere near what it should be, out here. She was sick for three days, vomiting from e. Coli, then had a bad reaction to the antibacterial drugs that made her break out in hives, and since then she hasn’t been able to stomach the water. Ghadir started making thin seafood soups, because Samira and Chloe were hit the hardest by the illness and need to stay hydrated. The protein should help them get stronger as well, and the seafood taste covers up the brine.
I miss fruit. Our tomatoes are blooming, and Durada and I pollinated the blossoms. I cannot wait to have tomatoes. The vitamin C in the nutritional loaf is, I’m sure, the only thing keeping me from going completely insane or suffering from scurvy.
Natsuki, Ihsan, and I gathered the small bag of fish eggs that we had and put them into the makeshift stream in the garden. We have tiny fish babies now, which will be released into the world over the next few days. Then we’ll release the octopuses. I hope they stay away from our bivalves, but I also hope that they don’t eat all of the schools of fish, so that we can enjoy a fillet once in a while.
Durada and Chloe, although they were both out with e. Coli for several days, have been working to make “soil” so that we can begin planting more solid foods. This mostly, as you can imagine, involves our waste, once it has dried out, mixed with dying algae cultures and the shells from our bivalves. Durada called it “composting,” and said it was something she did all the time when she ran her farm.
I suppose I should contact Breathe Easy directly, while they’re assembling the supplies, and ask for more medicine. If we have another breakdown in the waste system, we could all get sick again. But, if we have more filters, that is less likely to happen. Maybe I will just wait and see. We are, I hear, getting some seeds for strawberries and varieties of cabbages, along with more silk and carbon fiber.
Because I’ve been in direct contact with Breathe Easy recently, Haven has taken to micromanaging my writing. I just let her review this, but I’m not done. She needs another job, but because she exists as Breathe Easy’s eyes and ears, and has few other Maker-related skills than that, she doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with herself. She’s reorganized the storage areas several times already, and has attempted to organize our information library, much to Yuda’s chagrin – those two, lifelong Araboa and dedicated Bakalov, are like oil and water. Well, not even that – more like oxygen and a spark. They may not set each other off, but when they do, it’s better to stand several feet away. Because Zariah was once also Bakalov, she manages to come between them before a hole is blown into the side of the colony.
Maybe we should make a reading list for her. Chloe will probably also have some great books for Haven to read. And we should also restart the knitting group, now that our daily routines are evening out. If Haven is involved with all of us, or feels that she is able to keep track of us all at once, she may begin to calm down. I’m afraid that she will go crazy if she cannot find a way to feel useful.
I’m not sure how I’d propose a reading list to her. I might have been born a few castes higher than her, but I don’t want to order Haven around. She has an important role to play in this colony. I think.
*
Chloe, Ghadir, and I made a reading list for Haven of books on cooking, sewing, gardening, canning, circuitry, etc. I’m going to send this missive secretly before she reads it, but the way I finally decided to get her to focus was by putting the chapter information in the wrong order, and telling her that there was something wrong with our logs. I will tell her that I looked up the chapter on aloe vera’s uses as a calming agent for ulcers, and I had noticed that the book was horribly awry. She’ll have to actually read through everything in order to organize it. She’ll either enjoy the organizing – which will give us enough time to actually use items and have them terribly disorganized, or get the station dirty with our skin flakes and lost hair, and then she’ll have some kind of job again; or, she’ll become interested in some subject or other and want to start working on that part of the station. It’s not very nice, but it is clever.
I just want her to feel like she belongs here with us.
Vivien had some concern that they might be too exposed to radiation from outer space, because of where Rabbah is positioned. With the Conamara Chaos melt area above us, the ice crust does not fully protect against radiation. I think they’ll be fine, though. They won’t be near the surface more than a couple of times a month, which is not deadly exposure in most creatures on Earth.
We’ve had a bit of bad news in the last week, as well. Although we all worked hard to make sure all of our filtration systems were running efficiently, we focused more on the air filtration system than waste or water, and we did not have as many filters as we needed when we got to those systems. Our water has been a little briny, and it does not sit well when we drink it. We’ve all had dehydration headaches, too, because we can’t drink as much as we truly need. We will have to focus on making more filters for the water when we get our first supply shipment.
We also had a breakdown in the waste system, because about half of us were down with a mild case of e. Coli from waste contamination. The antibacterial drugs worked wonders, but it took about two days to figure out what had happened. We all took a round of drugs just in case.
Samira, of course, took the breakdowns harder than the rest of us. For an Ikin, she is incredibly delicate. She did not swoon, however, but instead spent most of her time elbows-deep in both the filtration systems, weaving the meshes back together. Her mental constitution is amazing, but her physical constitution is nowhere near what it should be, out here. She was sick for three days, vomiting from e. Coli, then had a bad reaction to the antibacterial drugs that made her break out in hives, and since then she hasn’t been able to stomach the water. Ghadir started making thin seafood soups, because Samira and Chloe were hit the hardest by the illness and need to stay hydrated. The protein should help them get stronger as well, and the seafood taste covers up the brine.
I miss fruit. Our tomatoes are blooming, and Durada and I pollinated the blossoms. I cannot wait to have tomatoes. The vitamin C in the nutritional loaf is, I’m sure, the only thing keeping me from going completely insane or suffering from scurvy.
Natsuki, Ihsan, and I gathered the small bag of fish eggs that we had and put them into the makeshift stream in the garden. We have tiny fish babies now, which will be released into the world over the next few days. Then we’ll release the octopuses. I hope they stay away from our bivalves, but I also hope that they don’t eat all of the schools of fish, so that we can enjoy a fillet once in a while.
Durada and Chloe, although they were both out with e. Coli for several days, have been working to make “soil” so that we can begin planting more solid foods. This mostly, as you can imagine, involves our waste, once it has dried out, mixed with dying algae cultures and the shells from our bivalves. Durada called it “composting,” and said it was something she did all the time when she ran her farm.
I suppose I should contact Breathe Easy directly, while they’re assembling the supplies, and ask for more medicine. If we have another breakdown in the waste system, we could all get sick again. But, if we have more filters, that is less likely to happen. Maybe I will just wait and see. We are, I hear, getting some seeds for strawberries and varieties of cabbages, along with more silk and carbon fiber.
Because I’ve been in direct contact with Breathe Easy recently, Haven has taken to micromanaging my writing. I just let her review this, but I’m not done. She needs another job, but because she exists as Breathe Easy’s eyes and ears, and has few other Maker-related skills than that, she doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with herself. She’s reorganized the storage areas several times already, and has attempted to organize our information library, much to Yuda’s chagrin – those two, lifelong Araboa and dedicated Bakalov, are like oil and water. Well, not even that – more like oxygen and a spark. They may not set each other off, but when they do, it’s better to stand several feet away. Because Zariah was once also Bakalov, she manages to come between them before a hole is blown into the side of the colony.
Maybe we should make a reading list for her. Chloe will probably also have some great books for Haven to read. And we should also restart the knitting group, now that our daily routines are evening out. If Haven is involved with all of us, or feels that she is able to keep track of us all at once, she may begin to calm down. I’m afraid that she will go crazy if she cannot find a way to feel useful.
I’m not sure how I’d propose a reading list to her. I might have been born a few castes higher than her, but I don’t want to order Haven around. She has an important role to play in this colony. I think.
*
Chloe, Ghadir, and I made a reading list for Haven of books on cooking, sewing, gardening, canning, circuitry, etc. I’m going to send this missive secretly before she reads it, but the way I finally decided to get her to focus was by putting the chapter information in the wrong order, and telling her that there was something wrong with our logs. I will tell her that I looked up the chapter on aloe vera’s uses as a calming agent for ulcers, and I had noticed that the book was horribly awry. She’ll have to actually read through everything in order to organize it. She’ll either enjoy the organizing – which will give us enough time to actually use items and have them terribly disorganized, or get the station dirty with our skin flakes and lost hair, and then she’ll have some kind of job again; or, she’ll become interested in some subject or other and want to start working on that part of the station. It’s not very nice, but it is clever.
I just want her to feel like she belongs here with us.
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