Chapter 35
It isn’t the 2nd day after an injury that is bad, it’s that 3rd day that makes you feel like death warmed over. I still worked through it, with the help of an occasional pain reliever, I just wasn’t moving as fast as I needed which slowed things down. We’ve still managed to get done what we planned. First, we cleaned out one of the side rooms … the room where I had moved everything that was in the way like Grammy’s canning equipment, processing utensils like the apple peelers and juicers, and all the extra junk and stuff that had just accumulated down in the cellar that I was supposed to help Grammy clean up this summer. All that stuff I had to stick in one of the bedrooms upstairs until I could find a new place for it. Then I banged together enough gorilla shelves to go all around the room and two back-to-back aisles down the middle. We used the tractor jack, which hadn’t exactly been a joy to get down to the cellar, to re-arrange all of the bins of staple goods that Grammy had ordered in with room to spare.
Doing that cleaned up the floor space enough that we could install the ramp which meant I could then put together more shelving and run it around the main room so that we’d have room to double stack the barrels with the silo grain. After we did that there was a bunch of open floor space but it couldn’t be used if we were going to use the ramp. Six of one, half dozen of another.
We didn’t start making real space until we reorganized the honey room and a couple of the other alcoves. The honey room we could finally walk into without breaking our necks and had room to finish storing the honey that came from the Delray place as well as a little room left over for the first batch of honey from the *gasp* eighty-freaking hives we are planning to work.
I’ve been trying to make my own notes in my own scratch pad as we tackled each area. I noticed that a lot of staple goods that Grammy had ordered in were going to start running out as soon as I have to start preserving things from the garden, especially the white sugar. But for now we’ve got an excess of honey. What I think I am going to have to do is figure out how to substitute honey for the processed white sugar. This is where I started wishing for the internet and a library. Uncle Hy has a library and Grammy’s notes might as well be a library but there’s no index that I can go to that tells me where the info is, or if it exists in what have to research with. I’m going to have to spend what little free time I have going over everything and creating my own index which is going to mean finding some way to organize it. I can do it on my tablet but if it goes kapootz I need to have it handwritten. Which means paper and writing utensils and sore fingers. Argh!
In one of the alcoves off the cellar we put and organized all the grains … trashcans on bottom and top and filling the remaining space with the tubs and such that we were using to hold the previously found stuff. Some of the trashcans were full of grains I know little to nothing about. That’s more research and experimenting because the white flour is going fast even if I don’t use it very much. And I also need to learn to grind flour, which I kinda know how to do because Grammy was teaching me some of the old-fashioned ways that things were done when her grandparents were kids because Uncle Hy wanted someone in the family besides him and Grammy to know.
Another alcove is where we organized all the dried beans and the tons of different rices we had. I never knew how many different kinds of white rice alone that there were. At home there was just white rice and brown rice. Not that simple anymore, oh no, of course not. Whoever was buying stuff for the Grist Mill House people made things a lot more complicated than necessary. There was regular white rice which even the sticker on the can made it seem like a third-class item. There were pretty stickers for all of the other rices like basmati, long-grain, jasmine, nishiki, extra long enriched, Calrose, Japanese short-grain, arborio, Valencia, medium grain, brown rice, wild rice, black rice, sushi rice, rosematta red rice, Thai red rice, parboiled rice, and then rice flavors like yellow rice, red beans and rice, black beans and rice, pilaf, and enough rice-a-roni mixes to feed a small platoon of scouts for several camporees. Okay, maybe that last was a little bit of an exaggeration but rice is one of the things I’m not worried about running out of any time soon. Good thing Mitch and I like rice because we are going to be eating a lot of it for the foreseeable future.
The good thing about getting those alcove areas organized was that the room where all the preserves and jars go can now be organized. That’s one of the chores that is on my to-do list. Also, as we organized we worked on the inventory and updated the categories and Mitch has asked me to start trying to judge how much food I use for the two of us each week so we can start working out a bare-minimum rationing plan as well as estimating how many people we can feed for how long when/if the family shows up. That’s going to require some thought because how much of our groceries I use depends on if we bring anything fresh in. I’ve made a note to myself that I need to start foraging more, plan for preserving what comes out of the gardens, plan how much to plant in the next garden rotations, how much we are getting out of the orchards, etc., etc., oh my gawd etc.
The organizing and “building” went on during the day. We took turns trying to cat nap after the first day of feeling like zombies. I felt like Mitch was putting me down for a nap like a little kid but it turns out he was right, I needed it because if wasn’t the pain making me feel pukey, it was the pain relievers that were doing a job on my guts.
The bringing in of the stuff from the livestock trailer and van took place at night after the ramp was built so we avoided any of the drones taking notice. Mitch said one of the things he learned that I hadn’t heard was that all the night-sight capable drones were being used closer to the battle lines and in the cities. However, just to be on the safe side we will move any big finds we make at night, using tree cover, as much as possible. That’s always assuming anymore finds. Both Mitch and I kinda have our doubts after finding out there were salvagers and refugees in the area.
Mitch was explaining what his job used to be when he got around to the people he served with. “I worked with Raj a full rotation. He’s not a bad guy, knows what he is doing. The main problem was that he was such a straight arrow and would report any abnormalities or anything he considered suspicious before we could even investigate them ourselves. I don’t know if that’s changed but we’ll be careful just to be sure. That third guy is named Ibrahim. I know him even if he doesn’t remember me. His nickname was Brahma.”
“’Cause he’s built like a bull?”
“That and because he is Hindu. And no, don’t ask me what that means, it is just how he explained it. Him we might find useful. He plays at being dumb around people he don’t know, but he’s got connections.”
“Connections? You mean black-market?”
“Not necessarily. He didn’t really like doing business those groups. But he knows people on the retail side.” Before I had to ask he explained, “The military has to buy their food just like everyone else, it is just higher up the food chain from what most civilians have access to. If, and this is a big if, we can really work the hives like I hope, him or someone like him might help us get it to market, or at least in the supply line. We won’t make market rate on it, but something is better than nothing and we might even be able to make it a direct payment for taxes and such. I’ll keep my ears open.”
“But they said they wouldn’t be transmitting to you.”
“Nann, you know how they say if people stop talking the sky will fall? Well make that doubly true in the military.”
Not sure I was following I quoted another saying to him. “What about loose lips sink ships?”
“Different kind of gossip. But if you get enough gossip from enough different places you can get a good idea what is going on.”
I decided to take his word on it.
And speaking of drones, Mitch finally got delivery of the radio and antenna. But it wasn’t by drone delivery. Sgt. Cahill, “Sarge” from the first meeting, and four other soldiers brought it. One of those four was a female medic. Oh how fun that was not.