10 Pound Bag Ch. 210-214

Chapter 210 - Stabilized Distillery and the US Mail

By: Emmeran, 4 July 2022

Editor: nnpdad 27 July 2022

Early morning reflections are one of the greatest luxuries in life. While I waited for the wood stove to do its job I climbed back under the covers to watch the fire and reflect. It had been less than a year since I had simply wanted to move to my ranch in Wyoming and to disappear from the face of the earth and the responsibilities associated therewith. Well, I got the disappearing part right; the responsibilities part - well not so much.

Nine months!

I had only been here nine months and so much had happened. Life had been a whirlwind of activity since the first of the year; everything about it had changed. I could have done without the trauma and the fighting, but in the overall of things I was pretty damn happy. In the end I was on a ranch in a really special part of Nebraska and I had good people around me.

It didn't hurt that I had actual craftsmen around to build things. Had it all been left up to me to build everything it wouldn't have turned out well. It would have been functional while also being functionally flawed - kind of like that old, reluctant rocker.

I enjoyed the actual work of building things, I always have. Being able to focus on a singular physical process was truly a form of meditation that did wonders for me. Unfortunately for me, I very much lacked the skill to be considered even moderately talented at any particular craft, let alone be classified as a master craftsman.

So when it came to 'inspecting' the progress of our new facilities, I was a bit more like a gawking tourist visiting a historical re-enactment attraction than a wizened leader of a productive village. Inspecting facilities was exactly what they had lined up for me again today. With that in mind I rolled out of bed and got busy with my morning.

Coffee in hand, I stepped out the door and into our first taste of the coming winter.

It was just a smattering of snow, maybe a quarter of an inch at best and the flakes still falling from the sky appeared to be the stragglers of our quaint little storm. It would all burn off before noon, the ground still wasn't frozen and the first hard frost hadn't come yet. But it would come soon.

I enjoyed the snow flurries while I could; it had been years since snow had come to me rather than me travelling to the snow. I even went so far as to stick out my tongue like a child in a vain attempt to catch a falling flake. I sat down and took a moment to enjoy the oncoming dawn, to do nothing but see, smell and hear. It was a moment to ignore the rest of the world, to simply enjoy the slowly brightening sky and taste my coffee whilst the clouds slowly cleared overhead. The sunrise was breathtakingly beautiful and totally in keeping with the theme of my morning. I treated it as a precious memory etched forever into my soul which could be a moment to remember and reflect upon when life was being unkind.

The sun slowly cleared the horizon and finally ended that memorable moment so I crushed out my cigarette, finished my coffee and got my lazy ass to work.

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There was a certain comfort in working with Amos and Holder on the morning chores. Much had changed while Amos and I travelled. For one thing, Holder had enlarged and hardened the stables for winter. He did grudgingly allow that his efforts were guided by the influence of Michelle and Matilda. Regardless, his results were incredible. Upon advice of Sheriff he had managed to combine his distillery/brewery with the stable. A single chimney rose from the center of the expanded building, the front side of the hearth in the distillery providing his cooking heat while the back side of the hearth had a water trough attached. As the hearth heated, the masonry transmitted the excess heat into the stable. The stock didn't much approve during the warmer times of the year but it was safe and efficient and the animals adored it during the cold months.

There were more tiny tricks to the setup but I would wait to learn those later; sadly the world caught up with my morning and there were duties at the town hall calling my name. Michelle led me away from my new toy and back into the world of tactical and strategic planning.

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The town hall hadn't changed; it was still little more than a hut with a large meeting/office room. The only item of note was the large table which was still rough hewn and could use some work to pretty it up. The news of the day was mostly as expected plus increased urgency on all topics because we'd seen snow. Frankly that wasn't really my problem, Michelle and Sheriff would manage the priorities based on the data that Sonya gave them. No real change from the past or the future, but with winter coming everyone wanted to be the squeakiest wheel and get the most attention.

Fabiola had the best squeak, she had a letter from the U.S. Postmaster General.

The letter was on a fine parchment and after the flowery salutations and introductions it basically got straight to the point. It was basically a form letter, which wasn't surprising considering the Post Office's aggressive growth in this time period.

The gist of the letter was as such: I was appointed the acting Postmaster of the Missouri Valley region and it was my responsibility to insure the delivery of mail between St. Louis and Fort Dickenson. I was allowed to appoint Postmasters at all villages and trading posts in between, creating local Postmasters as I saw fit.

There were a lot of details from that point but the only ones that stood out to me were our carriage fees and weather exemptions. The rest were details for Sonya and crew but my takeaway was the income stream and the need to clone our little steamboat.

Chapter 211 - Potatoes, Rutabaga and Carrots

By: Emmeran, 24 July 2022

Editor: nnpdad 27 July 2022

The morning meeting broke up with a decision to meet again after supper to hash out our postal plans. After all that was an important opportunity for us to grow and prosper, as such it would have a separate framework from the township itself. The hope was to leverage this into a multi-decade or even century-spanning revenue stream.

That was all for later. Next up, I was touring our root cellars and food warehouse. I was stunned to learn that we had an actual warehouse, quite a large one at that. It was an earth covered long house and it was pretty damn big; it included root cellars dug out underneath at the edges to store the various vegetables separately by storage need.

The crude foundation was made from clay bricks to prevent water damage and keep out most pests, the rest was structured from young trees bound together to form the ribs. The building was layered in sapling staves and finally covered with sod. Small windows dotted the walls to allow in whatever light was available. Of course all of the windows lacked glass but they had functional shutters to keep out the worst of the winter. This was all explained to me before I ever stepped foot inside that impressive building.

There were open areas on each side of the warehouse set up for sorting, curing and prepping the food for storage. There were ten women and kids deep in the business of preparing an incredible amount of root vegetables for storage while two men operated crude two-wheel carts. Hand carts were being used to move the food into and out of the warehouse and halfway through my tour/tutorial a freight wagon filled with barrels and clay pots pulled up. It was a load of salted meat, sauerkraut and clay jugs of eggs preserved in lime water.

I was blown away by the variety and amount of foods we had stored, my limited knowledge of food preservation came from old family recipes and woodsman/survivalist guides. Basically I knew next to nothing in the art of long term food preservation. Heck, I didn't even know you could pickle fruit!

The tour finally took me inside so I could see the actual stores, up until that point all I knew were the calculated numbers of how many weeks for how many people at what consumption level. Apparently I had given Sonya and her little crew far too much processing power because I was being buried in statistics and charts on a weekly basis. At that point it was projected that we had 30 weeks at moderate food consumption. That meant a lot of food when you considered how much each of those almost 200 people needed in a single, normal day.

The warehouse itself had large doors at front and back, big enough for a wagon to pull into if necessary. Side doors half-way down the long Quonset hut looking building were large enough to allow a hand cart to enter. The entire building was lit by tallow oil lamps hanging just above head height down the center aisle, giving off a meager light even during the daytime. Sconces were built into the walls for use at night but for the most part the entire area was cloaked in darkness excepting the main aisle and the office which sat in the middle.

The office itself wasn't much to look at, it had shuttered windows and was basically mud slathered over small logs making up the walls. It was enough for now and would keep a person working or standing watch warm. There was no serious thought given to warming the entire warehouse although there were several charcoal braziers installed in the main aisle to use for warmth during the worst of days.

Those braziers were also where the cats were fed and watered, although truth be told the cats weren't fed too much and only once after morning had broken. A cat who isn't hungry won't hunt and if our warehouse cats didn't hunt and eat the critters our grain was all but done for. So the policy was simple, feed them a small meal of raw meat in the morning before they slept for the day and let them hunt at night. They were fat and healthy cats.

A full half of the warehouse was stacked bags of grain of all sorts; we had harvested and bagged what we could of our own crops; the rest had been purchased on our supply runs down south. I spent a lot of money prepping for the winter and grains were a big part of it. To feed almost two hundred people a half pound of grain products every day it would require at least two bags a day.

The remainder of the warehouse was full of barrels and jars of goods that didn't need to be kept cool but could withstand freezing. They hoped to avoid freezing temperatures inside the warehouse but that was no reason to push our luck. Salt, tallow, lard, dried meats and other such didn't care about being frozen; salted meats could handle it as well.

The tour from that point moved on to the root cellars, there were four of them and each met different requirements.

The first cellar was the cool and very moist storage for potatoes, carrots and most other root vegetables. They were all sorted into crates and woven baskets stacked or placed on shelves in a very orderly manner. If additional moisture was needed a pot of water with heated rocks could be placed in the room to create steam without raising the temperature.

The second cellar held vegetables and goods requires cool, dry storage such as onions, garlic and certain preserved meats. Meats such as sausage and curing hams.

The final two cellars were for fruit one moist and cool, the other dry and cool. Fruit absolutely could not be stored with vegetables.

There were a few weird outliers such as sweet potatoes, those were simply stored elsewhere.

The most amazing point of the entire setup was that each of the communal lodges had much smaller versions of the same thing attached. Each holding enough food to keep fifty people fed for a week in the event of blizzard or true calamity.

I began to feel pretty damn good about our winter preparations at that point.

Chapter 212 - Screaming, Stomping and Gnashing of Teeth

By: Emmeran, 27 July 2022

Editor: nnpdad 28 July 2022

The tour of the warehouse and food stocks took up that entire afternoon, just watching the processing of the sun-dried fruits and vegetables took the better part of a half-hour. Granted that was a half-hour also spent snacking on fresh sun-dried raisins; it was a personal sacrifice for the greater good and all that.

Every bit of it was labor intensive work. You didn't just hang things out to dry and then forget about them, you had to bring the racks out of storage every morning and return them at night. Constantly monitoring the humidity was key and technology helped us there.

I had a small box of cheap thermometer/hydrometers from one of the farm stores I shopped at, costing something like four bucks each. Those were cheap and handy when camping and hunting in any century. Normally I'd hand one out to every tent and have one in the general camp area. Now they were being deployed with care into all of the storage locations where we needed them.

Sometimes the simplest of technological advances turned out to be the most useful - the can opener being a perfect example. Though canning started before the Napoleonic wars, a decent can opener wasn't invented until the 1920's. The first design for the pocket version known in the United States as the P38/P51 appeared in Popular Mechanics magazine. Before that it was pretty much a man, a can and his knife, not exactly the safest way to open a can.

Of course we didn't have the resources for canning yet so, once dried, everything was stored in barrels or clay pots. The clay lid would be sealed with the least amount of wax possible and then with liquified lard, tallow or some other oil pooled over that to keep the seal air tight. In controlled temperatures the fully rendered lard or tallow would stay good for more than a year.

The capper to all the storage was the testing that was going on. One of the previously enslaved ladies was walking around testing the pH and fluid density of the pickling brine and saline storage and charting the results. I could see the hidden hand of our resident chemical engineer at work and truly appreciated it. The pickled items needed to be checked often anyway; you had to press the food down and insure the weights were keeping everything well underwater so nothing could introduce bacteria to the stored food.

By the time spring came I knew I would be well sick of sauerkraut with pickled sausage.

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From our over-sized larder I went straight home to supper with my family, my strange and suddenly oversized family. From dreams of living alone in Wyoming with maybe a few drinking buddies and a nice woman or two, I went to full blown insta-family with teenagers, adults and babies on the way. It was a strange and messed up world I had ended up in. I never dreamt of babies let alone being happily married.

As for the two incoming babies with my friends Michelle and Matilda, well those ladies were just my friends and I guess I simply performed a delivery service of sorts. Our relationships remained platonic with the extremely odd exception of Matilda crawling into my bed whenever she liked. But outside of Matilda's highly-sexed hijinks you would think we were simply friends. In the end those were my kids and I'd do right by them and their mothers as best I could. Amos and Madeline had taken over my tent, Sheriff and Lucinda were using the other. We had installed the artic lining in both tents so they would stay cozy even if the temperatures were down well below sub-zero. They had built two lodge houses in our little walled compound, a small hut that Sonya and Holder were sleeping in and a larger hut where Matilda, Michelle, Esther and all of the dogs kept house. The larger hut was our main cooking and eating place, it would also do in a pinch to sleep all of us in the event of a really bad storm. I wasn't sure what to think about Holder and Sonya sharing a hut, for the most part I just ignored it.

The large hut was right up against the trailer and you almost needed to go through it to reach the storage run and cooler on the trailer. It was all oddly convenient when the storms actually came. But most important we managed to run power and feed for the TV out to the large hut and it was fully set up for long winter viewing entertainment.

My arrival for supper was not a joyous moment because I had a pissed off a hormone-enhanced wife stomping around the trailer cursing at me in languages I didn't understand. It was a pretty impressive show; she managed to expertly stomp around the tiny space in the trailer with her angry eyes and suddenly wild hair. Her hands were acting like she had suddenly turned Italian and her wrath was that of a Goddess spurned. Of course my exit was blocked by the door which was being held tightly shut from the outside.

Mouse was pissed. Sonya and Michelle were discussing the mail contract and what needed to be done; when, how and by whom were spoken in public. I hadn't had a chance to speak to Mouse yet.

She was a new wife - Strike One!

She was first time pregnant - Strike Two!!

I was leaving again and soon - Strike Three!!!

I was done for and the stages of punishment were known to all men everywhere.

Stage One - Disbelief

Stage Two - Realization

Stage Three - Outrage

Stage Four - Silent Fuming Anger/Banning from presence

Stage Five - Tears, Endless tears

Stage Six - Reluctant acceptance

I was in for a long night as we had only reached the 'Outrage' stage at that point, I just had to survive while pleading platitudes and escape when she screamed "Get Out!" I was out the door and gone. I grabbed some food from the table in the large hut while the guys chuckled and I shot lasers of anger at Sonya and Michelle.

I simply packed up my dinner and left for my meeting, I'd have a working supper and come home to a young wife in tears. My stomach was already burning and sleep would be bourbon-assisted this night.

I had plenty of time to plot out my revenge on the two loudmouths.

Chapter 213 - Going Postal

By: Emmeran, 30 July 2022

Editor: nnpdad 31 July 2022

I didn't much feel like walking down to Rulo and then later walking back in the cold autumn winds, so I took the lazy way out and saddled up Lunch for the ride. If the businesses kept doing as well as they were currently doing, I'd probably even break down and buy myself a coach a some point. That was how much my world had changed at that point, my new daydreams were a fancy horse-drawn coach, a far cry from my lottery daydreams that had gotten me here.

Lunch, Brin and I took our time ambling up the road towards Rulo. We had the road to ourselves and it gave me time to ponder everything that was happening. Mouse's reaction wasn't at all surprising; she was, after all, a young bride living in a new place with a child on the way. It was simply natural that she would be upset hearing that I was leaving again after I had just returned. I would go home after this meeting, snuggle and hold her all night and things would be mostly alright come morning.

The number one priority at tonight's meeting had shifted from Postal plans to information discipline. There was absolutely no reason that any of the committee's topics should ever leave the meeting room; it would cost us in blood eventually if I didn't start enforcing that discipline immediately. There were just too many people around these days, so our decisions and actions need to be firmly decided and presented as one voice and by one voice.

By the time I had it all decided in my head and discussed out loud with Brin and Lunch we were approaching town and the small yet functional town hall. For the record, both of my companions firmly agreed with my stance on the subject.