Tater feast today. And by “tater feast” I mean “pretending we don’t all want to summon Dread Cthulhu and give ourselves up to total madness rather than take another bite.”

Between the cave and the Hab, we got over 4,000 more potatoes. If I were the only one eating them, what’s left would be enough to get me beyond sol 950 or so- in other words, to the worst-case scenario Ares 3B rescue date, which of course isn’t going to happen now. And seven hundred sols of spuds for one person is one hundred and seventy-five sols for four.

We’re very, very nearly good on food for the remainder of our stay on Mars. And we definitely have enough potatoes.

Despite that, and despite all the work it means, we’re going to keep harvesting spuds until we leave. Just because the potatoes we’ve already grown will keep practically forever in the deep freeze which is Mars, it doesn’t mean fresh isn’t better. (By better I mean “marginally less disgusting”.) And we’ve been keeping track of the old and new crops, making sure we eat the old first. So we’re going to harvest potatoes as they ripen, keeping the plants alive to make more, and we’re going to pitch the older ones on a potato-for-potato basis.

Yes- we’re almost to the point that we are actively planning to THROW FOOD AWAY.

Also, we’re going to reduce production of potatoes. We’ve moved the plants that were in the pop-tents to the cave farm. Eventually we’ll move the soil there, too. That will let us repurpose those tents for other things. If a potato plant dies off in the cave (say we have a sinkhole again), we’ll replant using alfalfa clippings rather than potato eyes. We need more hay, not more spuds, but we still want lots of living plants to help charge Starlight’s magic batteries.

Speaking of, tomorrow Cherry Berry, Dragonfly and Starlight are going to go to the cave to fill up two batteries and bring them back to the Hab, while Fireball and I assemble the engine testing rig. Spitfire’s going to be with us, too, but she says she doubts she can turn a wrench. Quoting: “Not much try fixing things. More I do the breaking of them.”

And assuming Fireball and I have the cradle assembled by the end of tomorrow (which we should- we have the hardware, the MDV landing struts, and enough pony-ship scrap metal to do it all), on Sol 226 we remove the ship engines, put one in the cradle, wire it up and see what happens. With that out of the way, we can begin work on the Whinnybago.

Speaking of work… we have leftovers to dispose of. Eating has long ceased to be a joy. We’ve even got beyond the point where it’s a penance. Eating our daily requirement of hay and/or potatoes now requires three heroic acts a day. We no longer eat meals; we throw ourselves upon unexploded food.

The detonations, if you take my meaning, begin sixteen hours or so later. Let the record show I wasn’t the first one to comment about methane leaks in the Hab. Blame Fireball.

Author's Notes:

Buffer at one, a good bit longer than this one was.

And today I picked up a vacant booth at a small anime convention in Baton Rouge THIS WEEKEND. I don't expect much out of it, but I need to hit anything close to me with any significant prospect of even a tiny profit, so Louisianime, here I come.