#9868

周子瑜 쯔위 (TZUYU) (@thinkaboutzu)

Diskon 47% Mangoesteen 9868 Fashion Tote Bag – Hitam

25 Sept 9868

Brother Larry had some sort of conclave to attend yesterday in Lunaport. As it was to end fairly early in the day, Charmian and I travel into the big city to have dinner and spend sometime with our favorite “man-of-God”.

We had what could be considered a very early dinner… or very late lunch… near the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Lunaport. The food was excellent. We should not have been surprised at that. Larry always knows the best places to eat regardless in which city he finds himself.

The specialty of the restaurant was preparing mushrooms to simulate the great meat dishes. Our appreciation of this lead me back to my musings about how the fungi were so beneficial to humankind.

Brother Larry appreciated my premise and went a step further. He said that he had always wanted to visit the place on Luna where mushrooms were first cultivated, and that since we were quite nearby, we should do that this very evening.

As an historian, I have studied the detailed history of Solsys and the important history of Terra, but, other than in a cursory manner, I had never gotten into the minutia of Lunar history. The idea of visiting a mushroom farm seemed rather like watching a chess match without the three minute move limit, but the idea appealed to Charmian and I found myself out voted.

Lunaport, of course, was the first real settlement on Luna. To be a permanent settlement of any note, the place had to have an economic raison d’eitra… and a food supply for the people who would labor in whatever industry gave meaning to the place.

The first economically viable activity on Luna was the mining of Helium-3. The rare material so prized for specialty manufacturing on Terra was extremely rare on the planet which was the homeworld of humankind, but it was easily found in the crust of Luna. Remove the mineral from the lunar ground and ship it to Terra. A simple procedure and a profitable business in those early days on Luna.

Of course, mining required power and in those days of the early settlement, nuclear was the power of choice. With little population on Luna, it was easy to locate the nuclear reactor far enough away so that the shielding could be reduced. That would save money in the construction of the reactor and make it a lighter item to be manufactured on Terra and then shipped to Luna. Then some unnamed scientist put another fact into the equation: Although mushrooms did not require visual light to thrive, some of them did like radiation. And unshielded reactors had lots of radiation to provide.

And so we found ourselves far beyond the outskirts of Lunaport donning anti-radiation suits so that we could visit a mushroom farm.

“If mushrooms do not thrive on visible light, why are some of them so beautifully colored?” Our guide within the farm could not offer an answer to Charmian’s question, but he did tell us that the farm was still the best producer of mushrooms on Luna. Most mushrooms were grown in the utility sub-levels of the linear cities.

Before the girdle was created linking Luna’s cities into one great linear city, the mushroom farms had been customarily arrayed outside of the city limits. With any one spot on Luna having a night that was two weeks long, the farmer simply planted a species of mushroom that could mature in 14 days of darkness. Several sorts of fungi can do that, but they are not the most prized for their taste. The ones grown near reactors are the best for that. Even the mushrooms grown in the lower reaches of the cities out-class the two-week-farm mushrooms.

The radiation ground mushrooms, of course, are not radioactive per se, but the farmer who work to harvest from near the reactors must be careful not to send material that does retain radioactivity to market along with their mushrooms.

We were told that the mushrooms by converting rations into growth even reduced the radioactivity levels in the vicinity of the reactor.

Helium-3, nuclear reactors, and prize mushrooms… who would have thought it?

01 Oct 9868

Thinking about food in space, I picked up this from the Encyclopedia Solsystica:

Red Dog:

The cheapest yet most nutritious of the soya (tofu) flours is called “Red Dog”, an ancient sailor’s term for cheap flour. Long favored by the spacers in general and the Solar Guard in particular, this flour can do everything from forming bread to becoming faux meat of several different descriptions.

The present day faux meats which are normally produced from very ancient recipes can be processed to a fairly high standard even in zero gravity on board a spaceship. Adding spices and flavorings to this basically bland product makes it not only palatable, but down right desirable to most people.

The principal suppliers of Red Dog are Ganymede (for the outer planets) and Mars (for the inner planets).

High quality Red Dog produced on Terra seldom makes it into space as the fuel required to lift it out or Terra's gravity well makes it non-competitive in cost. Also the food needs of Terra's huge population makes the market for that high quality food adequate without the need to consider exportation. Tiny krill (a crustacean classified as shrimp for the purposes of flesh ban laws) are ground into a flour and used to fortify the Red Dog which is to be used to replace fish in the human diet.

Having tasted great amounts of Red Dog based food, I'm constantly amazed at how much variety can be wrung out of such a simple basic material!

20 Oct 9868

Since flesh for human consumption was banned millennia ago because it was just too inefficient as a component in the diet for billions of people, there has only been one legitimate source on animal protein: shrimp.

Many plants are and were grown in aqua culture and the shrimp farmers managed to convince the then “powers that be” of the relative ease of growing shrimp as a “byproduct” of the aqua culture of plants.

In addition, a convincing argument was made that the principal use of the shrimp was to be as an enhancement to Chinese cooking... thus making the shrimp a condiment!

I really refuse to follow this convoluted logic path further. Suffice it to say that most humans enjoy the flavor and texture of shrimp in their food from time to time.

I was talking to Officer Harmed Rastine recently and learned that there were great quantities of shrimp being shipped up to the Zero-point-five. I made a quick calculation and came to the conclusion that every man-woman-and-child on the space ship must be consuming about a pound of shrimp per day!

That is probably seven times as much shrimp flesh as most Lunans consume in two weeks!

I wonder what argument was made to the government to permit such a great amount of animal protein to be diverted to one group of consumers??

The Zero-point-five crew has special needs because they spend all of their time in space.

The Zero-point-five crew requires more protein because their activities are mostly mental rather than physical and mental activities are promoted when the being gets more nourishment... and you get more nourishment from animal protein that you do from vegetable matter per gram consumed.

The Zero-point-five has relatively little space to store food, therefore food relatively high in nutritional value is prized as it requires less space.

Maybe the Zero-point-five crew just asked nicely... “pretty please may we...”.

15 Mai 9868

Back from the Library Association of the Sov Union’s annual convention on Terra. This time it was in St. Petersburg instead of Sevastopol. I knew this was going to be a bit hard on me despite my routine of chest compressions and workouts in the wheel.

Of course, I had long since given up on the vanity of trying to show up on Terra without an exo-skeleton. The long trip from the Vladinska space port to St. Petersburg would have been pure hell without one.

I still wear the fine Brooks and Bandine suit which I bought for my first Library Association convention two years ago. Since I don’t wear a suit often on Luna, it is still in good shape. Beautiful material and expensive… worth the whole month’s pay that I spent on it. The material with its herribone pattern of chevron patterned stripes in chartreuse on a charcoal gray background. That jacket with the cardigan collar and the ragland sleeves.

It’s not quite as much in the vanguard of men’s styles as it was two years ago. The tight fit intended to show off a young man’s body still works for me despite the fact that no one sees me as a young man.

And it really doesn’t look all that good with the pseudo-leather finished exo-skeleton clamped around it, but I chose the tight fit to show that I was not wearing an exo-skeleton beneath it and now I’m stuck with it.

The much needed exo-skeleton made my long trip across the Sov Union as comfortable as it could be for one whose stomach and bladder feel strained with weigh loads almost twice what they normally sustain.

I wanted to see more of the great nation. Other than the Sevastopol area and my visit to the elven village in the far north of the Sov Union, I had seen none of the land of the group that hosted the annual convention that I had come to love. The train that carried me was unique in that it was radiation shielded. Studies when the intercity train line was built about 5 millennia ago had indicated that the most feasible course for the construction of the track was through the radioactive wasteland. What was spent on shielding the passengers and the workmen who laid and serviced the track was more than made up for in the land cost saving and shortened route.

The view of the “wasteland” was quite surprising. I had expected to see a wasteland of dead plant materials. (This, of course, was a ridiculous expectation. Something killed by the awful radiation released during the Sov Union’s civil war would have turned to dust eons ago.) Instead my eyes beheld a riot of life. Plant life flourished. Birds filled the air above the wasteland. Without man’s intrusion into the area except for his train, nature had selected its hardiest life forms to fill the areas once a burned out void. The conductor told me that the wasteland had been getting smaller in the last millennium. Some of the wasteland edges had finally dropped in their radiation levels to the point where human life could join the hardy plants and animals that had filled the wastelands.

***************

As she had in 9866 and 9867, Charmian gave me a great send-off... and Lialoril gave me a great welcome. (It was almost worth taking the trip for those two magnificent events in themselves.)

St. Petersburg is an ancient city even more than Sevastopol. Our convention center was in a hotel near the ancient Hermitage, and Lialoril and I spent much of our free time viewing the ancient art work housed in that museum. (Much of the art was in a virtual form as its age made actual viewing impractical if not impossible, but that did not spoil our delight in seeing the art in what must be the nearest possible representation of what its original setting should have been.)

The city is not on the Baltic Sea as one might imagine from a cursory glance at a map but is on the Nevskaya Guba. That is a gulf off the Baltic. The water was quite calm during our Mai visit and almost as picturesque as the Black Sea that we had relaxed by during our time in Sevastopol. Lialoril and I tried to use the small beach near St. Petersburg as a scene for our intimacies, but it was really too cold. Lialoril, of course, could have used her mental force to create an idyllic bower for us, but I wanted real physical intimacy, not just something manufactured in our heads. I insisted that that sort of intimacy be relegated to the times when our touching had to occur over long distances. In St. Petersburg, our touching had to involved the warmth our real hands on real flesh.

After I declared my manifesto, the beautiful elven woman returned with me to the hotel room that we shared. With the mystical smile that she so often wore, she told me that she would not do anything to shift away from the physical to the mental that night.

I remember beginning our love-making by caressing those magnificent pointed years of hers. I noted the shivers that my touch engendered. I had kissed her neck as her hands found parts of my body to touch and tickle. We each gave ourselves over to exploring the surface of the other’s body with the tips of our fingers and the tips of our tongues. And when our bodies craved more we probed deeper.

*********************

I had awakened that next morning as stiff and as sore as if I had been involved in a fist fight. My exo-skeleton had no place in our nocturnal exercises, but the next day I found myself more exhausted than I could ever remember having been before.

Lialoril laughed at my discomfort and then held up her right index finger. She said, “This is my magic wand.” At that the finger glowed and seemed surrounded by tiny sparkling stars.

As she touched me with that magical “wand”, she explained, “This will permit you to feel exactly as I now feel.”

The aching soreness disappeared. My skin felt like warm velvet… yet strangely damp. And the feeling above my crotch was something that I had never felt before… a weird wonderful glowing sensation.

“You feel like….” I attempted.

“Yes,” she said softly.

“I did that?”

“Yes, and tonight I would like you to do it again….”

***************

That day was the day that I presented my paper before the convention. As this was my third year I felt quite comfortable before the group and cheated a bit by setting forth a very simple subject: “Current Solar Guard Archival Methods”. The paper was quite brief and I was pleased to see that my audience had listen well enough to ask a series of good questions that filled out the time allotted.

The convention manager had changed. However, as they say, the more things change the more they stay the same. The new manager was a woman every much as concerned with proving that she could run a successful convention as her predecessor had been. There were differences, of course. She was as lean as her predecessor had been fat. She was almost abstinent in her alcoholic consumption while her predecessor had thrown down a vast quantity of vodka. Both tended to hold your arm while they spoke to you to demonstrate their power over you. Both gushed on about how good you were to come to the convention and how important that it was that you come back again next year.

On the final point, I equivocated. I had begun to think that I might be ably to find better places to spend my Terran vacations than at a Librarians’ convention. Something that I would need to discuss with Lialoril….

******************

Lialoril was unsure about changing our meeting grounds. The elves had been able to infiltrate and control the Library Association of the Sov Union for many years. To find a new safe ground for their activities could be difficult. Besides, she pointed out there was the Solar Guard and Charmian. Both had accepted the convention as something worth while for me to attend. To get them to accept another venue might be difficult as well.

We left the subject open. Something to be discussed over the next few months.

****************

I arrived back on Luna to find that Charmian was sure that she could smell the scent of another woman on me. She did not exactly say that, but I was sure that she felt that way. Jealous, but unwilling to challenge me about how I spent my time on Terra.

21 Juli 9868

I think that the elves of the Sov Union have decided to do something about my request to go elsewhere and see different things.

The Library Association of the Sov Union’s annual convention for 9869 will be held as a joint affair with the Chinese Union of Worthies in Chendu or Chungking or Congqing, the largest city in Szechwan or Sichuan or Szechuan Province… in central China. (It’s fascinating that after all of these millennia with one language as the main lingua franca in the entire Solsys that the Chinese place names still have difference spellings depending upon where you start as your reference speech.)

It should be interesting. I have been to the Japanese portion of China during my student days. As a student visitor, I roamed around the islands of Japan. I did not spend much time in the great city of Tokyo, but I did see much of the southern areas of Japan. I slao visited the northern part with its mountains and ski resorts. I even visited the north central east coast area where the Tsunami ruptures the nuclear plant and cause a minor world panic in the early days of the third millennium.

But I’ve never been to mainland China, so that will definitely be new to me. Lialoril says that she has visited the mainland, but never to this particular area. We’ll be relative close to the Chendu spaceport. It is only about forty miles from the convention site I understand, so we won't be doing a trip cross country the way we did traveling from Vladinska to St. Petersburg in the Sov Union for this year's convention.

China is one of the few nations that has two spaceports. The second spaceport is in Hyoga Prefecture in Japan (or Nippon or Nikon). Actually that’s not quite accurate. The Japanese built their spaceport on a platform north of Hyoga in the Sea of Japan. Japan has always been such a tiny land area for the population that it supports that they have always reached out to claim part of the sea around then when they had sufficient reason to do so.

Hyoga Prefecture is a relatively small area as are most of the Japanese prefectures. It has one delightful thing about it to recommend it to the traveler. It has coasts on two different bodies of water. To the north, Hyoga has the Sea of Japan (and its spaceport); to the south, the Inland Sea. The distance from sea to sea is only about 70 miles by my reckoning. With the major city of Kobe near the south coast and the spaceport on the north coast, transportation across the north-south direction in the prefecture should be quite good. And with the main linear city development of Japan running parallel to the Japanese island chains sea coast getting anywhere in Japan from Kobe should be particularly easy. (The linear city system in Japan is anything but straight as the island curve and twist in their natural north and south direction as witnessed by the fact that the linear city transportation system actually runs east-west through Kobe.)

Kobe is a particularly interesting city. It trades on its ancient heritage although there is really nothing all that old in the city of today... the ancient parts are really replicas of what existed so long ago.

With no open water on Luna save for a few swimming pools, I find myself particularly drawn to places on Terra that have large open water. Seas on two sides of Hyoga Prefecture certainly makes it move to the top of my list.

However, that is not where we shall be going on this trip.

Perhaps, I will not be disappointed. Szechwan Province is a different sort of terrain. The area is noted for having four rivers and great mountainous gorges. This has led the Chinese to dam to rivers to create great power-producing dams. The side effect of the great dams is to produce great lakes behind them. Surely, in the four-to-six millennia since the dams were first built there must have been the creation of some beautiful public spaces along the lake shores.