Today we went salt-mining. Just me, Starlight, Rover 2, and a lot of Pathfinder trip flashbacks.

We took the rover due west from the Hab about twenty kilometers, then found a decent-sized crater and carefully drove into it. Why so far? Because although the Hab blowout and our own operations have contaminated the Hab site, I don’t want to contaminate it any worse for Ares VI or whoever comes after us. And what we did today pretty much invalidates any soil or rock analysis you can imagine.

You see, the ponies need salt- more salt than they’ll get from alfalfa. They’ve raided every source of it in the Hab at this point, and we’re almost out. This isn’t something we can do without; without salt to supplement the hay, the ponies will begin suffering certain deficiencies, not least of which being loss of judgment. And on Mars you do not want to lose your sense of judgment- nor do you want to be within a mile of someone who has.

(Of course, these ponies have liked 70s music and so-called comedy practically from the word go, so I may be a little late on the poor judgment thing. Just saying.)

Fortunately Starlight has that lovely perchlorate-bomb-making spell handy, which she can tweak so that, instead of pulling all the toxic crap from the soil, it pulls all the salt instead.

And it worked- kind of. When Starlight did it in the cave, she got a giant mound of perchlorates. But here in Mars’s northern hemisphere perchlorate salts vastly outnumber and outweigh sodium chloride. We ended up with two medium-sized sample boxes full of salt, but that required the spell to cover an area a full kilometer in diameter and about five meters deep into the ground. And, of course, that emptied Starlight’s battery for the day. And we’ll have to do this again a few months from now.

There’s another possibility. There’s a bit of sodium chlorate and sodium perchlorate in the soil- trace amounts, but more than the sodium chloride. Get those up to about 400 degrees Celsius in the presence of metallic iron and you get a lot of oxygen and salt. You also get a bit of chlorine gas and some other not-nice things, because chemistry is everybody's Roommate from Hell. Also that stuff is rocket oxidizer just like magnesium and potassium perchlorate are, so I won’t be doing that inside the Hab anytime soon. But it’s a possibility I can work out, or ask NASA to work out, if it becomes necessary.

(You reading this, NASA? Yeah, by all means, tell me about another fun and convenient method I can use to blow up the Hab and maybe kill everybody inside!)

Starlight’s been working on two new magic batteries, by the way, using giant quartz slices from the cave and parts scavenged from the engine room of her ship. They haven’t started charging yet, but every day Starlight tells me she knows what she did wrong, and this time it’ll work. I have faith in her.

Unfortunately for her, she’s going to have less time to work on that than she’d like. When we got back from salt mining, NASA had a message waiting for us. It seems Starlight is officially the best pony at speaking and writing English, so she gets to take over teaching. Dragonfly speaks it a little better, but it was a written test, and Starlight is more careful with her writing.

Bad news for her, but good news for me- I don’t have to think up English lessons anymore. And Spitfire ought to be happy to have me stop talking down to her.

Of course, it’s ironic that the three pilots are the worst at English (Cherry is marginally better than Fireball, and Spitfire got the worst marks by a mile). If they want to use the MDV flight simulator, they’re going to have to learn really quickly. And I will take great delight in saying, “That’s Starlight’s job now- ask her.”

I don’t know what I’ll do with my life when I get back to Earth, but I know one thing: I am not cut out to be an English teacher. And I owe about eleven women and two men sincere apologies. Mr. Lindsay, Mrs. Ventrello, Ms. Vaughn, Mrs. Bryzewski, Mrs. Stockdale, Mrs. Madsen, Mr. Brooks… damn, there’s five or six more I can’t remember at all, but I thought you were all cruel, incompetent bastards determined to make school a torment.

I’m sorry. I never realized how hard your job was. If I’d known, I would have cut the spitballs and paper footballs down maybe fifty percent.

But diagramming sentences still sucks, and I’m not apologizing for telling you that to your faces. The detentions were worth it, especially when Dad told the principal he agreed with me.

Author's Notes:

Between the growing headache I had today and the distractions from customers, I didn't get much writing done until I got back to the hotel, and to be honest most of what I've written is lousy by my standards. The problem is, I don't want to make a huge time skip because I want to retain a sense of the passage of time that the book lost because it jumped fifty or a couple hundred sols at a time when nothing really interesting was happening. So, although I'd like to jump to Sol 174 now (Sleipnir 1 launch) or at least Sol 162 (the next hay harvest), I'm trying to find little things in between to touch on so we don't have whole months just vanish.

Be prepared for some REALLY short chapters in the near future. One of the bits I wrote today is less than 300 words long, but it's going to post as a chapter. And I'm probably going to do a few more short-shorts tomorrow before I have to pack up the booth so I have enough buffer for the upcoming cross-country drive.

Buffer's back up to three, thanks to that short-short bit.

The bit in yesterday's post about salt on Mars is accurate: for some reason our orbiting probes have spotted sodium chloride in craters and basins all over the Southern hemisphere, but none whatever in the northern hemisphere. I wasn't able to find any articles that would even guess why this is. My best bet is, the salt concentrated in the deepest part of the ancient polar ocean... which is right under where the north polar ice cap is now, more or less.

Starlight's lucky to get as much salt as she did. Maybe if she delved deeper, though...

And yeah, I was shocked to realize I could no longer recall the names of all my old English teachers in school. More time has passed since my high school graduation than before, so I guess it's natural, but it's still a bit of a tap on the shoulder from mortality, you know?